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In 2022, Web3 went just great

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Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#181

Post by specialist »

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…

What concerns me about these scams is the ever increasing velocity. Old timey gambling required cash or collateral. So there was a physical limitation.

Day trading and crypto and freemium games fleece people digitally. It's all ephemeral. What holds people back?

It pains me to buy a lottery ticket, so I've never been tempted by these scams. But I imagine having everything online hacks player's inhibitors. eg I've read rants about how Robinhood and the like weaponize "dark patterns" to loot their players.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#182

Post by Eisenstein »

abetusk wrote: post #164
voz_ wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your point is that oft-cited-never-correct "this is early days / this is like the early dot com era" notion - I want to dispel that myth for you. There has been no real value, product, or worth created here. With the rise of public internet spaces in the 1990s, online shopping, web search, and more - the value was immediate and apparent. Of course there were bad ideas, scams, etc, but the major difference between…

People forget how hyped the internet was circa 1996-2000. During the early days, one of the most popular sites was a web cam pointed at a coffee mug [0] and a webcam pointed at a "lifecaster" showing her everyday life [1]. Email was confusing and misunderstood [2]. Startups were laughed at when they said you would buy pet food online [3] or pay your parking tickets online [4]. Both are so commonplace now as to barely…

> but it sits at the middle of theoretical computer science, economics and finance in a novel way that responds to a lot of shortcomings of attempts before it.

The problem here is that the creator of Bitcoin was following a philosophical motivation, not a scientific one. The 'economics' behind it are completely misguided and appear to be based on the notion that taking power away from powerful entities and distributing amongst individuals will remove the problems associated with capitalist systems. It does not consider that people created these entities and removing power from systems that rely on it creates power vacuums which society abhors. Things just end up getting to the same place a different way, but redoing all of the bad outcomes that had to be painfully learned and many times almost led to humanity scrapping capitalism and free markets altogether because of the damage done.

When you approach problems thinking you have the answer before you start looking for the solution, then you get things like Soviet Russia and you get things like eugenics and you get things like Bitcoin.

I am sorry but by saying 'it has critical flaws' and then also claiming that it it is some work of science and can be used for progress in economics and technology and finance, you neglect totally that it's first and most critical flaw is that it is the product of a dogma which is completely removed from reality in two of those areas.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#183

Post by hurril »

RestlessMind wrote: post #174
hurril wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth is a little bit of a weasel word here though and you'll be well advised to research the difference between multiple expansion and underlying growth. In the world of stock, we don't like multiple expansion as it's a sign that prices go up on grounds that are hard to reason about. Things going up without reason tend to come down for the same reasons. Crypto has _zero_ growth. Crypto companies, however, that's a…

To me, price increase is a good proxy for growth and I believe in both BTC and ETH to appreciate more than S&P500 over the next 10 years.

Why is it a good proxy for growth? What do you base that on?

Are you familiar with the term Deflationary Asset?

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#184

Post by _8j50 »

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…

You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up.

Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess.

You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#185

Post by schmuelio »

jeroenhd wrote: post #35
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "not good for" list is "practically everything." The "good use cases" effectively don't exist. Every crypto solution falls into one or more of these buckets... - Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB - "Decentralized" but still requires some central authority to provide critical features (particularly any form of conflict resolution) - Depends on one or more smart c…

Crypto has very limited good use cases. In countries where inflation has gone haywire (worse than Bitcoin) and the government and banks have put strict controls on the ability to exchange local currency for another, cryptocurrency can be a last resort for keeping money in some kind of value store exactly because the government can't regulate it effectively. With decentralised payment providers, this allows for normal…

> In countries where inflation has gone haywire (worse than Bitcoin)

Other comment has addressed the rest, I just want to point out that Bitcoin (and most other cryptocurrencies) are not _inflating_, they're _deflating_.

If the buying power of a currency goes up over time then it is deflating.

While this makes it (arguably) good for speculation, it actively punishes using it as a currency since what you buy today will be cheaper tomorrow. This - in turn - punishes the poor that would have to use crypto for necessities (food, shelter, water, etc.) since they will always have to buy necessities when they are expensive (today) rather than when they are cheap (tomorrow).

Just felt compelled to add this since a lot of crypto discourse talks about how the traditional market is seeing record inflation or whatever, and crypto doesn't suffer from as much inflation. While this is _technically_ true, the reality is that a deflationary currency is significantly worse for the people using it than an inflationary one. Especially when it comes to things like concentration of wealth in the hands of a few rich people.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#186

Post by aww_dang »

voz_ wrote: post #123
aww_dang wrote: post #102

Here's an inflammatory post from an inflammatory domain on the inflammatory topic of cryptocurrency. I wonder what kind of discussion will follow?

Its not inflammatory, its a true and honest recap of a massive technological space that is entirely built on lies and scams.

Surely there's more to it than that. Promoting intellectual curiosity indeed. The entire thread is a celebration of toxicity. A narrow view resulting in the widest possible generalization.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#187

Post by [deleted] »

astrange wrote: post #93
dharmab wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#188

Post by Eisenstein »

_8j50 wrote: post #184
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…

You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets no…

And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business.

There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms.

As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money?

People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#189

Post by TimJRobinson »

coldpie wrote: post #113
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet, do you care if it was 300,000 that he invested into bitcoin and cashed for the 2.9 million? If it bubble money too, does it "count"?

> For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet He didn't pay for the first tweet, he paid for someone to create a hash of the URL of the first tweet. The distinction matters: the NFT scam works by tricking people into thinking they own the thing, instead of just a copy of a pointer someone made to the thing, which is what they actually "own."

"He didn't pay for that Picasso, he just paid for some canvas and paint!"

99.9% of people don't care about the technicalities of how NFT's work, they buy them because they are valuable to them and everyone else believes they are valuable.

Every single digital item anyone has ever bought, from Ebooks, to in-game items, to movies, is just a pointer to some bytes on a disk.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#190

Post by _8j50 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #188
_8j50 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets no…

And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business. There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me…

It all depends on how much they are spending. If joe has $1k disposable income he can play the lottery,crypto,options whatever. I personally only ever bought a few hundred dollars at a time only to sell at 5-10% profit. Even right now you can make a few bucks on the normal turbulence.

You seem to have overlooked my statement about rule #1 it has to be money you can afford to lose and of course people will tell you the risk is tol high, you have to learn the hard way if you think you know better.

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