I think a sufficiently advanced algorithm can over time.
Bitcoin is an example of a system of trust that has worked pretty well so far (although it requires a lot of electricity, but that is the trade off). There are also people on the Bitcoin core team, so there is some trusted element there.
Crypto will likely continue to innovate on algorithms, given the chance.
I think there can be trust in people, plus algorithms, with algorithms taking over more over time. This is already happening even in traditional finance, i.e. giving more control over to algorithms that participate in HFT. People do monitor those, but people monitor crypto, too, and maybe the failures in crypto so far mean too much control has been given.
I would argue that some more things in finance can be automated, without things being so black and white (i.e. no control vs total control given to algorithms). I do think the trust model given to governments and traditional finance gatekeepers can be iterated on, with some regulation involved too. I don't think we've figured everything out yet.
I've felt it a bunch of times, but I've worked through it with meditation (without drugs)...
I think psychedelics just bring out deeper parts of the mind. I don't do them anymore, but I used to, so I have some experience. I'm not a teetotaler, I still drink alcohol and smoke weed sometimes, but I'm done with psychedelics for the time being.
Yeah, I had been experiencing it for years before I ever tried psychedelics, I just didn't know it was something "real".
Before I knew what it was, if I had an episode of "harm OCD", I would sometimes feel physically ill and excuse myself to the bathroom and repeatedly splash water on my face until the feeling went away. Sometimes I'd keep my hands behind my back on purpose (the idea being that I would harm someone with my hands).
Since learning what it is, I'm more easily able to dispel it when it arises. Simply knowing "oh, this is OCD" is powerful enough for me to get on with my life. For the record, I completely abstain from psychedelics or any recreational drugs now (with the exception of coffee, and light alcohol at social gatherings).
In terms of NodeJS vs Python, specifically for web scraping, would you choose NodeJS? If so, why?
I'm more familiar with NodeJS but I'm working with a team that is leaning towards using Python for web scraping, so that's why I'm asking. They said spinning up multiple processes in Python is easier so at scale it will work better.
I know you can use the Cluster module to have child processes in NodeJS, but in my experience it's a bit of a pain to use, although it's not always required to use anyway, at least when only using NodeJS as a web server (as long as you have multiple NodeJS instances, in case one goes down). Web scraping is a bit different though.
NodeJS (V8) is faster than CPython, and NodeJS was built for this precise use case. I wouldn't use it over Python personally though, I don't use NodeJS and would sooner reach for Rust if performance mattered.
Concurrency is an important limitation as you've noticed, but it's already a problem for CPython. You would be able to squeeze out more req/s from NodeJS than CPython, up to a point where you would need to bring in something extra to scale to all the cores of one machine (multiprocessing in Python, something like Cluster in NodeJS) which you wouldn't need in Go/Rust/Java.
Then of course scaling further, you would need a system to run jobs across machines, and your choice of Go over Python wouldn't necessarily matter so much. The difference in performance wouldn't limit what you can do, it would just change what you pay for compute. If your compute costs more but your devs can implement features faster, performance is usually unimportant.
I worked on a project which required some medium scale web scraping (less than 100 million pages), and went with node primarily because of puppeteer.
The system had a couple dozen worker processes doing the scraping, and one coordinator which maintained a queue of pages which needed to be scraped. There was some logic to balance requests between sites, so we weren't making more than a request/s to any in particular. The coordinator just had a rest api endpoint, which the workers would hit to get their next job and to return w/e data.
Each worker process was ran on a separate aws instance, believe it was a t2 with unlimited cpu enabled. These are only a few dollars a day, and it was necessary to have as many ip addresses as possible (at least 5% of the sites we were scraping had some preventative measures in place, but they all seemed to be ip based)
I’ve never done web scraping professionally, but I can relay that any time I’ve tried to use Python for anything involving concurrency, except in the most trivial cases, it has been pure pain.
Elixir. Parallelism is 99% free, it's super easy to make almost any task parallel. And it's one of the fastest dynamic languages too, surpassing Node.JS in places.
