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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

#751

Post by anthonypasq »

teekert wrote: post #604
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…

My advice is always: Just hodl some bitcoin, but not in amounts that make you cry when you loose it. It's been better for me so far than normal savings accounts.

well i would hope so, a normal savings account has 0 risk. im not sure this is a great argument to hold some bitcoin lol

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#752

Post by hirsin »

paddleon wrote: post #647
hirsin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US. Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?

> Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US. you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace? or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card? Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hass…

Only one of those things is a state enforced requirement (the deed) and everything else are system requirements that do not get solved with bitcoin. What mortgage company is going to loan you a million dollars ("in btc" whatever) without figuring out if you're a good risk? That's not the currency of choice making you get cross examined, it's the nature of the thing you are trying to do.

Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#753

Post by efnx »

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 do you think about zcash? They seem to have solved the private transactions problem, have a better anonymity set than monero (and are accepted at exchanges) and are actively working on faster consensus.

Disclaimer, I currently work at a zcash corp.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#754

Post by l___l »

jcgl wrote: post #478
l___l wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace I don't think it's appropriate to compare it to the existing banking system (whose featureset goes far beyond payments and managing account balances). It's appropriate to compare it to existing payment and account systems. And on that front, compared to e.g. Mastercard, there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient. TXs/watt, $/watt, however you want to meas…

> there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient

No way? You studied this personally and can prove it?

Transaction Fees On Bitcoin Lightning Network Are 1,000 Times Cheaper Than Visa And MasterCard

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/447705

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#755

Post by nervysnail »

TrackerFF wrote: post #58

I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC. Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I o…

The worst thing about crypto is these "had I done this" calculations, which are crucifying for some.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#756

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

VHRanger wrote: post #723
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has it not been a store of value?

A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible. Bitcoin is a speculative asset: it has very high price volatility. It is not a store of value in the proper term.

By that standard, over the past year, Bitcoin would be a better store of value than gold...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#757

Post by l___l »

FabHK wrote: post #632
l___l wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its nothing more than a high risk stock Nothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn't innovative? With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD's purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.

lol. No, PoW existed before. Putting it all together in this specific form was an innovation, if only a minor incremental one on the large body of work of state machine replication, enabling for the first time sybil resistance and thus permissionless distributed consensus. But all that gave us were crime tokens; haven't seen a use case but crypto yet. Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.

If it was only a minor incremental innovation, in this specific form, wouldn't it have appeared years earlier?

> haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.

BTC is up 500%+ since 2 years ago. This looks like a use case to me. It maintained purchasing power better than stocks and bonds.

This comment read to me like AI slop.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#758

Post by ojr »

TZubiri wrote: post #711
ojr wrote: post #698

Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks. I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage. Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture beca…

>Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks. What? Prompting AI is barely a skill, let alone a cybersecurity one. > I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage. There's like 50…

I didn’t know what atomic operations, important concept in cybersecurity until working with crypto and blockchain, prompting AI is a skill, there’s an obvious context engineering skill gap I possess. I built a desktop application in Rust in 2 weeks while the industry uses Electron. Try to clone my apps, with whatever model of the week, it wouldn’t be easy. Not all prompts are made equal.

I was one of the earliest React/React Native developers before the industry shifted to it. Early Tailwind and Node.js adopter as well.

My AI apps are nothing new either but I do have subscriptions because of how I engineered them. Majority of apps in the app store make $0. You can compare yourself to those, not me.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#759

Post by Night_Thastus »

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…

Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all. Maybe a couple naive people who created them originally believed that, but it was never the goal.

They are speculative assets for gambling with. They have been since day 1.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#760

Post by lxgr »

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.

Taking possession of the ransom without getting arrested/physically followed by the police is what foils most kidnapping plots [1], and cryptocurrencies definitely address that part.

Criminals don't really need strong anonymity as long as the payment system has strong censorship resistance and at least one counterparty won't mind accepting "tainted" funds.

Arguably, privacy is much more important to non-criminal individual users as they themselves can be targeted by criminals as a result of their income/holdings being globally visible, and unlike organized crime, they often have less means to protect themselves from $5 wrench attacks.

[1] Source: I watched many crime thrillers growing up

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