TL;DR: Cryptocoins are here to stay, but bubble could go nuclear soon.
My first thread here. I will probably poke a hornets nest with a stick, but who knows
Anyways, I have also invested in some cryptos and have mined few of those myself, however I cannot shake the felling that the whole thing will just collapse on people heads. Hard. I recognize the need and the innovation and therefore give my best effort to keep myself informed, but I am growing skeptical by each day.
Here are some observations that I have made, feel free to discuss and use them however you like.
My first thread here. I will probably poke a hornets nest with a stick, but who knows
Anyways, I have also invested in some cryptos and have mined few of those myself, however I cannot shake the felling that the whole thing will just collapse on people heads. Hard. I recognize the need and the innovation and therefore give my best effort to keep myself informed, but I am growing skeptical by each day.
Here are some observations that I have made, feel free to discuss and use them however you like.
- The whole software ecosystem excluding mining software is shit. There are some really terrible pieces of code in the wild that people trust their live savings with. My personal experience is with Monero and Eth wallets, that are pure abominations of software development. Monero wallet spews meaningless logs like there is no tomorrow and doesn't know how much work has to be done when syncing. Eth wallet is even better, my particular installation managed to crash multiple times when trying to sync and also went KIA by killing its own network connections. Not to mention that it is written in JavaScript which under no circumstances should be utilized to deal with that amount of data (multiple GB of blockchain information). Mining software is done well, I haven't done any thorough analysis, but it behaves consistently when dealing with various tasks (networking, resilience, hardware access).
- Services are terrible. Once glimpse at /r/Coinbase and man can see that the most funded and "clean" operation is led by donkey and two rabbits. They don't honor withdrawals (some people are missing 10k+ USD!), they don't support their customers, etc. One of the most interesting things that happen is that they from time to time credit or debit wrong customers...like WTF?!? Can you imagine if that level of incompetency existed in modern banking system or complex ventures like MMOs, money transmitting services (PP, Skrill, etc.). Just short explanation here: I don't mean that latter never screw up, it is just that those screw ups are rare and there are usually firm protocols in place to mitigate such types of disasters.
- Security. I won't even go there in detail. Each day exchanges go down, funds are siphoned in trucks, "contracts" are depleted.
- Most ICOs consist of most unbelievable junk ever made. People with 2 page PDFs promise to cure common cold and all types of cancer, while people throw money at them. Poorly written contracts in fewer lines of code than typical's CS student homework destroy millions of USD. For now it, looks like there is a race who is going to combine word blockchain with most random nouns (de-centralized blockchain for medical devices got me laughing the other day).
- The biggest lie ever: BTC was sold as anonymity tool, but its actually in totally different part of spectrum: now three letter agencies can almost undeniably prove that you have been transmitting or receiving illicit funds, thanks to crypto signatures which pinpoint your sorry ass in a few lines of code.
- Demand is overblown. Yup, there is a drug deal or two, but basically nobody uses coins except speculators and holders. On top of that, even a small increase in utilization collapses the whole system, transfers are on standby for indefinitely, transaction processing becomes worse than in traditional banking, and still, no one is completely certain on how to solve this - which was the reason for recent BTC fork.
The story about classical financial entities using BTC have been proven bust, since they understand now that they can create their own blockchains and just use the whole thing as another communication protocol, in which case end-customer will have nothing to benefit from.
- There is agenda behind this. I am not going political here, but one thing must be pointed out. It is a bit strange that both TOR and cryptocoins were actually developed by branches of certain countries military and intelligence community. I don't think that the plan here is to utilize technology in a typical conspiracy theory fashion, but it is a very convenient method to simply "erase" a lot of fiat by simple press of the button.
