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It still makes no sense to me. It makes sense in the sense that if people believe in it it becomes real. But I don't get why people believe in it. And frankly I

by tootie 6y ago

It still makes no sense to me. It makes sense in the sense that if people believe in it it becomes real. But I don't get why people believe in it. And frankly I'm still pretty skeptical that it's being floated by more than money laundering.

rawtxapp 6y ago
One thing is, crypto is at the intersection of many disciplines at once, tech/finance/economy/psychology/game theory, etc. I'd if you try to start with a clean slate and no biases against it from the get go, spend some time researching and understanding it alonside what money is and it's history, etc. You'll probably start to see some usefulness to it.
- tootie 6y ago
  I understand a lot of that stuff. I think the last 10 years have very thoroughly vindicated fiat currencies and central banking. The fact that we powered through the last financial crisis without inflation and the biggest pain was inflicted by austerity policies in Europe made it all pretty unequivocal. Crypto is powering close to zero of the mainstream economy. Nobody got a bitcoin bailout. The "money" isn't flowing. I've seen multiple big Wall Street banks say they're going to start using blockchains for whatever and fail to get any traction. It's great for avoiding taxes or buying drugs but I haven't seen any other practical application. The game theory aspect is probably very relevant. There's a lot of FOMO driving speculators into the frenzy.
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    > The fact that we powered through the last financial crisis without inflation... If you trust those metrics, yes everything is perfect. Prices at grocery might not have inflated, but assets certainly have, real estate is crazy expensive, stock market P/E ratios have also exploded. For the working class whose income has relatively stayed stable, it means life is a lot harder. The money is very much flowing in the crypto world, just look at DeFi, it has more or less the equivalent services available elsewhere, but everyone has access, you don't need trust, it has large volumes and billions of dollars in capital in these protocols. It's great if you want a predictable global monetary system not controlled by any single entity. If you don't see any value in that (as in you really trust your gov and the politicians/bankers), I don't think there's anything I could tell you to convince you otherwise.
dogman144 6y ago
From something I wrote above, this was my ah-ha moment: Not all cryptos are like this, but for bitcoin and other ones that have the incentives right: bitcoin's massive breakthrough is a protocol that can send verifiably discrete entities across a network, without a central party needing to verify the discrete-ness. This is a huge breakthrough in a lot of ways, but basically consider if you network could send payments as exactly as easily as it does HTTP packets, and w/o a client-server model, just p2p. HTTP changed the world, and that's the idea behind bitcoin's value. If you could somehow buy a slice of HTTP in 1997, or TCP/UDP, now knowing how important and valuable those became (valued by the size of the internet economy), would you?
- tootie 6y ago
  The only distinction between crypto and just HTTPS is the distributed concept. Something that I don't really think is valuable and neither do most consumers. Crypto exchanges get robbed more often than banks. The notion of investing in "http" is akin to investing in "blockchain" which isn't a thing. Anyone who saw the value of the internet would have been buying Apple, Google and Amazon because they were providing goods and services. Not tokens. I'm heavily invested in reddit karma, but it's still not fungible.
  - dogman144 6y ago
    It's not so much the distributed concept, but it's the "verifiably discrete" packets that behave like a global internet protocol concept. I don't think you know the tech under the hood vs. existing tech, it sounds like. There has been no way, prior to now, to verify that my packet I'm sending over a network is a discrete entity, unless you use something like a certificate authority, and that's not really the same ballpark/use case. It's worth digging in that direction if you actually have an open mind about it.
delaaxe 6y ago
Only a engineer would say that

by tootie 6y ago

rawtxapp 6y ago

One thing is, crypto is at the intersection of many disciplines at once, tech/finance/economy/psychology/game theory, etc. I'd if you try to start with a clean slate and no biases against it from the get go, spend some time researching and understanding it alonside what money is and it's history, etc. You'll probably start to see some usefulness to it.

tootie 6y ago
I understand a lot of that stuff. I think the last 10 years have very thoroughly vindicated fiat currencies and central banking. The fact that we powered through the last financial crisis without inflation and the biggest pain was inflicted by austerity policies in Europe made it all pretty unequivocal. Crypto is powering close to zero of the mainstream economy. Nobody got a bitcoin bailout. The "money" isn't flowing. I've seen multiple big Wall Street banks say they're going to start using blockchains for whatever and fail to get any traction. It's great for avoiding taxes or buying drugs but I haven't seen any other practical application. The game theory aspect is probably very relevant. There's a lot of FOMO driving speculators into the frenzy.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  > The fact that we powered through the last financial crisis without inflation... If you trust those metrics, yes everything is perfect. Prices at grocery might not have inflated, but assets certainly have, real estate is crazy expensive, stock market P/E ratios have also exploded. For the working class whose income has relatively stayed stable, it means life is a lot harder. The money is very much flowing in the crypto world, just look at DeFi, it has more or less the equivalent services available elsewhere, but everyone has access, you don't need trust, it has large volumes and billions of dollars in capital in these protocols. It's great if you want a predictable global monetary system not controlled by any single entity. If you don't see any value in that (as in you really trust your gov and the politicians/bankers), I don't think there's anything I could tell you to convince you otherwise.

dogman144 6y ago

From something I wrote above, this was my ah-ha moment: Not all cryptos are like this, but for bitcoin and other ones that have the incentives right: bitcoin's massive breakthrough is a protocol that can send verifiably discrete entities across a network, without a central party needing to verify the discrete-ness. This is a huge breakthrough in a lot of ways, but basically consider if you network could send payments as exactly as easily as it does HTTP packets, and w/o a client-server model, just p2p. HTTP changed the world, and that's the idea behind bitcoin's value. If you could somehow buy a slice of HTTP in 1997, or TCP/UDP, now knowing how important and valuable those became (valued by the size of the internet economy), would you?

tootie 6y ago
The only distinction between crypto and just HTTPS is the distributed concept. Something that I don't really think is valuable and neither do most consumers. Crypto exchanges get robbed more often than banks. The notion of investing in "http" is akin to investing in "blockchain" which isn't a thing. Anyone who saw the value of the internet would have been buying Apple, Google and Amazon because they were providing goods and services. Not tokens. I'm heavily invested in reddit karma, but it's still not fungible.
- dogman144 6y ago
  It's not so much the distributed concept, but it's the "verifiably discrete" packets that behave like a global internet protocol concept. I don't think you know the tech under the hood vs. existing tech, it sounds like. There has been no way, prior to now, to verify that my packet I'm sending over a network is a discrete entity, unless you use something like a certificate authority, and that's not really the same ballpark/use case. It's worth digging in that direction if you actually have an open mind about it.

delaaxe 6y ago

Only a engineer would say that