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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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only buyers are criminals, sanction evaders, and probably the dumbest people in the world given that the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on one thing and one thing only. Creating the most deflationary monetary system in history.

There are a lot of places in the world where crypto payments are now prevalent, not because users are the "dumbest people in the world" but because they have no better alternative for electronic finance. Either conventional banking is nonexistent/abysmal for this purpose or their national currencies are in such bad condition that it's better for them to hold and use cryptocurrencies.

Name one, and provide evidence to support that assertion.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#492

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.

“Surely allowing the world’s wealthiest people to shelter their capital from the greedy clutches of democratically elected governments will naturally lead to a more equitable and humanistic world order”

And yet I have never heard anyone admit to being a "Warlordarian"—but that's basically what you get.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#493

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.

It's nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.

Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.

But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#494
post #34

I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.

Sounds like the author may have "lost their religion" though.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important: > ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they…

>"Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain" Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies. >"This is…

> Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.

In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#497
Similar thing happened to me, albeit like 6 or so years ago.

I was very young and had been "in the space" for a couple years. The concept of "decentralization" in general appealed to me as someone frustrated with the abuses of centralized power. I liked the idea of a transparent ledger and wanted to apply it to non-profit initiatives. I even spoke about this at the European Central Bank as a 20 year old (got there via anonymous paper submission -- imagine the surprise).

But very quickly I grew frustrated with how much of the space was scams, people looking to get rich quick, etc. I had been more interested in the applications of blockchain that went beyond crypto but even stopped paying attention to cryptos altogether as a speculative investment. Funny enough, a few people who were "evangelized" by me made a fair bit of money.

I'm thankful though because I got into programming at 18 to write smart contracts, and that actually changed the course of my life quite drastically.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#498
The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#500
post #190

> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and 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. These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well. I don't believe cross border was t…

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.

A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC.

I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.

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