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Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

• cube00 5y ago
  https://archive.is/SRr5X https://archive.is/SRr5X
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mettamage 5y ago
  I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy). For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me. [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/ https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
  • wyager 5y ago
    The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs). Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
    • karpierz 5y ago
      Why does Bitcoin have a clear advantage in solving double spend over a centralized solution?
      • krageon 5y ago
        > centralized If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.
        • acomms 5y ago
          Why are you so convinced that cryptocurrency solves the "outside forces much larger and more powerful than me have influence over the system" problem? It exchanged a solution to some problems for a new set of problems to be solved.
          • krageon 5y ago
            You are questioning what I'm saying by telling me something incredibly vague. I'm afraid I just don't know what to do with your question.
            • secondaryacct 5y ago
              I can rephrase it: why do you think it impossible for vastly resourceful entities to acquire so much power they can control the decentralized system - in a softer way, probably but still. Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity providers working as cartels to help each other and protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today called banks). How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?
              • megameter 5y ago
                It's easy. Copy-paste the blockchain and start over with a fork. When the system delegitimizes itself, a debt jubilee lies around the corner. This stuff is just glue now - a cheap way of making a financial system.
    • cryptica 5y ago
      I think this is an accurate assessment but I think authentication and account management should be seen as separate from 'identity'. Authentication can be useful without being associated with a real-world identity; for example, it can be useful for spam-prevention as an alternative to signups with captcha. You could theoretically log into multiple services which you don't trust by signing messages using your private key without revealing your passphrase to any of those services.
  • cryptica 5y ago
    Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simply sign a message to prove to any service that you control an account (and know the passphrase) without actually revealing the passphrase to any of the third party services.
    • UncleMeat 5y ago
      > The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.
      • cryptica 5y ago
        - Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out) - It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services. - The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts. - Superior integration potential between different services/systems provided by different companies/groups since they can all refer to the exact same account on the same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between the different services.
• marban 5y ago
  The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
  • xwdv 5y ago
    You mean at some point NFT had you?
    • marban 5y ago
      Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were already selling their digital art in genuine and honest capacity. But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
      • tiborsaas 5y ago
        I don't get this. The concept hasn't changed since and those genuine artists are still there you supported. Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?
        • wpietri 5y ago
          I think the NFT thing is kinda ridiculous. But then so are plenty of other marketing shenanigans. Maybe it could have worked? But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST". As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT: https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?lang=en https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?l... For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
• roenxi 5y ago
  Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who. But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who: 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people. 2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply. In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
  • ttyprintk 5y ago
    I wish the downvotes would explain how they plan to solve these problems, or otherwise concede the argument of the linked article.
    • roenxi 5y ago
      I wouldn't normally comment on downvotes, but the torrent on this post caught me by surprise. Probably they just disagree.
  • ARandumGuy 5y ago
    > 1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people. I mean, inflation actually does benefit poor people, when wages and prices rise at the same rate. Devaluing savings accounts isn't a big deal if you don't have any savings in the first place. Inflation also makes debt less valuable over time, making it gradually easier to pay off. The real problem is that (in the US) wages have been stagnant for decades. That's not an issue that cryptocurrency is going to solve.
    • pontus 5y ago
      Well, there are a lot of ways of investing your money in ways that track or exceed inflation, so it's not like people without savings are doing well with inflation whereas all those people with savings are getting screwed. Further though, I would imagine that people who have a little savings but not that much, would end up keeping that in a savings account rather than investing it. As such, the little savings poor people do have would be eaten away by inflation. Also, like you suggest, wages are not rising with inflation so that just makes things even worse.
• maxharris 5y ago
  Thanks for posting that. I hadn’t seen Jack’s pro-Bitcoin tweet, and seeing it here allowed me to like and share it. This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.
  • AmericanChopper 5y ago
    I got about half way through the article, and all I’d read was a bunch of poorly attributed motives the author had invented for the people who participate in cryptocurrency. Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at any point?
• superkuh 5y ago
  > Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet... Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the FUD.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    > never donate to journalists Not really, unless you count patreon. > Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg Credit cards or paypal. Both of which have a better refund system.
