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-#+title: A Review of Cryptocurrency
-#+author: Preston Pan
-#+description: Are cryptocurrencies useful in economic transactions? As technologies?
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-* Introduction
-Cryptocurrencies are often talked about as either a new technology that will solve everything, or
-an environment destroying, ponzi creating mechanism that has no real value other than to criminals
-or to people who want to scam other people looking to "invest" in said technology. I say it's still
-too early to tell what the economic impacts of cryptocurrency are, and I will be looking at this
-from the perspective of someone that is not a libertarian, but is nonetheless a techbro at heart.
-** "It's a ponzi scheme"
-Yes, in many cases they are, but people who say this often aren't getting the whole picture. Popular
-cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin often have the expectation attached to them that whoever is marketing
-it is either a sleezy businessperson trying to take your money, a financial institution that likes gambling
-on retail liquidity, or a libertarian techbro whose only hopes are to make a money that is untracable, often
-to the detriment of society due to factors such as the lack of financial regulation, sound monetary policy,
-high transaction fees, etc. [[https://bitcoin.org][Bitcoin]] in particular takes a lot of the blame for being the biggest Ponzi scheme
-on earth. However, if /other/ cryptocurrencies have value, that would peg the price of bitcoin to being
-the de-facto metric of cryptocurrency success, thus pegging it to some real value in the world.
-
-To prove what I just said, most cryptocurrency prices move with bitcoin, rather than moving independently,
-which is a fact known to almost anyone that has done trading in the cryptocurrency world. Additionally, because
-bitcoin is the first of these currencies to exist, it is basically the face of the industry, with the largest
-market cap (as of me writing this) out of all of these cryptocurrencies. In essense, purchasing bitcoin is equivalent
-to an informal prediction market on cryptocurrency success, plus the added cost of the small chance it has of replacing
-fiat currency (something I think will not happen).
-*** Other Currencies and Their Value
-The [[https://ethereum.org/en/][Ethereum]] network is, generally speaking, what people in the cryptocurrency space point to when they talk about
-real world applications. Although this is currently far-fetched, I don't believe it's far-fetched enough for it
-to make sense talking about banning cryptocurrencies and investment into these industries. There are many competing
-networks that do essentially the same thing as ethereum but maybe better, but the point is to talk about the idea.
-
-Ethereum is an interesting case because it is home to the idea of smart-contracts. They can be used to automate away
-the arbitrator in any agreement between two parties that can be formalized within blockchain internet (web3. See, it's
-a useful phrase!) facing code. Though there are currently centralization issues with using smart contracts and having
-to trust a single source of truth, projects like [[https://chain.link/][ChainLink]] solve this by using yet another decentralized information
-rewarding system that provides reliable information to smart contracts for the Ethereum network. I believe many
-other such centralization issues such as the ones outlined by, for example, various NFT critics (that NFTs aren't
-stored on-chain but rather via google drive links, etc...) can be solved with other projects such as something like Filecoin.
-Which leads me to this common talking point:
-** "You Don't Actually Own NFTs"
-You have ownership to a pointer of a picture but not the rights to the picture via copyright. This is correct, but this
-is not usually what people value. Rather, what people value when they buy digital artwork is just some conception of
-"owning" the picture in question. Yes, you can /copy/ the image, but the particular token you are trading will always
-be both non-fungible and scarce.
-*** "But the Google Drive Links"
-Yes, while many NFTs are stored on google drive, many are stored on [[https://ipfs.tech/][IPFS]], a decentralized storage system where, if pinned,
-IPFS addresses /always/ host the same content. If any one of these protocols becomes standardized, then it could be easy
-to see how these NFTs suddenly become quite valuable, because a given CID on IPFS will almost /always/ correspond to a
-given piece of data, and vise versa. Now, on Ethereum, for example, any person can create a contract that points to the
-same data. However, for a /particular/ contract, everyone can verify how many of each NFT is actually created, and if you
-believe that the contract supplier is trustworthy (where there is an open market for contract suppliers), then it can
-be easy to see how you can trace the chain between NFTs and some form of value. If you /could/ own IPFS addresses, it would
-actually be easy to see the value, and all that is needed is a particular set of contract providers on Ethereum to be
-trusted from consumers in order to see how you could assign IPFS links to NFTs that could be considered to retain value
-in the same way owning art retains value. If you just see the system for what it is and the logical chain of ownership,
-you can see that the only link in the chain that is inconsistent is not the ownership of the tokens, not the IPFS links,
-but the tokens corresponding bijectively to the IPFS links, and that can be solved pretty easily with the market naturally
-trusting a single or set of providers.
-
-What's particularly frustrating is that I've had people tell me that they host images on IPFS like this is somehow scamming
-the person buying the NFT, when IPFS is pretty rock solid, only requiring a little bit more trust compared to storing
-the image on-chain. But of course, NFTs are only a small part of why smart-contracts are useful.
-** "Just Buzzwords"
-Smart contracts! DeFi! Web3! Those are all just buzzwords, they couldn't mean anything, right? Well, if you've actually
-been paying attention for long enough, you can assign a meaning to all of these words in a completely logical manner.
-DeFi is actually a particularly interesting usage of smart contracts, as it allows one to automatically transfer liquidity
-(make loans, make financial contracts between willing parties; see [[https://aave.com/][AAVE]]). This is useful because it automates the job
-that banks have. We like automation when it comes to everything else (unless you're a luddite or don't know anything about
-economics), so we should try to automate arbitration jobs in the same way. But people, for some reason, lose their minds
-when we do this.
