6 ms·

I think there are a large group of techies who hold similar opinions and never really bought into the hype, but still sit and watch with amazement (and maybe en

I think there are a large group of techies who hold similar opinions and never really bought into the hype, but still sit and watch with amazement (and maybe envy) at how something that they believe is fundamentally flawed has passed the test of time and recovered through many boom-bust cycles.

loeg 1y ago
What boom-bust cycles have there been since 2009?
- maxbond 1y ago
  I assume you're asking because there has only been one major crash of the financial markets since 2008, but there have been numerous cycles local to cryptoassets (eg the NFT/web3 driven cycle several years ago). So, the answer is more or less "all of them," from dollar parity day to the latest all time highs.
silisili 1y ago
That's me. If there's one thing I've learned about it, it's that we'll never get rich quick as over logical people. Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. Of course og Twitter was dumb when group sms existed. Of course Bitcoin is dumb because...(waves hands in all encompassing disbelief). Wrong every time. It doesn't pay to be the 'smartest guy in the room', as a figure of speech. It pays to be able to figure out how the everyman will act, no matter how much it pains you. And maybe those people who do are the real 'smartest people in the room.'
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Survivorship bias is significant though, it's hard to notice—or even find and enumerate—all the people who may have lost money or given up earlier with a similar business/product. https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
  - dominicrose 1y ago
    Exactly. History is written by the victors. I call them success stories (when they're not straight lies) but the word survivor is stronger and seems to indicate that the others don't survive. It's common knowledge that one shouldn't pay back a low-interest loan faster than is expected, because it's better to have liquidity or to invest. But it's real easy to look at the past and say "oh I could've invested in that". It's also very easy to look at success stories and forget that poverty is widespread and the poor don't talk about their misfortune. Video games are interesting because you can count how many times your character dies before you actually manage to finish the game.
- Ozzie_osman 1y ago
  I think there's a difference between Bitcoin and Dropbox/Twitter. Even if you were skeptical about the latter products at first, with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make a retroactive argument for why they made sense (better usability, better network effects, etc). But with Bitcoin, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still don't get it.
  - evrimoztamur 1y ago
    Bitcoin is about moving large amounts of money around and evading taxes whenever possible.
    - mallowdram 1y ago
      He who controls the arbitrary, controls the universe.
      - evrimoztamur 1y ago
        Money's capacity to organise labour is still very much real.
        mallowdram 1y ago
        What organizes labor are the specifics. This is what math doesn't get, math isn't timeless, it's trapped in exact moments where it appears real. The arbitrary is simply a conduit metaphor, not only not real, but entirely illusory, prone to primate biases and exploitation. And all metaphors eventually fail, that's a bio-ecological certainty. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on arbitrary markets. There are no limitless molecules or homeostatic climate. The system is already bust in numerous indexes, we're just riding the arbitrary fan out.
        selimthegrim 1y ago
        I’m sure there’s some niche Japanese example.
- fhd2 1y ago
  Some people are smart in the sense that they are very logical. Others are great predictors of how people will behave, I would call those smart, too. I'm not in that group, but feels wrong to dismiss it as "not smart". Just different smart.
  - earnesti 1y ago
    I don't think the first group is smart as all. Understanding human behaviour is pretty basic skill. Missing a basic understanding on how humans work is just stupidity. Being able to build great lego sets, but not being able to have a basic conversation with other human beings, is not smart, but autistic.
    - exe34 1y ago
      that's an original definition, you should publish it in a journal of psychology!
    - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
      But then if you travel along the autism line until you reach turbo autism, doesn't it just loop back around to being smart again? Like Kim Peek or Scott Flansburg?
      - InfiniteLoup 1y ago
        >Like Kim Peek or Scott Flansburg? Interesting cases, thanks for sharing. I didn't know what real-life inspiration the movie "Rain Man" came from. However, the two people seem to be worlds apart socially. While Peek seems to be extremely "stunted" in his social development, Flansburg appears to be coping well with his position as a speaker, which I always thought to be rather unusual for people with autism spectrum disorder.
        MarcelOlsz 1y ago
        I was thinking the same thing, but I was watching his human calculator video [0] and there are moments where his mouth moves quicker than his brain and he has to catch himself a few times. My guess is he's given this talk and rehearsed the mannerisms so many times that he's on auto-pilot. [0] https://youtu.be/hesKQ_y1P7k?si=UkOIHLkGvFuNGc8S https://youtu.be/hesKQ_y1P7k?si=UkOIHLkGvFuNGc8S
- earnesti 1y ago
  > It doesn't pay to be the 'smartest guy in the room' But it is important that you keep thinking that you are the smartest man in the room.
- procaryote 1y ago
  Yes, although while being smart about bitcoin hasn't allowed me to predict its price at all, it has helped me not waste time on "what if we did this on the block chain?" One of them is in the class of "if enough people believe it, it's true", the other one is actually subject to logic.
- e1g 1y ago