  • ahoy 5y ago
    Normal people do not have, use, or understand cryptocurrencies. If you think they do all that means is you live in a very specific bubble.
  • EliRivers 5y ago
    Normal people do all that with money and credit cards and debit cards and bank transfers, which works faster and better and are much easier to use and much more convenient. The existing framework is a much better way to do all the things you mentioned. What do you have for which the existing framework isn't better, and how often do "normal" people do that?
• endisneigh 5y ago
  ICANN isn't perfect (not even close, lol) - but I wish a consortium of countries would just create their own crypto. Unfortunately this would probably devolve to what we currently have with individual fiat. Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-cards/points globally distributed sense.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    Bretton Woods, but for crypto?
  • wpietri 5y ago
    If you look at ICANN's .org fiasco, it's pretty clear that they couldn't handle even the relatively small amount of money flowing through that. The corruption opportunities of an entire currency are way too much for them.
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    You mean ENS?
• space_rock 5y ago
  The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else
  • TrackerFF 5y ago
    World's most expensive linked-list.
  • Destiner 5y ago
    Even if so, "only money" is a multi trillion dollar industry.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    I mean, if you look at transaction cost, settle time, user friendliness, and currency risk, it doesn't even work as a medium of exchange, which is the definition of money. More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitcoin and are much more widely adopted.
    • horsawlarway 5y ago
      Hard agree - the only thing bitcoin can reasonably be spent on for most folks is black market goods (usually drugs). Which is really why bitcoin exists as thing today, in my opinion. It was a way to pay for drugs over the internet. The rest of the pricing is purely speculation, and it hurts any real utility it might provide.
      • mywittyname 5y ago
        It does seem to be used by people transferring funds internationally, especially from SEA to the USA.
        • wpietri 5y ago
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Q4 is set to be an amazing crypto run because all I see is lots of last minute FUD right now on all media channels, and of course from China. The OG FUD source has blown its final wad and banned all crypto “for real this time.” Let’s hope the USA isn’t as backwards thinking and sees that banning crypto is removing yourself from the new world economy.
  • EliRivers 5y ago
    Surely you DO want the USA to ban crypto? I'm assured that crypto bans make the price go sky high and then the whales can cash out into dollars.
• sneak 5y ago
  We are currently transitioning from the part where they laugh at you, to the part where they fight you.
  • ttyprintk 5y ago
    The article mentions launderers and dirty tricksters, who we haven’t collectively stopped laughing at, yet to effectively fight.
  • zaphar 5y ago
    Nah, I'm still in the bemused stage. They may actually succeed in making crypto a normal thing adopted by society. At which point I'll transition to my usual next stage. Being resigned to yet another bad technology solution to what is fundamentally a people problem.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• voidray 5y ago
  If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning acceptance of government officials, you get this article. If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the space, they could read something with real data: https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-Net-Zero.pdf https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...
  • ahoy 5y ago
    This is the exact kind of utopian fantasizing that the article talks about. Charming!
    • voidray 5y ago
      Can you be more specific?
  • oyf 5y ago
    > Since 1920, at least 55 hyperinflation events have taken place, destroying savings and creating economic hardship... Bitcoin offers the world an alternative – a sound monetary system outside the control of governments and central banks. The paper you linked doesn't exactly get off to a good start, considering there are ~1600-2200 dead/worthless cryptocurrencies (see below) and Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile. It's somewhat absurd to claim Bitcoin is the stable alternative to fiat currencies, or the solution to cases of currency collapse. The rest of the summary is just speculation on how the carbon footprint of Bitcoin might be reasonable in the future. Would you mind pointing out the parts that you feel refute the article's criticisms? https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/ https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/ https://deadcoins.com/ https://deadcoins.com/
    • doomroot 5y ago
      > Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile. Largely in the right direction.
• kureikain 5y ago
  One thing funny about cryptocurrency is that it's built for highly technical group of audience. But in my peers, a majority of people who get benefit from it are non-tech user. Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow? Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff. Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)... all of that made crypto looks really bad. But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write into it. Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node. But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...
