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Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was reall

by bedobi 3y ago

Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to. Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for) These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity. You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends. The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.

EGreg 3y ago
I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718... My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did: Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app https://intercoin.app Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin https://youtube.com/intercoin Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai... Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works! Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain) But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists Any community is typically judged by their worst members. Much like a parent is judged by their worst child. Don't feel too bad about it, its just the natural course of things.
- yao420 3y ago
  Is it a dead project now? I searched on the coingecko link you provided and only see $3.9k in liquidity and a single $65 trade in the last 30 days.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Just because speculators aren’t actively trading the token and volume bots aren’t creating fake volume wash trading doesn’t mean the proejct itself is dead at all. One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  I'm very curious the overlap of socialism and the design of intercoin, I wouldn't have picked up socialism by looking through the intercoin site. I'm used to seeing socialism used at a national scale, was your vision to allow a much more local version of socialism with every town effectively running it's own socialist bubble? If not, how would a larger socialist system tie together all the individual currencies used managed by each town? Sorry for the tangent, I've just never really thought of a hyperlocal version of socialism before!
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Sure. I consider utility tokens as libertarian socialism online. They are voluntarist (you opt into using them) and eliminate the extractive shareholder class (which is the reason why, say, Uber drivers pay half their salary to the “owners” of the platform). Selling shares was the old way of raising money and it is the reason why all Big Tech are monopolies. Facebook and Twitter are each controlled by one guy (Elon or Zuck), while gift economies like Linux or the Web enrich the world without a shareholder cabal around Torvalds or TimBL extracting rents. No one advises them “Competition is for losers, Build a monopoly” like Peter Thiel did. By being permissionless and open they have created far more wealth for the world than their capitalist counterparts. Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work. A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities. One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it: https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-delightfully-communist/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-... Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however. I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end. The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums. So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities. Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :) If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web! So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org
pazimzadeh 3y ago
I think there's plenty of room for improvement but.. I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously. Either way, isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation according to Clayten Christensen?
- nailer 3y ago
  I didn’t take cryptocurrency seriously because eth is slow - nobody’s going to wait awkwardly for five minutes while the transaction clears - and gas fees are insanely expensive - nobody will pay 40 dollars for a 5 dollar coffee because the network is busy - and it looks like that won’t ever change. The Coinbase guy recently wasted half a million US dollars in gas fees on a lobbying project. It’s nuts. He could have funded a school. It’s not a good look for Coinbase. I still don’t have any interest in eth but I’m very much interested in cryptocurrency now. There’s a bunch of more scalable and cheaper L1 tech. Not naming names as I don’t want to shill any particular projects but yes. Was not interested in cryptocurrency. Now interested in cryptocurrency.
- bedobi 3y ago
  There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but > I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously. frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years. I don't think most people understand just how small and universally ridiculed, ignored and unknown Bitcoin was for the first couple of years. > isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote. Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't? Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
  - AraceliHarker 3y ago
prepend 3y ago
I thought bitcoin was cool when coins were just a cent. I can’t wait for them to get back to a realistic price so they can actually be used. I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.
- lxgr 3y ago
  The price is completely irrelevant, what matters is the perceived/expected rate of change in prices. A deflationary currency disincentivizes spending, which reduces velocity, which aggravates deflation – a death sentence for two of the three properties of money (it's not a medium of exchange if nobody is exchanging it; it's not a unit of accounting if prices fluctuate strongly – and that includes falling prices). I was also fascinated by Bitcoin in its very early days, from both a technical and an economical/monetary angle – the former fascination remains, but I'm pretty disillusioned on the latter after learning more about the nature of money and inflation (and especially how Bitcoin maximalists use a fringe economical model and definition of inflation to justify the design).
  - rcme 3y ago
    Deflation has a bad rap because its insidious form is caused by economic contraction. But other causes of deflation are neutral / positive and there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. Go look up how much a 400 MHz processor (e.g. Pentium II) cost in 1997 vs. today. Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Both (too much) inflation and deflation are ultimately very bad for money: Too much inflation ruins the "store of value" aspect; deflation disincentivizes trading it for goods and services, cutting into the "medium of exchange" aspect. Any drastic change of value/purchasing power, i.e. both inflation and deflation, make it useless as a unit of account. > Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand. Processors aren't purported to be money, though.
arp242 3y ago
To quote myself[1]: > First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt." This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law"). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092
- xyproto 3y ago
  Additionally, if there is a lack of people abusing the system, someone will step up and fill the gap.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Ah yes, as follows from the well-known law of grifter equilibrium.
listenallyall 3y ago
quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."
- bedobi 3y ago
  That was just us goofing around. What got me excited was mostly the enabling underbanked people argument for crypto. There's countless people all over the world who can't get a bank account, or if they could, can't get one that is reliable or useful enough for their needs. Eg, maybe the currency is too unstable, or maybe there's too many restrictions on international transfers and commerce etc etc. These people are left with cash and predatory "businesses" like Western Union as their only options. It's not fair and can and should change, but sadly, crypto has spectacularly failed to deliver on its potential here.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    Has it? Crypto proponents all the time are talking about the unbanked and people in countries with unstable currencies. I really don't know, but what's the deal in El Salvador? in South America? Ukraine? Aren't people using it?
hpeter 3y ago
Same. I used to be really into BTC around 2011-2014 but then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it. I like the idea of P2P cash but I don't want the casino.I don't wanna invest, I just wanna use it as money. It didn't work out so well for that.
- frozenport 3y ago
  2011 was tea party anti-establishment doomers
- Grimburger 3y ago
  > then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it Did the value of bitcoin actually go up, or did the thing you measure it by go down? I will happily bet on the number of bitcoins in existence by say 2030. Would you bet on the number of dollars in existence by then? https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-...
  - Synaesthesia 3y ago
    So if everybody just bought bitcoin, everyone in the world would all be rich! Brilliant!
  - dsmithn 3y ago
    I measure it by pizzas per Bitcoin. It’s definitely gone up.
- duringwork12 3y ago
  I sold all at 2014 that I had mined because exactly this. It went fast from maybe useful to just scam.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
I've looped back to crypto currencies three times over the last decade. Each time I started it with a bit of hope that the space progressed and it was time to invest, each time I was disappointed to see it only got worse. Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose. I'll stick with using the OG blockchain, git.

