Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing.
Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...
> If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.
That was never going to happen, too much institutional money and index funds have been super focused on trading rather than the tech, and their are ETFs that have paper BTC that can move the price at will, just as much as if a whale decides to do so--it wouldn't even take MicroStrategy's stash, it could just be Laszlo wanting to get some stuff out of cold storage and clear a couple days because the tx fee is low.
Also most of those HFT bots need to have liquidity on hand so this is part of the system, what is noteable is how little it takes to move the market these days: less than a 500 coin sell off on an exchange like Bitfinex gave us >$1000 swings. Which if you trade is what you want as volatility is where the money is made.
MTGOX taught us very early to never trust exchanges and this was after the capital controls in Cypus that made us all on edge at the time, and yet it took multiple GOXXINGS to learn (the last one still hasn't been resolved and the Japanese govt has been dragging it's feet for nearly a decade now). People who buy and keep them on exchanges are going to have to learn why self-ownership is a critical part of this ecosystem.
People may have lost untold millions/billions having sloppy OPSEC when handling BTC, but so did Turing [0] and he did it for the same reasons we have just so it's clear and goes to show how it's not a fringe idea to have self-sovereignty over one's finances, especially in uncertain times like war (and in his case peace time as they castrated for being gay despite his efforts in breaking the U-boat cryptography) and I doubt you will question his genius in cryptography and just think of him as a crypto bro: proving it's just as common for a super genius as it is from the layman to get it wrong.
We just need to make it better, and in that regard I think we have com efar but it's still too difficult and a trusted 3rd party is required: Dorsey is working on something along those lines.
This is why we have always encouraged doing small sums until you can replicate the process and then transfer the whole amount with several contingencies in place should anything happen. It's not easy or perfect, but neither is physics and we can still have re-usable first stage rockets when it was thought to be impossible.
The coins failed because exchanges shouldn't even have been created in the first place. Bitcoin should have been as easy to use and ubiquitous as the US dollar. As we all know, cryptocurrency turned into stocks instead.
If not exchanges, what entity would you suggest as a way to change crypto into fiat?
Using the most successful fiat currency the world has ever known as a goal seems a bit lofty. In your view, how much time should it have taken to surpass the dollar?
That's my point. There should never have been any need to exchange crypto into fiat. Bitcoin should have been as ubiquitous as USD. Everyone using it, pricing things in it, transacting with it, holding at least some amount of it. Exchanging for fiat should have been as easy as getting change from a store.
No one who was holding coins was paying attention to anyone who was telling them that the coins had failed. Do you remember 'have fun staying poor'? It was used to shut up anyone who said anything critical.
I guess I needed a /sarc tag. The coins aren't failing. And I'd disagree with the notion that the success or failure of a cryptocurrencies is directly correlated with "price".
No, there's still Monero and ZCash. And most holders do have their own non-custodial wallets. Or at least wallet seeds from intermediaries like MetaMask.
The speculative frenzy with FedCoins like BTC and ETH will obviously fall to baseline, but the true use case for cryptocurrency still exists.
Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing.
Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...