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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

#941

Post by homakov »

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…

> These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before

this is correct and wide way to look at replicated machines.

Many on HN just lack vision and love to hate on things. "Infamous dropbox comment".png

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#942

Post by immibis »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #824
immibis wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are your thought on nano. It has zero fees I repeat: > Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.

Once again, I have no skin in the game at all and I do not own any nano. Nano uses proof of work to counter scam from both sending and receiving side and it uses open representative voting. Basically nano works from my understanding as like hey, we will host the servers for nano since its kinda cheap to do so but also that we can promote our services via the voting model, mostly done by exchanges like binance,kraken…

> The model of nano lacks the idea of payment in the first place

oh well then I guess it's not a currency so why are we talking about it in the first place?

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#945

Post by jcgl »

l___l wrote: post #754
jcgl wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace I don't think it's appropriate to compare it to the existing banking system (whose featureset goes far beyond payments and managing account balances). It's appropriate to compare it to existing payment and account systems. And on that front, compared to e.g. Mastercard, there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient. TXs/watt, $/watt, however you want to meas…

> there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient No way? You studied this personally and can prove it? Transaction Fees On Bitcoin Lightning Network Are 1,000 Times Cheaper Than Visa And MasterCard https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/447705

Also, it should be obvious that sources from the cryptocurrency industry have a conflict of interest. If there are better sources than something like Binance, then those should be used. If there aren't better sources, well...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#946

Post by ojr »

TZubiri wrote: post #912
ojr wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t know what atomic operations, important concept in cybersecurity until working with crypto and blockchain, prompting AI is a skill, there’s an obvious context engineering skill gap I possess. I built a desktop application in Rust in 2 weeks while the industry uses Electron. Try to clone my apps, with whatever model of the week, it wouldn’t be easy. Not all prompts are made equal. I was one of the earliest Rea…

atomic operations are not a cybersecurity skill in particular, it's a generic programming concept that more often guards against bugs rather than attackers. Although it is the case that attackers often exploit bugs, it's more likely that you are just learning to program and don't know the difference between both. Congrats on making money though.

Security is built out of generic programming concepts, rate limiting, input validation, authorization, encryption, etc.

When you apply these programming concepts like atomic operations to something that control moneys it becomes security engineering.

Atomicity is literally the foundation of preventing double spending in a financial system. If people can spend bitcoin twice the price crashes to $0. Understanding atomicity is very important for cybersecurity/integrity of the system.

With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.

Programmers like you make me never feel threaten that my apps would be cloned, too many gaps in knowledge of system design.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#947

Post by ninkendo »

kikimora wrote: post #919
ninkendo wrote: post #915

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. [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 Nope, chargebacks in Russia do not work the way they do in US, not even close. The reason - government does not represent consumers, it represent bank owners. Also primary reason why scams in Russia are so widespread (and why internet is so cheap) is telecoms freely selling personal data (again, gov…

I honestly couldn’t care less how things (don’t) work in Russia. It’s a complete non-sequitur. Sucks that your country sucks. Maybe work on fixing your country. Sorry you’re too caught up invading your neighbors to fix basic things like your financial system.

Your fallacy is in saying “government isn’t perfect therefore crypto is better”. This makes no sense. Crypto dials down the protections to zero. It’s worse than any possible government can be, even in principal. Sorry your government is so bad that crypto’s flaws seem minor.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#948

Post by ninkendo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #928
ninkendo wrote: post #915

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. [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 explanat…

> What about cases of private abuse?

What about it?

Your entire point boils down to “fiat has flaws therefore crypto is better”, while completely ignoring that crypto is worse at the very things fiat is flawed at. Fiat sometimes doesn’t protect you, but crypto NEVER does, and CAN’T, even in principle.

None of your CONSTANT whataboutism across this entire thread is going to change this, so please, just stop posting.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#949

Post by bluecalm »

tsimionescu wrote: post #355
bluecalm wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure. >>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when…

It is extremely easy to convince yourself that the current system works. Numerous people volunteer to work in election monitoring every year, and any person who is not sure can take a day or two off work to do so at their next election. Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no s…

In my country there is usually a recount in some "suspicious" voting stations. The recount about never gives the same results as the original count. People are not very good at counting even if they have good intentions.

>>First grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.

-people are bad at counting

-some people might be bad at counting on purpose

-some people might try to influence the results

This happens all the time as proven by multiple recounts. I am not talking about USA here but about EU countries but I imagine it's the same in USA. You just hope those swings are small enough to not influence the end results. I am sure this is usually true but sometimes it's close and then the odds are at least some of those elections went the wrong way.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#950

Post by xnx »

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]…

2 groups: con men and marks.
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