• dcolkitt 5y ago
  It’s pretty clear from the article that the author thinks markets are intrinsically bad, most entrepreneurs and founders are generally bad, and that economic activity is generally better coordinated and controlled by the state. And it’s pretty clear from the upvotes and comments that many here agree with this viewpoint. And that’s fine. That’s a completely defensible world view, that many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?
  • Synaesthesia 5y ago
    It's only "bad" if you believe in democracy and equality. Markets are great for those who benefit from them. I just don't see cryptos benefiting the majority of mankind. They pretty much reinforce or retain existing power structures.
• brianolson 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don't even need a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm. If I am simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an adolescence of B and mature into A.
  • Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Except its not very decentralized and leaderless. It is dominated by a few ultra rich players, to an even greater extent than the stock market. And that didn't democratise finance either.
    • fksadfji12 5y ago
      Thats not true at all.
  • ttyprintk 5y ago
    This article argues that they are currently used transactionally to launder money. Not the only way to launder money. Not an easy way to promote prosperity among the poor, either. Not even a heuristic to tell the good sources of money from blood-stained ones. To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
• codingclaws 5y ago
  Off topic. Did anyone else's AI generated text radar go off on this article? Seems like too many fancy words. I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate content.
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Unless specifically encouraged, GPT-3 would probably prefer to use common language.
  • mahidhar 5y ago
    Actually it's pretty weird. This is a sports blog and content engine. And the author is someone who started this publication. I'm not sure what the motivation/context is at all here.
  • lern_too_spel 5y ago
    The author does seem to be influenced by the writing style of https://www.pakin.org/complaint https://www.pakin.org/complaint, but the arguments he presents are coherent.
• cfup 5y ago
  I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same. The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations. I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    "I worked for a sleezy startup that was scamming people, therefore all companies are scams"
    • cfup 5y ago
      "I worked at a sleezy startup and meet a bunch of partners doing similar things, and most of them are worse or just as sleezy" - But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the bad company We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired to do formal verification and system design. Until, money happened, and founders realize they over promised.
    • boh 5y ago
      Are you suggesting your statement is sarcasm?
  • overlaid 5y ago
    How did the pyramid scheme work? Who was recruiting (not in an abstract sense)? What were the rewards for getting new recruits?
  • dotlog 5y ago
    Was is literally a pyramid scheme that recruited people and paid people for getting new recruits? Or just a scheme?
  • xur17 5y ago
    > I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same. I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships. If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
• HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  I won't pretend I'm a computer genius or anything, but I feel like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at least, I'm the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by anyone I know. The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design. If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right? Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
  • landemva 5y ago
    'existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon' Yes, you are awakening. Cultures seem to like jewelry and art.
  • a_rustacean 5y ago
    "I don't understand it, therefore there is something suspicious about it" is a very dangerous way of reasoning. We burned innocent people because of this not long ago. Anyways, I find the Bitcoin paper very approachable. You may need to read it a bunch of times until everything clicks into place. But it's all there, in just 8 pages.
    • Valakas_ 5y ago
      Humans haven't changed. We just like to pretend we have and are superior now. Pick any random person and put them back in the middle ages, they'd be burning witches and screaming of joy at gladiator matches.
    • HelixEndeavor 5y ago
      Are you comparing my distrust of crypto to the Salem witch trials? Right... Anyways, the golden rules of investing is to not invest your money into something you don't understand.
• xutopia 5y ago
  Not going to say that no one lies about it but I had to transfer a sizable amount of money between two banks at about the same time I did a transaction from my home with BTC that took all but 20 minutes without the need for fax machines. There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much want a future where currencies they would use isn't hampered by government.
  • elzbardico 5y ago
    Transferring huge amounts of money between accounts, specially when you own both is not a problem unless you live in the US. For most of Europe, Asia and even latin america this problem has been solved almost two decades ago. Around the same time the banks on those countries retired their fax machines.
