Enjoy being the bail-in liquidity for bailing out the banks and the rich.
I can’t wait for the crypto Bois to nuke this thread
I’ll fight them fisticuffs style 💪🏽💪🏽
But what’s wrong with using real money to buy imaginary money? /S
What is this “real” money you speak of? What makes it real?
Nothing more than it’s widely accepted and that it’s backed by yet another widely accepted from of currency (usually; gold). Some systems don’t back it up, IIRC.
Because it’s widely accepted, there’s a degree of stability built into it. People generally agree on its value.
This is all gross-oversimplification, I realize, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds on this topic, because it’s only of passing interest to me. Regardless, my points around ‘real’ money being more stable and accepted are valid.
Nothing more than it’s widely accepted
Well, what’s wrong with Bitcoiners trying to make their currency widely accepted too?
that it’s backed by yet another widely accepted from of currency
So it’s turtles all the way down, is what you’re saying?
(usually; gold)
Not the USD, which is the worlds most widely accepted currency.
This is all gross-oversimplification, I realize, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds on this topic, because it’s only of passing interest to me.
Yes, I agree that this is gross-oversimplification. But if you don’t want to get into the weeds, why make a claim about something you don’t understand and don’t have interest in?
To troll; why else?
Not like I’m the first person to talk entirely out of their ass on the internet.
Your /S wasn’t loud enough. Next time try /S
The US has been on a partial fiat system for almost a century and fully fiat since the Nixon era, just FYI
Don’t be an ass
noo you don’t understand it’s going to the moon noooo hodl hodl hodl nooooooooo plz buy my crypto thank you :(
The idea was great, but it was ruined by greed.
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It’s always been a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Bitcoin was created shortly after some Banks almost crashed the world economy.
It was also a reaction on centralized services like PayPal freezing the accounts of Wikileaks or similar.
Saying that there were or are no problems is wrong. But Crypto is also not a perfect alternative.
[greed!] The cause of and solution to all of our problems
- homer Simpson
How did you buy drugs online before crypto? I think it’s made it much easier. Also for international transactions of large sums I used to pay fees for services and crypto allows for an easy universal standard with no middle men. Micropayments never caught on, but it would be a nice solution for that as well. This argument that we already have money, we don’t need different money never flew with me. Crypto has its place, it was just abused as an investment commodity way too early and this massive inflation completely suffocated any practical application.
So the use cases are:
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Buying illegal shit
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Scummy crypto exchange as middle men
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Small payments that never got used
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Trying to become rich by sitting on money
The argument is more that we already have better solutions than the one crypto tries to fill. Instead of finding a solution for a problem, crypto tries to find a problem to solve.
Blockchain may have some use case somewhere, but it is definitely not in money.
You are just putting a negative spin on things that are not necessarily negative. The last one is not at all specific to crypto.
Let’s not forget that monitary structures are currently backed by governments, crypto offers a way out of the risks associated with that structure as well. Of course if crypto ever takes off it will end up controlled by corporations which is not inherently better, but at least it offers a choice / way out from governmental whims.
A lot of technological changes start as things trying to find problems to solve - that’s often how discovery works.
I don’t share your confidence. Clearly crypto isn’t going to sprout in popularity any time soon, but there aren’t nails in this coffin.
Buying illegal shit is important. I never would have accomplished the truama recovery I have in the care access desert we lived in without being able to buy psychedelics online. I’m thriving personally because of a few high quality darkweb dealers. I’m great at my job in part because they sent me accurately labeled and carefully grown cannabis when it was illegal, so I was gaining strain knowledge and experience when most of my coworkers were getting the best generic weed they could find in town. If the fascists succeed in making trans care illegal, I’ll use it buy my hormones. It pains me to see the intense turn against crypto, because, used for actual commerce rather than as an investment, it kinda saved me. We never used bitcoin unless we couldn’t help it. I’ve always been angry that using the least energy efficient coin as an investment became the norm. The value of crypto, in my opinion, lies entirely in its prompt and regular use as currency. Hodlers ruined things for everyone.
