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.
Purchasing drugs
I wasted years of my life in crypto
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Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly. https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932 > "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."…
Alas, any comments trying to talk about the problem are getting buried. They don't understand the solution because they stick their fingers in their ears when someone tries to show the problem. Of course a solution doesn't make sense if there is no problem. We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were born during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisi…
The thing is - the world young people are accustomed to is just a carefully managed matrix. There are glitches.
"Why do house prices endlessly rise?"
"Why am I working so hard in such a technologically advanced world yet can't even afford to raise a family?"
Once you see the reason, you can't unsee it.
We also have Gresham's and Thier's Laws on our side.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I misinterpreting you or are you saying Bitcoin would make a better, faster, cheaper Git? If you are, I am already laughing.
They're saying git would not have been better or faster or cheaper if implemented in a classical centralized way.
Isn't git most of the time used centralized? And that offers better user experience than doing it some decentralized way? It seems to me like most prefer centralized use of git. Be it private server or some large server.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#304Earlier 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…
how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Anti-Americanism was well underway by that point. I think the impetus from both distrust in the American government and in Wall St really gave crypto the runway.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#306Earlier 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.
This is only a selling point in places like USA. Even before moving to the USA 13 years ago I was able to send money via wire transfer domestically for free, and it settled within 1 business day (to me that's fast enough). IIUC nowadays intra-EU wire transfers also are free (but I kinda view them as "domestic"), however I'm not sure how quickly they settle. The way how banking worked in the US was definitely one of t…
Less than 10 seconds for SEPA Instant. Still some stragglers, but I have understood coverage starts to be pretty good.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#307Earlier 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.
> 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.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#308My 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 problem of not being able to conduct transactions (globally or not) due to state-level censorship. Also called "censorship resistance".
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#309Crytocurrency was the initial use case for blockchain, but blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrency.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#310> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it. These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well. I don't believe cross border was t…
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
Yes, there are rare use cases where this is useful. The high inflation case is one as well.
So stop talking about a parallel system and start talking about what it is, a niche product.