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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

#681

Post by kanbankaren »

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.

It has proven neither to be a store of value nor medium of exchange though it is being used extensively for criminal activities.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#682

Post by mrtksn »

mozarella wrote: post #206

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section... Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals]…

Has Vitalik fallen of grace? Some time ago I stopped following the crypto culture and now I keep being shown tweets ridiculing him.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#683

Post by user34283 »

FabHK wrote: post #657
user34283 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial system being under government control is the only proposition consistent with reality. We, the people, make the rules. Replacing our democratic processes with finance controlled by the one with the most computing power, control of the software, or having horded the most of the tokens, is in no way desirable or realistic. Even if the proposition wasn't borderline idiotic in the first place, there is no c…

You might have formulated things a bit unclearly, but I fundamentally agree that money, like everything else, should be under democratic control of the people. Not controlled by some crypto bros that are happy to interfere with the protocol if it suits them (The DAO hack, two 20+ block rollbacks of Bitcoin), but not if massive crime happens on it.

I guess so, although crypto proponents will anyway tell you that you don't understand how crypto works as soon as you say anything negative about their scheme.

I believe what I said is a fairly accurate summary of Proof of work / Proof of stake mechanisms and Core developer's influence on the protocol.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#684

Post by SirMaster »

lxgr wrote: post #627
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.

Whether you made a profit, especially just once, is indeed not indicative of the quality of your decisionmaking either way.

You don't think a $1000 gamble on this new paradigm of blockchain crypto was a sound decision? When the sum I was putting in was otherwise an insignificant sum to me.

I bought in fully knowing it could go to 0, or maybe it could be worth a ton in 10+ years. To me it seemed like the chance it would blow up was well worth the tiny risk of losing a pretty meaningless amount of money to me.

I am not even otherwise a gambler. I have never gambled at a casino or on sports or anything like that. And my stock investing is all index funds. This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy. But the potential in my mind around the tech and the potential hype around it seemed to greatly outweigh the tiny risk.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#686

Post by FabHK »

troupo wrote: post #453
JuniperMesos wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. And if a country with say 200m people suffered a banking collapse, everyone could do a Bitcoin transaction every 40 days (assuming everyone else stopped using it), and would use only about 1% of the world's electricity. Great stuff.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#687

Post by tim333 »

jmye wrote: post #92
tim333 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How anyone, especially many "intelligent" people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top... However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.

The currency is absolutely not used by anyone serious as currency . Market caps are, quite obviously, representative of nothing, given the current state of the S&P. Let’s be serious.

I used it to buy some airtime on my phone. Not a very good currency maybe.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#688

Post by alphazard »

smokel wrote: post #671
alphazard wrote: post #661

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 pri…

What's the incentive for keeping these "robust" databases online, if not for making a lot of money by running scams?

No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them. If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger. Paying for a token to use the ledger is not speculative, it's pragmatic. Holding the token and not using it to write to the ledger is speculative, and encouraging people to do that in order to make money yourself is a scam.

If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed? You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use. But if you actually use Postgres, and it's cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it's not really a scam.

I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically. For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology. They don't have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves. Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity. They aren't processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#689

Post by FabHK »

l___l wrote: post #428
phplovesong wrote: post #366

Earlier 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.

A bitcoin transaction costs around $100 (in invisible money supply increase, paid by everyone that holds Bitcoin, but received by the miners).

There's no way a fiat transfer costs that much.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#690

Post by PKop »

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…

Both supporters and critics approach it too religiously. Yes 99% is scams and rugpulls. The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money. Why emotionally sell all your crypto vs holding some higher quality as insurance with potential upside? Or even, ride the periodic bulls and take profits, rinse and repeat? If it's full of scammers, why not take some of their money? Does this require "believing" in it? One can not believe in it at all, and thus actually insulate themselves from getting caught up in the hype.
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