Yeah crypto critics often gloss over the fact that the war on drugs is an example of repressive government policy and that darknet markets where a lifeline for folks using drugs. As an example, psychedelic have genuine therapeutic uses and on the street level, many “research chemicals” with horrible safety profiles are sold as things like LSD or MDMA.
With a darknet market you get access to a community that can help vet sellers through forums, comments and rating that help keep users safe.
Moreover what this shows is crypto can help organizations or people under repressive governments. Another example was a group in Nigeria who was protesting against the police group SARS. The Nigerian government froze their bank accounts but the group was still able to fundraise using BTC.
Scummy crypto exchange as middle men
And you think the companies charging exorbitant fees to remit money aren’t scummy? Crypto has its myriad issues, but remittance is one rock-solid example of it disrupting an egregiously predatory industry in a very positive way.
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It’s funny cause crypto can totally be traced, like the whole idea is everyone has a copy of a history of the transactions, although wallets can be effectively anonymous with certain caveats. The idea of providing my address for a shipment was the part that always put me off with darknet. Although knowing how the laws work with how police obtain warrants etc, I didn’t see a huge risk on that front. Also the things I wanted to obtain weren’t necessarily illegal, mostly Shulgin’s compounds, spores, certain species of wood bark, and we already had a huge medical grey market cannabis market. Plain old etransfers were always preferred because under $10k its not a red flag and nothing “illegal” is happening anyway in the supply chain.
not Monero.
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This sounds like everything ever.
Having a huge penis got worse the greedier I was
the idea was great
I have questioned this ever since I learned that the more adoption there is, the less efficient mining becomes, ergo more power is wasted accomplishing the exact same task for no extra benefit. Difficulty creates a back asswards system that makes adoption a con.
Ethereum doesn’t use mining at all anymore. It can get expensive to use though, which layer 2 chains help with
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It allows you to send money overseas very cheap. If you moved to a different country, cryptocurrency saves you a lot of headaches with exchange rates and bank fees.
It also allows you to lock down money into a program and distribute it systematically without anyone being able to touch it. Think mass donations being automatically distributed to a select number of organizations, but instead of trusting that the fundraiser doesn’t pocket any money for themselves, you make it impossible for them to do so.
It also doesn’t run as a company so it needs no offices, no employees or bosses, so theoretically it is more cost effective than traditional banking. In a way it is like the fediverse where instead of relying on one big bank service, many people host their own ones, and just like the fediverse, you have some hosts that you can trust and some that you can’t, and while it is more expensive to keep track of multiple instances, that simply is the cost of decentralization.
You’re not really supposed to earn money with crypto (unless you host a node), just spend it or use as your own private bank.
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Mining is only one strategy for concenous, but yes it is a pretty rudementary and inefficient version.
And even in mining there are different protocols, Bitcoin is just intentionally inefficient 🤷
My Excel spreadsheet remains efficiency champion!
Pretty sure there are more efficient databases than Excel for the kind of information stored on blockchains 🤪
Sure, but when even Excel is a more efficient database, that should say something about crypto.
My bad joke was that a real world cost is the point.
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Man, try to make maximalists understand that 🤣
Well it’s been over a decade and Bitcoin is still PoW, as well as nearly 50% of the entire crypto market.
Ok… that doesn’t make what they said any less true?
My point is how great can it be if over a decade later the terrible system for mining is still dominant? The more people participating, the worse it gets. We just had texas power companies paying crypto bros to stop mining it’s gotten so bad - and we aren’t even at .01% adoption yet.
You’re chiming in in a way that ignores nuance and implied meaning. I feel like my intention has been pretty clear but if I need to spell it out so be it.
That’s more a question of being first on the scene and the financial impact if Bitcoin maximalists finally accepted that their blockchain is crap compared to other options, that’s what keeps Bitcoin at the top, not how good or bad it is compared to the tech’s potential…
And no your intention wasn’t very clear otherwise I wouldn’t have had to reply how I did previously.
