I have had banks stealing my funds for years -- be it financial providers eating up my first 401k contributions in excessive fees, be it the banks that charged me $2 every time I used an ATM, be it the random charges unauthorized charges that the bank pulled from my account... Then there is the watching all my adult life as assets grow more expensive and further out of reach, a debt treadmill emerges to ensure the co…
How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit.
I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point (programming work for overseas clients), and I haven't gotten scammed yet. I'm not engaged in money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, or gambling, and only the usual amount of delusion. And I don't even buy illegal drugs! And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982; not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report on…
Thanks for sharing your point of view. What is unclear to me, is how these remittances work in practice. I get that in the US you can exchange USD to Bitcoin with a credit card and then send that to a person in, say, Venezuela (or share the wallet password). But how is it converted back to Venezuelan Bolivar? I can't imagine you buying a pizza with bitcoin in Caracas. Side question, why do you write your years with a…
I haven't been in Venezuela since 02006 so I don't know how people there cash out of Bitcoin. I'm guessing nobody has a clear view of the whole system, since being transparent to Maduro's thugs is not in the interest of any of the participants. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Venezuelans who are fleeing the country sell their dollars for Bitcoin, and Venezuelans whose family is abroad buy them.
One thing I do know is that a lot of overseas Venezuelans whose remittances are via Bitcoin don't know Bitcoin is involved. They know a storefront where people transmit money to Venezuela, and the guy there tells them where to instruct their family members in Venezuela to pick up the money. How the agent in Venezuela gets paid is no concern of the customers; they only care that the money they give the guy arrives safe and sound.
Isn't all currency more or less a "pyramid scheme" in the sense that Bitcoin is? I wish we had more subtlety in our discourse. It feels like it's all either blind admiration or blind condemnation. Bitcoin is trying to be a new currency. Currencies more or less operate on "collective delusion". I think many people scratching their heads at why Bitcoin is worth anything _are_ missing something, which is why any currenc…
Fiat currency is backed by courts and regulation, which is backed by a literal army, and the threats of violence that army brings. If someone steals your fiat USD, there will eventually be someone with guns removing you from society if you don't return them.
I can understand peoples' frustration with the artificial scarcity, but would like to see this same energy over the artificial scarcity of housing and free time. The oligopoly of national money systems is currently failing to provide people with basic access to capital. There's nothing intrinsic about cryptocurrency that will necessarily help this or exacerbate it, but the fact that I can get better interest on US do…
If i’m correct you can get upwards of like 5-10% interest on those platforms? Can you simply explain to me where that money comes from? That just seems like an absurd amount of interest. Considering the crypto/inflation hawk intersection, i’d presume people would be skeptical of all this “free” money?
If I'm not wrong, the average yearly ROI of something like S&P 500 has been around 7-8% over the last 70 years.
Since you're French as well, I can tell you that here it gives about 4-5% in yearly returns.
So it's not unheard of returns with traditional asset classes. As far as I'm aware, the money in that specific case comes from interests paid by those taking loans (from the funds that's you're putting out) or from staking rewards (in the case of staking cryptocurrencies using proof of stake).
A lot of people underestimate the value provided by a payment system that makes chargebacks impossible. Yes, it's a double-edged sword that needs to be used carefully. But it makes perfect sense for markets where one side has an established reputation, while the other doesn't.
In the same 7-day span a couple of weeks ago, I saw headlines about crypto's legitimization in the market, and a $1 BILLION crypto donation to COVID efforts in India. I can't believe both simultaneously.
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…
It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then someone else in your trip would just happen to mention, despite not wanting to mention it, that there was a great new jewelry offering discounted jewels, whatever, the point was they wanted the tourist to go to buy gold, then trade that gold for fake jewels, because then he couldn't get a refund).
These two resonated with me: > A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out > [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us It is o…
This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.
> it takes thousands of hours to grasp.
It really doesn't. But that is a convenient way to dismiss criticism from everyone who isn't a crypto insider (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people who spend that much time on it will necessarily be bought into it, the people who are critical will have given up caring about it at some point so will never have the necessary "credentials" to talk about it).
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
> With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do
Then you haven't looked deep enough or maybe the subject matter doesn't interest you. Don't extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I find the DeFi space and the scaling issues and layer 2 projects being built pretty interesting. Web3 and the protocols being built around that are also worth a look. Sure, there are a lot of scams and vaporware, but that's also true of the early and today's internet.
Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all? https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/ These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketpl…
> They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. This all happens in Second Life and doesn't need to burn the planet to do it.
If you think these defi projects are hurting the environment then you have not been paying attention to the industry. Proof of Stake, what most smart contract tokens are moving to, is very energy efficient.