Novo posted:

I wasted time trying to show you several pages ago and you bailed. You don't seem to understand what makes a currency like the US dollar useful, and why all this hype is really telling you more about the world's desire for dollars than particular crypto coins. You don't seem to get why crypto coins are inferior to existing currencies by design. You also assume that there are efficiencies to be gained through blockchain technologies when in fact its design considerations are orthogonal to the kinds of things transaction processors actually need.

I don't even know where to start unpacking the idea of a "digital store of value". Have you heard the expression "not even wrong?"

french lies posted:

Sure, mortgaging your house to buy XRP at peak is idiotic but I don't think the idea of putting money into crypto is itself idiotic. I have never seen any serious, well-thought out argument against it. Plenty of people calling it a bubble and rehashing 2014 Mt. Gox jokes though.

sleepwalkers posted:

What incentive does anyone have to put the effort into breaking down your points and watching an hour of video just to refute one person's understanding of crypto in making a quasi-counterargument?
Of course some people are taking crypto seriously as an investment, they're just absolutely bonkers at the moment unless they accept that they're trying to capitalize on a bubble and nothing more.

french lies posted:

I responded to almost every single comment and insult for hours until it was literally 3AM in the morning and I eventually had to go to sleep. You may have made some comment after that that I didn't see but I can't recollect you ever making any serious attempt at showing me anything.

french lies posted:

I never said you had to watch the video or read the article I linked. I was putting them out as avenues people could explore if they were interested in looking at this from another perspective.

Trig Discipline posted:

Honestly, if you view speculation on crypto as gambling, and the possibility of losing your stake as a reasonable price for the fun you have doing it, go for it. But as a long term investment that is worthy of chucking a significant chunk of your actual savings into, it is absolutely a fool's game. I have played along in a minor role in a couple of bubbles in the past and have been adjacent to others, and if there's one true sign of a bubble that's about to explode hilariously it's the exponential proliferation of arguments for why it's not a bubble.

french lies posted:

It absolutely is a bubble at the moment and I've said as much multiple times throughout the thread. Just the presence of Tether alone means that the market is grossly over-valued at the moment. My issue is with the notion that the cryptos are fundamentally worth zero and all the price action and interest comes purely from gambling and speculation.

french lies posted:

Sure, mortgaging your house to buy XRP at peak is idiotic but I don't think the idea of putting money into crypto is itself idiotic. I have never seen any serious, well-thought out argument against it. Plenty of people calling it a bubble and rehashing 2014 Mt. Gox jokes though.

Pokey Araya posted:

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU, OR YOUR STUPID INSIGHTS INTO CRYPTO, GO AWAY.

french lies posted:

If anything, I think it's worth investing some time during this bubble market into really understanding the current space and the problems that the various startups are trying to solve. If you are convinced like I was, you can then wait for the Tether blowup and collapse and buy some during the ensuing bear market.

Novo posted:

Uh huh. So you don't remember all the posts about whether crypto software actually offers anything useful to financial institutions (it doesn't). Or whether it's useful to replace human consensus with a proof-of-work scheme (it's not).

Ok I'll try one more time. Crypto currency technologies are all software. The software employs tricks to make it decentralized. This is not useful to real financial institutions. Crypto currency technologies may make speculators money and even become widely known but they will never replace our existing currencies or records of who owns what.

Humans tell machines what reality is, not the other way around. The burden is on you to show why relinquishing control of our records to a system that cannot be regulated would be more efficient or useful at all really.

quote:

Earlier this year, FinTech Network and Zerado issued a white paper on smart contracts for banks. While acknowledging the challenges that must "be overcome to allow for traditional legal contracts to be coded into smart contracts," the white paper concludes that "[blockhain-based] smart contracts can offer many benefits for a wide range of applications for banks. If properly implemented banks can benefit from reduced risk, real-time accurate and verified transactions, fewer intermediaries and lower costs."

Once banks adopt smart contract technology and develop interoperability infrastructure, a blockchain-based smart contract could trigger a payment in fiat currency from a pegged bank account, with all necessary exchanges and transfers taking place automatically once the conditions for the execution of the smart contract are met and all needed reporting to tax and compliance authorities done on the fly.

Mozi posted:

I'm not a Bitcoin fan by any means but goons have been consistently wrong about it

Andy Dufresne posted:

How about it doesn't have significant value because nobody is using it for anything. If it becomes entrenched maybe it will have value then, but until then why would it be worth anything at all. I know you think some institution is going to latch onto XRP or Eth smart contracts but we all disagree with you on that point, since even if they find the technology useful (hurdle 1 - they won't because it's not useful), they would need to choose your flavor of the technology (hurdle 2 - they won't because there's no advantage to doing so over making their own).

And I know it's a deep personal cut to ask you what you do, but it's important. If you have literally no expertise you aren't going to know bullshit from real. That's not a knock, that's just how highly technical things work.

french lies posted:

You keep claiming they're not useful yet for some reason every big bank in the world is carrying out blockchain initiatives or participating in one. Surely just a fad and it'll pass over. I'll re-iterate my point; if something saves on costs banks will jump at it. The issue is whether it can pass compliance and that's an open question with some of this stuff.

