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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

#311

Post by bhickey »

pyrolistical wrote: post #295
gavinsyancey wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can't actually tell if you're touting monkey jpegs or making a really funny joke.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#312

Post by charcircuit »

lazide wrote: post #219
charcircuit wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically there is no such thing as a bitcoin. Just unspent transaction outputs. Those get spent as an input of a transaction and then are gone forever. There is no concept of the output of a transaction being the same "bitcoin" as what comes from the input of the transaction. This means if you had 2 inputs and 2 outputs of the same amount there is no way to trace which input became which output. At best you can fi…

That is called tracing. It’s also not hard - every node does it to verify blocks.

When blocks are verified it just needs to validate that sum of the outputs isn't more than the sum of the inputs. It doesn't care about tracking what went where.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#313

Post by KaiserPro »

jongjong wrote: post #38
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…

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…

> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)

Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)

There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#314

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

I have had some thoughts on crypto but basically trust is required in every system, yes there are trustless ways to do things but that isnt the main issue

I think the main issue is that our current credit/debit cards primitives can be stolen/worried about, there are companies which accept your free tier and will auto charge you and hope you forget etc.

Another issue is privacy, Crypto provides some privacy by having usdc monero usdc pay where you want.

Another issue is for teenagers, I am a teen, I can't create a banking account but I have accepted money for 0 fees well technically but exchanges are a mess and I have used those to buy domain names and similar via crypto.

I think that there are stable cryptocurrencies with low or 0 gas fees so it can allow some primitives like just having a public key online -> convert it to respective token's -> send lets say 0.1$ as a token of gesture and then like it can enable a sense of microeconomy but the people who try doing it try to mess it up by having their own coins or whatever whereas I believe stablecoins should be the one doing it

Personally I really prefer gold tokens because that is the best way to get "yield" in my opinion because most places like aave etc. kind of work via providing liquidity to traders or this gambling and due to ethics and just in my opinion, gold coins since pegged to gold have an 100x more volume which is genuine.

Personally as a teen, I have always loved the tech behind crypto because it can enable somethings impossible but its current implementation with 0 pegged coins,trading/gambling etc. sucks and is scummy. I think stablecoins are genuinely really nice

I have shared it in another comment but frankly let me reshare it : https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

Man, I really wish if there was someone who can work with me accepting crypto usdc bank account as I know people in some industries who want to work with crypto but crypto is regulated with them in their country basically or like personally although I stay away from crypto even though I have built things on top of it (nanotimestamps), I would love working in stablecoins but I think that the market is saturated and it requires a lot of regulations and funding to establish a new stablecoin and for what basically when there are already good enough options?

Personally I dont think much of what I said makes sense if you are an adult (90% of the population) 90% of the time, privacy makes only sometimes sense when you are buying something very privacy sensitive and want to fundamentally be unable to link yourself with that identity

So mostly crypto would just be for ephemeral things, like I buy some monero right now instantly sell it to someone, like no need to "hold" things imo or only holding a very small amount

Or it can be good for teenagers which I wish man, people should do something about it.

Also for less transaction fees that visa/mastercard etc. take, I wish if companies can implement UPI transactions/Pix transactions or some system expands soon relating to it but UPI is genuinely so good that most of you do not know what you are missing out on if you aren't Indian. I have heard good things about Pix too

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#315

Post by ranguna »

stavros wrote: post #255
GRiMe2D wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk? Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the mome…

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

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#316

Post by KaiserPro »

donkeylazy456 wrote: post #283

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.

In practice is sorta allows reasonably quick bank transfers.

Something that outside of the US is solved by SWIFT, or the state equivalent of instant bank transfer. Most of the rest of the world has instant, or near instant bank transfers. The US doesn't, it has venmo or similar.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#317

Post by littlecranky67 »

donkeylazy456 wrote: post #283

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.

I only refer to bitcoin (and lightning as Layer2), not crypto. Real-world problems will become more relevant if you live in a 2nd or 3rd world country:

- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)

- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now

- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.

- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue

- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)

- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#318

Post by copirate »

pfortuny wrote: post #287
Ekaros wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash is not completely anonymous, but hard enough and not enough parties track it. Bills are serialized and you could take photos of coins and likely identify them based on scratch patterns. Still, whole thing is saved by not enough people actually tracking it to that level. And on other side, BTC tracks every single transaction ever. Which is also detriment, that is we keep everything stored forever in lot of places…

Point taken about anonymity. However, its design (that of cash) is theoretically anonymous, it is reality which gets in the way. BTC, on the other hand, is "just" a huge ledger of transactions with giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous) and preserved forever. Also, as you point out, BTC is a massive waste of resources and storage space.

> giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous)

Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.

And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#319

Post by stavros »

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

I'm pretty sure I could find someone who'd accept 1 BTC for bread and milk. After that, we're just haggling over price.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#320

Post by wisty »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #298
wisty wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Pretty much. People say it's meant to replace laws and regulations, but if it's successful then it won't.

The US has a large bitcoin strategic reserve. Banks offer bitcoin accounts (in some countries). You can get a loan backed by your bitcoin.

We're not yet at the point where you can get a credit card and 60 year home loan denominated in bitcoin, with the fed writing bonds or even issuing fiat to stabilise rates, but if it was more popular then is there any technical reason we couldn't get there?

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