The Crypto Elites Are Plotting a Wall Street Merger
concoda.substack.comI thought the overall "shadowy Wall Street elite cabal" in this article was bizarre and a bit nauseating.
I actually mentioned this somewhat recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31156677, but the one place where crypto and blockchain actually does make sense to me is as a replacement for our (in the US) insanely outdated and antiquated settlement systems for banks.
I was a software developer well steeped in the "API world" of modern software development, and when I got into fintech/banking and learned about how our current banking technology works I had about 64,000 WTFs. The thing that finally "clicked" with me is when I understood that our current banking technology is really just a digital implementation of paper processes from basically the 1950s and 60s. That why so much of the stuff is big, batch-file-processing-based, and why things that seem like they should be quite simple and straightforward have loads of confusing and arcane rules (just see the NACHA specs for ACH transfers).
So seeing that large financial institutions are making use of blockchain technology (but without some of the stuff that is the achilles heel of many current cryptocurrencies, like proof-of-work) I see as a great thing to modernize our financial technology. This "crypto anarchists vs. wall street elites" bullshit is just something that plays out in a comic book-view of the world.
> I thought the overall "shadowy Wall Street elite cabal" in this article was bizarre and a bit nauseating.
Especially since most of it is circumstantial, guilt by association or outright misleading. I don't know of anybody in crypto who still takes enteprise blockchains or the likes of JPM Coin seriously. In any case, it would give little credence to an accusation of collusion between Wall Street and the "crypto elite". It's just a private company using a certain technology.
Why can’t they just copy what the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is doing? We went from ‘1-2 day settlement, and God forbid you need to send money cross-border’ to ‘most transactions settle within 10 seconds’ in the span of 20 years.
So you see some garbage and conclude it is bad, therefore this other piece of garbage must be good
> comic book-view of the world
spot on.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
This blog post goes off the rails in the second sentence.
> The crypto movement, the very rebellion that set out to defeat [WallSt/TheFed] hegemony, has provided them with the necessary new-age tech to enhance their existing order.
Like what tech do banks or the government need from the crypto crowd? Trading has been electronic for decades, the credit card networks are orders of magnitude more scalable than any blockchain, ACH exists.
> The crypto movement, the very rebellion that set out to defeat [WallSt/TheFed] hegemony, has provided them with the necessary new-age tech to enhance their existing order.
While a bit hyperbolic, Satoshi did talk about the fragility of the financial system as the core driver behind inventing Bitcoin. It's even enshrined in the genesis block [1][2][3].
1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block 2. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52706 3. https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000019d6689c085ae...
They need retail FOMO and Crypto gives that. Probably less than 0.1% cares of underlying cryptography and computer science. Regular people are buying Shiba&Doge coins and NFTs to become rich quick.
Paypal, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Robinhood are all supporting that by hyping this “innovative investment” in their ads and providing easy way in.
They do not 'need' anything. Apparently there's some utility for a cryptographically signed ledger, but I suspect that's a 'blockchain' in name only.
EDIT: I remember some banking 'crypto' projects announced by several institutions across the globe. Whether they are real projects or just a way to try to attract investments by pitching the latest fad, I do not know.
One is mentioned in the article, JPMorgan's Onyx. But as always, if your system is not open to the public and doesn't need to protect against hostile actors, the overhead of a blockchain is a waste. The technology that JPMorgan is looking for is called... a database.
Political momentum to migrate to newer technologies while bypassing compliance and regulatory requirements. Most of the banking "distributed" ledgers are so siloed that the number of parties running the nodes can be counted on one to two hands.
The modern tulip bubble, but 1000x worse. I cannot wait for crypto-everything to die.
More than a decade into at this point. I don't see why it'd burst now.
At some point there are no more new investors to pay the earlier ones.
Such as what happened in 2018-19? Bitcoin never goes "bankrupt". Bitcoin never ceases to exist. The price can do whatever it wants, but the lower it goes, the more momentum it can build on the way back up.
This doesn't give any examples of crypto "going legit". Circle, Gemini, and Coinbase were set up to be legal from the beginning; they never tried to "fight the system". Tether/Bitfinex, Binance, etc. would like to be recognized as legal but so far I don't see any progress.
This has a lot of hype and opinion but very little substance. Respectfully, whoever wrote it needs to actually talk to people building things in the space instead of telling them what they are doing. There are small/partial examples of the clickbait title happening but they're few and far between and I saw none of them cited here.
Also of note, open dialogue, while not stylish in our current zeitgeist, is absolutely necessary and should be actively encouraged among all stakeholders even those that may have opposing views of the future. This is in regard specifically tho not exclusively to the Brian Armstrong/Pelosi convo. Anyone that's been around crypto long enough has seen someone finally grok the potential it brings for disparate, and disagreeing people to work together to accomplish shared goals / public goods.
> the potential it brings for disparate, and disagreeing people to work together to accomplish shared goals / public goods
Do you have examples of crypto allowing disagreeing parties to work together? Preemptively, I don’t think things like AMMs qualify since the parties are not really any more “disagreeing” than any negotiation or trade, and there is no shared goal.
Goodness - so much wrong in one headline!