    • xutopia 5y ago
      I live in Canada and had bank accounts in France as well where anything above 5 figures is hard to do across institutions. I was able to move 50k in 10 minutes in BTC when 25k CAD was tough to send and required days of wait time despite a certified cheque I paid extra for.
• henvic 5y ago
  Not necessarily, but to be honest I haven't seen a single cryptocurrency that made sense so far. I wrote about how misleading the crypto ecosystem is a while ago here: https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/ https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/
• bo1024 5y ago
  I think NFTs are really dumb, a scam, and/or vectors for money laundering. Then again, I think the same thing about multimillion dollar private artwork and politicians' "nonprofits". I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets. But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides. Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc. I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
• aazaa 5y ago
  > The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening. There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
• Ansil849 5y ago
  > Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
  • aceazzameen 5y ago
    Absolutely. And with anything that involves greed and riches.
  • bitcoin_anon 5y ago
    https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches? > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer. It's someone who cares deeply about humanity. Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space with similar motivations?
    • SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
      Who cares what Satoshi said back then. What Bitcoin has become now is a complete sham with early adopters stoking the flames of FOMO to get rich quick at the expense of everyone else. I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
      • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        And I wish cryptocurrency detractors would stop lick state boot, calling for bans and throwing out stupid arguments like energy usage. While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant with their ignorance. Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor. AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates. I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
• Geee 5y ago
  Bitcoin has nothing to do with all these scams like NFTs and "internet computers" like Ethereum, which are pushed by tech gurus, influencers and marketers. It's time to stop conflating these under the same umbrella. Bitcoiners are not the same people who push these useless things.
  • DanHulton 5y ago
    Absolutely correct. Bitcoin isn't the domain of NFT grifters, it's the domain of ransomware hostage-takers. We need to be accurate when discussing the various scams proposed.
    • Geee 5y ago
      That's not even remotely true.
      • SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
        What do you mean? Of course it is. How else has ransomware been able to thrive as of late? The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner this clown car of sadness will come to an end. As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are making some good moves in this department recently to eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in their steps here.
        • Geee 5y ago
          It happens, but it isn't "the domain" like he meant. There are hundreds of millions Bitcoin users already, and the vast majority of them are not criminals. According to Chainalysis, only 0.34% of total transaction value was criminal in 2020.[0] [0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-report-intro-ransomware-scams-darknet-markets https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...
• pcmaffey 5y ago
  If you think about crypto as a MMOG, people’s behaviors start to make a lot more sense.
• useful 5y ago
  Selling a future that hasn't happened is fine. If you saw the initial version of the internet or a cell phone you'd likely dismiss them. Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative. The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.
  • mypastself 5y ago
    Wouldn’t most laws need a real-world source of truth and arbitration external to the network? It seems like a lot of work just to arrive at what is essentially centralization once again. And the people who might have initially dismissed the early internet would likely have not understood it. A lot of NFT detractors are plenty tech-savvy.
    • useful 5y ago
      Any time you deal with physicals things? Yep. I wouldn't need a lawyer if a digital contract enforced a 2% commission paid to a wallet address. I would need a lawyer if all transactions weren't paid into that wallet address. If I use software to play a song and it uses an NFT to make a payment to the owner. I theoretically cut out a lot of middlemen whos value is making sure the correct people are paid. There are tons of edge cases where anyone can argue that this wouldn't work but I think that the system only has to meet a bar where it is potentially better than what we have now.
  • tomp 5y ago
    You mainly spend money on lawyers when things go wrong (or in anticipation of things going wrong). In crypto, when things go wrong they just fork the blockchain. YOLO
• 99_00 5y ago
  New technology often goes through a phase of wild speculation, touting by liars, and impractical business models that people throw money because they are afraid of missing out. The bubble eventually pops. But people keep improving the tech and it becomes practical and eats the world. First there was Railroad Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania After the initial bubble, rail roads changed the world First there was the dot-com bubble, and then internet changed the world. Both sides can be right in this debate. Crypto can be a bubble and a scam and it can also change the world.
