A beginner’s guide to getting started in the cryptocurrency world
Having been introduced to cryptocurrencies the technical route, I&#x27;d never really been exposed to the brand of hype in these Andreas Antonopoulos videos before. I guess I&#x27;ve never watched a televangelist either, but I imagine this would be the equivalent.<p>This piece of bullshit in particular stood out to me:<p>&gt; Where were you when libor was fixed? Where were you when gold markets were fixed? When high-frequency traders used front-running...<p>It&#x27;s odd that he uses these examples to support the &quot;trustless&quot; blockchain architecture, because blockchain does nothing to improve any of these. The opposite is true: it makes it far easier to manipulate markets because all transactions are anonymous, censorship-proof, and it&#x27;s impossible to recover funds from bad actors.<p>Not having to trust a central authority for the ledger does nothing to prevent collusion or frontrunning in markets. From what I&#x27;ve seen, cryptocurrency markets are constantly being manipulated in ways that are both unethical and illegal.<p>&gt; Bitcoin vs Ethereum is like Sharks vs Lions...<p>He claims that Bitcoin specializes in ways that Ethereum does not, but this isn&#x27;t true: effectively, Bitcoin is a subset of Ethereum. He claims that Ethereum &quot;scales 10x worse&quot; than Bitcoin, but I don&#x27;t know where he got that number from: the reality is more nuanced, but by any practical measure, Ethereum is already better-equipped to scale and the protocol is actively evolving (as opposed to Bitcoin&#x27;s, which is immutable as long as its community remains as toxic as it currently does).<p>If he means the size of the full blockchain, in practice Ethereum implements compression techniques that make it much more compact--the Bitcoin blockchain is currently at about 100gb, while the uncompressed &quot;archival&quot; version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb.<p>In terms of transaction throughput, Bitcoin has a stupid hard limit of 1mb per 10mins of data, and so Ethereum far outscales it in that regard. If you hear the term &quot;lightning network&quot; as a counterargument, you can ignore it: the lightning network doesn&#x27;t yet exist, and when it does, it will have several practical problems, including that it requires onchain scaling to work[1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cowpig.github.io&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;cryptocurrency&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;Segwit-and-Lightning-Network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cowpig.github.io&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;cryptocurrency&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;Se...</a>