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Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

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Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#41

Post by aeternum »

floatboth wrote: post #19
leppr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.

Still more efficient than the alternatives.

USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it.

Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#42

Post by cryptica »

banachtarski wrote: post #38
Passthepeas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast majority of crypto currency mining is done with excess green energy that would otherwise be rejected by the grid and wasted, as high as 78% by some estimates. https://medium.com/value-of-bitcoin/bitcoins-energy-consumpt...

Sorry but this reeks of nonsense to me. Even if true, surely the compute power could be used for protein folding or something actually useful instead of hashing bits only to throw the results away the majority of the time. Crypto needs to die.

Not all cryptocurrencies require a ton of electricity. Some, such as those based on Proof of Stake are extremely efficient and use very little electricity so it's not fair to disparage them all on that basis.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#43

Post by cryptica »

coldpie wrote: post #7
seibelj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.

Yeah but like, what's it valuable for ? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.

>> Yeah but like, what's it valuable for?

It's a deflationary store of value.

What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense).

Deflationary stores of value are valuable.

It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine).

When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#44

Post by VBprogrammer »

leppr wrote: post #34
throwaway2048 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.

Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure. Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for…

> inter-bank transfer would take days to go through

In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#45

Post by [deleted] »

pjkundert wrote: post #32
coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.

[deleted]

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#46

Post by gamblor956 »

leppr wrote: post #12
coldpie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but like, what's it valuable for ? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month,

No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#47

Post by [deleted] »

leppr wrote: post #34
throwaway2048 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.

Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure. Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for…

[deleted]

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#48

Post by [deleted] »

cryptica wrote: post #43
coldpie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but like, what's it valuable for ? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.

>> Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value. What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense). Deflationary stores of value are valuable. It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use w…

[deleted]

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#49

Post by beervirus »

leppr wrote: post #12
coldpie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but like, what's it valuable for ? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to vari…

It's "money" that's not meaningfully exchangeable for goods or services. I can't buy a sandwich with it, or pay my taxes with it, or get my salary in it. Its only utility is that it can (for now) be turned into a large amount of fiat currency. Its only value proposition is that maybe that large amount will be an even larger amount in the future.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#50

Post by jMyles »

coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
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