[deleted]
I wasted years of my life in crypto
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#452It's not a complete waste. 8 years is a lot of time spent learning to build a tool that, sure, might not have been "good" but it was still time spent building a tool. Those skills are applicable elsewhere, and perhaps the most important thing to realize is that at least the time wasn't spent on NFTs.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#453Earlier 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?
The internet is more resilient than that. I wouldn't want to live in a country where the banking system has collapsed, and one of the reasons is because I expect that this correlates with unreliability of the power grid; but you can run a lot of useful pieces of software on a computer powered by solar panels and batteries in the wilderness with a satellite uplink, including a bitcoin node.
Ah yes. And everyone in a country that suffers a banking collapse lives in a wilderness with solar power and a sattelite uplink.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Because it's attached to the bill itself, not the owner or the wallet.
If I give you a dollar bill with the serial number 100100, it's impossible for you to prove that bill came from me (unless you have forensic evidence of me giving it to you, of course - but that's equivalent to having photo evidence of me typing in my private key to a BTC wallet) . If you find a dollar bill on the street, it's now yours, you can't know anything about its previous owner.
In contrast, a BTC address is a unique identifier for someone who owns the BTC. The blockchain stores all addresses that it ever interacted with, so even if you create thousands of wallets, they can all be-anonymized quite easily if one is, as you can track how money was sent between them.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, that's what I thought nano had done: https://nano.org/en instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard! and then it just went no where :\
Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.
Okay full disclosure, I believe in stablecoins only but what are your thoughts on nano. It has zero fees and I worked using its zero fees to store data/timestamps in it by nanotimestamps
Personally I prefer usdc on polygon
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#456I'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…
You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but…
Deflationary "currencies" like crypto are significantly worse (why spend when you can HODL). Regular crypto "currencies" will have the exact same effects.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#457Sold most of my BTC off at $120k, but kept a chunk not as an investment but as a sort of emergency fund that could be useful if for some reason I ever find myself needing to transact without using cash, bank accounts or credit cards.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply put: Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina. Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.
A different metric of comparison isn't Bitcoin's energy consumption compared to other countries but compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace, which burns more energy than Bitcoin and allegedly burns more energy funding wars with fiat. Mining gold instead of Bitcoin burns more energy than Bitcoin too. Compared to that for energy consumption, Bitcoin is superior really.
The comparison is moot because Bticoin barely functions as a currency. Banking system provides a lot of other functionality beyond just money.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That's only true if they observe the channel being fraudulently closed in the right time window. You have to actively monitor the BTC chain to see if your Lightning network partner might steal from you. If you don't (e.g. There is some network or power issue and they take this opportunity to steal), tough luck.
Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and only settle later. No one would say that you're using Visa when you tell the bartender to put some drink on your tab, even though at the end of the day or week or whatever, the transaction will go through Visa.
Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto
#460I'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…
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
Early on bitcoin was thought to be pseudoanonymous. Like sure, it's all public, but what's public is "bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh", not "John Smith, age 43, living in Florida".
Then two things happened: people figured out that it's actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: "donate here: (hash)".
And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we've got real names connected to those random looking numbers.