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I wasted years of my life in crypto

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Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#181

Post by rizky05 »

originalvichy wrote: post #169
fy20 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse. At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.

I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together. Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.

[dead]

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#182

Post by jenadine »

HaZeust wrote: post #117
fsh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There's absolutely no reason that a driver's license can't derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block's information when you finish voting. ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, ide…

What if one doesn't have a car and a driver's license?

> identity is kept secret,

Except to anyone who sees your driver license.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#183

Post by sumedh »

ryandvm wrote: post #110
spicyusername wrote: post #9

I'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…

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.

> Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.

What happens when a country's banking system fails?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#184

Post by johncolanduoni »

jimmaswell wrote: post #175
fsh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.

Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#185

Post by sroerick »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #151
dreamcompiler wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's stupid because blockchains don't scale. In most other respects they're quite clever.

In theory a L2 network coukd solve the scaling problem, but every time I've looked at L2 solutions theve had terrible UX.

I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos.

This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.

You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.

Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#186

Post by sumedh »

originalvichy wrote: post #169
fy20 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse. At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.

I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together. Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.

> Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.

What happens when a country's banking system fails.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#187

Post by johncolanduoni »

HaZeust wrote: post #117
fsh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There's absolutely no reason that a driver's license can't derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block's information when you finish voting. ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, ide…

There are schemes for this, but it requires much more than just a hash. You need not only asymmetric cryptography, but some sort of Zero Knowledge Proof if you don’t want to be able to identify the person who voted.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#188

Post by [deleted] »

chickensong wrote: post #162
dpedu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That visibility could be considered a feature for some use cases. We could use more transparency in many areas, particularly government.

[deleted]

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#189

Post by lmm »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #177
charcircuit wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital. It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to t…

> the banks can ask for it in cash if need be

Ehhh, can they? I suspect any bank that tried would pretty soon find that it actually couldn't.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#190

Post by hvb2 »

> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.

These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.

I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe

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