  • cromulent 5y ago
    This is true. Although the examples you give show survivorship bias. There are many new things, fads and scams that simply fade away. I don't think that Bitcoin will be a thing in 100 years, but blockchain will still exist in some useful format. Not in the way that it is pushed by some of its proponents though.
• BTCOG 5y ago
  Here's your seemingly month reminder that there is only one cryptocurrency. Bitcoin. NFTs are epitome of tulip mania. Bitcoin, while it does increase in value due to low supply, is the only secure and actually fair escape hatch to the global monetary system and holds value globally. Proof of Stake, and every single coin below Bitcoin, copied from Bitcoin, are similar to fiat and centralized. Ethereum is the worst of the bunch and is scamming millions.
  • mywittyname 5y ago
    Let's accept your premise for the sake of argument. Why do you thinik the contagion from other crypto scams imploding won't bring down BTC? Will people still trust BTC if they lose trust in other crypto?
    • BTCOG 5y ago
      The rest are completely irrelevant.
      • postalrat 5y ago
        To me this sounds like more lies.
  • kharak 5y ago
    For everyone who doesn't follow crypto. OP is obviously a Bitcoin maximalist. For them, the world of crypto begins and ends with Bitcoin.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    A fair escape hatch? Anybody can buy BTC with stablecoins, which are unaudited, and whose creators have openly lied about maintaining a 1:1 ratio between USD and stablecoins in circulation. Say what you will about fiat, but no bank in the world will let me exchange monopoly money for something I can use to buy a sandwich.
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency was a broken concept from the very start. It assumed that you can build a financial system by engineering "trust" in purely technical terms. Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that the "system" is not ripping them off there is no amount of cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you. The very anonymity of the bitcoin founder(s?) shows this was never an honest-to-goodness project. Its not surprising then that crypto never solved any real economic problem. As in: making any economy a tiny bit healthier, more resilient, less unequal. Not a single one. But had it stayed a failed financial reform project would have been one thing. It is heartbreaking to witness the amount of fraud, waste of resources and manipulation it unleashed. Its ongoing amoral adoption by the formal financial system as "yet another asset class offering diversification to our customers" is a fitting closure. The chicken came home to roost.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    All I know is that I actually feel in control of my money with crypto and can easily move it around the world. ACH and wire transfers are painful in comparison.
    • streamofdigits 5y ago
      I am not defending existing monetary systems. The cost and difficulty of transfers is in no small measure the result of cartels that the official system is quite happy to let fester because they haven't seen an oligopoly they didn't like.
      • trixie_ 5y ago
        I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with cartels and everything to do with an incredibly complex banking infrastructure running mostly on fortran and cobol.
        • streamofdigits 5y ago
          I'm sorry, do some research. A few large operators keep the remittances costs high. https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-remittances https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-remittances As for fortran and cobol, why change the technology if you are sitting pretty?
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  The title is 100% true for much of the cryptocurrency sector, but the body of the article is a shameless bad-faith attempt to rationalize an extremely heavy handed government response that would criminalize entire classes of voluntary interactions between consenting adults, and turn the future of the internet into a much darker place with much more government repression. Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited article. There isn't an even an attempt by the author to give the subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators, but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article unconscionable.
• jcbrand 5y ago
  This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs. NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so. I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men. Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons. The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha. The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.
  • Synaesthesia 5y ago
    What has happened in those 12 years has been a great deal of scams, get rich quick scheme a and instability. Bitcoin has also become dominated by a few major players and is a power structure in itself, not really benefitting ordinary people much at.
    • WinstonSmith84 5y ago
      the ecosystem from 12 years ago is radically different from what it is now. Heck, it's radically different from what it was just 2 or 3 years ago. And well, it benefits (smart) ordinary people. That is, those who have invested or are investing. Smart money is here - and small investors are here too. And I'm saying purposefully "investing" as opposed to "trading". The former doesn't require any technical skills. As for "ordinary people" not versed into technologies doing what their government is telling them to do (bans, warnings, hackers, criminals, murderers, ...), well... I'm feeling sorry for them, but crypto cannot just replace local country currencies without government consent. Now think again: who is to blame?
