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I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extrem
by spicyusername 11mo ago
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.
Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
- grim_io 11mo agoIdeology can be blinding. It was never about the technology.
- Ekaros 11mo agoIt might have been for first few months. And then it kinda got into becoming rich or kings of future world...
- embedding-shape 11mo agoOr a more charitable explanation; the ecosystem was initially filled with people caring about the ideology and technology, but as money got involved, people who cared more about accumulating money started taking over more and more of the ecosystem. The initial people still exist, although they are few compared to the money people who've infected the ecosystem.
- freehorse 11mo agoPeople cared about money from the beginning, firstmost. You do not create such a new kind of currency if money is not what you care about. As the original article says: > The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. I was enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals. Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me. People sure had a "cypherpunk ethos" but they built cryptocurrencies, not tor network or signal. The author's dream was to be rich and untouchable. Imo the author is not that far away from the ethos of modern crypto as they think they are.
- jb1991 11mo agoTruer words have never been spoken.
- jstanley 11mo agoThat you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else is wrong.
- grim_io 11mo agoIt's funny that you think of crypto bros as "everyone", when in reality they are very much the few.
- bena 11mo agoNo, but it doesn’t mean they’re correct either.
- AshamedCaptain 11mo agoThe Emperor was very pleased that everyone was admiring his new clothes, even if he couldn’t see them himself!
- panzi 11mo agoYeah and even more crazy: all other applications of blockchains are even more stupid. Haven't seen another application that wouldn't have been better, faster, cheaper implemented in a "classical" way.
- tim333 11mo agoGambling.
- shuntress 11mo agoGit
- panzi 11mo agoYeah, and I always say git with commit signing is a cryptographic block chain in the loosest sense. But in this context I was of course referring to the proof of work/stake BS. In git the proof of work is the work you put into writing the source code. There is actual value in it, not just fictional speculative value.
- hobs 11mo agoAm I misinterpreting you or are you saying Bitcoin would make a better, faster, cheaper Git? If you are, I am already laughing.
- 11mo ago
- kachapopopow 11mo agowell actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT. but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal. edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> bitcoin is great for criminals Never understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash. The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn't make that easier, it makes that part harder. But "Bitcoin is great for criminals" is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don't actually know what they're talking about.
- kachapopopow 11mo agoit becomes significantly easy to store money and launder it whenever, it's what all indian scammers do: get it out of the banking system into crypto
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> and launder it whenever Again, there is no "LaunderBTCAndTurnIntoUSD" function in the Bitcoin protocol... > get it out of the banking system into crypto And please describe how you do so without involved A) banks who look the other way and B) registered companies who handle the on/off-ramping from/to BTC. When people argue that it makes it so much easier to launder money, please spend at least a minute to actually figure out how that will work in practice, and you'll understand that Bitcoin makes the laundering HARDER than what it is with cash, not easier...
- nacozarina 11mo agoread the original Satoshi paper all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.
- sigwinch 11mo agoI’m not sure the paper or the character Satoshi himself matter anymore. Once you have a preeminent coin with fiat power behind it, the details of a paper and the wherewithal to reinvent that coin more purely are irrelevant. Once a particular political family signaled that control starting in Sept 2024, keeping close to that family reassured you of a bailout or pardon.
- wmf 11mo agoThe whitepaper has some problems. Satoshi isn't automatically right and virtually no one uses Bitcoin/crypto the way Satoshi envisioned. Arguably if you judge Bitcoin based on the whitepaper it is a complete failure.
- ahartmetz 11mo agoApparently, some fraction of the population is willing to believe whatever makes them rich.
- d--b 11mo agoWhat do you mean? Technically it works, no? it is an incovenient database, for sure, but the fact that people can trust it enough that they put billions of dollars in it is remarkable. I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…
- jongjong 11mo agoI guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron. Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this. Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'. I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right? Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability. Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.
- Ekaros 11mo agoI never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat. And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?
- 11mo ago
- bayesianbot 11mo agoI agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it's amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation. Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that's true, but if you'd ever want to connect to banking backend, you'd get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you'd just run or connect to a node.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago> just scams and speculation The "currency" part is actually the only one that is not a scam, as long as you understand what it is and the trade-offs it makes. If you do actually have a legitimate reason to use it (because conventional payment rails are not available, or you're doing crime, or need pseudonymity), it is a perfectly fine tool.