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Bitcoin is more religion and cult than anything. Of course they think it’s great or at least able to hand wave criticisms.
And yeah, consensus is a hard problem to solve for. Many have taken the route of least resistance and implemented what is known to work.
Way back when Bitcoin was first being talked about on Slashdot, I mined for a while. On my processor. For like a month. I got about 1/20 of a Bitcoin out of it.
And then I lost interest for a long time. And then it became clear blockchain is an infinite self-similar fractal of scams and ponsis.
I haven’t done anything with my 1/20 of a Bitcoin. I don’t have any expectation it will go up or down. If the bubble takes back off and inflates so much 1/20 of a Bitcoin becomes life-changing money, I might try to sell it. Maybe if a bunch of crypto-owning crypto-skeptics organize a mass sell event to drive it to zero, I’ll take part. Otherwise, it’ll stay where it is for the forseeable future.
Ironic that someone like me who believes wholeheartedly that blockchain is snake oil is such a model hodler.
You’ve basically explained why crypto can’t work.
Deflationary currencies don’t make sense to spend because their future value will be higher.
The outcome is people hold onto them in the hopes they gain value. The exact opposite of what you want for a currency.
As a counterpoint: From the perspective of the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin is not inherently deflationary as long as mining continues to introduce new coins. Mining rewards do drop over time, but new Bitcoin will continue to be generated until the year ~2140.
I think the view of Bitcoin being deflationary now is based on its increasing/volatile value against other currencies which does encourage people to hold with the expectation that they can sell for more in the future. I’d argue that this is price discovery and not deflation. If it remains where it is now, then I agree that it will just be another casino. If the value stabilizes eventually, then it does offer some benefits, especially in countries where the local currency is a less reliable way to hold money.
Disclosure: I do hold some crypto and obviously would prefer it to go up but it won’t change my life. I just think it’s an interesting experiment at the end of the day.
For sure. Also, the inherent unscalability of blockchain as a technology makes for a payment system far too slow for your typical payment scenarios, which makes transferring Bitcoin a pain in the ass, further incentivising hodling.
(Just to address some of the "akshully"s I’m probably going to get for the above, you can make blockchain fast if you centralize it like Solana does, but if you’re going to centralize it, you’re better off using Postgres than blockchain.)
I think largely the argument that convinces some people that cryptocurrency is worth “investing in” is that it’s going to revolutionize the way we pay for things. In which case the fact that it doesn’t work as a currency completely robs it of any legitimacy as a security.
If you want something that does have potential to improve the way we go about buying groceries, look into GNU Taler.
Does it matter here? If we’d talk about making BTC the federal currency, I’d agree. But the average person has < 1% of the total welth in Bitcoin and it’s more like a side-by-side thing… The block size is also limiting how much it can be used anyway. So, inflation would highlight that problem… I think, at this point, no one behind Bitcoin is actually aiming to make Bitcoin the single world currency everyone uses exclusively. So, let it be deflational for those who want to put a fraction of their money in a non-inflational currency…
This makes perfect sense in theory, but after multiple years of 8% to 10% inflation I’m not so keen on the “inflation always” line of thinking. Some kind of “generally stable” currency that alternates unpredictably would be best.
I’ll take 8% inflation for life versus 8% deflation for life.
A deflationary currency would simply cause people to be more careful with their spending. You still need food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, etc. An inflinflationary currency encourages overconsumption, because material things hold value better than money.
If you’d like a world with zero discretionary spending then yeah, deflationary currency is for you.
I don’t think that’s an economy you want to live in though.
Bitcoin, not CrYPtO… fucking noobs
Extremely relevant…
I love that “Web 1.0” link on the bottom for us NoScript users. Enough webs already!
Hah, cool! I didn’t even notice that until you pointed it out. 👍
I have invested a total of $2000 in crypto.
I took out $2000 when I had like $12000.
I have no idea how much what is left is now. Probably $500-$700. Definitely less than a months rent.
Imma let it ride. I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason. Otherwise, whatever.
