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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

#441

Post by reactordev »

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…

This. The moment dex’s started allowing speculation is when it all when bottoms up.

When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#442

Post by maaaaattttt »

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#443

Post by KellyCriterion »

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…

>> I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#444

Post by KellyCriterion »

npoc wrote: post #380
geremiiah wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great. Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses. The problem with 2008 was corruption not mon…

"Monetary policy" in reality simply means printing more money than is ever destroyed. It's human nature and always will be. This means bitcoin's average price will go up forever when priced in fiat tokens. Or anything else for that matter - even gold's above-ground stock doubles every 35 years. How's that for an incentive? The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of…

>>The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.

Thats Gresham's Law

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#445

Post by geysersam »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #434
amelius wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a difference between "Freedom to do something " and "Freedom to not have something happen to you ". If we keep curtailing the former to serve the latter, we will end up perfectly safe from interruptions, doing nothing at all(aside from what the government dictates as 'serving the common good')

There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.

What's the difference between having the freedom to walk the street and having the freedom to not be hindered from walking the street?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#446

Post by VieEnCode »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #442

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in genera…

If, after all these years, Crypto has not become a stable store of value that can replace a fiat currency and let you buy your groceries with it, why do we suddenly 'need it' to do that now, and what would change that will enable that to happen?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#447

Post by Traster »

mozarella wrote: post #206

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section... Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals]…

Ah I see, so the [token holder] hires a [builder] to build something, and uses that to then hire [intellectual] to scam the ['pragmatic user']?

To take this a little more seriously, this is computer programming, very famously you don't need massive gobs of VC capital to build something. The only reason for the [builder] needs [token holder] is to hire [intellectual] to scam [user].

Oh and of course, [token holder] [builder] and [intellectual] are the same guy with 3 different anime profile pics.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#448

Post by troupo »

dotancohen wrote: post #425
voodooEntity wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading your comment made me think of an ad i saw several years ago. It was an ad that started off like a typical quality coffee ad, nice pictures of beans, people harvesting, some roasting etc. But than it switched to the topic if making sure that "fair trade" was really applied - switching to IBM Blockchain and claiming that through the use of Blockchain there is safety that everything went fair trade..... And i ju…

I have not seen this scenario, but I assume that a blockchain could more reliably and believably be made public, recording all the way down to the farmer, then could other technologies. Blockchain enables transparency from the farmer to the consumer. It does not ensure that the farmer was not coerced.

To make it simple to understand:

For example, international conglomerate using exclusively slave labor inputs "these bananas are small farmers fair trade bananas" into blockchain.

That's it. That is the "transparency".

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#449

Post by bhickey »

gloosx wrote: post #374
bhickey wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off Subversive literature printed on blotter paper. Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.

>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In severa…

And the Glock switch is useful for home defense.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#450

Post by somenameforme »

geysersam wrote: post #445
Dilettante_ wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between "Freedom to do something " and "Freedom to not have something happen to you ". If we keep curtailing the former to serve the latter, we will end up perfectly safe from interruptions, doing nothing at all(aside from what the government dictates as 'serving the common good')

There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently. What's the difference between having the freedom to walk the street and having the freedom to not be hindered from walking the street?

There's tremendous difference. Imagine I put a 5' high fence every 3 feet on a sidewalk. You still have the freedom to walk down the street, but no longer have the ability to do so. This is why the Bill of Rights is framed in terms of limitations on governments as opposed to guarantees of rights.

For instance, the Bill of Rights doesn't grant you the right to free speech. You already naturally have that. It instead makes it unconstitutional for the government to try to hinder that right. By contrast the USSR and China both had/have guarantees of freedom of speech in their constitution, but they mean nothing because obviously you have freedom of speech by virtue of being able to speak.

You having the freedom of speech says nothing about the ability of the government (or private companies in contemporary times) engaging in actions making it difficult to exercise that speech without fear of repercussion. Or as the old tyrannical quote goes, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."

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