As for what I do, I really really don't want to doxx myself. I'll re-register plat and I can reach out to you via PM if that's okay.

french lies posted:

Blockchain and smart contracts absolutely have something to offer banks and financial institutions, otherwise you wouldn't have the current blockchain fervor in the industry. Pretty much every significant player in the financial industry have a blockchain initiative of their own or are looking into it. For example, several big banks are testing and some are already using Ripple (though this is a separate issue from the value of the cryptocurrency itself). From this article:

If you don't see how fully automating things like securities settlement, custody operations and loan applications, and thereby reducing employment in back- and mid-office functions are useful to a bank then I really don't know what to tell you. There is an issue of safety and reliability that needs to be worked out over time. It might be that the weaknesses of the technology are insurmountable and the current testing of the waters by mainstream financial players pan out to nothing. But to say that it doesn't offer anything useful is wrong. Anything that reduces cost is useful to a bank, provided that the risk by employing that technology is acceptable.

Pokey Araya posted:

Whoaaaa found this sweet bitcoin simulator if you guys wanna play without touching the poop, its pretty loving realistic too.

http://bitsim.beepboopbitcoin.com/

Communist Q posted:

So french lies, I get what you're saying, but I've never understood why blockchain inherently needs a cryptocurrency to work. There's been distributed ledgers before bitcoin and block chain. Where does adding any sort of cryptocurrency into the mix add other than it's an easy way to get funded due to the lack of regulations?

Novo posted:

french fries do you really think that banks didn't have any way of automating their computer systems before 2009 when bitcoin came out?

like, do you think there are hundreds of people in cubicles manually editing spreadsheets all day long and thats how banks work?

boss: "any way we can credit the customer's account when escrow comes through?"
employee: "I'll set a calendar reminder to check on it every morning"

french lies posted:

"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"
"very few people will deny this"

french lies posted:

FAGGY CLAUSE posted:

Lmao like 90% of al cubicle space is dedicated to people just manually loving around with spreadsheets. See: big 4 accounting firms

french lies posted:

Surely just a fad and it'll pass over.

french lies posted:

Blockchain has a future regardless of cryptocurrency, very few people will deny this.

french lies posted:

You're free to think whatever you want. I'm not trying to convince anyone as much as I'm giving an alternative perspective on this. This forum has an atrocious track record when it comes to assessing trends, betting against it is likely to be a very good strategy if the past is in any way a guide to the present.

Andy Dufresne posted:

I would like you to offer up more proof that "every big bank in the world is carrying out blockchain initiatives or participating in one". I don't see it. The companies you've listed- Fintech and Zorado, each have about 4 employees and are consulting companies trying to drum up business. This is something that happens every day in the software world. I don't doubt for a minute that they've gotten a meeting at JPMorgan Chase but it hasn't gone beyond that.

There's really nothing to it until a major player invests real money into adopting the technology, and there's not even a hunt of that happening (again, we're 8 years into this).

You don't need to give me your name and address to prove that you've got expert knowledge in these areas. Hell, even if you were an astronaut I wouldn't be able to identify you.

quote:

(Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) said on Monday it launched a new payment processing network that uses blockchain technology, in partnership with Royal Bank of Canada (RY.TO) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ.AX).

DACK FAYDEN posted:

My dude, you toxxed for Marco Rubio winning the 2016 primary.

Rad Russian posted:

No financial institutions besides some sketchy startups are using XRP (the lovely Ripple coin you trade on exchanges). There are legit financial institutions that are testing the use of xCurrent service that Ripple (the company) provides that does not use XRP, and has nothing to do with XRP. Ripple the company however likes to use the media to pump news of partnerships with financial institutions that use xCurrent to mislead crypto idiots into thinking that it somehow figures into XRP adoption. People who do not read more than headlines might think that but Mr French is a self described crypto expert and should know this and not spread this bullshit here.

The smart thing to do, of course, if you think that financial institutions of the future would all use xCurrent, is to buy STOCK in Ripple the company (which you can't). It's not smart to buy up their lovely coin that no one uses or needs.

french lies posted:

LOL, here's the first thing that popped up on Google.


I sent you a PM just now with my job. I'm in finance and that's all I'll say publicly.

ElGroucho posted:

what do i do if i accidentally put the block chain up my butt

Dmitri-9 posted:

Let's talk about SIA because I actually know a little about it. They want to provide cloud storage and they claim they can do it at substantially reduced costs. So let me put forth some scenarios:

1. SIA can do what it says and reduce cloud storage costs and people mine the token to keep the network going but the token is only used to pay for the service so there is no incentive to buy early or speculate on the value.
2. People bid up the dollar price of the token in a bout of speculative mania and it ruins the competitive advantage of the token meaning it is useless. This is the bitcoin fee problem.
3. People bid up the dollar price of the token in a bout of speculative mania so the cloud storage people just deflate the price of the storage meaning there is no rational price for the token. This is the Silk Road problem, the price discovery of the bitcoin market should be related to the money flowing through the system to buy drugs and the supply of crypto tokens. The drug market doesn't care if bitcoin is fractions of a penny or $20,000 per all of their products will always be denominated in dollars.
4. People see that dollars are hyper deflationary to SIA tokens which means people buy less and less cloud storage as they hope to get gains from speculating meaning the cloud storage protocol is useless. This is the bitcoin problem.

People think that owning a valuable token and owning a token from a valuable protocol are the same thing but they might be opposite of one another.