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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

#921

Post by nurettin »

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…

> nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble

Sounds like index futures. I understand wanting to buy fresh corn in one year at a constant price, so you get corn contracts for december 2016 and it gets delivered at that price when the contract expires. You know the cost beforehand and you plan for it.

Index futures? They just dump the equivalent dollar amount to your account when it expires. Who benefited? What happened? No physical commodity got exchanged. You've played with numbers, paid commissions, probably some spread and had around 6x leverage. Pretty much checks every box for gambling.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#922

Post by reducesuffering »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #905
reducesuffering wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. So literally…

> So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. "Thing that solves some problems for some people doesn't solve all problems for all people" is not a very useful criticism.

It is when people are trying to act like Bitcoin is an enormous source of value to the market like several JP Morgans and not a Hallmark level of value provided

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#923

Post by sroerick »

aeternum wrote: post #215
sroerick wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos. This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol. You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and hav…

>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't s…

I should note, the scaling I was referring to was transaction processing. Data storage is a little different.

The architecture which I heard described or hypothesized was more akin to Amazon deep storage. More frequently accessed data would be more accessible on "hot" nodes.

Full nodes would effectively, under this paradigm, become cloud storage providers. As a bonus, the problem of how to charge for access is basically already solved, and does not require a complex corporate payment scheme.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#924

Post by sroerick »

FabHK wrote: post #680
aeternum wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't s…

Indeed. Bitcoin's blockchain grows with a laughable 3kB/s, yet is an unwieldy 700 GB. A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.

Looks like BSV is about 7TB and grows at about 4GB a day. I have no clue what those guys are up to these days. This may be unweildy for a home PC but really is still pretty trivial for a data center.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#925

Post by mbrochh »

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]…

Classic Vitalik logic. A giant mountain of word salad and he still somehow magically fails to name the fifth and most important group: Scammers.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#926

Post by sroerick »

KaiserPro wrote: post #304
sroerick wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos. This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol. You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and hav…

how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?

Looks like the max they've done is something like 22k TPS. No idea how accurate this is, I don't follow the ecosystem. There's a lot of different numbers like "maximum theoretical potential" that probably ly mean nothing.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#927

Post by phplovesong »

l___l wrote: post #428
phplovesong wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put: Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina. Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.

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.

You should not compare bitcoin to "the banking industry", but instead to say a stock. Apple is worth more than the entire crypto industry, but for arguments sake lets say they are the same.

So you should instead compare bitcoin to APL stock. How much energy is APL (and APL alone) stock using? This is hard to measure, but probably a fraction of a fraction of the bitcoin energy use.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#928

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ninkendo wrote: post #915
kikimora wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account" I see this as a very naive statement. A big story in Russia - popular singer sold her appartment, then told court she was scammed to sell appartment and have sent all money to scammers. Appartment returned to the singer, court suggested the buyer to get money from unidentified scammers. So much for court orders :))) Poor…

> >The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account" > I see this as a very naive statement. [words] Ok, you clearly have a lower opinion on the ability of your government to help than I do, but it doesn’t matter one bit: credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that t…

> credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse.

What about cases of private abuse? Suppose you're using Paypal or Stripe and they lock your account for no apparent reason. Money you were paid for goods you've already shipped is now locked up, stolen from you, with no explanation or recourse.

> Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.

Suppose someone commits fraud by having you send them $50,000 in computer hardware or precious metals or bearer bonds. What happens? The government arrests them, seizes the goods and ultimately returns them to the owner. It's not any different when it's a hard drive with a private key on it instead of a bag of expensive rocks. But then they can't just take your stuff, i.e. reverse a transaction, without due process -- which is good.

Meanwhile the scammer in that case is the property owner in cahoots with the government. If the government isn't corrupt then there is no scam, because then either the person you're paying actually owns the property and having paid them the agreed upon price that is now your real estate, or they don't own it and then when you go to confirm that they actually own the property the non-corrupt government says that they don't and then you don't pay them.

> I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.

Except when they don't. US banks are not exactly known for their customer support, and their fraud departments don't have the investigative resources of a government. If Alice says she sent the goods and Bob says he didn't receive them, how's the bank supposed to know who's lying without sending them both to court? But every time they get it wrong they're a party to a theft.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#929

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ninkendo wrote: post #911
mothballed wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back. A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back. Of…

As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department. Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege. For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in a…

> You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option.

That's not the only option for a government. You don't need those specific coins, you only need anything of value. Their car, their house, the wages their employer would have paid them, anything else they'd already bought with the money, etc. And they're criminals, they're going to jail, and they're staying there a lot longer if they don't give back the money, which has a way of making non-compliant people more compliant without hitting them with a wrench.

> The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system.

That doesn't give you recourse either because they can spend the money right away. Which transaction are you going to reverse if they use it to buy a physical commodity or foreign asset? Then the scammer has the asset, not the money, so the only thing a fiat money system can do is cause the victim to be the innocent asset seller instead of the potentially negligent or actually in on it person claiming to be the original victim.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#930

Post by esperent »

vatsachak wrote: post #785
esperent wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.

Another way of looking at this is that the main players have a vested interest in keep it as a casino. Therefore it'll never become a currency, because casinos and monetary systems have fundamentally different requirements when it comes to stability.

Instability in cryptocurrency is a feature. It'll never go away unless it gets regulated to the point that all the things that differentiate it from the fiat monetary system are gone.

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