Libra/Diem was told by regulators to not move forward with the project. They were very early days, and trying to "do it right" in which the administration said "not at all".
Similar also happened with Visa... check when they were publishing in-depth reports from their crypto arm and then suddenly stopped.
What if the work these folks do to increase market efficiency does produce real-world value, as slower verifiable economic information would increase periods of uncertainty and price slippages?
Or the HFT engineers producing research and products that speed up general compute, such as accelerating SHA and ED25519 signature verification, so that their trading shops get information faster?
I wonder if there are actually a lot of third-order, downstream effects that society gets by paying engineers to just make computers and telecommunications faster.
Slippage in the price of cabbages at my corner market? I don't think so.
There's very good evidence that as the finance sector grows to be a larger portion of the economy (which it very much is compared to 50 years ago) that increasing inequality goes along with it, as the profits made in the finance sector are mostly rent seeking from the rest of the economy. You could also interpret it as a private tax on all other economic activity.
Just look at UK... Largely based on finance sector and it does look pretty bleak for those outside... And I am not even sure if that is yet the end state...
There is some value there, but the cut they get is likely too large already. Then again it is all just fake numbers...
I think everyone will have different behavior sec for their funds, with the options now ranging from simply committing a 12 or 24 word seed phrase to memory and buying ETF shares.
There is shamir secret splitting, multisig, MPC, secure enclaves with biometerics, etc...
I think how one handles their wallets will be much like how people make their espressos. Some will just stick k-cup in a machine and hit a button, others will become full-blown coffee enthusiasts that carefully measure their beans, de-static their grinds, and extract for the exact right amount of time.
> simply committing a 12 or 24 word seed phrase to memory
That's absolutely out of the question for almost any human being, especially given the timeframes involved.
> There will be phones like Saga [...] There will be apps like Fuse wallet: [...]
Again, we're talking about a timeframe of decades. How many of these will even still boot up after that amount of time? None of these seem safe to just throw in a bank safe deposit box.
> make their espressos. Some will just stick k-cup in a machine and hit a button
I'm really not a coffee connoisseur by any meaning of the word, but even I know that what comes out of a k-cup machine is brewed coffee, not espresso.
> I'm really not a coffee connoisseur by any meaning of the word, but even I know that what comes out of a k-cup machine is brewed coffee, not espresso.
This should actually be quicker and easier to prove than something like gold ETFs (e.g. SPDR) or other commodity ETFs.
The custody provider (e.g. Coinbase is the custody provider for most of these ETFs) should be able to simply show wallet addresses for all the Bitcoin they hold.
>>> finally reaches its ultimate form of a centralised list maintained by the DTC
> simply show wallet addresses for all the Bitcoin they hold
DTC's database is not where the Bitcoin is. It's still on Bitcoin's decentralized blockchain, just like always. That's the ultimate authority no matter how many centralized forms you stack on top of it.
At least with this structure, there are separate, distinct entities for custody, market making, transfer agent, etc. to reduce the incentives to self-deal and print fake paper securities and commodities.
So a huge improvement on the current state of affairs, where FTX or Binance handles all of these functions, with no segregation.
