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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

#991

Post by jiveturkey »

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.

> Crypto has zero fundamental use case in the real world.

ransomware would beg to differ.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#992

Post by jakelazaroff »

SirMaster wrote: post #986
jakelazaroff wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out. It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.

I guess my argument is that turning $1000 into 1 million was probably a significantly more probable outcome than winning 1 million in a lottery which is specifically why I decided to put my money into bitcoin instead of lottery tickets. I just don't see the equivalence in comparing it to buying a lottery ticket. There are way way way more bitcoin winners than there are lottery winners.

The lottery analogy is reductio ad absurdum analogy — like, yeah, your odds of doing basically anything are better than winning the lottery (that's why the comic is funny). The point is that the positive outcome doesn't retroactively make your risky investment decision less risky. That's survivorship bias!

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#993

Post by henearkr »

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…

No, just publish the hash of the full log. No blockchain required at all. Anybody can check they are seeing the same log as others by checking the log hash.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#994

Post by l___l »

jcgl wrote: post #890
l___l wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Lightning isn't Bitcoin. It's an L2. It helps implement actual practical payments for Bitcoin, and doesn't (afaiu) manage account balances. In other words, you cannot seriously compare it to Mastercard; you've gotta include Bitcoin itself.

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Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#995

Post by l___l »

l___l wrote: post #757
FabHK wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. No, PoW existed before. Putting it all together in this specific form was an innovation, if only a minor incremental one on the large body of work of state machine replication, enabling for the first time sybil resistance and thus permissionless distributed consensus. But all that gave us were crime tokens; haven't seen a use case but crypto yet. Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.

If it was only a minor incremental innovation, in this specific form, wouldn't it have appeared years earlier? > haven't seen a use case but crypto yet. BTC is up 500%+ since 2 years ago. This looks like a use case to me. It maintained purchasing power better than stocks and bonds. This comment read to me like AI slop.

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Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#996

Post by gsky »

Yizahi wrote: post #630
gsky wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India banned crypto. It never even traded using crypto. By the way a country of billion plus should have freedom to do trade in whatever way they like

And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know. A fitting quote for the moment: "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But the…

>> "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell

America and Europe invaded other counties for no valid reasons which means they are the fascist nations.

Is not America buying Russian Uranium and fertilizers is not helping Russian economy?.

Is not Europe buying Russian gas and oil is not helping Russian economy?

btw India never ever traded with crypto. bought oil under price cap which was set by the west.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#997

Post by hvb2 »

kikimora wrote: post #894
hvb2 wrote: post #190

> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it. These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well. I don't believe cross border was t…

>why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? I challenge you to explain how such a system would work?

Not sure if this was a legit question but this is standard in the entire euro area, not rocket science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#998

Post by kikimora »

hvb2 wrote: post #997
kikimora wrote: post #894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? I challenge you to explain how such a system would work?

Not sure if this was a legit question but this is standard in the entire euro area, not rocket science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

It was a legit question. Your link is about EU regulation, not actual transfer mechanics.

Your bank does not have your money because it has lent it to someone else. If a bank has 5 business days to make a transfer then it can buy bonds, put money into an overnight deposit and do many other things. If a bank has 10 seconds then it has to maintain larger reserves which is a pile of money doing nothing.

A good bank would model cash flows to predict capital requirements and borrow from the CB as needed. Instant payments increase bank’s capital requirements and reduce margins. An EU bank cannot borrow from US Fed Reserve. Therefore EUR -> USD transfers are more problematic. The bank has to keep some USD buffer and/or be able to borrow in USD. Lenders will do fraud checks at various steps in the process, some steps can be manual. It does not happen at the time of the instant payment but rather triggered by it at a later time. Still, the end result is bank needs more capital.

As a user of fiat financial system you would observe: 1. Cross border instant payments are rare. 2. Large instant payments (>1M) do not exist. 3. Large payments may stuck at a middleman. Especially true at the time of political instability, even more so between unfriendly countries (e.g. China - India).

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#999

Post by jongjong »

KaiserPro wrote: post #313
jongjong wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for E…

> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain. But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions) Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.) There is no utility…

The utility of stablecoins is to bypass regulations. I suspect it could potentially be even more shady than that; could be some hack which leverages the Eurodollar system to allow EU entities to print US dollars which can be used inside the US.

The concept of fiat currency is fundamentally flawed. A US dollar in my bank account probably has nothing to do with a US dollar in your bank account besides the name. In reality; your bank uses one ledger, my (different) bank uses a completely different ledger. There is no consensus. It's not even the same currency in reality; only the name is the same.

If I hold a US dollar in a European bank account, it's yet another thing on a different ledger, operating under a different government with different incentives.

There are supposed to be checks and regulations to ensure that Europeans cannot print US dollars and then transfer them into the US for spending (to prevent Eurodollars from physically flooding the US economy), but correspondent banking is extremely complicated and there is no real consensus; one weak link in the chain (one nefarious or neglectful bank out of thousands) could potentially compromise the entire system and currency.

Imagine if some corrupt EU politicians, working with some big finance traders, found a way to digitally 'print' US dollars out of nothing within the EU and then spend them into the US; to redeem real US labor in exchange for these Eurodollars they printed out of nothing. I suspect this is where stablecoins may play a role as they are not as well regulated; some shady firms with minimal licensing and supervision could neglect to segregate Eurodollars from USD behind the scenes; thinking "A dollar is a dollar."

There is a big difference between exchanging currency vs converting currency. If, you were to set up an account which could receive both Eurodollars and USD and teat them both as the same; this isn't an exchange; this is a CONVERSION; it's counterfeiting.

But most people would see this situation and just think "This is just an international account which receives US dollars from both US and Europe; no big deal, nothing nefarious going on." They don't realize that the US Dollars printed by the US are not the same as those printed by Europe. I believe stablecoins may be an additional mechanism to try to blur the boundaries between the two monetary systems to allow counterfeiting.

Re: I wasted years of my life in crypto

#1000

Post by kim100 »

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