Topic: How will the crypto community avoid the issues the financial industry fails on? (Read 558 times)
March 19, 2014, 08:13:32 PM
Sadly no. Greed is a person problem. Bitcoin attempts to create a trustless currency that cannot tempt the issuer into behaving in a manner to further their own interests. However, mining power coming into the hands of a few centralised pools is a concern. People think a 51%+ ownership of the hash-rate means the coin value would collapse, but this is only true if the operator wanted to counterfeit coins. The more-likely alternative is that they want more coins and more transaction fees. As long as they can be trusted not to subvert the network running a pool with a majority ownership of the hash-rate, the network would still be useable. Of course once one entity is granted trust, they inevitably ceed to their own greed.
March 19, 2014, 06:40:36 AM
One of the key things that makes crypto appeal to me is that it offers a chance to replace the corrupt rent seeking behaviour of those currently in charge of the keys to finance.
In what ways can crypto avoid the same greed that plagues Wall St? Sure, the decentralised nature removes a lot of opportunities for rent seeking, but concentrated points of power will still exist in some forms leaving plenty of opportunity to abuse these positions for personal profit. Crypto offers a great replacement for simple banking services and transactions, but I don't see much in the way of innovation and change in terms of investing. I guess the increase in competition will help with this, but what if we end up back at the same point we are now with an oligopoly of massive corporations in charge. Most industries seem to tend towards this in the long term.
In what ways can crypto avoid the same greed that plagues Wall St? Sure, the decentralised nature removes a lot of opportunities for rent seeking, but concentrated points of power will still exist in some forms leaving plenty of opportunity to abuse these positions for personal profit. Crypto offers a great replacement for simple banking services and transactions, but I don't see much in the way of innovation and change in terms of investing. I guess the increase in competition will help with this, but what if we end up back at the same point we are now with an oligopoly of massive corporations in charge. Most industries seem to tend towards this in the long term.
Jump to: