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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

#411

Post by yes_man »

dist-epoch wrote: post #352
yes_man wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your crypto still needs to be declared, even if you hold the keys. Not doing that breaks all kinds of laws and makes you jail-able. Sure, you can hope the state won't find out about your crypto, but then how do you enjoy it?

Specifically for a refugee, at least with crypto you have the possibility to declare your assets in your destination, since you actually still hold on to them. Which is unlikely if it is tied to banks or investment platforms of an authoritarian country trying to genocide you. I understand this sounds like a fringe example but there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#412

Post by agumonkey »

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…

my naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing:

    - waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store)
    - sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too)
    - emit very small amount of data
    - struggle with security
    - reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network
somehow (and again, i'm naive and not knowledgeable) i felt that a lot of useful processing for society would be better if there was a global encrypted network that would enact the same simple things but without the human layer round trip. you get 24/7 operations, globally, open, encrypted.

in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire.

and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..

but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#413

Post by nout »

fpoling wrote: post #251
nout wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For larger amounts it makes sense to use the bitcoin rails for international transfers. I'm doing bank to bank international transfers and using bitcoin saves around 3% compared to Wise and you get the money immediately (or within 1hr, depending on what you use).

Few years ago I needed to transfer a big sum from a Scandinavian country into Euro. The official bank exchange rate plus fees was worse than Wise’s. But I asked the bank and the bank gave me an exchange rate that was like 0.1% better than one from wise.

Depending on the direction, but there are ways to actually make a little extra on top of the middle exchange rate (e.g. on the USD to EUR path), since there are many people that want to buy no-KYC bitcoin in Europe and they are willing to pay a couple % extra.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#414

Post by KellyCriterion »

charcircuit wrote: post #264
bawolff wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most states have in fact invented bank transfers for that purpose.

The decentralized nature of banks makes it hard to offer a good payment experience to consumers and businesses.

SEPA is among the most stable & robust payment areas globally with a lot of interesting features which a lot of other regions are jealous about :-) And there are additional layers built on top, so at least we have N=1, while I have to admit that convenience could & should be improved

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#415

Post by user34283 »

kaluga wrote: post #213

The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like. When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.

From OP's post;

> 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.

I'm sorry, but that just seems idiotic. Ever heard about anti-money laundering or KYC?

It is not desirable to send a billion dollars internationally "to anyone" within seconds, and certainly not without checks and irreversible. The core idea was fundamentally unrealistic from the very start.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#416

Post by KellyCriterion »

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…

There was a great article in a German magazine some month ago, they are listing very detailled how cash tracking works and who is involved and which process step: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/reise-eines-zwannis-diese-gerae...

Its really interesting, feel free to use your favorite LLM to translate it :)

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#417

Post by nout »

tsimionescu wrote: post #232
nout wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you start transacting on Bitcoin Lightning network (which is essentially sending pre-signed bitcoin transactions in a smart way, without submitting them on the main chain), then you no longer see each transaction. Lightning introduces decent privacy, not perfect, but decent.

It's also not guaranteeing double spend protection (especially not passively), and is not actually using Bitcoin, except occasionally and optionally.

It does guarantee double spend protection, that's exactly what the lightning nodes do. If someone tries to double spend, they lose their bitcoin. I have a different definition for "using bitcoin" than you do.

Similarly I believe that HTTP Live Streaming is using Internet...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#418

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

tsimionescu wrote: post #238
Cyao wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you (theoretically) cannot know who mined the coin, or who is actually the holder of the coin, thus the anonymity. Though currently this is getting restricted as governments require more ID verification from businesses dealing with crypto, which links up your coin to a real person.

The correct term here is pseudonimity - you know the immutable, stable wallet id of who mined the coin, which is a pseudonym for a real person. Anonymous systems are ones in which it's impossible to associate an identity with the work item. For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming th…

How is the serial number on cash any more anonymous than bitcoin addresses?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#419

Post by KellyCriterion »

immibis wrote: post #349
kec wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what circumstance could the banking system collapse but leave the electric grid and all other infrastructure which supports the internet intact?

One where the president prints trillions of dollars to bail out his AI cronies.

++1

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#420

Post by komali2 »

joejohnson wrote: post #326

Guy who was "enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals" is shocked to learn that the system "will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation". He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.

Yes! I've been thinking for a while that crypto/libertarianism borrows a lot of language from anarchist philosophy, but redirects that energy towards an environment that's even more capitalistic than our liberal democracies. Which is the opposite of the supposed values of these crypto libertarians, but because libertarianism is a schizophrenic ideology that tries to combine capitalism with anarchism, it of course goes the way of all libertarian projects and turns into a nightmare (at least this time there's no bears).
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