• cratermoon 5y ago
  How long before Amazon starts paying their workers in a BezosBucks cryptocurrency that can only be redeemed at the Amazon company store? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-communities-towns-geography-warehouse-fulfillment-jfk8-cajon-inland-empire https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-communities-...
  • boh 5y ago
    https://youtu.be/CPW3YikDwEM https://youtu.be/CPW3YikDwEM
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    Good god what is with their obsession with scrip? Scrip payments have already been banned and it wasn't even a winning strategy for its users! You might as well raise concerns about the Kaiser going militant or the Shogun holding a coup in Japan. I am seriously sick of people writing execrable impromptu science fiction and presenting it as reality.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  The fomo is real tho. Everyone imagines "just imagine if I invested when BTC was < $100 just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now. And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze. All "doom and gloom" has bounced off the market. I am still expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment. It is insanely profitable. Thats the fun part of all this :)
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    In the sense that people who can't afford rent buying lottery tickets is "fun".
  • dorgo 5y ago
    >I am still expecting a massive crash I wonder what you would consider a massive crash in crypto. Because -90% in two or three months is nothing special, just day-to-day business. I would start to worry if it drops below 0.1% though.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > the insistence that cryptocurrency is a boon for all of humanity quickly collapses into the assertion that it will become one This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board. Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn't actually matter because it will be true some day. Social media is healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another thread: bitcoin isn't bad for the environment (well, it could be better, therefore it's fine).
• crumpled 5y ago
  Keep in mind that Bitcoin is vulnerable to cracking by quantum computers some time in the next couple decades.
  • swift532 5y ago
    This is kind of overstated. From what I remember, it only makes addresses vulnerable after you spend from them, and in all likelihood the network would migrate to a resistant algorithm.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  Regarding an interesting counter-example to blockchain hype, check out Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com/ https://www.omnichains.com/ They initially argued that they could provide an unrivaled form of transparency because they kept all the data on the blockchain. But now I'm working for a customer of their's, and I realize there is no blockchain. I believe they now run a standard service backed up by a standard SQL database. But look at their marketing: "Omnichain has earned the prestigious recognition for its innovative solution that is helping brands and retailers create more transparent, connected supply chains and drive intelligent process automation." Or check out this blog post: "Lack of visibility is not a new problem. Supply chains have long dealt with fragmented management systems and data siloes—barriers that limit transparency, efficiency, and collaboration between stakeholders. The pandemic only magnified these challenges. ...Moving forward, end-to-end visibility solutions—made possible by technologies like blockchain—will be instrumental in helping businesses proactively identify risks and pivot accordingly. So going back to suppliers, manufacturers can use blockchain to connect and share data with their suppliers. With accurate, real-time visibility into available resources upstream, they can quickly identify alternate sources if needed, and ultimately prevent costly production delays." I have the impression this company started off hoping to use the blockchain to create a more transparent supply chain. I also have the impression they have pivoted away from that vision. And that's fine, of course. I'm not criticizing them. A startup starts with one hypothesis, tests it, and then pivots when that first hypothesis fails. This is good management. But I think, in a small way, it indicates what is happening with those startups that got started when blockchain hype was at its peak. Two or three years ago you could get money from investors by promising to revolutionize an industry by using the blockchain. And now it's turning out that the blockchain is less useful than was supposed for creating new kinds of transparency. As it turns out, supply chain transparency is limited by each companies unwillingness to share it weaknesses, it's lack of cash flow, it's lack of inventory, and it's slow shipping times. Blockchain can not fix any of those things. And as I've said elsewhere, with these industrial applications of blockchain, I've yet to see a service that could not have been done more easily with a standard framework (Ruby On Rails or Django or Symfony or NodeJS) sitting in front of a standard SQL database. A final point: this is my first time working on a big retail/warehouse project, and I am absolutely shocked at the primitive technology that is currently in use. Most of these companies lack APIs, which, in the year 2021, I find shocking. For our warehouse, for instance, there is no way to do an API call to find how much of a particular item is still in inventory. And this clearly limits how much the blockchain is able to change anything. And this is especially wild: I've spoken to the good folks at Omnichains, and they tell me that they do not have an API. Rather, they can send us a CSV file at regular times, but that is it. In the year 2021! Just amazing.
