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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

#191

Post by johncolanduoni »

lmm wrote: post #189
johncolanduoni wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#192

Post by lmm »

vachina wrote: post #136
bdangubic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety.

Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#193

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

hvb2 wrote: post #190

> 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 t…

It is not an engineering problem, it is a geopolitical and legacy banking problem. Yes sending an encrypted message somewhere in the world in under a second is solved.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#194

Post by lmm »

ikt wrote: post #128
Nextgrid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in practice services like TransferWise solved this problem using fiat currencies with fees low enough not to make it worth bothering with crypto.

I duno, I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard, still a problem to be solved to me Looks like other people still trying to solve as well: > Earlier this year, Coinbase changed online payments forever with a new protocol called x402. But could this technology really usher in a new age of 'machine to machine' payments? Let's run it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6wc6yvoZLY

> I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard

Let me introduce you to the wonders of Discover.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#195

Post by jenadine »

kachapopopow wrote: post #66
soulofmischief wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's make this simple: people who murder and steal. So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel? What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I'm so confused about how you're able to make the delineation of those who "murder and steal" to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many o…

you could call them criminals, many do, activists are also criminals from the view of politicans I generally just used "who murder and steal" as a basic notion of "it's good for people who are in trouble with the law"

Legal and morally right are two different things though.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#196

Post by HtmlProgrammer »

hvb2 wrote: post #190

> 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 t…

I think the key difference is the inability to be (easily) deplatformed / locked out which can happen in traditional banking

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#197

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

TrackerFF wrote: post #58

I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC. Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I o…

You didnt make a mistake. There is no reason to believe 40k of coins becomes 10M... and if you keep that much on a USB drive I think it would send most insane!

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#198

Post by lmm »

sumedh wrote: post #186
originalvichy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What happens when a country's banking system fails.

The people who looted it transport their ill-gotten gains away via Bitcoin, often enough.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#199

Post by hvb2 »

vatsachak wrote: post #147

Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet. We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth

There is no value in a currency that isn't mass adopted. That was the whole reason we switched from trading 100 breads for 1 pig etc.

In order to be that currency it cannot be volatile. Ask any country with high inflation how useful their actual currency is...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#200

Post by colinhb »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #79
serial_dev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority. Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and the…

> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing. Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.

Skipped the metaverse, slotted between the two
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