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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

#851

Post by kyle-rb »

Zaskoda wrote: post #598
paxys wrote: post #498

The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.

I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable. Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind: Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem…

Web3 is dead, because the VC valuation multiplier switched from "blockchain-native" to having an "AI story", so startups don't have to pretend to care about data-sovereignty anymore.

Developers want to use Postgres, not a distributed ledger. And most end users don't really care about data-sovereignty. If I thought a significant percentage of my app's users did, I would much rather rewrite to conform to ATProto than touch anything on the blockchain.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#852

Post by anthonypasq »

clbrmbr wrote: post #845
bangaladore wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What risk are you taking on with a normal savings account? If you are saying the global collapse of the financial system, crypto will be the first to fall in that case. Crypto like BTC is pretty much a more volatile market tracker.

Ofc a savings account has risk in real terms. But I assume GP was referring to risk in terms of losing principle in dollars. There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.

dont bother, hackernews commenters are constitutionally incapable of not being the most pedantic person in the room.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#853

Post by charcircuit »

lazide wrote: post #820
charcircuit wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except I can literally pull up a full node and see a wallets current balance - which is because it traces all the transactions through the blockchain, verifying all of them. Literally the only way anyone can see their wallet balance is by doing this.

You can find your balance by looking at the UTXO set and seeing if your adress can spend it. There is no need to trace where those UTXO came from.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#854

Post by bangaladore »

anthonypasq wrote: post #852
clbrmbr wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ofc a savings account has risk in real terms. But I assume GP was referring to risk in terms of losing principle in dollars. There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.

dont bother, hackernews commenters are constitutionally incapable of not being the most pedantic person in the room.

I believe there was an implication of the commenter I responded to that the risk of a savings account is somewhat similar to the risk of crypto. So, I asked said commenter to quantify or describe the risk. A comment simply with the text "A normal savings account does not have zero risk." is useless to a productive conversation.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#855

Post by teekert »

bangaladore wrote: post #822
sneak wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A normal savings account does not have zero risk.

What risk are you taking on with a normal savings account? If you are saying the global collapse of the financial system, crypto will be the first to fall in that case. Crypto like BTC is pretty much a more volatile market tracker.

Currency depreciation due to inflation is one.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#856

Post by psunavy03 »

lxgr wrote: post #737
psunavy03 wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the S&P 500 will give you a return. The stock market is not gambling, much as some people want it to be.

It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow. There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.

And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains.

There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#857

Post by amelius »

127 wrote: post #626
amelius wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a case of in theory yes, in practice no. Tracing btc transactions to real persons can be quite some work and is a new kind of cat and mouse game.

Easier than with either cash or gold.

Unless you know where and when the ransom exchange takes place.

For criminals this is far less convenient than obfuscating the transaction trail.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#858

Post by lxgr »

psunavy03 wrote: post #856
lxgr wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow. There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.

And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains. There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.

> If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments.

That’s exactly my point.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#859

Post by PKop »

wat10000 wrote: post #826
PKop wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why crypto? Why not one of the millions of other things you can invest in? Should I hold some onion futures as insurance with potential upside, or ride the periodic bulls of the Nepalese rupee and take profits?

Because of the returns, volatility and the liquidity obviously. This is a stupid question. I'm not even talking about "investing", it's a trading vehicle. Short term. Those other things you mentioned are less correlated directly to changes in global liquidity and overall risk assets, so in a sense even more risky and obscure. The fact that you even suggested "holding" onion futures means you're missing the point.

Looking at the chart of Nepalese rupee I don't see any bull market going back to 2005 so what are you talking about?

"Everything is the same" is a bad thesis. Just look at the charts.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#860

Post by CamperBob2 »

tim333 wrote: post #674
mervz wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. It's similar to AI... the only people trying to tell you "it's the future" are those with financial stakes.

There have been people going back to Turing thinking AI is the future and I don't think he was trying to pump his AI stocks.

Yeah. Rosenblatt, von Neumann, McCarthy, Weizenbaum... buncha morons
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