I made a submission [1] about this today too, but it didn't generate any comments. I was hoping to have a discussion regarding how Bitcoin / crypto / web3 is often grouped into one category. Jack Dorsey is making a distinction here that they are not the same thing. This specific tweet [2] sticks out for me:
> You don’t own “web3.”
> The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.
> Know what you’re getting into…
I know there are concerns with Bitcoin's energy consumption, but I still think it's one of the most innovative things to come in the last decade, and I don't think it should be grouped with things like NFTs, etc.
I like some other altcoins, like Ethereum and some other smart contract platforms, so I'm not just a Bitcoin maximalist. However, personally I think NFTs are a lot of hype. I don't think Bitcoin is the same as that. There were no early VC investors in Bitcoin (with the exception of Tim Draper, but he wasn't invested from the start of the network).
Now the VCs are looking for the next big altcoin and investing in that. I.e. some altcoins that I even think have potential, like Solana, are also heavily VC backed. In that regard people should also know what they are getting into.
Just because there weren't early VCs into bitcoin doesn't mean that most BTC is distributed fairly amongst a large portion of people. Most BTC seems to be owned and controlled by a fairly small concentration of wealthy people at this point. It will do no good for average people, so it shouldn't be hyped as "a form of "freedom" or "revolution" or anything of that sort - it's just another asset for wealthy people to buy up.
Isn't this always going to be the case with money, especially hard money. Partially due to the definition of "wealthy"? The money appears to be unfairly distributed amongst the wealthy people. Yes! Thats how money works! If you have a lot of it, guess what, you are now a wealthy person.
Absolutely, but the bitcoin maximalists (including Jack Dorsey) should stop evangelizing it as the solution to so many societal problems when it's indistinguishable from any other asset at this point.
There is a fundamental. difference to why they evangelise this as correcting a root problem of fiat money. Fiat money causes price distortion and monetisation of non-monetary assets. It also acts as a constant handbrake of people heavily reliant on holding the medium of exchange - most notably poorer people, salary earners. Fixing this removes a very large systemic impediment to more universally fair system (not equal distribution) to achieve prosperity and social mobility. It isn't a panacea, but a significant improvement on the status quo.
Does the term "expensive" really make sense for an infinitely divisible medium of exchange? Can money be more or less "affordable"? The more meaningful metrics are purchasing power and historical and expected purchasing power, and the confidence of that. By this metric, regardless of price, if it can realistically expect to have its purchasing power increase, then it is helpful to poor people for saving.
I agree, and I imagine it's seen as "expensive" due to the psychology of people wanting to own one whole of something, i.e. a whole Bitcoin, in this case.
However, due to the 21 million max supply cap, not even everyone in the world today can own a whole Bitcoin.
Measuring things in satoshis (100 millionth of a bitcoin) will probably become more common, assuming demand continues to increase. I think it will, due to Bitcoin's scarcity, and the ever increasing realization of the need for a hard asset, as inflationary monetary policies continue around the world.
I also think an important distinction is that several of the other popular cryptos do not have a hard supply cap, or it's so high as to not matter.
Ethereum does not have a hard supply cap. With EIP-1559, some ETH is burned, causing some deflationary pressure, but still, there is no max cap in place at this time. The Shiba Inu meme coin has a 1 quadrillion supply cap, which is so high as to not matter at all. People can own a bunch of Shiba Inu, and maybe they like having a high number of something, but IMO, it just doesn't have the long term resilience of Bitcoin.
By the way I'm not hating on Ethereum, I think it has a place too, but Bitcoin is different. I have no idea why people invest in Shiba Inu except just to try to ride momentum, but I don't see how that will work out well long term (or maybe they believe in ShibaSwap, I'm not sure).
Anyway going back to Bitcoin, another benefit is allowing the unbanked to economically participate with others using digital money just by having a smartphone or computer, and an internet connection. Otherwise they have to rely on physical cash.
The hard money aspect of Bitcoin, and the ability to transfer money to anyone across the world over the internet, even the unbanked, are two aspects that I consider a "revolution". I do think Bitcoin needs the Lightning Network to scale, but I don't see any issue with that.
