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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

#141

Post by dreamcompiler »

serial_dev wrote: post #43
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…

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…

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

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#142

Post by kaluga »

What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.

The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#143

Post by dboreham »

As someone who spent some time in "crypto land" and much time in the "real world", my surprise was usually that people seeing odd things in crypto land didn't realize that very similar odd things are also present in real world. E.g. the author's frustration at not being able to spot a real business. How many times have we seen an IPO or acquisition at an unfathomable valuation, for example?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#145

Post by hirsin »

bdangubic wrote: post #115
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.

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…

What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.

Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#146

Post by stephen_g »

koonsolo wrote: post #100
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…

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".

Market cap is pretty hypothetical though - if somebody actually tried to liquidate $50bn of bitcoin into fiat money you'd probably send the BTC price to about zero...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#148

Post by stephen_g »

malfist wrote: post #82
m00dy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.

How does Jerome Powell decide the price of a dollar? How does an algorithm fix that? What is being fixed?

Maybe in their head it's still back before 1976 where we have the Bretton Woods system, there's no foreign exchange market and policymakers set the price of dollars against gold?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#149

Post by wmf »

nacozarina wrote: post #28
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…

read the original Satoshi paper all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.

The whitepaper has some problems. Satoshi isn't automatically right and virtually no one uses Bitcoin/crypto the way Satoshi envisioned. Arguably if you judge Bitcoin based on the whitepaper it is a complete failure.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#150

Post by BLKNSLVR »

ikt wrote: post #67
TrackerFF wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow. And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.

Yep, that's what I thought nano had done: https://nano.org/en instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard! and then it just went no where :\

Nano is pretty amazing, but, yeah, the interest is in profit not the technology, so it's fading into the background. Pity.
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