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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

#931

Post by mozarella »

brianolson wrote: post #462
cryptonym wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a casino you have - The gamblers spending a lot on the casino - The people coming in for the fun and spending little money - The owners/C-levels - The operational team Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.

I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'

The point i was trying to make was that the disillusionment faced by technologists possibly stemmed from a naivety about how the economy works and how people respond to incentives. Speculators are a "feature/bug" of pretty much any financial system. Stocks, real-estate, fiat-currencies, potatoes - The price of everything is being distorted by speculators. Done right, they bring liquidity, financial stability, and wealth creation. Left to their own devices, they cause volatility, inequity and financial destruction. (Crypto is probably more on the latter side on some of those metrics atm). The People looking to build a good crypto solution has to be clear-eyed about how to handle them.

I also wonder if the author has partly himself to blame. From his post, it looks like he worked for the seedier players in the space (because the pay was better) and is angry at the whole space. Its like a developer who worked for Oracle on MySql swearing off the entire open-source community.

edit: >nobody cares about good tech'

True. That's a big part of why you need [token-holders], "Build it and they will come" is more of a hope than a strategy.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#932

Post by mozarella »

mbrochh wrote: post #925
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.

Because he is only talking about categories that can contribute to the system. [Scammers] do not. In so far as the system and the diagram is concerned, [scammers] are to be thwarted and their harmful effects mitigated. A lot of the work done in crypto is security which is entirely about thwarting [scammers]. As an example, The original bitcoin paper on double-spending problem is devoted to securing against a particular type of scam.

Speculators fall in a gray area and need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. many of them are straight up scams, Some are legit, and the rest are in between. Stratton Oakmont was a scam. Does that mean your index-fund is also one? Or the stock market and financial system as a whole?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#933

Post by mozarella »

TZubiri wrote: post #703
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]…

That's a very nice categorization, but it seems orthogonal to the categories of: [scammers and hackers that want an untraceable and unrefundable payment method], [scammers that use cryptos themselves to scam and rugpull], ...

He was talking about actors who contribute to the system. See my other reply : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46202319

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#934

Post by cryptonym »

SirMaster wrote: post #664
cryptonym wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You basically just confirmed that, from beginning, it's just gambling. Being lucky on your bet doesn't make it a wise investment. I wouldn't call you dumb. I don't know how gamblers feel about their moves.

And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such. Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas? In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income... I am not saying it was a smart choice,…

Putting money in a company because you reviewed its business, the way it operates and add value to the society is more of an investment than gambling. Now things happens and I agree there is always a part of luck, called risk.

BTC isn't really adding value to the society, except the shady parts of it. I can't assess the part of luck in BTC gambling. Many lost money, many betted on the wrong coin. Did you bet on it because of the impact on dark economy or because you believed in unlocking the economy, blockchain everything which didn't happen?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#935

Post by torginus »

kikimora wrote: post #895
torginus wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC. I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.

As a Russian I can attest - you can do crypto in Russia and it is one of a very few ways many friends of mine support their families from abroad.

And what's the legal status of crypto nowadays for individuals?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#936

Post by habinero »

andrepd wrote: post #472
habinero wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.

Yes, and "buying subversive literature" is a crime too. That was the original point.

If you took all the crypto txns and grouped them by purchase, I would be willing to bet mortgage money that approximately nobody uses crypto to buy "subversive literature", out to many many decimal places of precision.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#937

Post by habinero »

Lio wrote: post #437
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. The argument is right here: > Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling. It doesn't contain the word "primarily" which indeed makes it false, and the rebuttal to your different claim is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260 > Also, if you want privacy, d…

>> Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto. > Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID? Isn't the real question more, does crypto actually allow you buy things without tying the purchase to a government ID? I'm no expert but I regularly see articles about de-anonymisation. This leads me to be sceptical about claims to privacy, certainly given…

You don't need to be a government actor, even. You just need to understand what a graph is and be willing to patiently walk through the txns. It's not even that difficult. I have investigator friends who regularly do it as part of fraud investigations.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#938

Post by kikimora »

torginus wrote: post #935
kikimora wrote: post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian I can attest - you can do crypto in Russia and it is one of a very few ways many friends of mine support their families from abroad.

And what's the legal status of crypto nowadays for individuals?

Crypto is qualified as property and regulated in a very similar way. There is a market for borrowing using tokens regulated by digital assets act (цифровые финансовые активы).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#939

Post by homakov »

>I wasted years of my life in AI

→ “AI generates slop, false info, deepfakes make ppl look bad, therefore AI = bad.”

Same vibes.

You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from that scenario. Only replicated state machines (or L2s built correctly on top of them) even attempt to close that attack surface — and they’re still not finished.

In 10–20 years the world will run on government-run CBDCs, and your relationship with your bank/broker will finally be protected by actual cryptography and replicated state: xln.finance. That’s when crypto reaches its real bloom. Right now it’s nowhere close to being mature enough to judge.

If you’re a trader, jokes on you — you were never “in crypto.” You were just passing through.

The only people who are actually in crypto are the ones who build: smart contracts, consensus, p2p layers, replicated state machines.

Everyone else is just cheering from the sidelines (usually for the wrong team).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#940

Post by homakov »

spicyusername wrote: post #9

I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and ho…

> extremely inconvenient database

You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, what do you do?

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