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> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “
by meowkit 5y ago
> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt.
So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens.
I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded systems. Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me. The author saying the “silent majority tech people” know its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes.
Sure there are tons of misinformation, scams, and bullshit going on. That’s everywhere and is not special to crypto.
- chrisco255 5y agoYeah, U.S. household net worth is near all-time lows in Fed balance sheet terms and people think crypto is the scam: https://mobile.twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1398733901913264133 https://mobile.twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/13987339019132641...
- chrisbolt 5y agoWhat does “in Fed balance sheet terms” mean?
- atomicnumber3 5y agoI think they're referring to the ratio of household wealth to total value of the fed balance sheet. Which is a number easy to calculate and his claim is factually true (mostly because the fed balance sheet has never been bigger). But while his claim is true, in a Boolean sense, I don't know what exactly we're supposed to conclude about the world based on it. This isn't a ratio I've ever seen talked about before. I'm guessing they're insinuating that the size of the feds balance sheet is somehow related to inflation, which it is only in a fairly loose sense.
- delaaxe 5y agoSome analysts joke that the first thing you’re shown when you arrive in hell in a chart of the S&P divided by the Fed balance sheet
- TchoBeer 5y agoWhat's the joke I don't get it
- chrisco255 5y agoThat US household net worth is falling despite the fact that real estate prices and stock prices are near all time highs.
- ashtonkem 5y agoSomething being wrong with the economy doesn’t preclude Bitcoin from being a scam. That’s a false dilemma you’re proposing.
- CalChris 5y agoIt's actually a whataboutism but otherwise I agree.
- chrisco255 5y agoThis, this is a scam: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL Notice the 5x supply increase without a corresponding 5x in economic efficiency. Bitcoin is what it is. It's worth what people think it's worth. Just like gold. Gold has minimal practical use in real life but it was used as a type of money off and on for 5000 years.
- lottin 5y agoAll money is worth what people think it's worth. Next question.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago> The author saying the “silent majority tech people” know its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes. Counterpoint: most "tech people" I know — including people who have worked in crypto — both know about it and also think it's a scam.
- meowkit 5y agoThat’s the real point. For the author, me, or you to claim what most tech people think is ridiculous.
- eli 5y agoI think you’re being too literal. There are lots of tech people who quietly feel this way — just look at the comments here. The point is that they shouldn’t be so quiet about it. If someone only knows crypto from stories in mainstream press or cable news, they’d probably incorrectly assume “tech people” are almost universally for it.
- baby 5y agoWell, I work in the field and I think there’s both. Scams and real technology advances that would blow anybody’s mind if they would spend a bit of time to look into it. I promise there is more than Bitcoin and dogecoin.
- forwardslash 5y agoHow have you done a deep dive on Tether and not seen it as deeply troubling?
- meowkit 5y agoDid I say I did not find it deeply troubling?
- forwardslash 5y agoYou said > Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me Which I took as an implication that you didn’t see Tether as a deeply troubling or a scam
- meowkit 5y agoTether is an application, not a core technology. Stablecoins would fit that quote. Tethers management is the problem - obfuscation and using other crypto as collateral instead of just USD.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amingilani 5y agoPlease don't cherry pick the worst example and apply it for the whole population. Tether is one stablecoin, and arguably the worst example since it is literally the one coin every coiner will agree with you is a bad stablecoin. Do a deep dive on MakerDAO's DAI instead.
- eli 5y agoWhen tether implodes a lot is going down with it.
- skrebbel 5y agoWhy can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam? I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property. All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff. (sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)
- meowkit 5y agoI disagree with the characterization that the primary use is a scam. That’s like saying the primary use of email is to receive ads and phishing mail.
- crummy 5y agoAre there numbers on what the primary uses of cryptocurrency are? I would guess remittances, purchasing illegal things, purchasing legal things, and ransomware - but I'm not sure in what order.
- idlewords 5y agoI think it also depends on what you count as "use". The #1 function of Bitcoin is as a speculative asset.
- morelisp 5y agoI am not sure remittance counts as a "use", especially if it is only useful for remitting money because it is also actually "used" for settling ransomware payouts or buying cocaine.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI have a lot of digital artist friends who used to rely on live performances and installations for their money, now they're seriously killing it selling NFTs Some of them opt out of more environmentally unfriendly stuff like Ethereum for sure Personally I've developed systems for paying for everyday things like your bus fare or phone bill using crypto in a country where there's a hell of a lot less confidence in fiat (Brazil) -- hell check out the history of the Brazilian Real if you want an idea of what real candycorn money looks like Personally I just feel a hell of a lot of privileged bullshit out of people arguing that crypto is some good for nothing shit. Yeah sure great try living in a country where your government is fucked. We truly don't live in some francis fukuyama neoliberal fantasy world where we can trust stuff like traditional financial markets which have gone and failed us in the non english speaking world time and time again. I welcome any and all alternatives
- wmf 5y agoI'm a tech guy. I've spent years experimenting with crypto and it isn't fit for any legitimate purpose.
