Obsidian Sync 2024-10-20 18:38:36

content/daily-notes/2024-10-20.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ Podcasts:
 
 
 #### John Collison on Crypto
-From the podcast linked above. I used the transcript made available on Listen N
+From the podcast linked above. I used the transcript made available on Listen Notes site, which seems to be really bad at transcribing an Irish accent 😀:
 
 > Well. The thing about crypto is there's been a lot of hype on what crypto is useful for. And so for example, if you go back and read the original Bitcoin paper, which is a great read. It's a very readable original paper, it actually used the word interchange in there and talks about kind of the use of bitcoin as a payment method. But bitcoin turned out to be certainly stock bitcoin, you know, before lightning and everything like that should have to be a horrible payment method, like slow expensive, let's not do that. And now the technology has matured through what has been kind of fourteen years of development. I think the crypto haters used this argument that like, well, you know, it is the Web in ninety three for you know, many many years, whereas the actual web coming along. But there's been fourteen years of lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up with much more advanced technologies. And so what you specifically have now with stable coins is you have, firstly, something that's value doesn't change and so there's none of the kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about. You have something that's actually very technically scalable, so with the current L two's there's no real scalability issues with them, and you have a pretty sensible construct where in a way, it's narrow banking. Right. We've been talking about narrow banking in this country for decades, and we have ended up with narrow banking through stable coins, where let's say a good stable coin, you know that like a PAXOS or a USDC. In the case of USDC, it is fully backed by short term treasuries. And that actually just seems like a pretty good construct to me. And so you know, we now make it where you can, you know, accept money and strive via crypto. You can do some payouts things like that. And the obvious thing that people say is true where in the US you will be slightly too biased against crypto because the US is the world's best currency. You know, the US has the world's reserve currency where you get to spend and might back exactly. And so of course people in the US think the USD is awesome because it is an awesome currency, whereas many people in many other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their own currency. And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though it is true. I'm talking about Turkey, which is a very large country and economy and population, but people there do not have full faith in the lira, and they think about what's a better place to keep money than lira.