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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

#661

Post by alphazard »

It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#662

Post by spir »

Crypto is a casino (often fraudulent) and a scam factory.

It's also the source of at least one great new global public institution (Ethereum) and is likely to run much of the global economy in the coming decades.

If you hate or are skeptical about crypto, it is crucial to at least understand the difference between three things:

1. Casino/scams/hacks

2. Crypto/on-chain technology

3. Ethereum as a decentralized chain and global public institution

I've been a full-time Ethereum person for many years. I hate the casino. I hate the scams and hacks. But I see something very special going on here. So let me try to describe it

The casino is just terrible and it'll likely get much worse. The steady stream of scam shit tokens sold to unsuspecting investors shows no sign of slowing down. And wait until r/wallstreetbets discovers perps (perpetual futures). Perps for equities are already live and scaling up.

The scams will get much, much worse. Crypto (on-chain) lets you send bearer assets over the internet, it's scam fuel. The bad guys will have access to a sophisticated internet financial system, too.

Hacks in mature protocols should get much better over time due to improved bug-finding techniques, including AI/tool-assisted auditing and formal verification.

The technology of crypto offers the world a number of benefits, including inherently globalized payments and instant settlement.

Centralized deployments of crypto technology are a big segment of the future. For example, Stripe is actively working on a centralized chain named Tempo that's optimized for payments. It is basically fintech 2.0 on the blockchain, but entirely centralized.

The last and most important part of crypto is the rise of decentralized chains. There are only two chains that are remotely decentralized, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no programmable app layer, so its utility is limited beyond the whatever value the world assigns to BTC.

Ethereum is a decentralized programmable chain, a new kind global public institution. Ethereum can make a highly credible commitment that the rules of the programming environment will be followed in all cases. This makes Ethereum a uniquely excellent neutral hub for global commerce.

Ethereum's decentralization (what we sometimes call "credible neutrality") is driving massive grassroots adoption among corporations and institutions. This is the #1 thing in crypto to keep an eye on because if Ethereum gets large enough it will become a de facto global economic backbone.

I understand you hate crypto. I've lived since 2018 full-time in the industry, and it's been often soul-sucking and harrowing. Many days I hate it. But Ethereum as a platform is benevolent, virtuous, productive, and probably a key part of humanity's future.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#663

Post by FabHK »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #547
gavinsyancey wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.

That's exactly the point of smart contracts. The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer. The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests the…

Read Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. Or just read the title, it has the main point.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#664

Post by SirMaster »

cryptonym wrote: post #583
SirMaster wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.

You basically just confirmed that, from beginning, it's just gambling. Being lucky on your bet doesn't make it a wise investment. I wouldn't call you dumb. I don't know how gamblers feel about their moves.

And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such.

Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?

In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...

I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#665

Post by dotancohen »

troupo wrote: post #448
dotancohen wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Right. That's a forgery - a lie. No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.

An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.

I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#666

Post by jadbox »

earnesti wrote: post #633
reenorap wrote: post #601

I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money…

I've never understood crypto, however I'm long term Bitcoin fan and user, and don't consider it "crypto". I think Bitcoin is pretty much opposite what the typical crypto project is.

I worked in crypto for five years, and this resonates. Sure, you can make money hustling some hype coin, but chances are you are more likely to lose money/time in the process. Outside of very specific supply chain blockchains, 99% of the actual value I see in order of value: 1) Stablecoins [faster than ACH!], 2) Bitcoin, and in certain places, 3) Ethereum has its uses.

Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#667

Post by FabHK »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #79
serial_dev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority. Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and the…

> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing. Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.

> spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon

There were also a few months of super conductors, don't forget :-)

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#668

Post by SirMaster »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #629
SirMaster wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.

"So it was dumb of me to buy my lottery tickets just in the slim chance that I won? Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me." (See also: https://xkcd.com/1827/ )

I don't see how that relates to me. I made a singular choice. I am going to put in $1000 one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here.

I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.

I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#669

Post by amarant »

gsky wrote: post #595
Yizahi wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

India banned crypto. It never even traded using crypto. By the way a country of billion plus should have freedom to do trade in whatever way they like

I tried to pay my parking ticket in heroin, and they threw me in jail!

Viva la revolución!

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#670

Post by gaigalas »

nailer wrote: post #635
gaigalas wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc. Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).

> but no actual ideological arc. Wasn’t the first thing signed an article about the collapse of the banking system?

This is the first thing:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It has nothing about the collapse of the banking system.

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