Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wasted years of my life in crypto

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 1001 posts

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#341

Post by cherryteastain »

pas wrote: post #334
bloppe wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoff…

but there's no compounding interest. no dividend based on future cashflows. holding stocks of a diverse index seems better on the long run, no?

Check out how $100 put in bank deposits or S&P500 have done versus gold over the last 50 years. You will find that these do not generate real returns when measured against sound currency either.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#342

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bhickey wrote: post #307
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature fro…

> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off Subversive literature printed on blotter paper. Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.

Okay, tell me how I buy something over the internet without tying the purchase to my government ID.

Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#343

Post by bluecalm »

tsimionescu wrote: post #227
HaZeust wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important: > ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they…

In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure.

>>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.

And it's currently not the case at all.

I think blockchain is a terrible idea for about anything. Electronic voting is hard. Voting is hard. It doesn't change the fact that the current system is a complete security joke .

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#344

Post by balamatom »

spankibalt wrote: post #256

> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did." A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.

If you're so cool and all, do you have a hypothesis as to why in Slavic languages they keep translatin' "Atlas Shrugged" as "Atlas Straightened His Shoulders"?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#345

Post by dist-epoch »

bloppe wrote: post #328
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…

To understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoff…

If you only care about inflation, real-estate in desirable locations is also inflation-proof. You can't print more land in San Francisco, London or Hong Kong.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#346

Post by spaceman_2020 »

ranguna wrote: post #315
stavros wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you convert them into bread and milk the same way you convert little pieces of paper into bread and milk: You find someone who's willing to give you bread and milk in return for them.

Good luck finding someone who will accept btc for literal bread and milk

There are massive P2P economies already built in most third world nations that work on crypto. They prefer stablecoins but will happily accept BTC as well. It's a serious enough problem that they've started using code words to refer to crypto currencies ("goat" for USDT, "chicken" for ETH, etc.)

If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#347

Post by FieryMechanic »

dpedu wrote: post #51
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…

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.

You are confusing anonymity and privacy. Bitcoin can be anonymous, but not private.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#348

Post by tsimionescu »

copirate wrote: post #325
tsimionescu wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

L2 networks achieve scale by... Not being blockchain. And by not offering the double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains. So this statement is "you can scale blockchain tech by using another tech in its place that doesn't offer the same guarantees".

With the Lightning network, L2 is basically a database between only 2 parties that are required to be online during the transaction. It's not possible to double spend in that situation. There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party. More details here:…

> but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#349

Post by immibis »

kec wrote: post #212
sumedh wrote: post #183

Earlier 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?

One where the president prints trillions of dollars to bail out his AI cronies.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#350

Post by globular-toast »

Ekaros wrote: post #44
jongjong wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for E…

I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat. And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem th…

What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win".

Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.

What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?

Post reply on HN