Regardless of the divisible nature, it's still an asset - not money. Poor people don't have enough to invest in assets. They live week to week with enough cash to buy shelter, food, and the bare necessities. If they do have enough to save, it makes more sense to keep that savings in cash so they can pay for unexpected incidents and needs without having to first convert BTC into their local currency.
Yes, I agree with you, at least until Bitcoin is accepted widely, which I think is only a matter of time. At that time, there is no need to transfer to local currency, if Bitcoin is the global monetary standard and accepted for all day to day expenses as well as for larger expenses like real estate. At that point it's beyond an asset, but we will see with time what happens.
> To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana.
Good point. What are your thoughts on Cardano, Algorand and Tezos?
Interesting points about AVAX's C-chain and Fantom as well. I have a friend who did a project on Fantom due to lower gas fees and it also being EVM compatible, but yeah, it's using Solidity.
Also, just wondering, do you agree with this quote from the article?
> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. The goal for Etheruem is not to be the chain most consumers transact on. It’s to be the settlement layer for a number of other chains sitting on top of it, which can run much faster and much cheaper, because they’re backed by Ethereum’s security and infrastructure. In other words: the consensus layer for a variety of networks.
I'd also be curious to hear once you have time to look into zkRollup L2's.
I like Solana but it has gone down several times. Not totally an apples to apples comparison to ETH, which I don't think has ever gone down (someone please reply if that is incorrect). ETH did need to be forked, but that's a different story.
Avalanche does seem promising. I like their concept of multiple chains: Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain) [1].
For anyone who is a Principal Engineer at a FAANG, what do you do day to day?
I'm a Principal Engineer, not at a FAANG, and that mostly means i'm an expert at what I do and know the product inside and out, and I spend a good amount of time coding. I do also help others, answer questions, and deal with complex problems. I'd say I do 80% coding and 20% meetings / other things.
I interviewed somewhere else and they wanted me to do 50% coding and 50% meetings / other things. Was a bit surprised, since i'd personally rather code and keep my skills up.
My take is companies should have their top engineers spending a sigificant amount of time coding, or at least architecting, but I could imagine, and have read, that at FAANG sized companies it becomes more political? Also with so many employees I guess in theory the idea is to have Principals spend more time leveling up the rest of their workforce? In practice does that happen?
Staff/principal level here. I accelerate my team. Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes that involves teaching/mentoring others, sometimes it means improving our tools and processes, sometimes it involves hammer out our architecture and security approach, and sometimes it involves figuring out what baroque process I need to go through in order to get legal’s approval to launch our new product. I make sure almost all of what I do is well documented and communicated to the rest of my team.
The three rough metrics I’ve heard for how staff/principals are evaluated are “creating clarity”, “impact”, and “leadership.” Those metrics are all very difficult to perform on if I were focused on my code related output as an individual, although there are people who make and achieve within that level in my company who do more straight up coding then I do. The important thing is good judgement on where to spend your time to have the most impact.
If you wanted me to put numbers on it, I’d say my time is probably 25% coding, 20% meetings, 20% working on infrastructure and tools, 20% documenting/communicating, and 15% mentoring/recruiting.
this is a great summary, and pretty much exactly reflects my role. My job is to help other engineers in our org be as productive as possible. That always means trying to include other people in what I'm doing from a mentor/career-development perspective, but otherwise follows your % splits pretty well.
The bits that people don't talk about frequently are things like "what do you actually do in the 20% of the time you are coding?" It's usually things like performance analyses and optimizations, solving misc tech debt that I have the flexibility to work on since my time isn't allocated to project teams/squads, architecture and PoC work for new capabilities we think we will need, and honestly sometimes its just picking up a couple super low level tasks anyone could do because keeping team members focused on other things is what's most important.
At least in my org the common theme is almost always "there's a hard problem over there, go help them fix it'.
Source: principal engineer for a couple years, senior for 6 or 7 years before that. Not at a FAANG, but in a ~350 person technology org at a company with nationwide offices and consumer product presence in the USA.
