In 2022, Web3 went just great • Hacker News Board

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#91

Post by ska » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

wonderwonder wrote: post #81

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

I think you likely encounter the rude people on twitter hiding behind anon. accounts. My step dad lost ~30k in what he thought was a relatively safe investment (earning APY). I did tell him to be very careful as most of crypto to the uninitiated is a scam. He ended up being able to put Ethereum in but not able to take it out. Obviously if the returns appear to good to be true they probably are but this is an older gu…

> pproaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.

New clothes on an age old story.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#92

Post by UncleMeat » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #85

qbasic_forever wrote: post #45

"The collector who dropped $2.9 million on an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet found himself in a bind in April, when he tried to resell the NFT and wound up with a top bid of… $280." Hahaha, wow. You couldn't even take a 2.899 million dollar write off loss on your taxes too! Just straight vaporizing nearly 3 million bucks.

Honest question: why not? I don't really understand the nuance of taxes. I just use a tax app and answer the questions.

In the US, capital losses can offset capital gains to arbitrarily large numbers, but only $3,000 of capital losses can offset ordinary income.

So if you lose $3M in one year and happen to have $3M in other capital gains then hooray - they offset and you pay no taxes on them. But if you lose $3M in one year and made $300k in income, you are still paying income tax on everything minus $3,000.

You get to keep carrying it over so you can apply $3,000 every year - but if you've got losses in the millions they'll never be exhausted in this manner.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#93

Post by astrange » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

dharmab wrote: post #89

tantalor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shoulda seen my broker’s face... That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash? Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.

> That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. In US law this is a taxable event.

Paying for something with crypto is the same taxable event as converting it to cash. You can’t get out of that.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#94

Post by helf » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #77

helf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking. I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol. Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my…

> shoulda seen my broker’s face... That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash? Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.

I did convert it to cash. The problem is in the US you can’t suddenly have thousands of unexplained dollars when getting a mortgage or similar.

I guess I should have clarified: I didn’t directly give them crypto. I was using it to cash out and pay cash with. But I had to prove ownership.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#95

Post by helf » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

mhluongo wrote: post #90

tantalor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shoulda seen my broker’s face... That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash? Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.

If it's within 30 days in the US, there will still be an issue with provenance of funds.

Exacty.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#96

Post by LouisSayers » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

dayvid wrote: post #74

I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money. With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys i…

> and governments issuing their own coins.

... in which case they could just create a standard centralised system and avoid all the overhead of blockchain - or am I missing something here?

I don't see the point in mining coins when you could simply run a for loop generating uuids followed by perhaps signing transactions with public key cryptography.

I feel like we'll look back at "web3" as a wild west of cryptomania.

Perhaps we all need to start thinking along the lines of "Generation GPT" - this seems to be the next evolution of the Web if you ask me.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#97

Post by klibertp » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

yifanl wrote: post #40

Lendal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate w…

I mean, the historical solution to this type of stuff is just hardline regulation right? There isn't a general solution against bad decision making. Your toddler will drink that liquid under the sink -> you put that liquid in a really high place and now everybody will complain and have to find that stepladder every time they want to clean the drains. The best non-regulatory fix I can think of would be socially enforc…

Well, the "get rich fast" things should be regulated as you say. The problem begins when such schemes become "get rich at all", with nothing in terms of viable alternative. The best way to deal with it is not to make people that desperate in the first place...

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#98

Post by HN_is_for_gemes » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

[flagged]

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#99

Post by pornel » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

> Topping the charts is the March 29 hack of the bridge used by the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity — a hack that saw $625 million taken and funneled to the North Korean Lazarus cybercrime group.

If it was a movie, I'd think the plot is just too stupid: a dictatorship funded their nuclear missile program by hacking an angry-birds-styled JRPG game.

An yet here were are. This demonstrates that playing with cryptocurrencies is dangerous, even seemingly benign or useless applications.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#100

Post by simplify » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #72

simplify wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper use of cryptocurrency could have prevented the problem, but FTX and users mutually agreed to give FTX more trust by giving FTX custody of user funds. That's really all it was. Not very interesting.

Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument. Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.

Blind faith how so? I merely stated a technical fact. Blockchain is programmable money; they could have programmed a system such that FTX could not run away with user funds – there are defi systems that do this already.

But they didn't. Instead, FTX used crypto as a means to transfer funds into their own, centralized custody. Not much different from a bank wire.

This isn't a "communism would work perfectly" style argument at all. I'm really not sure of what you're getting at, or if you understand how crypto works beyond surface level articles.