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TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

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Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#311

Post by strikelaserclaw »

SilverBirch wrote: post #205

I think we really need to start talking about the broader "why" of why crypto. There's a good reason that we're seeing /r/antiwork and people throwing their last pennies into crypto. People have seen that those with assets got rich and those that work get poorer. There's no point aspiring to a better life through work. In reality what has happened is inflation that we don't measure. Assets are inflated by easy money…

it seems to be a key rule of the world that the rich get richer and poor get poorer, not even in an economic sense, in terms of everything in life, the world imo tends to lean toward this model.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#312

Post by gonehome »

lawn wrote: post #257
gonehome wrote: post #176

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad. BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd…

Monero is far better than ZCash privacy wise since it's privacy by default. It really is the closest to money, which was Bitcoin's original purpose, not the silly store of value only that just translates to a purely speculative asset.

Monero is security through obscurity- it’s not better.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#313

Post by strikelaserclaw »

dehrmann wrote: post #180
dubswithus wrote: post #54

> Keith Baldwin, a 44-year-old surgeon who lives outside New Bedford, Mass., saved $177,000 during the past decade. Last year he took his savings and bought USD Coin, putting it in a crypto account that paid a 9% annual yield. A surgeon saved 177k over 10 years? Something else might be going on here.

It also feels like a surgeon should have known better. Not because this is something he studied, but he's obviously halfway intelligent, so he has less of an excuse for not knowing better.

it seems primal desires in humans such as greed, lust, envy seem to shut off the rational brain centers in many people.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#314

Post by gonehome »

randomran01234 wrote: post #260
gonehome wrote: post #176

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad. BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd…

They are both volatile and unpredictable, any investment could easily be wiped out in a day or week, and there is the added challenge of having to maintain and secure one’s own keys and use privacy preserving tools and techniques. But if you are OK with all that, ETH and BTC are fine investments for those seeking to self-manage a high risk high reward portfolio, and ofc. for only a small percentage of net wealth but…

BTC is simpler and more static which I think is an advantage for long term store of value. PoW also has advantages on that front too. I think the environmental concerns are generally overblown and don’t matter.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#315

Post by acdha »

randomran01234 wrote: post #285
nradov wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the technology doesn't actually work for anything useful (besides tax evasion). Cryptocurrency is a zero-sum ponzi scheme; for someone to win, others have to lose. With stocks, there are on average more winners than losers because new value is being created.

Is it really a good way to evade taxes? Each transaction is recorded publicly on-chain forever. User would have to be very careful with their on-chain privacy and very determined to skirt the legal system. The average crypto user will begrudgingly pay their crypto taxes to avoid having to live the life of a criminal, and would happily welcome more frictionless ways of having taxes recorded and collected on-chain. > C…

> A user can purchase $1000 of DAI and send this to another person in the world within 30-60 seconds, without the beneficiary needing to set up a USD bank account or disclose private data to a third party.

Your “refutation” is leaving out some key details:

1. You do in fact have to deal with legal requirements - it’s a requirement for converting into useful money and tax evasion has serious consequences in most of the world.

2. Replacing Western Union has some appeals but it’s not enough to justify the returns which blockchain salespeople have been claiming, especially when the established player can cut margins easily and blockchain users need a fairly large just to compensate for currency conversion and increased risk.

The Ponzi claims aren’t because someone is claiming that they can beat PayPal’s overhead by 2% — it’s from all of the people claiming double or triple digit returns which are obviously unsustainable, and hand waving questions away claiming that you should just buy now before the price goes up.

> And when you own stock, you cannot do much except hodl and sell

My dividend income suggests you might be leaving something out here too.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#316

Post by gonehome »

josefx wrote: post #261
gonehome wrote: post #176

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad. BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd…

>ETH Which ETH? As far as I understand the currency keeps forking and rewinding every now and then because whatever safety features it provides to "smart" contracts are widely insufficient and the resulting buggy mess falls over the moment a sufficiently motivated script kiddy so much as sneezes into its general direction.

Programmable money is a useful feature and ETH has won that space. It doesn’t mean it’s not high risk or easy.

The one hard fork was fine imo - it’s probably good to have an extreme case community fallback when there’s serious abuse. BTC is the counter to that and why I think it’s good as a store of value long term (rather than just holding ETH).

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#317

Post by Balgair »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #221
andrewstuart wrote: post #172

There's nothing at all wrong with crypto if you understand it is a ponzi scheme and nothing more . With that understanding, you now know how to play the game - which is to say you MUST get out before the ponzi collapses. Your job as investor/gambler is to get in while the house of cards is starting to be built, and to get out before the Jenga tower collapses - and it definitely will. If however you play crypto and te…

Interesting take. I mostly agree, but I do think there is legitimate value in the foundation. Every time the ponzi collapses, the next jenga tower has a slightly higher foundation

I've gotten confused in the metaphors here.

Do you think that with the collapse of every ponzi scheme that the next ponzi scheme is somehow less ... scheme-y? I'm not even sure what that really means, but it seems to me that ponzi schemes, by definition, always go to 0 in the long run. There are no foundations, just greed and misery.

Can you clarify?

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#318

Post by gonehome »

merek wrote: post #212
gonehome wrote: post #176

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad. BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd…

> BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into At what price?

Probably any price for now, but psychologically easier when it’s down.

If BTC does become a real international settlement layer then it’ll be worth a lot. It’s basically an asymmetric bet on that (which is why small % is good enough).

Similar for ETH being the default for programmable token.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#319

Post by deebosong »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #221
andrewstuart wrote: post #172

There's nothing at all wrong with crypto if you understand it is a ponzi scheme and nothing more . With that understanding, you now know how to play the game - which is to say you MUST get out before the ponzi collapses. Your job as investor/gambler is to get in while the house of cards is starting to be built, and to get out before the Jenga tower collapses - and it definitely will. If however you play crypto and te…

Interesting take. I mostly agree, but I do think there is legitimate value in the foundation. Every time the ponzi collapses, the next jenga tower has a slightly higher foundation

Curious, but what's your take on what this foundation is, functionally speaking? Is it indeed a decentralized financial alternative that will address the current woes of tradfi? Or is it something else? Or is it, again in your opinion, sort of a blank canvas, and just SOME foundation that's being emerging, and eventually people will be building on top of it?

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#320

Post by detuur »

MadeThisToReply wrote: post #267
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can Bitcoin be a ponzi scheme if it doesn't generate returns for the investors? I have bought and sold Bitcoin on an exchange and the anonymous person on the other end of the trade did not make any promises of returns. By your definition is Uber stock a ponzi scheme? It too does not provide a return and relies on buying pressure to increase it's price so people can reap the rewards of their so called "investment"…

"Ponzi scheme" has become completely divorced from its original meaning. It's supposed to refer to a specific type of scam where you pay "investors" using the money you received from previous investors, but nowadays it's basically just used now to mean "anything crypto-related in which people might lose or have lost their money."

It's a "ponzi scheme" in the sense that you need to buy in early, find suckers to join the scheme after you, and only make a profit because the suckers you pulled in are pulling suckers in turn. If you don't get too greedy, you eliminate your position while it's profitable.
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