https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&t=5826s&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas
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💡 This 2+ hours long video highlighted many of Crypto’s flaws. The entire video is split into 14 different chapters.
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0. In 2008 the economy collapsed
- financial recession occurred due to collapse of housing market
1. Bitcoin
- collapse of the system in 2008 set the stage for the genesis of Bitcoin in 2009 → philosophically started off as an end-to-banks and centralized currency
- idea behind cryptocurrency:
- digital wallet functions the same as a bank account, there’s no need for a bank to hold and process your transactions
- because this money isn’t issued by a government, it is resistant to historical cash crisis like hyperinflation caused by governments devaluing their currency
- brings flexibility and anonymity of cash and barter to digital realm, allowing individuals to transact without oversight or intermediaries
- however, it started off mainly being used to purchase drugs e.g. Silk Road Marketplace and have since not been able set out its goal of replacing banks
- even change of the guards is an illusion → old money like Winkelvoss twins and Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street) got in early, Bitcoin does nothing to help 99% of the people that got burnt in 2008 crisis
- ended up not changing problems with the banking industry → because the problems are inherently patterns of human behavior → the problem is what people are doing to others
- Bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity compared traditional financial systems, and majority of this electricity can be considered as redundant since POW results in a winner takes all situation
2. Ethereum
- Ethereum was initially built to address the problems of Bitcoin, but not only does it not solve any of them, it introduces more problems
- developers have ambitious plans for how Ethereum can disrupt the world, but are often disconnected from reality → they lack domain knowledge regarding the ecosystems they are trying to disrupt, it’s a lot harder to implement irl
- these programmers assume "the issues are like nails, easily driven by the hammer they created", meaning devs assume every problem can be assumed to be solved by code, when in reality its much more complicated