- perching_aix 11mo ago> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so: > I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. (...) Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me. It is also why you keep hearing about crypto transactions being primarily used for illegal stuff. Just like with the uber-free-speech p2p platforms, it primaily benefits those who'd be otherwise hampered. Who, contrary to the usual talking points, are usually not actually so innocent or respectable. But then we do keep sliding back, so maybe it's only a matter of time the proportions shift, and the claims of these technologies' justness stop being so false and hollow. And maybe these events and processes are further not actually uncorrelated. Trust is at an all time low and dwindling, after all.
- immibis 11mo agoI've recently used Bitcoin to pay for several legitimate items because the fiat financial system just decided not to let me pay with my debit card, for no apparent reason.
- serial_dev 11mo agoBlockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority. Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company). It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.
- CaptainZapp 11mo ago> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing. Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.
- JojoFatsani 11mo agoLLM has more tangible benefits for companies and consumers. If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
- culi 11mo ago> According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... We're currently all subsidizing the AI industry. When we solve the energy problem then we can talk about potential benefits of LLMs
- colinhb 11mo agoSkipped the metaverse, slotted between the two
- globular-toast 11mo agoTo understand Bitcoin you need to forget the technology and first understand the problem. You need to understand what caused the 2008 financial crisis and how it resulted in us collectively funnelling more value into the hands of useless bankers. You need to understand that there are people who are literally spending their days playing games with each other, trading bits of paper and making silly deals and bets. If you don't understand the word "literally" or don't believe it, read more, study harder. If you don't understand a zero sum game or how this nonsense fucks up the lives of regular people, read more. Read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read Other People's Money by John Kay. Only once you understand the problem can you begin to understand why a trustless digital cash would be good for us. Bitcoin is simply the first viable solution to the problem. If you can come up with a better one you'll change the world.
- geremiiah 11mo agoOK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great. Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses. The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
- globular-toast 11mo agoNo solution is perfect. Come up with a better one. More regulation, however, is not what we need. We need to decide what we want the financial sector to actually do, and that probably doesn't involve a bunch of children playing games.
- bawolff 11mo agoJust because no solution is perfect doesn't mean we should adopt a solution worse than the status quo.
- dpedu 11mo agoThe anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
- Cyao 11mo agoBut you (theoretically) cannot know who mined the coin, or who is actually the holder of the coin, thus the anonymity. Though currently this is getting restricted as governments require more ID verification from businesses dealing with crypto, which links up your coin to a real person.
- tsimionescu 11mo agoThe correct term here is pseudonimity - you know the immutable, stable wallet id of who mined the coin, which is a pseudonym for a real person. Anonymous systems are ones in which it's impossible to associate an identity with the work item. For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming there is no footage of the post box where I deposited the envelope, and I left no DNA on it, etc). If you receive a second payment, it's impossible to tell whether it came from the same person or someone else.
- rjdj377dhabsn 11mo agoHow is the serial number on cash any more anonymous than bitcoin addresses?
- tsimionescu 11mo agoBecause it's attached to the bill itself, not the owner or the wallet. If I give you a dollar bill with the serial number 100100, it's impossible for you to prove that bill came from me (unless you have forensic evidence of me giving it to you, of course - but that's equivalent to having photo evidence of me typing in my private key to a BTC wallet) . If you find a dollar bill on the street, it's now yours, you can't know anything about its previous owner. In contrast, a BTC address is a unique identifier for someone who owns the BTC. The blockchain stores all addresses that it ever interacted with, so even if you create thousands of wallets, they can all be-anonymized quite easily if one is, as you can track how money was sent between them.
- gosub100 11mo agoregardless, they found a way for two parties to exchange wealth without trusting each other. the failures were letting it diverge from being a currency into a speculation instrument. It failed in being a low-cost wallet that we can pay our restaurant tab with.
- m00dy 11mo agoSomeone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.
- malfist 11mo agoHow does Jerome Powell decide the price of a dollar? How does an algorithm fix that? What is being fixed?
- m00dy 11mo agoDude, you might not belong to our civilization. Sorry.
- stephen_g 11mo agoMaybe in their head it's still back before 1976 where we have the Bretton Woods system, there's no foreign exchange market and policymakers set the price of dollars against gold?
- jpadkins 11mo agoJerome Powell sets the future price of the dollar by setting a goal that is achieved by the Fed creating dollars and buying bonds (or selling bonds). > What is being fixed? A small group of people decide how much currency is circulated and can be used as debt, which creates inflation or deflation. Also there is no democratic process that can be used to control this small group of people, other than a repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. > How does an algorithm fix that? As an example, Bitcoin's algorithm has a fixed schedule in which new BTC is created. People can voluntarily use or not use BTC as a currency based on this currency creation schedule (vs. arbitrary creation that comes with fiat currency). This algorithm can only change by actors that take hashing majority on the Bitcoin network.