-
-In any case, Web3, like I said above, can literally just be taken to mean /Blockchain-Internet Facing/. This is important
-as a phrase because blockchain itself is a /walled garden/, with very specific informational requirements (the network
-and all data that gets supplied to the network as inputs to smart contracts have to be trustless). Smart contracts are
-legitimately just the term used to describe the type of financial transaction automated by cryptocurrencies.
-** "Global Warming!"
-That's all industry/technology right now, why would you expect blockchain to be any different? Okay, maybe it uses more
-power than some other things, but that's because I think we have a combination of a few things:
-1. we might have a genuine blockchain bubble
-2. the technology is not mature, so everyone is rushing to use blockchain while the technology to make it scalable is not there
-but proof of stake does really well at counteracting blockchain energy usage, currently.
-** Transaction Costs
-Proof of stake solves this to an extent, but there are also some high transaction-per-second (TPS) networks (such as [[https://polygon.technology/][Polygon]])
-that stack up well against existing payment processors with respect to TPS. Also, I think some currencies should be more
-liberal for how much they print for miner rewards (paying miners/validators costs a lot of money for the network it
-turns out), which is pretty easy to try out, and would reduce the transaction costs by quite a lot.
-** "Do you Think It'll Actually be Useful?"
-I don't know, and if I knew for sure, I would be trading options on cryptocurrency right now, but I'm clearly not. However,
-what I do know is that the promise of automating arbitration jobs is niche yet enticing
-(also, blockchains can do other cool things like with Chainlink and manufacturing truth with a decentralized network).
-Already, they have some niche usecases like in prediction markets and in the NFT space (although, yes, that space does
-run a lot of scams, it'll eventually be just the beneficial stuff). [[https://www.getmonero.org/][Monero]] is already used as THE currency on the dark web
-because it's anonymous (not an endorsement of the dark web usage, just a living example of a crypto economy).
-If one of these experimenters could come up with a good enough algorithm that could keep into
-account price stability, cryptocurrency might actually be the superior way of transacting, simply because it has a lot
-of programability baked into it.
-
-Even anonymity can be used to its advantage. With the inception of Monero, corrupt governments have a harder time tracing
-usually-legal citizen activity. Yes, it does give a lot of power to money launderers, but at the same time, it's not like
-it has its upsides and usecases.
-** Were we Better off Without Cryptocurrency?
-I don't know, I can't go to the universe where they haven't been invented, but so long as they exist, we should probably
-make the most of them. My personal opinion, though, is that they are a net gain.
-* Misc.
-There are other curious things within cryptocurrency that are not explained in this article, so I'm adding them here.
-** DAOs
-DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, is made up of a collection of smart contracts that enables certain
-NFT or token owners to be able to take part in actions in a particular organization, usually something like a company.
-Because they are trustless, they are sovereign which means they need no other institution to legitimize them. In this
-way, DAOs usually outline an ownership structure of stuff on the blockchain (which represents capital) and contracts
-can be made that mimic the shareholder capabilities in conventional companies.
-
-They are useful already for managing DeFi organizations. For instance, AAVE, the smart contract linked above, runs
-on a DAO and they generally move (as of me writing this) $14B USD in financial assets* at any given point in time.
-
-So there are successful DAOs on-chain because they seem like a natural and integrated company structure for on-chain
-services, but are there any DAOs which run in real life? Well, that would be pretty illegal at the moment, but at the
-same time, I think it's plausible that they will in the future. People are experimenting with the many ways in which
-DAOs could potentially out-perform joint-stock companies in a trustless manner, and I think they have potential as a
-systems engineering tool for formalizing the hierarchy structure of existing companies via code. It's pretty enticing
-to just be able to copy and paste an existing management structure that you think works well for your own company,
-and I think it would be pretty useful for that reason. But also, maybe something can be done with trustlessness that
-just beats the government-granted joint-stock system out there in some miracle of efficiency, which is definitely
-something that can happen.
-** Off-chain Systems
-There are projects such as [[https://layerzero.network/][Layer Zero]] which work off-chain but in a conventional peer-to-peer trustless fashion, which
-aims to provide the ability to communicate between different blockchains. These kinds of projects also exist within
-the cryptocurrency sphere, and utilize conventional computing methods in order to take load off of blockchains.
-Blockchains only need to handle a small part of the job, i.e. they are an environment that both /provides incentives/
-and /ensures/ trustlessness. But in some cases, the /incentives/ part can be done in other ways, so you can scrap the
-monetary or scarce aspect of these networks, which means you don't need a blockchain. In the case of layer zero, it
-is believed that any organization which manages a blockchain would also want to host a node because they gain access
-to liquidity over a wider range of blockchain networks, for example.
-* For the Laymen
-Before you talk about cryptocurrency like you know everything about it, you should figure out more about the underlying
-ecosystem. Although I like listening to and reading [[https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman][Paul Krugman]], he gets cryptocurrency pretty wrong, maybe because
-a lot of libertarians shill the technology. You might be the same. I'm pretty confident that I know a decent bit about
-the technology, but if you think I'm wrong, then you can message me. Though, it seems pretty obvious that how legacy
-media talks about cryptocurrency isn't the full picture, and neither is how libertarian tech-bros talk about it.