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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

#781

Post by jakelazaroff »

SirMaster wrote: post #668
jakelazaroff wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out.

It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#782

Post by leftouterjoins »

I was saddened when crypto took this direction and became an industry. To me the interesting part was always the idea of someday having a digital medium for value exchange that cannot be controlled by any one or groups of government, billionaire, or corporate entities and to be able to transact privately and anonymously if needed.

Monero is still in this game but the entities listed above are doing everything they can to kill it so they can retain power. They claim we should think of the children and worry about crime, but they really only care about their power. The benefit to the economy if money could flow freely around the globe instantly would far outweigh any real harms.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#783

Post by dogman144 »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #442

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in genera…

Understanding crypto from this type of international context focused on these sorts of issues is where it indisputably makes much sense and is seeing indisputable adoption. Low and slow but end of the day to a very large and growing problem, bitcoin+ adoption or a mass civics readjustment in the US are the solutions. Which is more likely?

So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#784

Post by munificent »

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…

> You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten.

But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying.

Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#785

Post by vatsachak »

esperent wrote: post #167
vatsachak wrote: post #147

Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet. We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth

Crypto currency uses up to 1.5% of the world's electricity, makes up 2.5% of the world's money, uses up to 0.1% of the fresh water supply, and perhaps as high as 6-10% of silicon chips produced. And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harde…

Yeah, it's definitely a huge bubble right now. I think a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.

A hypothetical good use case: one can have a "science crypto" where the transaction fees go to funding science. By using the cryptos you want you can essentially pay taxes to causes you think are important

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#786

Post by collinmcnulty »

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…

> Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

People have been saying this for nearly a decade and many people with a great deal of motivation have failed to find any that worked and couldn’t be done better with traditional databases. It’s past time to ask if there’s actually any gold in them hills.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#787

Post by leftouterjoins »

atomic128 wrote: post #747
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.

Monero is used for criminal activities, not Bitcoin. How do I know? I monitor crime, mostly but not exclusively drug crime, on Tor's hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Monero is the cryptocurrency of choice.

This is the same, nonsensical argument against monero that is used against end-to-end encrypted messaging. "app of choice for criminals" "makes enforcement harder" etc.

It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.

The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#788

Post by alphazard »

efnx wrote: post #753
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.

IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions. It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus. Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the network very difficult to understand and build confidence in. So I don't see upgrading to faster consensus to be a small incremental improvement, it's fundamental.

A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are. The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken. At that point it seems like it's better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#789

Post by lawlessone »

PKop wrote: post #690
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…

>The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money.

Make money from what?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#790

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

api wrote: post #422
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…

It was started as an alternative to fiat casino capitalism. It became an absurdist parody of fiat casino capitalism.

Offtopic but zerotier is really good software that I used but I am in India and its pings were high which is when I started to look around at free vps's in the form of jupyter notebooks like intel tiber and others using things like pinggy and trying to find a non rooted version of ssh (dropbear) etc.

Technically it was one of my "first" achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.

I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...

I didn't know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews "hacking" community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)

It uses (https://e4mc.link/), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvement

maybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into it

I know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I "wished" to create a product in this market but I don't have the funds and/or I wouldn't have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.

Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify/ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)

have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.

Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p

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