by bedobi 3y ago

EGreg 3y ago

I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718... My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did: Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app https://intercoin.app Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin https://youtube.com/intercoin Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai... Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works! Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain) But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P

surgical_fire 3y ago
> But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists Any community is typically judged by their worst members. Much like a parent is judged by their worst child. Don't feel too bad about it, its just the natural course of things.
yao420 3y ago
Is it a dead project now? I searched on the coingecko link you provided and only see $3.9k in liquidity and a single $65 trade in the last 30 days.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Just because speculators aren’t actively trading the token and volume bots aren’t creating fake volume wash trading doesn’t mean the proejct itself is dead at all. One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
I'm very curious the overlap of socialism and the design of intercoin, I wouldn't have picked up socialism by looking through the intercoin site. I'm used to seeing socialism used at a national scale, was your vision to allow a much more local version of socialism with every town effectively running it's own socialist bubble? If not, how would a larger socialist system tie together all the individual currencies used managed by each town? Sorry for the tangent, I've just never really thought of a hyperlocal version of socialism before!
- EGreg 3y ago
  Sure. I consider utility tokens as libertarian socialism online. They are voluntarist (you opt into using them) and eliminate the extractive shareholder class (which is the reason why, say, Uber drivers pay half their salary to the “owners” of the platform). Selling shares was the old way of raising money and it is the reason why all Big Tech are monopolies. Facebook and Twitter are each controlled by one guy (Elon or Zuck), while gift economies like Linux or the Web enrich the world without a shareholder cabal around Torvalds or TimBL extracting rents. No one advises them “Competition is for losers, Build a monopoly” like Peter Thiel did. By being permissionless and open they have created far more wealth for the world than their capitalist counterparts. Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work. A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities. One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it: https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-delightfully-communist/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-... Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however. I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end. The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums. So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities. Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :) If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web! So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org

pazimzadeh 3y ago

I think there's plenty of room for improvement but.. I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously. Either way, isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation according to Clayten Christensen?