  The cynic always sounds smart and remains poor.
  - exe34 1y ago
    The Cynic on the other hand knows how to enjoy life with just enough. He is free, a spy for the gods.
    - earnesti 1y ago
      But he keeps writing and talking about people who have more than enough, and how they are wrong.
      - exe34 1y ago
        He points out their foolishness - he has what they will never have. Enough.
        e1g 1y ago
        It takes no imagination or insight to see reasons why something wouldn’t work. It’s the default mental pathway for every risk-averse beast. Skepticism is not born out of contentment and abundance but out of self-preservation. It’s not correlated with feeling enough, but with feeling bitterness and envy of those who took risks and gained an advantage instead of suffering consequences.
        fancyfredbot 1y ago
        People who are content feel less need to take risks by accepting dubious statements without proof. They have what they need so why risk it for more? Sceptical people will be grounded by what we know to be true. They will explore new ideas but will not be swept up by them. We need people like that or we'll waste our time on flights of fancy. But we need the irrational optimists to explore new ideas too. It's a classic exploration vs exploitation trade-off.
- tarsinge 1y ago
  It’s because in investment it’s not about being right. Thats why I invested in it. Also gold is the same, makes no sense on paper, still works. Second effect is it made me lean left economically realizing how flawed are liberal economics basic assumptions about rational actors and efficient markets.
- johncolanduoni 1y ago
  This depends on what people mean when they say “Bitcoin is dumb”. Cryptocurrency as a speculative asset, regardless of whether it’s driven by the flocking of the everyman, is clearly capable of producing personal wealth the same way every other highly volatile speculative asset can. But usually people hawking cryptocurrency are talking about other applications than that, and those are almost always unrealized or just straight up scams.
  - fastglass 1y ago
    1. in terms of "proof", eg. "asset performance", it's proven its more capable 2. crypto as a whole is the riskiest investment on the market 3. speculative assets in general or in highly-notable abundance rn are performing abnormally well, better than assets have performed in the past by a few metrics, as though they're trying to compete or hopefully catch up with the anomaly of bitcoin's growth
  - tobias3 1y ago
    Bitcoin is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and miners continuously have to pay for electricity and chips to keep the game going. It is also a dump speculative asset. I'd even claim Tesla stock is better as speculative asset, at least it may be a positive-sum game. Caveat: I am one of those people OP mentioned.
    - derangedHorse 1y ago
      Maybe seeing you’re argument as a template will have you recognize the weakness of your argument: {{currency}} is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and {{entities}} continuously have to {{maintain infrastructure}}. An actual argument could be derived from the last point by asking whether the cost of maintaining the infrastructure is worth it. This is something the market decides.
      - tobias3 1y ago
        My argument was specific to the use case as speculative asset. Currencies usually have other uses.
- jasode 1y ago
  >, it's that we'll never get rich quick as over logical people. Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. It's neither over-logical nor "smartest guy in the room" to equate Dropbox with rysnc. Instead, it's a category error. Consider that rsync syntax is basically : rsync <src> <dst> Before that command is run, that "<dst>" has to exist somewhere that's reachable by all client devices that want to see the same files. That means creating that "dst" target such as arranging a $5/month VPS at Hetzner, or a self-hosted NAS at home with Tailscale/CloudflareTunnels VPN, etc. Dropbox takes care of the "<dst>". rsync does not. That makes a profound difference in usability for non-techies. (One could use rsync only as a peer-to-peer sync between client computers with no "server" but that doesn't work well for a 1-to-many file sharing setup to facilitate a "Single Source Of Truth".)
- derangedHorse 1y ago
  Or perhaps there are important properties about these things that you're missing. Something that’s causing you to conflate similar use cases as alternatives to these projects. Maybe the perception of being the ‘smartest guy in the room’ is really just hubris.
- sealeck 1y ago
  > Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. Of course og Twitter was dumb when group sms existed. Of course Bitcoin is dumb because...(waves hands in all encompassing disbelief). Twitter/Dropbox offer more convenience to people: Bitcoin offers _less_. That's why people are using Bitcoin for two things: crime and speculation. People aren't buying houses with Bitcoin, they don't use it as a store of value (because it has extreme deflation), and they aren't doing their books using BTC as the currency. What features/improvements does Bitcoin offer over the financial system? So far, the differences to me seem to be - It's easy (or at least possible) to get a bank transaction reversed by going to court. - If you forget your password, your bank can reset it and you don't lose all your money. - When you transfer money using your bank, it arrives immediately in the recipient's account. When you transfer money using Bitcoin, it takes hours. The bank checks that the name matches the bank account number beforehand. - If you get hacked, and the hacker tries to steal all your money, your bank's fraud detection system will kick in and stop this. - Banks are regulated, and the currency is stable. This means that you can quote a price in USD, and do your accounting in USD, whereas very few people do their accounting in BTC. - People have faith in fiat currencies because they have state backing, which means that the central bank will intervene to maintain price stability.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." True. But if you're invested in the market staying irrational, it can crush you when it abruptly becomes rational. We may not get rich, but we may miss out on becoming poor, too.