Same. I had the money to spare and the means to mine so why not? We made more doing that than I have in working for the last few years and even if it were gone tomorrow it wouldn’t affect our livelihood. It’s just so nice thing to have when we are old.
This is the way to do it. What I’ve got is all profit too, whether that means a million dollars or just one.
I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason.
Ooh, that sounds handy! Mind if I ask where those feeds are coming from?
…and yet here you are making a post about it. :)
Crypto is the hack. On your wallet…
Not arguing about the merits of blockchain, but if your money is in a bank, it is on a computer that depends on cryptography (TLS) for controlling access.
edit: Well, ok, at least then it’s not just crypto standing between your assets and someone else. Then there’s going to be at least another layer, like multifactor authentication, VPN/MPLS, etc., depending on the point being attacked.
You very well know that is not what is being talked about here.
I think generally the big issue that people have with crypto is that there are so many irreversible mistakes you can make, not that the underlying security is worse/better than a bank. There are lots of ways to securely manage crypto, but most people don’t have the tools, expertise, and discipline to do so. Even simple things like being diligent about randomly generating strong passwords, hardening your accounts and devices against account theft and social engineering, etc.
At the end of the day if you lose your bank password, account details, etc, you can go to a branch with your id and get access. If you are scammed and money is transferred from your account, the bank will generally make you whole or be able to reverse the transaction. None of those safeguards exist in crypto, and many would say that is a feature, not a bug. Which is fine, I get it, I was a crypto early adopter because I liked the math side of it. But it’s not what most people need or can integrate into their life.
I will also say that I laughed long and hard about reports of NFT smart contracts being used to execute malicious code sent as an NFT, which is a massive security issue, but I don’t think it’s fair to lump the whole crypto ecosystem into the NFT cesspool.
I wish the technology itself was used to replace the stock market, i.e. blockchain to take care of transactions in a truly transparent fashion, coins as a replacement for stocks. Other than that there isn’t much that crypto can do better and more efficiently than the systems in place right now except maybe international money transfers in certain countries…
It’ll be interesting to see which traditions endure over the decades. The stereotypical “crypto bro” squirrels away his own coins, but doesn’t have a plan for when he dies. So these “lost coins” will gradually become a majority of the total supply. Meanwhile groups like families and unions can use shared accounts to majority-approve each expense, and cycle through users over time.
I kinda love cryptocurrency but you nailed the problem. For me all of the features sound like power. To others they sound like risk.
Except that your bank will probably not prevent you to withdraw your money, will probably not be banned from other banks, and will probably not tweet “oh shit someone stole everything, nothing to do its gone, so you are ruined, bye”
I was one of the lucky ones who bought bitcoin so I could buy acid on the internet. Years later I put a down payment on a house with the change that I forgot about. DARE was wrong.
I played around with it for a bit in 08/09. Got a few coins, but didn’t keep going with it and lost the wallet at some point.
2008? are you Satoshi?
yeah that’s an easy lie to call out. Genesis block was 2009. So 2008 is already a no go. And very few people would have even known about it… let alone get their hands on the original software let alone mine something.
or you know he just doesn’t remember the exact year because it was fucking 15 years ago.
Don’t attribute to malice what is adequately explained by spotty memory
If you were in that early, you’d know.
what if he meant 2009/2010? that’s literally 1 year off.
And if you were in a couple years later, ya might not know
Seriously if they are in their 40s or older I’d get being off by 2-3 years which I would not understand when I was 20.
Hey, the 80s were 20 years ago.
I legit still think Taylor Swift is a new artist from time to time instead of someone celebrating a 20 year long career.
I mined a few back in the day. I think I got a couple pizzas and a new router out of it. Could’ve bought a decent house at the peak value. Oh well.
We have a few 100k and it’s just gaining. Mined it several years ago. Definitely not something for people who don’t understand it but Definitely worth it if you did.
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What crypto is gaining?
All of them are, as long as you’re measuring them in Argentine Pesos.
