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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

#951

Post by ramchip »

HaZeust wrote: post #243
henearkr wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because each participant can check its contribution in the log. Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote. The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).

I see what you're saying now, I was imagining the type of transparency log that's usually run by a single institution and audited by a few others. Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in…

These kind of things are part of transparency log threat models, for example: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html#page-24.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#952

Post by amunozo »

mervz wrote: post #624
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…

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

The difference is that AI is a huge array of technologies (not only LLMs) and are being used in several fields with different, useful purposes.

There's a cult and a bubble too, though, and I agree with that part.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#953

Post by Kbelicius »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #556
Kbelicius wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?

I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust. You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do,…

Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you.

> The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.

That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?

> You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.

What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?

> And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.

Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims?

TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#954

Post by nout »

tsimionescu wrote: post #459
nout wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does guarantee double spend protection, that's exactly what the lightning nodes do. If someone tries to double spend, they lose their bitcoin. I have a different definition for "using bitcoin" than you do. Similarly I believe that HTTP Live Streaming is using Internet...

That's only true if they observe the channel being fraudulently closed in the right time window. You have to actively monitor the BTC chain to see if your Lightning network partner might steal from you. If you don't (e.g. There is some network or power issue and they take this opportunity to steal), tough luck. Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and…

Bar tab is so very bad analogy here that breaks for multiple reasons:

- At the bar is almost always a single direction: customer pays the bar. Lightning is both directions - sending money between friends and sometimes to shops.

- In this (bad) analogy bitcoin would not be Visa, but bitcoin would be "dollars". Both the bartender and customer would say that they are using dollars for the tab.

- The tab analogy doesn't really match the fact that you establish a "channel" (e.g. both you and the bartender would put some bitcoin into this channel and then you can pay your grandmother in another country with bitcoin in this channel... see the analogy doesn't work here), you can resize ("splice") the channel if you want, you can swap in and swap out...

In most solutions your wallet monitors the chain and it automatically resolves any of the dispute (e.g. Phoenix wallet, or Zeus). The time scale is also different, so even if power goes out for multiple days and you are running your own very private wallet without any associated service (LSP), then you still have on the order of weeks for your wallet to automatically resolve any issue.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#955

Post by nailer »

gaigalas wrote: post #670
nailer wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but no actual ideological arc. Wasn’t the first thing signed an article about the collapse of the banking system?

This is the first thing: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It has nothing about the collapse of the banking system.

https://grokipedia.com/page/History_of_bitcoin#genesis-block...

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#956

Post by gloosx »

FabHK wrote: post #646
gloosx wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In severa…

> the people who depend on it for everyday survival Oh, my, all those poor people that died prior to 2009.

Reducing real human struggles to a punchline is exactly the kind of cynical detachment you can afford only if you have never lived through a failed banking system. If you had lived through what people in some countries deal with, you would not be making snarky comments

The reality is that crypto became a lifeline in places where the traditional financial system collapsed or simply abandoned people: Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria are good examples of people dealing with real crises, using whatever tools actually work, including crypto currencies.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#957

Post by cwmma »

wyck wrote: post #865
cwmma wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example crypto would only replace the visa network. Most of the fee you are playing is to Airbnb for getting you the client in the first place.

Correct, but these fees are trending up and not down, its not uncommon in this space to see payment fees hitting 15%. Removing the primitives of payment requirements, rails which are hard to build and practicably a monopoly, would free the state, this would power end-users instead of building more monopolies.

Actual payment fees are hitting a couple % max, all the rest is platform fees which are orthogonal to how you are paying. If you sell something through airbnb, they will get a cut no matter how you pay.

Credit card fees are a great deal for consumers even when they are added as a surcharge or there is a cash discount. Not having to deal with cash AND being able to dispute transactions are significant benefits.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#958

Post by darkwater »

bangaladore wrote: post #825
darkwater wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not into cryptocurrencies and I hold exactly 0 of them but... Isn't basically how people make money out of gold?

Gold has a use case in the real world. We can't manufacture it, so every time it is used to plate a printed circuit board, or XYZ other real application someone needs to purchase it from someone else. Some amount gets recycled, but certainly some not. Crypto has zero fundamental use case in the real world.

Yes I know but... is that use case what really drives the price in the real world? I'm really asking. My intuition would say "no, the main driver is people trading it as a financial product", just like Bitcoin.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#959

Post by SirMaster »

cryptonym wrote: post #934
SirMaster wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

I bet on it because in 2009 when I bought the coins for about $100 each I thought that maybe blockchain could do something unique that would cause the value to rise an appreciable amount. Or at the very least that it sounded like something that would get the tech sector excited and that alone would be enough to build enough hype around it that many more people would buy it causing the price to go up.

In my mind it seemed cheap enough to try a $1000 gamble and just hold long, long term ignoring the fluctuations and either this will be worth 0 or it will maybe be worth a boatload in the far future. That was always my idea and goal from day 1.

I mean I invest tens of thousands in the stock market and real-estate every year. This was just a tiny and wild gamble, but I don't think it was a dumb or foolish decision at the time given my financial position at the time and the amount involved.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#960

Post by aeternum »

blackjack_ wrote: post #247
aeternum wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also confiscate those hard-to-copy tokens if you acquire a sufficiently large quantity and attempt to leave the country with them.

I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things. Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably w…

Very similar arguments were made for slavery. Giving up freedom for a promise of safety rarely the right choice.

While it is possible for the state to inflict violence, it's relatively difficult to scale. The state can freeze your USD accounts with the stroke of a key (as they did for Russian accounts recently). Whereas rounding up and torturing all those account-holders is just obviously infeasible.

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