- tim333 1y ago
  Bitcoin is kind of brilliant in a way - the first secure decentralised currency. The white paper is a good read. Twitter and Dropbox were much more obvious things.
  - armitron 1y ago
    Did you bother to read the OP text where it’s made crystal clear that Bitcoin is neither secure nor decentralized?
- midmagico 1y ago
  lol ArtForz was an engineer who single-handedly designed from scratch low-run book printing machines, built his house with CHP that he designed and created himself, created his own pick-n-place machines from parts he had laying around, reversed a hidden opcode in the AMD GPUs of the time, designed at the gate-level his own FPGA, manually soldered his own sASIC, and printed his own MOSIS chips. He was the smartest person in the room. By far. Many of the very early non-get-rich-quick people that didn't think anything would happen for decades but were interested in Bitcoin, were in fact the applied-science smartest people in the room. The people generally who thought it was digital tulips even a few years later were also people who thought they were the smartest people in the room, but were actually nowhere close. Others who were very early (source: I was there and interacted with them) were extremely wealthy investment bankers with a track history of being able to make money, some kinds of cryptographers (Hal, Adam, etc) and others who were ultra-competent, often inventors of new technique in their own right. It's a well-studied but unfortunately not particularly well-known result that the people most interested in Bitcoin are at the two ends of the expertise spectrum—highly highly financially competent, and financially incompetent people. You will never hear from most of the highly-competent people because they also recognize that being noisy about owning Bitcoin draws a giant target on their backs. E.g. try and find ArtForz now. I would offer that the late and very great James Randi's often-repeated comments on ultra high-skilled people being some of the easiest to trick are probably illustrative, and my personal opinion at the moment is that many of these people have been tricked long ago into thinking that Bitcoin is something bad.
otterley 1y ago
It’s not because crypto is useful for the average person. It’s because demand for a place to safely store illicit assets is practically inexhaustible. Had I the foresight to realize that criminals would turn to it as an alternative to traditional forms of hoarding and money laundering, I would have invested in it ages ago.
- earnesti 1y ago
  Isn't the property that it keeps getting up pretty useful for the average person.
- procaryote 1y ago
  I saw that potential as obvious from day one. I just thought governments would care. Usually when someone sets up a money laundry ring, someone tries to stop it. My best idea, that probably gives governments too much credit, is that it's pretty useful to have a transparent record of illicit money flows, and that you can be OK with a bit of crime to get it.
  - earnesti 1y ago
    Governments do care, they have developed heavy regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrencies, such as MiCa in EU. I think central banks have been giving (negative) comments about Bitcoin since 2011 or so when it first gained modest publicity. Governments are huge and consists of many different institutions. I guess many would like to see Bitcoin stopped, but how to do that without fondling with the basic human rights, such as the right to free communication? So far the governments have been regulating it, trying to reduce the illicit use, which doesn't really stop it but actually makes it more legitimate.
  - Scoundreller 1y ago
    Government sure killed egold and liberty reserve.
- spaceman_2020 1y ago
  Baffling that people make blanket statements like these without any real world experience of living in high inflation, poor countries. All the contractors I’ve hired from Philippines or Nigeria or Vietnam want to get paid in USD stablecoins because their currencies depreciate 5-15% against the dollar every year and stablecoins help them protect their capital Same for friends living in high inflation LatAm countries - crypto stablecoins are a way to escape rampant inflation
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
m463 1y ago
I could never wrap my mind around the formation of the united states, over 200 years ago, based on people agreeing. There was basically no technology back then. Their "software" was the constitution.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  The Continental Congress was famously held in secret. A small number of wealthy aristocrats waged war on their home country without the consent of the people they were governing. I don’t remember the powhatan or Lenape (Virginia-MD-PA tribes that were exterminated in order to build the core of the US trade and political networks) being consulted on any of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan
tomgp 1y ago
I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true) [edited to correct a couple of typos]
tanh 1y ago
I could always see how useful it is for criminal enterprise. That doesn't mean I want in. I wish I could avoid it altogether. Alas even stocks in my ETF holdings are proxies for some cryptocurrencies.
fxtentacle 1y ago
It didn't take long before it became obvious that Bitcoin would revolutionize money laundering. I think this is more like the righteous vs. evil scale in D&D. Some people are OK with profiting off crime while others aren't. And techies are more likely to be on the righteous side, while bankers, traders, or CEOs are more likely to be on the psychopathic side. And if you look at how many times HSBC has been in the news for working closely with mafia, I'm not surprised that they're selling crypto ETFs now.