On the whole my responsibilities are a mix of things:
1. Technical strategy - primarily writing strategy docs and discussing with other tech PEs. Usually precursor to architecture.
2. Business Strategy - reviews with non tech staff and leadership (across the org) about what the business needs are, where we see the future going. Often takes the form of reviewing other peoples documents or contributing sections to those
4. Architecture - Creating architecture documents - lots of text and boxes and lines. Several rounds of reviews. Usually precursor to coding or reading other people's code.
5. Coding - takes the form of staring at various IDEs and scratching my head.
6. Reading other people's code - same as above. Also include code reviews.
7. Operations - On call stuff. Usually where all the architecture stuff falls apart :-)
8. Mentorship - structured 1:1s, feedback, etc
9. Prototyping and demos
I spend probably 90% of my time doing the items above. The mix among these items varies but I consider all of it my work. For the rest I sometimes get pulled into the items below that are not officially my responsibilities
- Conferences and public speaking - I could, but choose not to
- Project tracking and reporting
- Managing people's careers directly
- Funding decisions
My work is rarely political depending on how you define politics. To me politics is about "who gets the cool stuff" so mostly funding decisions. I do get pulled in occasionally to sort out "who should build this" discussions but they are usually good faith discussions trying to align expertise and charters before funding decisions are made. Biz and tech strategy does involve consensus building but I suspect the Real Politics™ happen behind the scenes at higher levels.
I admit #9 is fun but I try not to do too much #9, because there's a huge risk to doing too much of that: losing touch with what's important to the bottom line, and indirectly influencing all the other ICs that prototypes get you promoted. That's just not true in my company. My prototypes are usually for exploring something important to the company or validating a tech hypothesis of some sort. I try to spend more time writing production code where possible.
It does feel like some folks ignore the business side of things but I think I enjoy being a part of the larger picture. It's definitely not for everyone. I know several people who are personally happy and have had WILDLY successful careers being hands-on tech specialists and ignoring the business side. It's great that it works for them.
Not everyone can do the same thing over and over again their whole life. Soon, I'm going to scream if I have to build another website or app... thankfully I'm making a massive career shift into Aerospace.
I am happy to be open here if it helps others. I am not with a FAANG, I am employed by Red Hat. My title is Senior Principal Software Engineer. At Red Hat it goes Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Principal Software Engineer -> Senior Principal Software Engineer -> Distinguished Engineer.
My main duties are that I lead a team of 7 engineers and we all work on open source security projects.
My day is a mix of half coding / half meetings. I am UK based, so my mornings are nice and free (while the US sleeps) and then around 2pm I have a large chunk of meetings. The meetings are mostly with my team, senior management, and open source community meetings.
For me being a Principal is a much more than just coding prowess. You also need good 'soft skills'. You need to mentor engineers and think about their growth. Make sure they are challenged enough to grow, but not so much that they end up stressed and out of kilt. You need to be able to communicate with not just other software engineers, but also product managers, directly with customers and many other verticals within a business.
I'm a staff/principal at a FAANG. My experience agrees with the other answers here that "it depends"—specifically, on what the larger org or team needs from me at the moment. There is a chunk of consistent work, though, which is somewhat of a mix between an engineering manager and an IC.
Like engineering managers, I am responsible for planning out a team's long term goals and reporting on them to senior management. Also like engineering managers I'm responsible for hiring and evaluating technical talent, particularly the senior software engineers in our org plus people who are under consideration for promotion or hiring into my level.
Unlike engineering managers, it's important that I do "hands on" work. This includes my own tech designs and coding, but much more reviewing the designs and code of others. I see my job as delivering technical artifacts through others. What's different between the principal/staff role and the senior eng/tech lead role is the levels of indirection. For a senior eng, you are generally owning the output of a team of people (roughly 3-7 people, though it varies).
At the staff/principal level you work at the level of a team of teams, so your job is really to develop and mentor the tech leads of those teams. Occasionally you might be called in as a tie-breaker or to assist on some cross-team issue, but ideally that doesn't happen too often because the tech leads know their stuff (and they'd better because there is no way you can know the details of multiple team's worth of systems).