• nootropicat 5y ago
  In absence of real economic growth winning at zero and negative sum games is the only realistic chance at making it in the broadly defined West. The ponzi trend is only going to grow until the whole system collapses under itself. People not playing the game are going to lose the most, as unfair as it is, because rich executives are going to exploit their positions and dump their bags on public companies they control. In more corrupt cases, countries instead of companies. It's only going to grow. Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook, twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize best ai/ml in existence to steal people's attention, at this point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best years on making ads even more effective instead of creating actual wealth. In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without long term damage to real productivity. This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates until there's nothing left, after which everything stops with no system energy reserves. That's how Soviet Union ended.
• raptor99 5y ago
  I think you can sub in the word Money or Currency in this headline and it would still ring true or perhaps even more true
• xtat 5y ago
  What this article does is let me take a mental not to take anything too seriously from this source that pops up in the future.
• kaminar 5y ago
  Greater fool theory, in either case.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  More like deflector.com. I'm not going to claim that cryptocurrency is going to change the world for the better, but this is an article almost entirely composed of straw men. Whether you like cryptocurrency or not, if you understand it at all and have actually heard the evangelists' arguments and understood them almost every single point made in this article doesn't really apply.
• tradertef 5y ago
  I was thinking like the headline until I witnessed that a government seized assets of thousands and left them pennyless in a very short time. After coup attempt in Turkey, 1.5 million people are investigated with accusation of being a member of armed terrorist organization (population of Turkey is ~80 million). Lots of people who could run away found their assets were frozen, and eventually legally or illegally seized. All of a sudden they were poor. Were they kept some of their assets in Bitcoin, they could easily move them out of the country. Yes, the state can still go after them but it becomes much more difficult. This alone is sufficient for me to "invest" a percentage of my assets in Bitcoin in case something bad happens. Yes, it is unlikely but anything that makes a state stronger bully should be done.
  • digianarchist 5y ago
    The fact that Bitcoin is a complete failure as a currency is why it's not practical to keep all of your assets in it even as a targeted person.
    • tradertef 5y ago
      Complete failure.. haha..
    • tradertef 5y ago
      Complete failure adopted by a nation state: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1441846960332361730?s=20 https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1441846960332361730?s...
      • digianarchist 5y ago
        Not the win you think it is.
    • andirk 5y ago
      Don't keep all your assets in anything, including blood-fueled fiat. I have bought plenty of things, traded, gifted plenty of crypto, so to me and a lot of ppl around me, it's a currency.
• bob229 5y ago
  Cryptos are trash
• fallingknife_ 5y ago
  This is as boring and ignorant an article as I've seen in 10 years of participating in blockchain. Please, if you're going to hate on bitcoin, try to bring something new or interesting to the convo.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    The good criticisms of blockchain are old and boring. It's slow, it uses a lot of energy, not being regulated is bad actually, reversible transactions are good, etc.
• amanda62996 5y ago
  My experience with Qshield recovery is not recommendable due to their unclear activities. You can report with your local authority service but the issue is that they receive a thousands cases in an order of priority, and these might make you wait for long while waiting for a feedback. However, if you are to file a report with a company, make sure it’s a legitimate one. One I’ll recommend is vibrant horizon tech because they successfully helped me in getting my bitcoin when I lost it to scammers. They were very transparent in their process and they carried me along every stage of the process.
• amanda62996 5y ago
  My experience with Qshield recovery is not recommendable due to their unclear activities I was deceived by making profit which are not realistic. You can report with your local authority service but the issue is that they receive a thousands cases in an order of priority, and these might make you wait for long while waiting for a feedback. However, if you are to file a report with a company, make sure it’s a legitimate one. One I’ll recommend is vibrant horizon tech because they successfully helped me in getting my bitcoin when I lost it to scammers. They were very transparent in their process and they carried me along every stage of the process.