loeg 1y ago

What boom-bust cycles have there been since 2009?

maxbond 1y ago
I assume you're asking because there has only been one major crash of the financial markets since 2008, but there have been numerous cycles local to cryptoassets (eg the NFT/web3 driven cycle several years ago). So, the answer is more or less "all of them," from dollar parity day to the latest all time highs.

silisili 1y ago

That's me. If there's one thing I've learned about it, it's that we'll never get rich quick as over logical people. Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. Of course og Twitter was dumb when group sms existed. Of course Bitcoin is dumb because...(waves hands in all encompassing disbelief). Wrong every time. It doesn't pay to be the 'smartest guy in the room', as a figure of speech. It pays to be able to figure out how the everyman will act, no matter how much it pains you. And maybe those people who do are the real 'smartest people in the room.'

Terr_ 1y ago
Survivorship bias is significant though, it's hard to notice—or even find and enumerate—all the people who may have lost money or given up earlier with a similar business/product. https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- dominicrose 1y ago
  Exactly. History is written by the victors. I call them success stories (when they're not straight lies) but the word survivor is stronger and seems to indicate that the others don't survive. It's common knowledge that one shouldn't pay back a low-interest loan faster than is expected, because it's better to have liquidity or to invest. But it's real easy to look at the past and say "oh I could've invested in that". It's also very easy to look at success stories and forget that poverty is widespread and the poor don't talk about their misfortune. Video games are interesting because you can count how many times your character dies before you actually manage to finish the game.
Ozzie_osman 1y ago
I think there's a difference between Bitcoin and Dropbox/Twitter. Even if you were skeptical about the latter products at first, with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make a retroactive argument for why they made sense (better usability, better network effects, etc). But with Bitcoin, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still don't get it.
- evrimoztamur 1y ago
  Bitcoin is about moving large amounts of money around and evading taxes whenever possible.
  - mallowdram 1y ago
    He who controls the arbitrary, controls the universe.
    - evrimoztamur 1y ago
      Money's capacity to organise labour is still very much real.
      - mallowdram 1y ago
        What organizes labor are the specifics. This is what math doesn't get, math isn't timeless, it's trapped in exact moments where it appears real. The arbitrary is simply a conduit metaphor, not only not real, but entirely illusory, prone to primate biases and exploitation. And all metaphors eventually fail, that's a bio-ecological certainty. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on arbitrary markets. There are no limitless molecules or homeostatic climate. The system is already bust in numerous indexes, we're just riding the arbitrary fan out.
        selimthegrim 1y ago
        I’m sure there’s some niche Japanese example.
fhd2 1y ago
Some people are smart in the sense that they are very logical. Others are great predictors of how people will behave, I would call those smart, too. I'm not in that group, but feels wrong to dismiss it as "not smart". Just different smart.
- earnesti 1y ago
  I don't think the first group is smart as all. Understanding human behaviour is pretty basic skill. Missing a basic understanding on how humans work is just stupidity. Being able to build great lego sets, but not being able to have a basic conversation with other human beings, is not smart, but autistic.
  - exe34 1y ago
    that's an original definition, you should publish it in a journal of psychology!
  - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
    But then if you travel along the autism line until you reach turbo autism, doesn't it just loop back around to being smart again? Like Kim Peek or Scott Flansburg?
    - InfiniteLoup 1y ago
      >Like Kim Peek or Scott Flansburg? Interesting cases, thanks for sharing. I didn't know what real-life inspiration the movie "Rain Man" came from. However, the two people seem to be worlds apart socially. While Peek seems to be extremely "stunted" in his social development, Flansburg appears to be coping well with his position as a speaker, which I always thought to be rather unusual for people with autism spectrum disorder.
      - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