Or if we have the power to terraform Mars, and not just be stuck in a space colony out there, but be able to explore the planet freely, why not just terraform Earth back to Earth [1]?
I see this point rehashed on HN over and over. I'd love if there was a more productive discussion of cryptocurrencies. I don't think they are going away anytime soon. Too many technologists and others are thinking about them now. I personally think store of value is a strong use case, at least for those of us who consider them to have value.
Just wondering, what would it take for you (and others who share similar views) to change your mind about crypto? How long does the technology need to be around to be validated? Would you feel better about the space if it was regulated (which would bring scams, manipulation, and illicit activity down), or would you still think it's all nonsense?
The "change my mind" criterion for this would be actual price stability. That is, a significant market for goods and services which can be bought at a fixed crypto price over a period of a year or more with zero price variation. People getting paid salary in fixed crypto denominations. People taking out 10-year mortgages in fixed crypto denominations at interest rates comparable to fiat mortgages.
It is feasible that cryptocurrency might be more stable than, say, the Bolivar. It is not feasible that it will be more stable than the dollar.
If you want a really concrete use case, suppose you want to buy a new Macbook next year and you want to save on a weekly basis. If you'd done that over various periods over the last year you'd end up with between 150% and 70% of the price of the Macbook. Now, so long as "number go up" you're winning ...
Yep. Stability is really the only gap in the market for a "store of value". Shares are fairly fungible and have a "number go up" tendency as well, but there's actual reason for their numbers to go up other than convincing more people to believe they're a share of value than believed last year.
I have heard Metcalfe's Law applied to crypto networks, and I think it actually does make sense. I.e. as the number of participants goes up, the value increases, similar to how as the number of users goes up on a social media or other technology platform, those networks are considered more valuable. Crypto is a technology so I think it makes some sense to apply the same framework.
Crypto doesn't claim to be a telecoms network, it claims to be an asset. If you double the number of people owning stocks, or bond or oil, it doesn't make the stock, bond or oil four times as valuable as before. It simply updates the market value of stock, bond or oil to whatever the new users paid for it - which might even be less than before (whilst the use value of collecting the dividends or coupon payments or burning the oil to individual end users doesn't tend to change much in response to more people using it at all)
And even if we grant a Metcalfe exponential relationship between crypto prices and crypto participants, you're still running into the basic Ponzi scheme problem that if all your value comes from the price appreciation predicated on the number of HODLers growing, it'll hit that ceiling eventually. Which means it isn't a particularly great store of value, compared with something like a stock that generates future income regardless of whether new people enter the stock market or not
Aren't social media networks like Facebook/Meta and Twitter valued higher as an increasing number of users join the network? Or new startups trying to get more users? Do you consider those ponzi schemes? Also, I'm just wondering, do you like tech stocks? And do you think high P/E ratios would be possible if new investors weren't buying those stocks?
Also, if there's not enough Bitcoin ever going to be created for everyone alive even now to own just one (21 million max supply cap), and assuming the interest in it only increases over time, how would a ceiling ever be hit?
> Anyway aren't social media networks like Facebook/Meta and Twitter valued higher as an increasing number of users join the network? Or new startups trying to get more users? Do you consider those ponzi schemes?
Facebook/Meta and Twitter getting more MAUs means that they sell more ads. Zuck would still be rich if nobody was willing or able to buy FB at all.
But if their only product was FB and TWTR stock, the only thing that stock did was allow you to hold, give or sell it, and the only argument for buying it was an entirely recursive argument that it was a store of value because people will value more in future because more of them will want to buy it because its a store of value and an appeal to Metcalfe's law for the valuation because stock markets are a bit like telecoms networks then yes, they would definitely be Ponzi schemes.
Question makes more sense flipped on his head: if you think everything that looks a little bit like a telecoms network in terms of having lots of participants obeys Metcalfe's law, then why aren't actual Ponzi schemes actually extremely valuable to participate in?
