The whole point of crypto is that it's not regulated. As soon as the regulators take real action on crypto, the entire promise of crypto will vanish in a puff of smoke.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I struggle to envision what a tightly-regulated crypto market would look like that wouldn't defy the entire point of crypto.
Indeed, regulation in the anti-thesis of crypto, and what crypto enthusiasts detest - but if crypto has any plans of going mainstream, regulations will have to be in place.
I think that regulations would come in the form of how so-called stablecoins and their owner companies can operate, how other companies (exchanges, etc.) can operate, and so on.
Take stablecoins - one might regulate these with hard requirements of how many % of their backing are in extremely liquid assets. Take tether - the idea is that it should be backed 1-to-1 with USD. Of course, that is not the case, at all. The owners have said that it's not backed at such ratio.
With extremely opaque stablecoins, you really have no idea what they're backed by. Imagine if stablecoin xyz said "We're 99.99% backed by [some currency]!" but then it turns out that they're backed 5% by said currency, and the rest has been put on the stock market - because the owners figured they could get filthy rich by betting all that money on low-risk stocks. Works until it doesn't work, and then people do a run on the coin.
So, regular audits, full transparency, hard regulations around what they can or can't do. That alone will probably flush out the majority of fly-by-night scams.
I think it is understood that most people are in it for huge and quick gains. Some crytpo fundamentalists will say that they're in it "for the tech", but I would be very, very surprised if that was the case for majority of crypto holders. So you are right - a regulated crypto space will probably drive out many of the speculators and gamblers, but I think that's OK. In the end there's a need for cheap and efficient cross-boarder payments, without having massive companies as middle-men. But to achieve true mainstream adaption, that will come at costs. The wild-west days are closing up.
"Ponzi scheme" has become completely divorced from its original meaning. It's supposed to refer to a specific type of scam where you pay "investors" using the money you received from previous investors, but nowadays it's basically just used now to mean "anything crypto-related in which people might lose or have lost their money."
I think people refer to some cryptos as a ponzi scheme in the way that for a lot of coins the only reason that they have a value is that lots of people own them. So the strategy there is to buy low, try to convince or just hope that others will buy it as well, which drives the price up, then sell it when the price is up.
In that description the people on the top of the pyramid are just the early buyers or founders, and the later you buy a specific coin, the lower on the pyramid you are. When early whales start selling of their bag, you as a late-joiner will be left holding your own bag.
This of course does not necessarily apply to the minority of cryptocurrencies which have an actual use-case other than just existing.
It's a "ponzi scheme" in the sense that you need to buy in early, find suckers to join the scheme after you, and only make a profit because the suckers you pulled in are pulling suckers in turn. If you don't get too greedy, you eliminate your position while it's profitable.
When I see people use it in this context I think it just shows a lack of understanding.
To be fair I probably wouldn't disagree if someone said UST was a actual Ponzi scheme. Holding UST had no real utility compared to the alternatives. The only incentive to hold UST was the 20% APY. Deliberate or not it was a classic ponzi scheme.
This was my main lesson. I lost some money on Terra/Luna - thankfully much less than $5k, but still enough to sting. Looking back, I can see that I really had no idea what I was getting myself into and it was mostly just FOMO.
Obviously I'd rather still have the money I lost, but in a sense I feel lucky. If Luna had waited an extra six months to collapse I would have become confident enough to put more money in, i.e. I'd have ended up losing even more. And I'll definitely be putting much, much more thought into any kind of crypto "investments" I make in future. The money I lost was a small price to pay for the lesson I've learned.
yes, I had similar lessons years ago with options, forex etc. (ok, yes... I needed more than one lesson :D)
However, since I am a person that likes to "risk" their well-earned money, I think it's good that I have burnt my fingers early when I had less money. Now I have learnt that at the very least I should not put all my money into one bag. That's the biggest lesson: Split your investments. Split your accounts even. It doesn't rescue all your investments in a downturn but at least you'll likely never lose more than 50%.
> Jack Dorsey just launched “Web5”, a buzzwordy project focused on decentralized identity
Woah, hold on, I thought we were still on "Web3"? Actually I'm not convinced that we've even moved past Web 2.0, since Web3 is still mostly just bullshit, scams, vaporware and monkey jpegs.
Did "Web4" get swallowed up by the same beast that made us skip IPv5?
> Your ability to obtain credit is based on the past several years of income, with a penalty for instances over the past ~7 years in which you didn't pay back debts.
Okay, and using these inputs, what function is applied to determine whether or not to grant the loan? How does that system differ from a "credit scoring" system, apart from that your perceived ability to repay isn't explicitly mapped to a single variable?
Is he wrong? What is "Web3", except a trendy marketing term to make the old seem like it's new? All I hear about Web3 is that it's the future, it's the next big thing, it's blowing up, it's coming soon - but they were saying the same things five years ago about "blockchain", and none of those promises came true.
The only thing that seems to have materially changed since 2017 is that "blockchain" is now rebranded as "Web3", meaning its enthusiasts can recycle the same old promises about how this stuff is definitely the next big thing and hope that no-one will say "hold on, haven't you been saying this for five years now without a single thing to show for it?"
So all it means is that you have a public/private key. You end up sending and receiving money by signing stuff you don't really verify, and trust some other 3rd party website for any chain verification.
So you have a private/public key, and the rest is website. You don't really do anything on the chain by yourself
I know what you're doing in the bathroom, but you still close the door.