        I was thinking the same thing, but I was watching his human calculator video [0] and there are moments where his mouth moves quicker than his brain and he has to catch himself a few times. My guess is he's given this talk and rehearsed the mannerisms so many times that he's on auto-pilot. [0] https://youtu.be/hesKQ_y1P7k?si=UkOIHLkGvFuNGc8S https://youtu.be/hesKQ_y1P7k?si=UkOIHLkGvFuNGc8S
earnesti 1y ago
> It doesn't pay to be the 'smartest guy in the room' But it is important that you keep thinking that you are the smartest man in the room.
procaryote 1y ago
Yes, although while being smart about bitcoin hasn't allowed me to predict its price at all, it has helped me not waste time on "what if we did this on the block chain?" One of them is in the class of "if enough people believe it, it's true", the other one is actually subject to logic.
e1g 1y ago
The cynic always sounds smart and remains poor.
- exe34 1y ago
  The Cynic on the other hand knows how to enjoy life with just enough. He is free, a spy for the gods.
  - earnesti 1y ago
    But he keeps writing and talking about people who have more than enough, and how they are wrong.
    - exe34 1y ago
      He points out their foolishness - he has what they will never have. Enough.
      - e1g 1y ago
        It takes no imagination or insight to see reasons why something wouldn’t work. It’s the default mental pathway for every risk-averse beast. Skepticism is not born out of contentment and abundance but out of self-preservation. It’s not correlated with feeling enough, but with feeling bitterness and envy of those who took risks and gained an advantage instead of suffering consequences.
        fancyfredbot 1y ago
        People who are content feel less need to take risks by accepting dubious statements without proof. They have what they need so why risk it for more? Sceptical people will be grounded by what we know to be true. They will explore new ideas but will not be swept up by them. We need people like that or we'll waste our time on flights of fancy. But we need the irrational optimists to explore new ideas too. It's a classic exploration vs exploitation trade-off.
tarsinge 1y ago
It’s because in investment it’s not about being right. Thats why I invested in it. Also gold is the same, makes no sense on paper, still works. Second effect is it made me lean left economically realizing how flawed are liberal economics basic assumptions about rational actors and efficient markets.
johncolanduoni 1y ago
This depends on what people mean when they say “Bitcoin is dumb”. Cryptocurrency as a speculative asset, regardless of whether it’s driven by the flocking of the everyman, is clearly capable of producing personal wealth the same way every other highly volatile speculative asset can. But usually people hawking cryptocurrency are talking about other applications than that, and those are almost always unrealized or just straight up scams.
- fastglass 1y ago
  1. in terms of "proof", eg. "asset performance", it's proven its more capable 2. crypto as a whole is the riskiest investment on the market 3. speculative assets in general or in highly-notable abundance rn are performing abnormally well, better than assets have performed in the past by a few metrics, as though they're trying to compete or hopefully catch up with the anomaly of bitcoin's growth
- tobias3 1y ago
  Bitcoin is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and miners continuously have to pay for electricity and chips to keep the game going. It is also a dump speculative asset. I'd even claim Tesla stock is better as speculative asset, at least it may be a positive-sum game. Caveat: I am one of those people OP mentioned.
  - derangedHorse 1y ago
    Maybe seeing you’re argument as a template will have you recognize the weakness of your argument: {{currency}} is a negative-sum game. You can only get out what others put in and {{entities}} continuously have to {{maintain infrastructure}}. An actual argument could be derived from the last point by asking whether the cost of maintaining the infrastructure is worth it. This is something the market decides.
    - tobias3 1y ago
      My argument was specific to the use case as speculative asset. Currencies usually have other uses.
jasode 1y ago