> Question makes more sense flipped on his head: if you think everything that looks a little bit like a telecoms network in terms of having lots of participants obeys Metcalfe's law, then why aren't actual Ponzi schemes actually extremely valuable to participate in?
Yeah, good point there. I think the thing with a Ponzi scheme, the way I see it, is that I can't transfer a share of that Ponzi scheme across the world, 24/7. I could only hold it, and if it is a Ponzi scheme, it would eventually collapse. I do see value in the monetary transfer aspect to crypto as well, so that's part of it, and I personally don't think crypto will collapse, at least not Bitcoin, Ethereum, and probably several of the other major ones. The rest, I have no idea, and maybe some of those other altcoins could be considered Ponzi schemes. Definitely some of the altcoins are pump and dump schemes, if not Ponzis, and definitely some altcoins will collapse. I just don't think applying Ponzi scheme to the entire crypto ecosystem is fair.
Also, sorry, I edited the comment you responded to, so it changed a bit. I do wonder what you think about the ceiling I mentioned, in regards to that there's only 21 million Bitcoin ever going to be created, and that's not enough for everyone in the world to have even one full Bitcoin. If interest grows, and population continues to grow, then how would a ceiling ever be hit? I don't see that as a Ponzi scheme, I see that as interest in a scarce asset, that you can't make more of, while we are in an inflationary period, with governments printing money all around the world. Just wondering if you have any thoughts on that.
The way I'm thinking about it is that some people may want to hold Bitcoin forever, and just loan it out, to put it to use, while also having a deflationary asset in their portfolio.
Shares in Ponzis are often easily transferable, as are penny stocks pumped by email spam and all the tokens and altcoins you mention that were created in obvious bad faith. Many of them have considerably fewer than 21 million in circulation too, and none of them claim to be worth as much as a Bitcoin. It doesn't make them good investments.
"If interest grows" is the big if and "price go up" is a very, very bad reason for interest in one particular coin to continue growing indefinitely when faced with all the alternative ways for people to park their money, from technically superior coins to investments they can actually live in (some available for less than a cryptographic string!) or stuff that pays actual dividends and gives you legal claim to actual real world assets. And for all the FUD cryptoenthusiasts like to spread about government money printing, it's the "fiat" world that has all the mechanisms that link money supply growth with market demand and real world activity, ability to shrink the money supply if its growing too fast, and the crypto world where basically the entire supply of coins has been printed in a few years by a small number of people trying to get rich and those coins will continue to exist for as long as the blockchain is maintained whether people want to buy them or not.
I don't think crypto in general is nonsense. I do think a lot of the hype is. Some of my concerns with it
* Is it a currency or an investment? None of the major coins seem usable as a currency to me, the values are too volatile.
* What does it offer me over using USD? For me at least I see very little value, I often cannot use it for purchases and most of the places that I have seen it offered do it for secrecy, VPN or counterfeit goods. I am not trying to perpetuate the idea that cryto is only used for illegal activities but for myself I have little to no benefit of using it for purchases.
* Would you compare your "store of value" use case the same as owning gold? It is interesting to hear coins having a store of value since for me at least the volatility kills it and without a huge use in the economy I don't have confidence in it holding up.
* Is it a currency or an investment? None of the major coins seem usable as a currency to me, the values are too volatile.
More of an investment, for the time being.
* What does it offer me over using USD? For me at least I see very little value, I often cannot use it for purchases and most of the places that I have seen it offered do it for secrecy, VPN or counterfeit goods. I am not trying to perpetuate the idea that cryto is only used for illegal activities but for myself I have little to no benefit of using it for purchases.
Yes, I've purchased like one thing with crypto and that was back when you couldn't buy hardware wallets with USD, so crypto was the only option.
* Would you compare your "store of value" use case the same as owning gold? It is interesting to hear coins having a store of value since for me at least the volatility kills it and without a huge use in the economy I don't have confidence in it holding up.
