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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

#211

Post by aeternum »

fsh wrote: post #109
snapplebobapple wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.

They also confiscate those hard-to-copy tokens if you acquire a sufficiently large quantity and attempt to leave the country with them.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#212

Post by kec »

sumedh wrote: post #183
ryandvm wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

> Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff. What happens when a country's banking system fails?

In what circumstance could the banking system collapse but leave the electric grid and all other infrastructure which supports the internet intact?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#213

Post by kaluga »

The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.

When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#214

Post by UltraSane »

NickNaraghi wrote: post #174
snapplebobapple wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.

I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)

smart contracts need some link to reality that has to be.... trusted.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#215

Post by aeternum »

sroerick wrote: post #185
Seattle3503 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos

This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#216

Post by koonsolo »

petesergeant wrote: post #123
koonsolo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion. You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion. Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".

South Sea Company at its height was worth almost 3x British GDP. Not bad for a company "with negligible business activities"!

We've been hearing the story for years already that the Bitcoin value will go to zero.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#217

Post by lazide »

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.

The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.

Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#219

Post by lazide »

charcircuit wrote: post #138
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.

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 fi…

That is called tracing. It’s also not hard - every node does it to verify blocks.
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