My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
Allows scammers to avoid money being returned by having no centralized platform.
I wasted years of my life in crypto
291–300 of 1001 posts
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#292I'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.
It isn't anonymous. Anybody who says bitcoin is anonymous either doesn't understand bitcoin or doesn't understand anonymity. It's pseudonymous.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#293My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
The only real world problem is probably solved by low chain fees where I can hold usdc or gold coins and then pay or recieve payments without too much hassle
But that again, is such a low niche and something that includes exchanges fees too
Recently I wanted to get a domain name on black friday so I went to namecheap and paid them 10 $ in crypto, I had to pay 80 cents to an exchange to convert my usdc polygon to btc to then + some btc fees because namecheap just accepted that
I am a teenager so technically buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case
I think stablecoins have potential to atleast remove this stripe/paypal/visa/mastercard etc.'s monopoly and allow cheap payments
Honestly I wish UPI from India or Pix from brazil were implemented at a global scale, they are so good.
My thoughts are nuanced but since I am a teen and yes I have a bank account but it cant be operated fully until I turn 18 by me, its all just complicated and crypto kinda solves some aspect of it
But this whole field is niche too and most people who build on these primitives basically build gambling as the author said
Here are my thoughts on crypto that one time I was on HackerNews on a similar thread and wanted to give a proper space to my thoguhts: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#294I heard some people were talking about using crypto to build a full State on it, this is doomed to fail.
Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.
Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.
No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :-)
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
That’s just a bad contract. Now consider one that mints you an NFT
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.
I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?
Is it necessarily the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart contracts can only enforce things which happen on the chain. No smart contract can prove you were not actually delivered your goods without trusting someone else.
Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.
So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#298Earlier 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.
The issue isn't that it solves the wrong problem. The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely u…
> Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
You use monero to do those things or zano or freedomusd and similar things for these but I didnt understand the conclusion of this statement
Basically you are saying crypto is just an less regulated fiat nowadays?
A legal curry of tech jargon just meant to replace laws and regulations?
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#299crypto means cryptography
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#300I'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 why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people . There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around wh…
I think a lot more important for understanding crypto is learning the first bitcoin was minted in January 2009, months off of the heel of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, and more notably the "start" of the 2008 financial crisis