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The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real u

The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project. And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.

Capira 5y ago
Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. And if you want to launder money use Dollars just like everyone else.
- kuschku 5y ago
  That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.
  - Capira 5y ago
    You can use the Lightning Network to send Bitcoins instantly.
    - kuschku 5y ago
      True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much. The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
      - mr_spothawk 5y ago
        > True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network. > being unable to run a full node anymore Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
        kuschku 5y ago
        > What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network. Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet. The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
        mr_spothawk 5y ago
        It's hard to not talk past people about these things... i'm really struggling to understand what you're trying to communicate. Are you saying that keeping some amount of bitcoin tied up in a LN channel is painful? Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ? Also, you completely ignored the point about running a node.
        kuschku 5y ago
        > Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ? Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses. Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account. Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
    - danaris 5y ago
      Not the point. Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many. You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
    - rvz 5y ago
      Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system' Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'. It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency. [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- asterix_pano 5y ago
  I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)
rvz 5y ago
Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person: > Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere? > So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed? From the other reply: > Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments? Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.
- jiscariot 5y ago
  HN is heavily affluent and westerner-skewed, but how about when you have a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency? We often praise projects that morph from their intended purpose in to something else (e.g. a good % of tech out there).
  - kuschku 5y ago
    Then monero is what you’ll want to use. Not ETH, BTC, or NFTs.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    My understanding is that in those circumstances the people move to US dollars.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro. No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude. Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200% Etherum's is ~300% Monero, 330% It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.
    - 5y ago
the_only_law 5y ago
> and so much focus on buzzwords The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage? People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage? There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game? There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgb23 5y ago
    > Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage? Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions. > People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage? This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many. > Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms. There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years. This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after. Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out. There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.

Capira 5y ago

Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. And if you want to launder money use Dollars just like everyone else.

kuschku 5y ago
That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.
- Capira 5y ago
  You can use the Lightning Network to send Bitcoins instantly.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much. The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
    - mr_spothawk 5y ago
      > True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network. > being unable to run a full node anymore Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
      - kuschku 5y ago
        > What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network. Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet. The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
        mr_spothawk 5y ago
        It's hard to not talk past people about these things... i'm really struggling to understand what you're trying to communicate. Are you saying that keeping some amount of bitcoin tied up in a LN channel is painful? Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ? Also, you completely ignored the point about running a node.
        kuschku 5y ago
        > Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ? Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses. Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account. Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Not the point. Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many. You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
  - rvz 5y ago
    Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system' Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'. It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency. [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
asterix_pano 5y ago
I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)

rvz 5y ago

Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person: > Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere? > So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed? From the other reply: > Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. Buy Bitcoin and use it for what? Currency? Payments? Bitcoin has failed at being useful at all and it's intended purpose which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Not an 'investment', 'store of value' and 'digital gold'.

jiscariot 5y ago
HN is heavily affluent and westerner-skewed, but how about when you have a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency? We often praise projects that morph from their intended purpose in to something else (e.g. a good % of tech out there).
- kuschku 5y ago
  Then monero is what you’ll want to use. Not ETH, BTC, or NFTs.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  My understanding is that in those circumstances the people move to US dollars.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency As a sibling comment said, they move to a separate able currency like dollars or Euro. No one in their right mind will move to a fantasy token whose value oscillates up and down every second, sometimes to within several orders of magnitude. Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is 200% Etherum's is ~300% Monero, 330% It's not as bad as Venezuela's or Zombabwe's hyperinflation, but no ine in their right mind would use a currency this volatile.
  - 5y ago

the_only_law 5y ago

> and so much focus on buzzwords The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.

aww_dang 5y ago
Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage? People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage? There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game? There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dgb23 5y ago
  > Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage? Criticizing over-engineered cloud solutions is done all the time. At the same time there are a ton of useful and pragmatic cloud solutions. > People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage? This is being criticized all the time. At the same time there are useful financial products that are quite important for many. > Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms. There is no disruption taking place. That's the issue. It's all just pure hype that quite obviously creates more problems that it claims to solve. People are tired of hearing the same arguments and excuses since years. This is not like the Internet (or anything similar that has been used as an analogy) that was not taken seriously at the beginning, typically by established players who then got surprised shortly after. Quite the contrary. It has been taken seriously but it didn't turn out to be what was promised. Just yet another hype, and "this time it's not like the last time". The negativity surrounding these topics came from insiders and initial adopters who started to speak out. There are maybe some useful things in here that get overshadowed, but to be taken seriously those parts need to very clearly distance themselves from the rest.