- DANmode 11mo agoIf by “price of the US dollar” you mean “direction of financial sentiment”, then yes. But that’s a big mistake.
- fsh 11mo agoIt's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
- snapplebobapple 11mo agoNeither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
- fsh 11mo agoIndeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
- charcircuit 11mo agoMost states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
- bawolff 11mo agoMost states have in fact invented bank transfers for that purpose.
- charcircuit 11mo agoThe decentralized nature of banks makes it hard to offer a good payment experience to consumers and businesses.
- TrackerFF 11mo agoAt least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow. And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.
- ikt 11mo agoYep, that's what I thought nano had done: https://nano.org/en https://nano.org/en instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard! and then it just went no where :\
- Nextgrid 11mo agoBecause in practice services like TransferWise solved this problem using fiat currencies with fees low enough not to make it worth bothering with crypto.
- nout 11mo agoFor larger amounts it makes sense to use the bitcoin rails for international transfers. I'm doing bank to bank international transfers and using bitcoin saves around 3% compared to Wise and you get the money immediately (or within 1hr, depending on what you use).
- fpoling 11mo agoFew years ago I needed to transfer a big sum from a Scandinavian country into Euro. The official bank exchange rate plus fees was worse than Wise’s. But I asked the bank and the bank gave me an exchange rate that was like 0.1% better than one from wise.
- nout 11mo agoDepending on the direction, but there are ways to actually make a little extra on top of the middle exchange rate (e.g. on the USD to EUR path), since there are many people that want to buy no-KYC bitcoin in Europe and they are willing to pay a couple % extra.
- tim333 11mo ago>How anyone, especially many "intelligent" people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top... However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.
- heresie-dabord 11mo ago> Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand. Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
- kkfx 11mo agoThe blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path. It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café. That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html
- koonsolo 11mo agoSo the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion. You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion. Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".
- petesergeant 11mo agoSouth Sea Company at its height was worth almost 3x British GDP. Not bad for a company "with negligible business activities"!
- koonsolo 11mo agoWe've been hearing the story for years already that the Bitcoin value will go to zero.
- stephen_g 11mo agoMarket cap is pretty hypothetical though - if somebody actually tried to liquidate $50bn of bitcoin into fiat money you'd probably send the BTC price to about zero...
- baq 11mo agoSlippage yo. Market cap means jack shit if the true order book is thin like a slice of carpaccio.
- duxup 11mo agoI think the sort of libertarian mythos of crypto is very appealing to a lot of people. Escape the big bad man and so on. The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...
- ryandvm 11mo agoCrypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff. No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do. Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.
- bdangubic 11mo agoI am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…” I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
- petesergeant 11mo ago> after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…” and he said no, because you also can't do this. Bitcoin has not solved any problem there.
- lazide 11mo agoActually, in many places it would work fine. Some it would be immediate jail time.
- petesergeant 11mo agoIn the places it would work fine, so would a traditional transfer, though. Again, Bitcoin hasn't solved any issue here.
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- picklepats 11mo ago[dead]
- bawolff 11mo ago> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology. When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom". I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story. > How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)
- npoc 11mo agoYou say bitcoin is "so silly". Please give me an example of anything better for nation states to hold as reserves and to transact with other nations with. I'll even allow you an imaginary thing as long as it's constrained by the real world.
- bawolff 11mo agoFiat currency. (So-called petro dollar) Gold. There is a reason why no countries are using bitcoin as a reserve currency.
- npoc 11mo agoFiat currency: Why would I hold a currency that another nation sucks the value out of by printing it? Even the dollar has half its value stolen every decade. Gold stock above ground doubles every 40ish years, halving it's value each time. Think how difficult it is to safely move and assay billions of dollars worth. The reason nations aren't publicly using bitcoin as a reserve is that it's still only the year 2025
- npoc 11mo agoTLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly. https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932 https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932 > "The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me." The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value. Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect). It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.
- rfw300 11mo agoYour comment assumes that the purpose of an economic system is to preserve a financial status quo. It isn't, and shouldn't be. Inflation incentivizes people to put their money to productive uses in the economy (capital formation) rather than hoarding resources.
- npoc 11mo agoThe purposes of money are: - store of value - unit of account (a measuring stick for value) - medium of exchange Allowing the financial system to inflate the money supply destroys two of those fundamental qualities. The fact it can additionally charge interest on the money funnels the stolen value into its hands. Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses". Nothing about hard money affects that. In fact inflation only causes the people at the top of the pyramid to hoard all of the economic value instead. They are buying up and hoarding the entire world with the wealth they are taking from the people.
