811–820 of 1001 posts
Simultaneously the only use case people have found for it are defrauding people, hiding illicit financial transactions and gambling that some line will go up. Which is something pro-crypto people rarely acknowledge.
Tangential: a friend of mine growing up refused to read Ayn Rand, because he said that everyone he knew that had read her books turned into assholes, and he didn't want to become an asshole too.
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.
One of the sensitive issue is the price of ETH it seems as it didn't perform well over the last 3-4 years. And staking it will only give you about 2.5% today.
So in a sense the Ethereum Foundation is the opposite of the criticism we usually hear about crypto: the "stock" doesn't perform well but real progress have been made with the technology and in the ecosystem.
One thing that is clear is that transactions are cheaper, more reliable and anybody can still participate and build on it.
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…
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Or the university could pay 3$ per year to host a DB that all clubs can use. I’m sure you can imagine a make believe world where no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time, and in this world somehow blockchains are useful. But that’s not the world we live in.
> no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time lol, you perfectly described a group of college students.
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This is the worst financial advice anyone could take. For context, this is the equivalent of someone telling you to invest all your savings in the company you work for and use all your salary to buy more stock.
I think you’re missing the joke where the poster is advising others to always buy whatever he’s holding.
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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.
What is that hidden service scanner showing with regards to monero?
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The only buyers are criminals, sanction evaders, and probably the dumbest people in the world given that the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on one thing and one thing only. Creating the most deflationary monetary system in history.
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.
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That is called tracing. It’s also not hard - every node does it to verify blocks.
When blocks are verified it just needs to validate that sum of the outputs isn't more than the sum of the inputs. It doesn't care about tracking what went where.
Literally the only way anyone can see their wallet balance is by doing this.