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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

#401

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

amelius wrote: post #384
phplovesong wrote: post #363

The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago. Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people. Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is no…

To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

only for privacy coins tho

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#402

Post by throw101010 »

Ekaros wrote: post #279
pfortuny wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be money, but it is definitely not cash. Cash is completely anonymous, BTC is not.

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…

Which is why higher layers like the Lightning Network, Rootstock, Liquid offer to not store everything on chain and offer speed/features Bitcoin natively can't while resting on the higher security model of their base layer.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#403

Post by amelius »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #394
amelius wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

"Freedom enables crime" is an entirely true argument, and a gift from heaven for The Powers That Be who need to justify the taking-away of Freedom.

Freedom is never absolute. What gives one person freedom may limit another person's freedoms. Therefore you will have to weigh the pros and the cons of a technology that promises freedom.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#404

Post by mettamage »

amelius wrote: post #384
phplovesong wrote: post #363

The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago. Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people. Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is no…

To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.

I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.

Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#405

Post by theelous3 »

All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.

As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#406

Post by gaigalas »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #388
phplovesong wrote: post #363

The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago. Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people. Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is no…

> The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people. Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself. Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean - hiring personal security - being very ca…

It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc.

Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#407

Post by agumonkey »

I've talked to people that, around 2023, were still very deep into the "we are the revolution. open source decentralized finance will free humanity" belief, while it was obvious that more and more of it was blending with institutions and dubious characters. Pretty odd (but massively interesting as a sociological pattern).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#408

Post by throw101010 »

LikesPwsh wrote: post #280
lmm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety. Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.

Most token holders use exchanges, where freezing accounts and just keeping the tokens is a daily occurrence. That's not something solved by cryptocurrency in its current form.

You do realize that they get frozen only because of the fiat system regulations/laws?

These exchanges freeze accounts in fear of what governments might do to them if they weren't cautious/suspicious enough. They have no economical interest in freezing account otherwise, that's one less customer trading and paying them fees.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#409

Post by user34283 »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #399
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…

Your argument here appears to be "crypto is no better than fiat, because you can build the same systems on top of them." What you put on top is not the core value proposition of cryptocurrencies? It's what's underneath that's different, that was always the point. Fiat currency is built on a foundation of gov't control, whether it's the physical currency or the money in your bank account. Cryptocurrencies, fundamental…

The financial system being under government control is the only proposition consistent with reality.

We, the people, make the rules. Replacing our democratic processes with finance controlled by the one with the most computing power, control of the software, or having horded the most of the tokens, is in no way desirable or realistic.

Even if the proposition wasn't borderline idiotic in the first place, there is no clear explanation how such a system should reward early adopters and allow them to cash out at a profit many times exceeding inflation.

It's all a scam.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#410

Post by Dilettante_ »

pjc50 wrote: post #395
Dilettante_ wrote: post #387

Cynically reduced, tfa reads as: "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for", but claims to say: "The promised freedom did not materialize." If crypto allows people to do something that was previously not possible(order drugs in the mail with the convenience of amazon, invest at consistently insanely chaotic conditions, run multimillion hustles with total impunity) versus doing s…

> "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for" I think this is a totally valid conclusion, especially for someone growing out of Randianism. It's yet another Chesterton's Fence, or someone discovering that the safety rails were there for good reasons. I'm not sure how we got from the massive international overreach of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg to "s…

If people making bad choices is a deal-breaker for someone, then I think they might not have been a very good libertarian/randian in the first place.

Also, my point against tfa was less "the author holds a bad opinion" and more "the piece claims to talk about one thing, but actually talks about a completely different thing, drawing bad conclusions as a result."

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