Yes, I do compare the store of value use case similar to owning gold. Gold is just much harder to transport, send across the world, store, etc. Gold has also been trading sideways for about a year, so I don't think it really protects from inflation (someone correct me if I'm mistaken about that). I actually do own both gold and crypto, so I've been able to compare them first hand.
Also, crypto is super volatile, for sure, but if you think about it over a multi-year horizon, similar to how someone would invest in an S&P 500 index fund, then I think crypto will in general appreciate and the volatility should go down as more people hold it and consider it valuable. The idea is that it stabilizes as its market cap goes up. Also just want to call out that I consider Bitcoin its own thing, apart from the rest of crypto, since Bitcoin actually has a max supply cap. Many cryptocurrencies do not (they can essentially print money), or their max supply is so ridiculously high as to barely matter at all.
Thanks for responding! I like to hear about how people are thinking about this, beyond the point that it's only used for illicit activities.
To be clear, what I said was that the real-world uses of crypto-as-a-medium-of-exchange are almost all tied to criminal activity.
I didn't say anything at all about crypto-as-a-store-of-value. Like any fiat currency, crypto has value iff people think it has value, no surprises there. At the moment, crypto's value is heavily tied to speculation about massive increases in its future value, which is not sustainable in the long term and is the biggest blocker for the medium-of-exchange usecase.
I have nothing against the idea of crypto - it's a good idea, especially with the stuff built on top of it around smart contracts, and the technology is neat - but until it stabilizes at predictable exchange rates it will never be used by the unsophisticated masses as a medium of exchange.
Do you think that it's possible that as the market cap of crypto grows, the volatility goes down? I believe this applies to traditional markets as well. It just takes more money to sway the price.
Also if people see value in it, vs other assets, wouldn't they want to hold it, so wouldn't value be stored in it? Curious if you have any thoughts about that.
The trouble with the usual measures of market cap, trading volume, etc. is that so much of it is faked. And lot of crypto is premined or is otherwise held by whales that don't have much use of it unless they find someone to dump their coins, and they have both means and motive to swing the market. So it's entirely possible that crypto market cap continues to "grow" but volatility just stay the same.
But otherwise, yeah, if there's enough people to make the whales look comparatively smaller, it may get more stable.
> As for Bitcoin: You're missing the fact that while Bitcoin can't be manipulated away from 21 million, the Bitcoin markets can definitely be heavily manipulated by sufficiently large players and insiders. And there does seem to be ample evidence that this is happening.
So what will the argument be when this market is regulated? Gary Gensler is obviously a fan of Bitcoin. He considers other digital assets in a different light, and seems to consider many of them to be securities. What happens when crypto exchanges are regulated and the level of manipulation is much harder, similar to traditional financial markets? The 21 million cap on Bitcoin is going to look more attractive then, I think, at least to those who aren't considering that now. Plenty of folks already consider the 21 million cap on Bitcoin very attractive, and I think this will only increase over time.
Also the other comments that I see arguing how Bitcoin could be changed tells me that those people have not followed the history of Bitcoin very closely. It seems one of Bitcoin's main goals over the past 10 years is ossification and hardening of the system, i.e. being very strict and careful about changes. This seems built into the ethos of the system. The Bitcoin Cash fork is an example of this. Bitcoin Core refused to change the block size and that led to a fork which has not done well in terms of price in comparison to Bitcoin. One could say that so far the Bitcoin Cash fork has failed in comparison.
Bitcoin is an example of a system of trust that has worked pretty well so far (although it requires a lot of electricity, but that is the trade off). There are also people on the Bitcoin core team, so there is some trusted element there.
Crypto will likely continue to innovate on algorithms, given the chance.
I think there can be trust in people, plus algorithms, with algorithms taking over more over time. This is already happening even in traditional finance, i.e. giving more control over to algorithms that participate in HFT. People do monitor those, but people monitor crypto, too, and maybe the failures in crypto so far mean too much control has been given.
I would argue that some more things in finance can be automated, without things being so black and white (i.e. no control vs total control given to algorithms). I do think the trust model given to governments and traditional finance gatekeepers can be iterated on, with some regulation involved too. I don't think we've figured everything out yet.