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

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#701

Post by johncolanduoni » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

krispyfi wrote: post #389

walthamstow wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?

The war on drugs is a scam. Cocaine prohibition is a pretext to oppress indigenous peoples of the Andes. https://filtermag.org/world-health-organization-coca-prohibi...

The war on drugs is a scam, but pretty sure if the primary goal was to oppress indigenous people in another country the US government could’ve found a cheaper way (both fiscally and politically).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#702

Post by TZubiri » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

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.

Ethereum seems useful as well. But that's about it

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#703

Post by TZubiri » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

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]…

That's a very nice categorization, but it seems orthogonal to the categories of: [scammers and hackers that want an untraceable and unrefundable payment method], [scammers that use cryptos themselves to scam and rugpull], ...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#704

Post by troyvit » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #94

ikt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's what I thought nano had done: https://nano.org/en instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard! and then it just went no where :\

Because in practice services like TransferWise solved this problem using fiat currencies with fees low enough not to make it worth bothering with crypto.

Man they don't solve it for me. They charge much more for using a credit card vs a checking account, especially when going across currencies, and I consider it pretty dumb to share my checking account information around when I can control things much more easily with a credit card. And literally any fee they charge is more than what nano charges. It's just that nobody takes nano :(

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#705

Post by thefringthing » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #696

kanbankaren wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How has it not been a store of value?

It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#706

Post by TZubiri » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

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.

>Proceeds to provide their opinion.

At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular/first/best coin is completely useless.

I'd invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#707

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.

Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)

Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#708

Post by lxgr » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #684

lxgr wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gamb…

You had a positive outcome, but yes, despite that, I don't know if that was based on a sound decision. It's possible to vastly misjudge the expected value of a trade and still come out ahead.

> This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy.

The only thing that matters is whether it's positive EV (and whether your methodology of coming up with the EV itself is sound). If you didn't have any explicit or implicit notion of the EV at the time you made it... It was probably not a sound investment decision, despite being profitable.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#709

Post by venturecruelty » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

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…

What did you do with the money?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#710

Post by venturecruelty » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #363

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…

You can't convince me bitcoin wasn't simply a psyop to get criminals to commit crimes on a global, immutable ledger.