>go read the UniswapV2 contract. If you don’t think that’s a cool innovation, please come back and let me know, I’m interested.
I feel like the coolness of Uniswap requires putting the cart before the horse. If I'm not convinced of the real utility of these tokens, why would I be impressed with the ability to move them around in various clever ways? I need to see a valuable external use case before I can see the value in what Uniswap enables.
I guess to me it’s more about progression. From Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to Uniswap, there is a strong development of the early ideas and technology. This doesn’t seem like it will just stop to me. It indicates a very bright future in my opinion. Also, although I get disillusioned, I personally have come to appreciate more that the value being produced is financial. There is clearly massive pent up demand for financial games. On Wall Street there is a huge market for firms that proudly do not pay attention at all to the underlying assets they trade in a “fundamentals” sense, and just play games with mathematical and technological advantage. From what I can tell massive segments of finance are just money games. This is a form of that, which is a real and tremendous market. A natural progression that people who say “high frequency trading provides no value” or “banks shouldn’t be allowed to deal in derivatives” will hate.
You should hear the kind of stuff people are coming up with…what if I could sell a token, and the interest generated from staking it gets repackaged into an options contract on another chain that then gets its value automatically updated every time someone sells and…
It seems nonsensical, until you go learn what all these quants are getting paid millions per year to do for hedge funds and you think to yourself “oh, it’s a similar thing. There is demand for this.”
I mean, if someone showed by some great new innovation to let HFT shops move faster, I'd also be a bit nonplussed. If the answer is just "well, this is no more useless other frivolous* money games", then I'm not really convinced.
*frivolous in the sense of real utility. Obviously they make boatloads of money.
Sure. I guess what I’ve come to accept more is that what people on Wall Street do is real. Games are real. I don’t personally buy into the “new world currency”, “real world use case, I’m gonna own my house on a blockchain” lines of thinking. The use case is still being fleshed out but in my opinion it’s much more likely to produce lots of Citadels than lots of Amazons or Googles if that makes sense. Whereas I think that HN believes it will just go away because it’s all a scam.
> From Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to Uniswap, there is a strong development of the early ideas and technology.
To do what useful thing, that isn't crime?
> From what I can tell massive segments of finance are just money games. This is a form of that, which is a real and tremendous market.
For what, except speculation and crime? What application? It's been twelve years. Crypto is almost as old as the smartphone.
> A natural progression that people who say “high frequency trading provides no value” or “banks shouldn’t be allowed to deal in derivatives” will hate.
Derivatives have obvious economic value. I can go into a room and write an economic model for them and it will agree with everyone else's because there's an objective theory that can be applied to get answers (and I have successfully done this in the past).
Any economic model for the value of cryptocurrency gives it a zero value.
More, crypto people don't have any competing valuation model or theory or explanation or anything. The values for all these coins simply come from nowhere.
> It seems nonsensical, until you go learn what all these quants are getting paid millions per year to do for hedge funds and you think to yourself “oh, it’s a similar thing. There is demand for this.”
You are wrong. I did this for a living for years.
All you are doing is adding the present value of future cash flows together to get the value. The tricky part is dealing with volatility, for which there's an "arbitrage-free" (no magic cash) model called Black-Scholes - and then there are a zillion details.
But cryptocurrencies _have no cash flows._ No cryptocoin produces or destroys fiat currency. The _only_ way you make $1 out of your crypto is if some Greater Fool buys your cryptocoin for more than you paid for it.
Eventually, there won't be a Greater Fool, then everyone will be left with a crappy and expensive payment system with huge transaction costs and nothing else. Everyone will rush for the doors, but there's no liquidation value and no fundamental value and no market makers.
I could replace your use of “cryptocurrency” here with “Pokémon cards” and nothing would change. Yet you don’t seem concerned with the buying, selling, trading, owning of Pokémon cards with regard to their utility. You are not the arbiter of utility. Nobody is. If you have no utility for digital cash, great. That doesn’t mean others don’t. You don’t have to play Pokémon if you don’t want to.
Cryptocurrencies, unlike trading cards, have large negative externalities. They are causing component shortages, driving up GPU prices, enabling new scams and ransomware, wasting electricity, accelerating climate change.
It might be justifiable if cryptocurrencies were providing real economic value, but if we're drawing analogies to Pokemon cards, then they are net-negative value to humanity and we should hope for them to fail as soon as possible.
What are the negative externalities of central banking and dollar hegemony? I'd argue the externalities of dollar dominance are orders of magnitude greater for enabling crime (and legal antisocial behavior), wasting natural resources and accelerating climate change.
The automated market maker design of Uniswap is useful even for non-blockchain based scripts to e.g. trade stocks digitally.
It's just a simple way of creating an orderbook and liquidity. So you don't need to be convinced of the real utilities of tokens to appreciate the brilliance of the design.
I feel like the coolness of Uniswap requires putting the cart before the horse. If I'm not convinced of the real utility of these tokens, why would I be impressed with the ability to move them around in various clever ways? I need to see a valuable external use case before I can see the value in what Uniswap enables.