nailer 3y ago
I didn’t take cryptocurrency seriously because eth is slow - nobody’s going to wait awkwardly for five minutes while the transaction clears - and gas fees are insanely expensive - nobody will pay 40 dollars for a 5 dollar coffee because the network is busy - and it looks like that won’t ever change. The Coinbase guy recently wasted half a million US dollars in gas fees on a lobbying project. It’s nuts. He could have funded a school. It’s not a good look for Coinbase. I still don’t have any interest in eth but I’m very much interested in cryptocurrency now. There’s a bunch of more scalable and cheaper L1 tech. Not naming names as I don’t want to shill any particular projects but yes. Was not interested in cryptocurrency. Now interested in cryptocurrency.
bedobi 3y ago
There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but > I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously. frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years. I don't think most people understand just how small and universally ridiculed, ignored and unknown Bitcoin was for the first couple of years. > isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote. Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't? Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
- AraceliHarker 3y ago

prepend 3y ago

I thought bitcoin was cool when coins were just a cent. I can’t wait for them to get back to a realistic price so they can actually be used. I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.

lxgr 3y ago
The price is completely irrelevant, what matters is the perceived/expected rate of change in prices. A deflationary currency disincentivizes spending, which reduces velocity, which aggravates deflation – a death sentence for two of the three properties of money (it's not a medium of exchange if nobody is exchanging it; it's not a unit of accounting if prices fluctuate strongly – and that includes falling prices). I was also fascinated by Bitcoin in its very early days, from both a technical and an economical/monetary angle – the former fascination remains, but I'm pretty disillusioned on the latter after learning more about the nature of money and inflation (and especially how Bitcoin maximalists use a fringe economical model and definition of inflation to justify the design).
- rcme 3y ago
  Deflation has a bad rap because its insidious form is caused by economic contraction. But other causes of deflation are neutral / positive and there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. Go look up how much a 400 MHz processor (e.g. Pentium II) cost in 1997 vs. today. Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Both (too much) inflation and deflation are ultimately very bad for money: Too much inflation ruins the "store of value" aspect; deflation disincentivizes trading it for goods and services, cutting into the "medium of exchange" aspect. Any drastic change of value/purchasing power, i.e. both inflation and deflation, make it useless as a unit of account. > Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand. Processors aren't purported to be money, though.

arp242 3y ago

To quote myself[1]: > First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt." This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law"). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092

xyproto 3y ago
Additionally, if there is a lack of people abusing the system, someone will step up and fill the gap.
- arp242 3y ago
  Ah yes, as follows from the well-known law of grifter equilibrium.

listenallyall 3y ago

quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."

bedobi 3y ago
That was just us goofing around. What got me excited was mostly the enabling underbanked people argument for crypto. There's countless people all over the world who can't get a bank account, or if they could, can't get one that is reliable or useful enough for their needs. Eg, maybe the currency is too unstable, or maybe there's too many restrictions on international transfers and commerce etc etc. These people are left with cash and predatory "businesses" like Western Union as their only options. It's not fair and can and should change, but sadly, crypto has spectacularly failed to deliver on its potential here.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  Has it? Crypto proponents all the time are talking about the unbanked and people in countries with unstable currencies. I really don't know, but what's the deal in El Salvador? in South America? Ukraine? Aren't people using it?

hpeter 3y ago

Same. I used to be really into BTC around 2011-2014 but then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it. I like the idea of P2P cash but I don't want the casino.I don't wanna invest, I just wanna use it as money. It didn't work out so well for that.

frozenport 3y ago
2011 was tea party anti-establishment doomers
Grimburger 3y ago
> then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it Did the value of bitcoin actually go up, or did the thing you measure it by go down? I will happily bet on the number of bitcoins in existence by say 2030. Would you bet on the number of dollars in existence by then? https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-...
- Synaesthesia 3y ago
  So if everybody just bought bitcoin, everyone in the world would all be rich! Brilliant!
- dsmithn 3y ago
  I measure it by pizzas per Bitcoin. It’s definitely gone up.
duringwork12 3y ago
I sold all at 2014 that I had mined because exactly this. It went fast from maybe useful to just scam.

flagrant_taco 3y ago

I've looped back to crypto currencies three times over the last decade. Each time I started it with a bit of hope that the space progressed and it was time to invest, each time I was disappointed to see it only got worse. Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose. I'll stick with using the OG blockchain, git.