- tuesdayrain 5y agoYou're not very good at experimenting then. I first bought BTC in 2013 because of a legitimate purpose: to pay for online goods (legal software) to a seller who wanted to completely eliminate any risk of chargebacks.
- eli 5y agoAnd 8 years later the fees no longer make it viable for even that niche use case.
- tuesdayrain 5y agoSurely you recognize that this is a bad faith argument? The average transaction fee today is around $8 USD. That's a small price to pay for knowing that a transaction is set in stone.
- Clewza313 5y agoIt's a pretty high price to pay for donuts though. Especially since it's kind of hard to reverse a donut transaction after you've eaten them.
- baby 5y agoWhat fee? Are you talking about a specific currency or all currencies? In Celo currently fees are 0.1 cent per transaction, for example.
- input_sh 5y agoI've never heard of a single physical item being sold for any other cryptocurrency, only Bitcoin. How would a merchant of physical goods even know about something like Celo, whatever that is?
- SamBam 5y ago> Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me. I think everyone is talking past each other, because no one's exactly defining what the "scam" is, so you're talking about different things. I don't think anyone's suggesting that, say, deep in the BitCoin code there is some algorithm giving Satoshi Nakamoto a dollar for evert transaction. On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority of buyers are buying simply because they hope that someone else will buy at a higher price tomorrow, or next year. This causes everyone to cheer-lead about how everyone else needs to buy or HODL, because they simply want to drive the price up. For me, personally, I'd say this is what I'd call a "scam," in the sense that a MLM company is a "scam": that the motivation of the majority of people extolling the virtues of buying crypto tends to be simply personal enrichment.
- mattgreenrocks 5y agoYeah. And I think some people see that and think, “okay I can get in on that too!” while others think, “this whole thing smells and can’t be sustainable.” I fall into the latter camp. I don’t begrudge the former. I just don’t think it’ll last and have little taste for speculating.
- adambatkin 5y agoBlockchain as a technology is definitely innovative. The problem is that, in practice, the way that it solves certain problems come with tradeoffs. This isn't a technical problem per-se, just that it doesn't (IMHO) solve any real problems better (given the tradeoffs) than other, more "traditional" solutions. That's not to say that you can't make money with blockchain tech (just like you can make money playing blackjack).
- baby 5y agoHow doesn’t it? Do you know how slow traditional solutions are? Or prone to error?
- p1necone 5y agoIt's not that the tech itself is a scam per se (although there are plenty of cryptocurrencies that were started with the express purpose of being a ponzi scheme or a pre-mined vehicle for a pump and dump). It's just that widely available, totally unregulated financial instruments will always be primarily used to run ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and meaningless speculation (meaningless in that speculators are largely just speculating based on what other speculators might do).
- barrkel 5y agoThe bit that is a scam is a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's tulips, Beanie Babies, housing market bubbles; not technical. Assets rising in price are chased by people who want to surf the rise. What is interesting about distributed ledger consensus via proof of work only remains interesting when there's a disconnect between the economy and good government. If your government is corrupt, or your economy is corrupt, you want the two to be disconnected. The problem is that the latter - corrupt economies - dominate over the former. If you have a functioning government, you can use the legal system to enforce contracts, and then ledgers don't need to use proof of work. If you don't have a functioning government, or you can't let the legal system look at your contracts, then blockchain starts to look interesting.
- AlexandrB 5y agoHave you read this? https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-inside-cryptos-doomsday-machine-f8dcf78a64d3 https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-insid... Tether smells extremely fishy and seems to be used for a huge amount of trade volume on BTC and other cryptocurrencies.
- Clewza313 5y agoAh yes, Iota, which uses ternary internally because it's the "superior technological solution" and "the future of computing". https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/8/why-does-iota-use-a-ternary-number-system https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/8/why-does-iota-use...
- simg 5y ago> Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me No, the scam part is the idea that crypto is going replace fiat and as such will be worth many times more in the future than it is now. I'd also be very, very surprised if there wasn't price manipulation going on with crypto trading.
- UncleMeat 5y ago> B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes. Hi there. I've published a few papers in top conferences on BTC and ETH. I don't own a cent of crypto and believe that a lot of it is a very bad idea. I find it endlessly frustrating when people insist that the only way to disagree with enthusiasts is to be ignorant.