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I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was
by danaos 1y ago
I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets.
During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these abductions. Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society.
- elevaet 1y agoI had a similar experience, and also have zero regrets about missing out on gains. The baked-in energy wastage and the scams and memes were a complete turnoff. That's not the way I want to get rich. Similarly I wouldn't invest in an arms manufacturer or a plastic bag company. Money that doesn't align with your values is just bad mojo.
- NoOn3 1y agoIf you think about it deeply, it's still not entirely clear who consumes more energy: the traditional banking sector and servicing of visa, mastercard, etc. cards, or cryptocurrency technologies. At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.
- aredox 1y agoExcept that the traditional banking sector does much more than cryptocurrencies do. Bitcoin still runs only around 5-7 transactions per seconds - several orders of magnitude less than Visa alone. https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transactions-per-... https://crypto.com/en/university/blockchain-scalability https://crypto.com/en/university/blockchain-scalability
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- Ekaros 1y agoAt least banking I believe if someone went out and said we could save 100 million on energy cost by spending 10 million. They would at least consider doing it, if it looked realistic enough. On other hand efficiency for BTC mining does not matter. The energy expenditure always approaches the value of mined coins. When efficiency increase same energy is spend just to do more hashes, which are really not useful.
- matkoniecz 1y ago> At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big. in total? or per transaction? How many transaction BTC makes compared to Visa/Mastercard/bank transfers?
- rokkamokka 1y agoI'm glad you've made peace with your financial loss. It is an important thing not to dwell on the past in order to be able to move forward, a lesson it took me long to internalize myself.
- razakel 1y agoHindsight is always 20/20. You mustn't judge your past decisions based on information you didn't have at the time. That way lies madness.
- dgrr19 1y agomemecoins have nothing to do with BTC. Talk about the price was always a thing because BTC is a currency, thus price is key. The tech is good, or it was at the time. I don't see the case for money laundering in BTC, only one could be XMR and mixers in ETH. Apart from that, in general cryptocurrency is not good for laundering since the blockchain can be tracked.
- mvdtnz 1y ago> because BTC is a currency The big narrative I keep hearing about bitcoin the past ~8 years is that it's no longer considered a currency even by the true believers.
- trealira 1y agoI'm not really a Bitcoin true believer, but it seems like a currency to me. I've had to use it. There's certain medication that's cheaper for me to buy online from overseas than it is in the US (where I live) even with my insurance. Those from whom I've bought it only accept payment in Bitcoin. I'm going to admit that it seems kind of sketchy, but I'm grateful for the existence of BTC because of it, and I think it really does seem like a good decentralized currency in that situation. Maybe skeptics would label this money laundering or criminal activity, but I'm using it to buy medication I have a prescription for; if this is illicit, it feels like it shouldn't be.
- satanfirst 1y agoWatching how it is working. That the laundering can be tracked is just an expense to the process of recruiting suckers to be the visible parties who eventually do time and don't know about anything but the other visible parties.
- dgrr19 1y agoBut that also happens in the fiat system, so where's the flaw in crypto?
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- onion2k 1y agoToo many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society. Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the original idea lost all its meaning so the well-meaning folk left.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoBitcoin was invented with a number go up mechanic, and the idea that a single Bitcoin would be immensely valuable were the currency to gain traction was a point of discussion from the start Fact is it became popular with speculators faster than it did with anybody else, but the hodlers weren't doing anything to stop people from using it to buy pizza.
- tromp 1y agoThe capped emission certainly encourages FOMO and speculation. A fixed block reward would still provide scarcity in the long term while strongly discouraging speculation [1]. [1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply
- rchaud 1y agoDoesn't seem like a hard cap when every BTC is almost infinitely divisible into smaller amounts of "satoshis".
- jazzyjackson 1y agodenominating US money supply in hay pennies does not double the money supply
- tromp 1y agoEnjoy your uncapped supply of food and drinks, with each kg almost infinitely divisible into septillions of molecules.
- vkou 1y ago> Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society. To be fair, almost nothing that most techies work on benefits society.
- AaronAPU 1y agoI often ask myself, if not crypto what other things would those same people be ruining?
- dgrr19 1y ago> Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society Decentralization doesn't benefit society? umh...
- buran77 1y ago"Decentralization" is a generic principle and a very selective choice in this case. What was the specific practical implementation that was so beneficial to society to this day? Centralization is what enabled today's societies to thrive. So when talking about decentralization you have to get into the specifics to show the value.
