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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

#561

Post by Yizahi »

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…

It is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn't work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn't scale.

The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#562

Post by ninkendo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #257
fsh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature fro…

> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

> That problem already has solutions

The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto.

The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#563

Post by dns_snek »

user34283 wrote: post #543
dns_snek wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We, the people, make the rules. Since when? We merely vote for politicians who promise to enact laws and regulations that are beneficial for us but they almost universally fail to do that, succumbing to self-interests and corruption. If a government implements authoritarian measures that curb our freedom in an unpopular manner, "we the people" can't do anything about it. In a few years we may or may not vote them o…

That's a bleak view on the state of democracy. Whatever your feelings on the topic may be, we will not be giving up government control of the financial system in favor of a blockchain and profits for crypto-bros.

Bleak but realistic, unfortunately. There needs to be a viable alternative as long as our elected representatives have the power to abuse the financial system as a means of authoritarian control, like freezing the bank accounts of protestors.

A truly democratic leadership with stringent limitations on how they can meddle with financial transactions would be preferable, but that's just a dream at this point.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#565

Post by danaris »

dns_snek wrote: post #518
danaris wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ."

That is just an observation, not an argument against building, improving, and using crypto. Cryptocurrency doesn't need to do everything for everyone at all times to be a useful thing to have in the world. It only needs to be helpful to a subset of people, in a subset of situations, some of the time. I'm happy paying by card for ~100% of my daily transactions, but I want cryptocurrency to exist should the need arise.…

But cryptocurrency enables more abuse, more victimization, today. And the problems with authoritarian governments a) cannot actually be solved by introducing cryptocurrency; that only enables some people to work around them; and b) cannot even be worked around with cryptocurrency for the majority of people: only those who are already relatively wealthy have access to the systems that enable that.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#566

Post by rrdharan »

ForHackernews wrote: post #552
HighGoldstein wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nigeria, Argentina, Venezuela, all prime examples because they faced especially severe problems with hyperinflation and traditional banking. You can also find widespread use in developing economies like Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, but of course to a lesser degree since the problems with traditional finance are not as severe there. I will gladly provide more in-depth information, if someone provides some evidence…

You've mentioned some places in the world that have economic problems. You've provided zero evidence to support the idea that "crypto payments are now prevalent" in any of those places. As a counterexample, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as an official currency, provided state-subsidized infrastructure for citizens to adopt it, and still achieved only minimal usage: > The October 2022 “Encuesta Dinámica Empresarial” fro…

I’m shocked it’s even that high

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#567

Post by etruong42 »

The internet was about freedom (to most of its initial creators). It is now a cornerstone of the surveillance state. And yet, independent journalism is now possible only mostly through the existence of the internet.

AI & crypto may end up in a similar bucket. It is a paradoxical enabler of both freedom and imprisonment. No one gets to build a technology a declare a problem solved. Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe and thus paradoxically ended up being called the Merchant of Death.

Freedom is not free. It is an eternal struggle.

I am grateful for the builders who try to build something for freedom. I do not spurn them when their invention gets corrupted. It is now our job and the job of future generations to fight the corruption.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#568

Post by Yizahi »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #257
fsh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature fro…

That (freedom of payments) may have been the idea. But there are two problems with it:

1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate.

2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#569

Post by earnesti »

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…

> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.

Care to elaborate? I have been using Bitcoin now 10+ to store my wealth and make payments, and it has been very convenient - not much time needed to use it, and I think I've gotten plenty of value for my time-investment.

What kind of database would you recommend to make it more convenient? Maybe you can write a guide how to implement decentralized value transfer and storage system on top of PostgreSQL, so that the amount of tokens is limited to 21 Million, with similar security guarantees?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#570

Post by rrdharan »

uselesswords wrote: post #440
theelous3 wrote: post #405

All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time. As I say, crypto is o…

There are multiple countries in the world where issues like hyperinflation have pushed day-to-day transactions to crypto for everyday people.

No, there actually aren’t. People just assume there are but the majority of desperate people turn to the barter system before crypto helps them.
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