>, it's that we'll never get rich quick as over logical people. Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. It's neither over-logical nor "smartest guy in the room" to equate Dropbox with rysnc. Instead, it's a category error. Consider that rsync syntax is basically : rsync <src> <dst> Before that command is run, that "<dst>" has to exist somewhere that's reachable by all client devices that want to see the same files. That means creating that "dst" target such as arranging a $5/month VPS at Hetzner, or a self-hosted NAS at home with Tailscale/CloudflareTunnels VPN, etc. Dropbox takes care of the "<dst>". rsync does not. That makes a profound difference in usability for non-techies. (One could use rsync only as a peer-to-peer sync between client computers with no "server" but that doesn't work well for a 1-to-many file sharing setup to facilitate a "Single Source Of Truth".)
derangedHorse 1y ago
Or perhaps there are important properties about these things that you're missing. Something that’s causing you to conflate similar use cases as alternatives to these projects. Maybe the perception of being the ‘smartest guy in the room’ is really just hubris.
sealeck 1y ago
> Of course Dropbox is dumb when rsync exists. Of course og Twitter was dumb when group sms existed. Of course Bitcoin is dumb because...(waves hands in all encompassing disbelief). Twitter/Dropbox offer more convenience to people: Bitcoin offers _less_. That's why people are using Bitcoin for two things: crime and speculation. People aren't buying houses with Bitcoin, they don't use it as a store of value (because it has extreme deflation), and they aren't doing their books using BTC as the currency. What features/improvements does Bitcoin offer over the financial system? So far, the differences to me seem to be - It's easy (or at least possible) to get a bank transaction reversed by going to court. - If you forget your password, your bank can reset it and you don't lose all your money. - When you transfer money using your bank, it arrives immediately in the recipient's account. When you transfer money using Bitcoin, it takes hours. The bank checks that the name matches the bank account number beforehand. - If you get hacked, and the hacker tries to steal all your money, your bank's fraud detection system will kick in and stop this. - Banks are regulated, and the currency is stable. This means that you can quote a price in USD, and do your accounting in USD, whereas very few people do their accounting in BTC. - People have faith in fiat currencies because they have state backing, which means that the central bank will intervene to maintain price stability.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." True. But if you're invested in the market staying irrational, it can crush you when it abruptly becomes rational. We may not get rich, but we may miss out on becoming poor, too.
tim333 1y ago
Bitcoin is kind of brilliant in a way - the first secure decentralised currency. The white paper is a good read. Twitter and Dropbox were much more obvious things.
- armitron 1y ago
  Did you bother to read the OP text where it’s made crystal clear that Bitcoin is neither secure nor decentralized?
midmagico 1y ago
lol ArtForz was an engineer who single-handedly designed from scratch low-run book printing machines, built his house with CHP that he designed and created himself, created his own pick-n-place machines from parts he had laying around, reversed a hidden opcode in the AMD GPUs of the time, designed at the gate-level his own FPGA, manually soldered his own sASIC, and printed his own MOSIS chips. He was the smartest person in the room. By far. Many of the very early non-get-rich-quick people that didn't think anything would happen for decades but were interested in Bitcoin, were in fact the applied-science smartest people in the room. The people generally who thought it was digital tulips even a few years later were also people who thought they were the smartest people in the room, but were actually nowhere close. Others who were very early (source: I was there and interacted with them) were extremely wealthy investment bankers with a track history of being able to make money, some kinds of cryptographers (Hal, Adam, etc) and others who were ultra-competent, often inventors of new technique in their own right. It's a well-studied but unfortunately not particularly well-known result that the people most interested in Bitcoin are at the two ends of the expertise spectrum—highly highly financially competent, and financially incompetent people. You will never hear from most of the highly-competent people because they also recognize that being noisy about owning Bitcoin draws a giant target on their backs. E.g. try and find ArtForz now. I would offer that the late and very great James Randi's often-repeated comments on ultra high-skilled people being some of the easiest to trick are probably illustrative, and my personal opinion at the moment is that many of these people have been tricked long ago into thinking that Bitcoin is something bad.