- dgrr19 1y agoTell third-world countries that centralization is good :) Centralization could be good, sometimes (if it works idk). The problem is that the financial world has been monopolized by certain entities and the barrier of entry is enormous. It is never fair to not play by the same rules when regulation favors big institutions, etc... Access to credit is difficult sometimes and unfair. But that is just a reason you could give in the US. Decentralization ensures that countries that condemn their citizens to raising inflation can access other types of income. Some argentinians get paid in USDC, because their currency is just worthless in other countries, and they would never be able to access USD in their banks. Decentralization (I have in mind something like Hyperliquid or even BTC) ensures that everybody in the world have access to the same economy without intermediaries asking for a fee. Which means, a person in Indian can access to income the same way a person in the US would. Or you could do a transfer overseas with less fees or regulation problems.
- buran77 1y ago> Decentralization (I have in mind something like Hyperliquid or even BTC) ensures that everybody in the world have access to the same economy without intermediaries asking for a fee. Which means, a person in Indian can access to income the same way a person in the US would. And do they? In practice? The theory is always sweet, but in practice once you take away "crime" and "hold to sell high" you'll be hard pressed to see too many, or widespread instances of usefulness. You don't make society better by just building a taller peak for a few if at the same time you're digging even deeper troughs for the many. > Or you could do a transfer overseas with less fees or regulation problems. Every time someone gets swindled out of their "deregulated, decentralized" money, every time someone loses a finger for their million dollar wallet, you have one more voice asking a centralized organization for protection, maybe with some regulation. You handwave away all the obvious problems, even though technology or time won't solve any of them. Without protection most people will be screwed out of their belongings. Ask that person in India if they're eager to "access to income the same way a person in the US would" (whatever that means) if this means there's no recourse when they lose the money.
- tm-guimaraes 1y agoStablecoins are actually the future of remittances, the problem is which stablecoin is safe and has enough adoption. (When a big or central bank decides to have a stablecoin, things will change a lot) I work in “traditional” (as in, non crypto) payment systems, and i can tell you that plenty of companies are looking into using cryto rails for complex remmitance routes. The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. For these “small” banks it can be extremely hard to get better banking partners for better network (as in banking not IT) connection (multiple reasons, from price to available business partner, and company bandwith to go with the project) Stable coins are much simper by comparison, you just need a wallet, and you ate a n a global network with automated settlement. Now whats lacking is standardizing how to send a message “ your crypto X received money from our crypto wallet Y, from our customer with acct number yyy, intended to your customer with acct number xxx” Still some guys send iso message via swift to semd those intents and then settle via crypto. This is a non existing problem for intra-eu payments due to all eu members being part of TARGET settlement system, and there are pan-EU clearing systems, but as soon as you get to more “disconnected “ countries, or “smaller” banks cross continent, it’s a pain.
- soco 1y agoAnd there it is: the first valid use case for a coin I have ever heard! (nb: I'm not much into crypto, there may be more I have missed)
- hiq 1y ago> The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. But why is this complicated? Isn't it mostly about regulations / KYC / AML, rather than anything technical? Stablecoins are much simpler because they don't do anything with respect to regulations, they're just a dumb ledger. For those who don't want to bypass regulations and the legal system, stablecoins bring as much as yet another database / ledger, which are not the problem in the first place.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoI had a similar experience and lost I think like one coin to mtgox - thinking nothing of it, it’s on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere. I think more crucially though is that crypto people just have absolutely zero understanding of the concept of money in a political sense. Money is not real - it’s a social experience - and the fact is monetary sovereignty is by far the most important thing for any state to maintain. If bitcoin or any other of the cryptocurrencies were actually useful, they would be immediately outlawed because they would subvert the control the state has over economics Even if they didn’t or couldn’t make it illegal, they would make it dollar parity, and then tax it such that it just gets absorbed into the local financial system Fully realized cryptocurrency would destabilize the entire economic system of intermediaries and that’s entirely the purpose of it - per the white paper So anybody who has an undergraduate or masters degree in economics (me) or rather somebody who had a holistic view of economics in the political and monetary sense - immediately understood that there was a limit to how far this could go before state intervention The reality is, it never actually took off as a medium of exchange - and so never challenged the domination of the US dollar or any other reserve currency. That itself has proof that it doesn’t actually have the social momentum necessary to do what it intended to do.