31–40 of 121 posts
Defense contractors associated with the U.S. military said they would sever fingers to make me "care more" here is a screenshot:
or
This was sent over a Department of Defense channel.
I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…
If you think about it deeply, it's still not entirely clear who consumes more energy: the traditional banking sector and servicing of visa, mastercard, etc. cards, or cryptocurrency technologies. At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In at least two of these stories, the “bank balance” was public because the person posted it on social media (Belgian guy and Turkish influencer). Im not sure if the risk is any lower when you post “my savings account is up to $1.6million!” ?
Of course it is lower! You have plenty of rich people living in known places without any special security and no one comes to kidnap them because they cannot just send over their whole wealth in an irreversible transaction in a second. The problem is not to know who has money, it is a system in which it is trivial to transfer it without any supervision and without any way to go back.
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I've always liked this analogy because it accidentally implies something I believe to be true - the crypto industry will eventually overtake transitional finance while moving at great speed. It says a lot about how bad the traditional finance industry is that this is the easiest path forward that the market found.
Bad money drives out good money, which explains why crypto is moving so fast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it is lower! You have plenty of rich people living in known places without any special security and no one comes to kidnap them because they cannot just send over their whole wealth in an irreversible transaction in a second. The problem is not to know who has money, it is a system in which it is trivial to transfer it without any supervision and without any way to go back.
Correct which means it's even more important for that currency to be not public but private and even anonymous.
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I always found the idea of a free, unregulated financial market being a positive thing amusing. Many of these regulations were made because more or less complex loopholes got exploited and many less wealthy people lost their money. And quite a few of these people with practical experience in these various exploits are still around.
You can always opt into security by being the customer of a bank.
So thinking crypto will be an outlier is wishful thinking since it will never be allowed to be more powerful than governments. At most, new world orders will be created, but they will settle and be like the old ones, with some new more crypto native rules. They will always know who you ar and who you’re transacting with and where either of you are.
Current crypto fanatics are assuming they will all be part of this club. This road will be filled with poor old men with fewer fingers and lots of regret.
I want crypto to succeed, but I don’t expect it will be unregulated. You’ll pay the same taxes, you’ll go to jail if you try to avoid them or if you send crypto to entities banned by governments. Eventually the things that make crypto so valuable will be hammered out so it’s more like fiat.
Maybe the value will crash or wealthy people of today will find a way to freeze it into reserve currencies (like the newly minted federal crypto reserve), but after some point it will stop being a source of wealth just by holding it at the right time. You will need to exchange it with value you create.
The math of crypto wealth by HODLing is unsustainable.
I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…
memecoins have nothing to do with BTC. Talk about the price was always a thing because BTC is a currency, thus price is key. The tech is good, or it was at the time. I don't see the case for money laundering in BTC, only one could be XMR and mixers in ETH. Apart from that, in general cryptocurrency is not good for laundering since the blockchain can be tracked.
I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…
Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the original idea lost all its meaning so the well-meaning folk left.
If you had a million in gold, would you leave it on your desk? Walk around with it on the street? Your odds of getting to where you're going with the gold are pretty good in most places, but it's still a big risk. Brag about or show that gold off to somebody, as many in this story did, and you rapidly become a target.