This is about cryptocurrencies, not actual cryptography.
I wasted years of my life in crypto
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Laws at least have the advantage of being written down. Morals are different for everyone and not constant in time even in a single individual.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
A transparency log, as I understand them, requires a centralized actor; which makes it easier to fudge numbers and introduce false participants.
No, because each participant can check its contribution in the log. Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote. The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).
I see what you're saying now, I was imagining the type of transparency log that's usually run by a single institution and audited by a few others.
Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in the event that there's not a ton of replication - hoping that wouldn't be the case in an election.
With a (properly designed) blockchain, you at least push those assumptions into a consensus layer with many writers/validators and game-theory penalties for rewriting its history. It's still not magic; but for something like elections, I'd rather minimize the points where a single operator can tilt the playing field, which is why I was thinking "blockchain" instead of "centralized transparency log"
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#244Earlier 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.
Why should the method of payment solve that problem? A reputation system for sellers and service providers makes more sense to be entirely separate.
except currently the main usecases for cryptocoins are to buy illicit goods and services online. I remember when OpenBazaar was a thing. It even somehow managed to get an iOS app despite it being ridiculously easy to find listings for lbs of cocaine
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#245I'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…
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".
Slippage yo. Market cap means jack shit if the true order book is thin like a slice of carpaccio.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
LLM has more tangible benefits for companies and consumers. If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
> According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
We're currently all subsidizing the AI industry. When we solve the energy problem then we can talk about potential benefits of LLMs
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#247Earlier 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.
They also confiscate those hard-to-copy tokens if you acquire a sufficiently large quantity and attempt to leave the country with them.
I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.
Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
The internet is more resilient than that. I wouldn't want to live in a country where the banking system has collapsed, and one of the reasons is because I expect that this correlates with unreliability of the power grid; but you can run a lot of useful pieces of software on a computer powered by solar panels and batteries in the wilderness with a satellite uplink, including a bitcoin node.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#249Wrong. People who use crypto as a casino - that is, "invest" into it or "trade" it - are a numerical majority but they aren't those who make actual money there. Actual money is made by those who use it for:
- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).
- Tool for scams.
- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.
I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.
Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What happens when a country's banking system fails. The people who looted it transport their ill-gotten gains away via Bitcoin, often enough.
What should the average citizen of that country do in that case?
Cooperate with their fellow citizens and fix their banking system, rather than trying to grab as much as possible for themselves?