I don't think the author should be sad. He helped push an industry that lets people move value around freely without third parties being able to choke them off. That alone is pretty powerful. The people gambling with it would probably be gambling with something else instead. As for not learning to create something users want, nothing will prevent him from starting now
I wasted years of my life in crypto
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
Most states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#133I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies. But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea? Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are h…
The max supply is what makes it "hard money." Splitting it into smaller pieces is a separate concept and does not devalue it.
Ah, got it! Thanks for the clear explanation, really appreciate the clarification on max supply vs. divisibility and the Satoshi limit.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
And put people in jail they catch making and using fake ones.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#135I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies. But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea? Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are h…
BTC cannot be split beyond 10^-8
Thanks , I've learned something new today!
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff. No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do. Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.
I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give yo…
If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety. Just follow through the motion.
A local agent on a flat fee will probably make things easier.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTC cannot be split beyond 10^-8
With a soft fork it could easily.
Lightning Network already uses millisatoshis. Of course they can't be settled in sub-satoshi amounts on the main chain, until there's enough interest in a fork to do so.
The fixed supply describes the total sum of units that have been issued, and that are intended to be issued in the future - it doesn't relate to the divisibility of those units.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#138I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and ho…
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
Technically there is no such thing as a bitcoin. Just unspent transaction outputs. Those get spent as an input of a transaction and then are gone forever. There is no concept of the output of a transaction being the same "bitcoin" as what comes from the input of the transaction. This means if you had 2 inputs and 2 outputs of the same amount there is no way to trace which input became which output. At best you can find which outputs potentially came from an input.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#139> I have zero doubt that BTC will hit $1m one day. Well, there's your problem. Here is a potentially interesting math paper that comes to very different conclusions: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf
They didn't think it would get to 120k either.
I once thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $17.
Almost everything other than Bitcoin and Etherium, and some of the stablecoins, has crashed hard. A lot of issuers made money, but few others did.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#140Considering the transaction time and cost, crypto never made sense. As fast as I can tell, it's been pure speculation since its inception.
What? Most of networks nowadays are faster or as fast and cheaper than normal credit card and banking systems.