I wasted years of my life in crypto • Hacker News Board

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#501

Post by throw0101d » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:21 PM UTC

bleuuuu wrote: post #476

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.

Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime. Having transcations on a ledger forever, works against your criminal take. You are just repeating.

> Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime.

Depends on the crimes, and up to certain values/volumes.

For 'consensual' transactional things for goods/services it could be useful (e.g., drug deals). But for ransom-like stuff, where one end of the 'transaction' is not thrilled with the 'deal', having to physically pick up the cash puts the perp at risk.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#502

Post by Yizahi » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #477

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.

Anonymous crypto, yes. But if you're suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that's not the case for bitcoin at least. It's a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.

In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#503

Post by throw0101d » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:25 PM UTC

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 is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you". […]

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

The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:

> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

(The book was published in 2024, and there are a number of talks he gave on the subject online made during his book tour.)

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#504

Post by danaris » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

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…

No; the argument is much closer to "if you don't make cryptocurrency basically the same as fiat, by building the same systems on top of it, it's useless to the vast majority of people."

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#505

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

KellyCriterion wrote: post #444

npoc wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

[deleted]

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#506

Post by danaris » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #343

tsimionescu wrote: post #227

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…

In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure. >>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when…

The "current election system", in the US, is not one single system. It is much closer to 50 separate systems with their own differences that range from quirks to wildly different fundamentals.

You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#507

Post by verzali » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #320

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone. You use monero to do those things or zano or freedomusd and similar things for these but I didnt understand the conclusion of this statement Basically you are saying crypto is just an less regulated fiat nowadays? A legal curry of tech jargon just meant to replace laws and re…

Pretty much. People say it's meant to replace laws and regulations, but if it's successful then it won't. The US has a large bitcoin strategic reserve. Banks offer bitcoin accounts (in some countries). You can get a loan backed by your bitcoin. We're not yet at the point where you can get a credit card and 60 year home loan denominated in bitcoin, with the fed writing bonds or even issuing fiat to stabilise rates, bu…

What purpose does a bitcoin strategic reserve serve?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#508

Post by immibis » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #242

jenadine wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal and morally right are two different things though.

Laws at least have the advantage of being written down. Morals are different for everyone and not constant in time even in a single individual.

Laws aren't always written down. A good example is what happens if you criticize Israel - the government, if it notices you, will come down on you like a sack of bricks, even though there's no law that says "don't criticize Israel". https://youtu.be/zJt3omLLAuA

Likewise, there's no law saying "don't accept payment in Monero" but you may be jailed for money laundering if the government notices you.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#509

Post by immibis » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #40

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've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so: > I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted…

I've recently used Bitcoin to pay for several legitimate items because the fiat financial system just decided not to let me pay with my debit card, for no apparent reason.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#510

Post by immibis » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

GRiMe2D wrote: post #237

solumunus wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult t…

Okay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk? Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the mome…

There is no conversion of money into goods, only exchange of money for goods.

I'll give you some bread and milk for 100 BTC if you want. I'll even fly to your country to personally deliver them to your house.