otterley 1y ago

It’s not because crypto is useful for the average person. It’s because demand for a place to safely store illicit assets is practically inexhaustible. Had I the foresight to realize that criminals would turn to it as an alternative to traditional forms of hoarding and money laundering, I would have invested in it ages ago.

earnesti 1y ago
Isn't the property that it keeps getting up pretty useful for the average person.
procaryote 1y ago
I saw that potential as obvious from day one. I just thought governments would care. Usually when someone sets up a money laundry ring, someone tries to stop it. My best idea, that probably gives governments too much credit, is that it's pretty useful to have a transparent record of illicit money flows, and that you can be OK with a bit of crime to get it.
- earnesti 1y ago
  Governments do care, they have developed heavy regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrencies, such as MiCa in EU. I think central banks have been giving (negative) comments about Bitcoin since 2011 or so when it first gained modest publicity. Governments are huge and consists of many different institutions. I guess many would like to see Bitcoin stopped, but how to do that without fondling with the basic human rights, such as the right to free communication? So far the governments have been regulating it, trying to reduce the illicit use, which doesn't really stop it but actually makes it more legitimate.
- Scoundreller 1y ago
  Government sure killed egold and liberty reserve.
spaceman_2020 1y ago
Baffling that people make blanket statements like these without any real world experience of living in high inflation, poor countries. All the contractors I’ve hired from Philippines or Nigeria or Vietnam want to get paid in USD stablecoins because their currencies depreciate 5-15% against the dollar every year and stablecoins help them protect their capital Same for friends living in high inflation LatAm countries - crypto stablecoins are a way to escape rampant inflation

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

m463 1y ago

I could never wrap my mind around the formation of the united states, over 200 years ago, based on people agreeing. There was basically no technology back then. Their "software" was the constitution.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago
The Continental Congress was famously held in secret. A small number of wealthy aristocrats waged war on their home country without the consent of the people they were governing. I don’t remember the powhatan or Lenape (Virginia-MD-PA tribes that were exterminated in order to build the core of the US trade and political networks) being consulted on any of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powhatan

tomgp 1y ago

I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true) [edited to correct a couple of typos]

tanh 1y ago

I could always see how useful it is for criminal enterprise. That doesn't mean I want in. I wish I could avoid it altogether. Alas even stocks in my ETF holdings are proxies for some cryptocurrencies.

fxtentacle 1y ago

It didn't take long before it became obvious that Bitcoin would revolutionize money laundering. I think this is more like the righteous vs. evil scale in D&D. Some people are OK with profiting off crime while others aren't. And techies are more likely to be on the righteous side, while bankers, traders, or CEOs are more likely to be on the psychopathic side. And if you look at how many times HSBC has been in the news for working closely with mafia, I'm not surprised that they're selling crypto ETFs now.