Alternative joke: Bitcoin is gaining right now… No wait, it’s dropping, gaining, dropping…
Doge to the moon obviously
1 doge = 1 doge
Stability achieved!
It’s the American Dream
Sometimes i feel like im the only one living it, i see it as Karmic justice because i tip really well and try to be nice to animals.
I can understand monero since you can actually use it as a currency on some certain websites, but that’s basically it. I do not care about crypto anymore because of the almost toxic culture it can brew.
Back when reddit was a thing, I asked how to even start with crypto (what type of wallet, general set up general use etc) and just didn’t even talk about the actual mining (I remember saying something around the lines of “I’m looking to mine because it’s supposed to get extra cold this winter, I do not care about actually getting any crypto” and those dense mfers kept linking a website that calculates how much I would make with the cost of electricity and the efficiently of it all… like… I didn’t even care about making anything, I just didn’t want it going into the ether)
Anyways that’s my rant
I ran a very small mining operation at home back in the day and it definitely was all about trying to optimize everything.
Today, I don’t think mining is economically viable without running a data center, but I still mine in the winter and turn my computer into a space heater for my home office. It definitely doesn’t cover the power cost but it does offset a small portion of it.Not affiliated in any way but Nicehash is what I use now since it (mostly) runs out of the box with minimal configuration.
As a side note, don’t mine on laptops - you won’t get enough heat to keep a room warm and you might end up with something failing from overheating.
Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t be cost effective since my old rig had an AMD RX580 8gb, but if I could play games and already have a space heater, I may as well mine crypto to heat up the whole house. Nowadays I’m just using Folding@Home during the winter
If you are doing folding@home you can earn [email protected] and Curecoin at the same time for your folding. Helps w the electric bill :). Gridcoin also rewards [email protected] so you can do other medical & space research as well if you get bored of folding.
That makes sense. CPUs and GPUs convert most of their energy use into heat. May as well do something slightly useful with that.
No idea what the numbers are now, but last winter, I think my 3080Ti cost ~$2/day to run and generated ~$1/day in crypto.
I sleep well at night knowing nobody will steal my thing I don’t care about because I don’t own any. I just wanted you all to know that.
you can’t really hack crypto besides maybe a 51% attack
All those GWh wasted on “mining” only got us closer to the edge.
Electricity better spent than what is dimming our night skies with light pollution, IMO, but also proof of stake fixed that.
The GPU mining got me a free GPU and several hundred dollars, for the cost of about 10 cents per KWh. I’d take that “scam” any day of the week, and so I mined until it was over for GPU mining. No regerts.
And that money came from someone. You can’t win in crypto unless someone else loses. Typically it’s vulnerable people wishing for a get rich quick hack who lose.
You probably don’t really know how much of it works. I was paid by a mining pool, for completing blockchain work segments. The mining pool being a for-profit enterprise that pays GPU workers to mine coins that they keep or sell for profit. If you want to extrapolate that to the extent that you imagine I’m harvesting someone else’s wealth, then you’re going to have to warm up for an intense workout of mental gymnastics.
No, you were given a piece of a worthless token by the mining pool. If you ever want to get anything with that worthless token somebody else has to lose money. That somebody makes the bet that another somebody will be an idiot and lose more money so he can get his back.
I bought gold with the crypto haha. Mined me up some gold with a computer.
I’m hoping the gold appreciates in value over time, but I also just wanted to see if I could directly get gold with the crypto and I could.
Which is why a lot of cryptocurrencies adopted proof of stake in favor of proof of work.
Too little too late.
They were using more power than the entirety of Switzerland, just so a handful of people could get rich.
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which is literally a rich get richer scheme on steroids…
It’s trickle up economics
Just like the cycle of water ! if it never rained
Vacuum cleaner economics
Not like the millions or billions of man hours wasted to make 50-ish removed into defacto-gods.
Don’t forget its not just man-hours, but man-lives too
Potentially our future as well considering the carbon and ecological footprint of crypto, both in terms of energy spent mining, and production of single-purpose hardware that can’t really do anything else, rival some medium sized developed countries.