- solumunus 11mo agoI can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.
- tiku 11mo agoA lot of countries don't have access to bank-accounts, by not having valid id's for example. But they do have cellphones so they can download crypto apps to accept payment for jobs etc. And then there is the money receiving from relatives in other countries, yes.
- derriz 11mo agoHow exactly can you send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda using Bitcoin? Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there. So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?
- solumunus 11mo agoThere are people that hold billions in Bitcoin and they could send it to someone in Uganda without friction, do you dispute this? You’re being pedantic, stick to the hypothetical. Change the example to $1,000 and yes it’s trivial to do and will be cheaper and quicker than using traditional systems.
- GRiMe2D 11mo agoOkay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk? Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to "food" all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer. I'm telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country
- tormeh 11mo agoI think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn't inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that's also true for gold, and I've yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle / speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they'll reply with something about "sound money", seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It's rather disheartening.
- summa_tech 11mo ago> sound money Perhaps they're the new incarnation of audiophiles.
- roncesvalles 11mo agoTo understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power. Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.
- trizuz 11mo ago[dead]
- sakompella 11mo agoI think a lot more important for understanding crypto is learning the first bitcoin was minted in January 2009, months off of the heel of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, and more notably the "start" of the 2008 financial crisis
- roncesvalles 11mo agoAnti-Americanism was well underway by that point. I think the impetus from both distrust in the American government and in Wall St really gave crypto the runway.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bloppe 11mo agoTo understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.
- pas 11mo agobut there's no compounding interest. no dividend based on future cashflows. holding stocks of a diverse index seems better on the long run, no?
- cherryteastain 11mo agoCheck out how $100 put in bank deposits or S&P500 have done versus gold over the last 50 years. You will find that these do not generate real returns when measured against sound currency either.
- atwrk 11mo ago$100 put into S&P 500 in 1975 would be about $7500 today, or about $1250 in 1975 dollars. $100 put into gold in 1975 would be about $2600 today, or about $440 in 1975 dollars. S&P 500 would have had 3x the returns of gold.
- paddleon 11mo agocheck your numbers with a purchase date of 1971.
- jbstack 11mo agoI'm not sure how you reached this conclusion. I did as you suggested. $100 invested 50 years ago into gold would be worth $3000 today. $100 invested into the S&P500 50 years ago would be worth $6870. https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat... https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
- immibis 11mo agoBecause... Nothing else achieves that? Besides a centralised database, which is extremely vulnerable to censorship - as seen when Visa blocked Steam from selling porn games.
- spaceman_2020 11mo agoYou say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.
- troupo 11mo agoDeflationary "currencies" like crypto are significantly worse (why spend when you can HODL). Regular crypto "currencies" will have the exact same effects.
- spaceman_2020 11mo ago> why spend when you can HODL You touch upon an important point: the entire foundation of our current economic system is built on high velocity of money. You are incentivized to spend rather than hold because without it, there's no mindless conspicuous consumption. A deflationary currency will grind this system to a halt But the question you need to ask is: has all this mindless consumption really done us any real good? For the handful of genuinely useful things to come out of excessive consumption, there are a gazillion pieces of wasteful crap that clogs homes first, then landfills A deflationary currency is bad for the current economic system. But that doesn't mean it's bad by itself.
- troupo 11mo agoLol. All you have to do is think about five seconds without going into rants about over consumption. Let's take Bitcoin. It has a predefined limited supply. That is, it already has an artificial deficit built-in. On top of that, obtaining bitcoin becomes exponentially more expensive over time (until it becomes impossible once all the bitcoin has been "mined"). Now you have to spend many magnitudes more resources to obtain even a tiny fraction of a bitcoin. So even in the absence of any external world to compare to (e.g. without denominating Bitcoin in USD) why would anyone spend a limited resource they obtained? Especially considering that even today getting even a single bitcoin through traditional mining is nearly impossible except for the filthy rich miners running industrial-scale data centers.
- phplovesong 11mo agoSimply put: Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina. Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.
- mirekrusin 11mo agoI never understood why bitcoin is winning popularity/pricing over ie. ethereum - which doesn't burn energy anymore and you can actually do programming on it, not just moving money from a to b.
- munksbeer 11mo agoBecause it's based on narratives. Bitcoin has the strong narrative and the "network effect". Because bitoin keeps surviving, the narrative reinforces itself. At this point surely most people know, even if they're unwilling to admit or fooling themselves, the utility value is basically dead. The utility value is now a pure gamble that a person tomorrow will pay me more than I paid for it today, thinking that a person in the future will pay them more than they paid. And that can be a powerful enough narrative to keep it going. But if bitcoin disappeared today, 99.99999% of the world wouldn't even notice, that is how little of a problem it solves. Anyway, the point is, imagine the scenario if ethereum overtook bitcoin in value. What will this actually do to the ecosystem? In my view, it would be catastrophic to the value of all coins, because it suddenly destroys the narrative of a "store of value" (the last lingering narrative). Any other coin could just overtake ethereum, and out of all the thousands of coins, which one? At that point, I think the whole thing comes down.
- l___l 11mo agoOne interpretation of this comment, if viewed from an adversarial angle, is that comments like this, although perhaps not this comment specifically, are designed to dissuade people from buying crypto days before a bull-run starts. Accurate data illuminate a lot of things.
- agumonkey 11mo agomy naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing: - waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store) - sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too) - emit very small amount of data - struggle with security - reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network somehow (and again, i'm naive and not knowledgeable) i felt that a lot of useful processing for society would be better if there was a global encrypted network that would enact the same simple things but without the human layer round trip. you get 24/7 operations, globally, open, encrypted. in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire. and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality.. but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know
- ErigmolCt 11mo agoThe funny thing is that a lot of early Bitcoin advocates did recognize the blockchain's inefficiency
- Yizahi 11mo agoIt is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn't work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn't scale. The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
- earnesti 11mo ago> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. Care to elaborate? I have been using Bitcoin now 10+ to store my wealth and make payments, and it has been very convenient - not much time needed to use it, and I think I've gotten plenty of value for my time-investment. What kind of database would you recommend to make it more convenient? Maybe you can write a guide how to implement decentralized value transfer and storage system on top of PostgreSQL, so that the amount of tokens is limited to 21 Million, with similar security guarantees?
- dyauspitr 11mo ago> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database The point is to be a database that isn’t controlled by a central authority, rather by the majority of its users.
- lm28469 11mo ago> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. Because it's a cult, like the "AGI is coming in 2027" cult thinks we're on the brink of skynet level world destruction, it'll come and go and 99% of the people who fell for it will tell you they never really truly actually believed
- jcalvinowens 11mo agoAmen. Bitcoin barely manages to continue to function, while currently handling 0.0000001% of the worlds money transfers. The idea that we could base any substantial part of our financial system on a globally serialized transaction ledger is a laughable joke. As a technical experiment, I love bitcoin, and I have thoroughly enjoyed wasting some of my own time on it. But it's not mainstream, and it never will be.
- scotty79 11mo ago> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. It's the cost of it being out of control of any single party. Efficiency and convenience are worth nothing if you have a system someone can just wipe out or manipulate. Have you experienced hyperinflation in your lifetime? Have the generational assets of your family been seized by totalitarian government? I think you'd understand better if you lived through events where your wealth very painfully was just an "entry" in the efficient system someone else controls (badly).
- mattstir 11mo ago> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. That's the entire point when the goal is to achieve a public, immutable, decentralized ledger that prevents double-payments without needing to trust a third-party to adjudicate properly. It being inconvenient makes it exceptionally difficult to edit history. Whether that's a useful goal is less clear when nearly all of modern society relies on trusting parties at some point along the way (will the thing you bought be delivered to you? Will the service you purchased actually be rendered? etc). > Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology A financial process being unwieldy hasn't really been an issue historically. Why are most publicly issued stocks in the US owned by Cede and Company for example? No one that has stocks really thinks about the underlying system (the fact that they have contractual rights to stocks rather than actually owning stocks), as long as it ultimately works. Where things have broken down in my opinion is how centralized the systems have become with massive exchanges being the only realistic way to interact with them. In the same way that a bicycle wasn't designed to be a moving van, these systems weren't designed to be centralized. With that being the reality though, the entire blockchain backbone is mostly useless, and at that point it really is an inconvenient database.
- TZubiri 11mo ago>I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. >Proceeds to provide their opinion. At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular/first/best coin is completely useless. I'd invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago>How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- ericmcer 11mo agoMost of my transactions go through credit card, that means every time I exchange money for services/goods a private corporation takes a 3% cut. That makes sense to you but the dream of BTC doesn't? Of course it turned into a gambling scam filled cesspool like most human endeavours, but the initial dream was sound.
- homakov 11mo ago> extremely inconvenient database You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, what do you do?