I was one of the lucky ones who bought bitcoin so I could buy acid on the internet. Years later I put a down payment on a house with the change that I forgot about. DARE was wrong.
All those GWh wasted on “mining” only got us closer to the edge.
Not like the millions or billions of man hours wasted to make 50-ish removed into defacto-gods.
Don’t forget its not just man-hours, but man-lives too
Potentially our future as well considering the carbon and ecological footprint of crypto, both in terms of energy spent mining, and production of single-purpose hardware that can’t really do anything else, rival some medium sized developed countries.
The GPU mining got me a free GPU and several hundred dollars, for the cost of about 10 cents per KWh. I’d take that “scam” any day of the week, and so I mined until it was over for GPU mining. No regerts.
I have invested a total of $2000 in crypto.
I took out $2000 when I had like $12000.
I have no idea how much what is left is now. Probably $500-$700. Definitely less than a months rent.
Imma let it ride. I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason. Otherwise, whatever.
I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason.
Ooh, that sounds handy! Mind if I ask where those feeds are coming from?
I genuinely tried to look for a legit way to make it an option for paying in a small online store without having to depend on paypal or a bank gateway.
Well transaction fees for any big coin are like many dollars per transaction. It’s ridiculous. For smaller transaction fees you have to go to smaller coins that can disappear or lose half their value one day to the next.
And still, if we forget thar people wouls need to pay like a 14€ fee for 1€ transaction. They still have to go to a exange to change their money, and then I have to change it back, because very little things can be bought with crypto, less with cryptos that doesn’t have ridiculous transaction fees.
Did I mention than transaction are not instantaneous either? Unless you pay big transaction fee or use some obscure coin that no one uses.
At the end, I ended up with paypal. I really wanted a way to be “independent” of big companies for transaction. But crypto is completely ruined (if it was ever functional that I doubt it). It’s not a coin, they are just speculation and bets. With cybercrime and drug dealing being the only “real” uses it has.
I tried to do the same for an online marketplace I wanted to create so I didn’t have to fuck around with the legal stuff and the sellers could do whatever they wanted with the money and have them deal with legal when exchanging the crypto at an exchange. The closest project with some stability and something was the Blockchain Telos with their pinned Telos USD coin. It seemed promising, but I gave up.
Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum resolve the issue of high transaction fees and still be able to transact in ETH. I get there is hurdles compared with the simplicity of PayPal, but at least some of us prefer decentralized payment options where possible.
Like it was basically just digital gold… which is also a terrible currency in physical form.
Wouldn’t say terrible. Just volatile and with a specific use cas. But incaseyour currency loses value you still have some wealth wich you can use for financial interactions (assuming you still have access to it)
Extremely relevant…
I sleep well at night knowing nobody will steal my thing I don’t care about because I don’t own any. I just wanted you all to know that.
MY APES IS GOAN
Someone could just send you a copy
Way back when Bitcoin was first being talked about on Slashdot, I mined for a while. On my processor. For like a month. I got about 1/20 of a Bitcoin out of it.
And then I lost interest for a long time. And then it became clear blockchain is an infinite self-similar fractal of scams and ponsis.
I haven’t done anything with my 1/20 of a Bitcoin. I don’t have any expectation it will go up or down. If the bubble takes back off and inflates so much 1/20 of a Bitcoin becomes life-changing money, I might try to sell it. Maybe if a bunch of crypto-owning crypto-skeptics organize a mass sell event to drive it to zero, I’ll take part. Otherwise, it’ll stay where it is for the forseeable future.
Ironic that someone like me who believes wholeheartedly that blockchain is snake oil is such a model hodler.
You’ve basically explained why crypto can’t work.
Deflationary currencies don’t make sense to spend because their future value will be higher.
The outcome is people hold onto them in the hopes they gain value. The exact opposite of what you want for a currency.
A deflationary currency would simply cause people to be more careful with their spending. You still need food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, etc. An inflinflationary currency encourages overconsumption, because material things hold value better than money.
If you’d like a world with zero discretionary spending then yeah, deflationary currency is for you.
I don’t think that’s an economy you want to live in though.
For sure. Also, the inherent unscalability of blockchain as a technology makes for a payment system far too slow for your typical payment scenarios, which makes transferring Bitcoin a pain in the ass, further incentivising hodling.
(Just to address some of the "akshully"s I’m probably going to get for the above, you can make blockchain fast if you centralize it like Solana does, but if you’re going to centralize it, you’re better off using Postgres than blockchain.)
I think largely the argument that convinces some people that cryptocurrency is worth “investing in” is that it’s going to revolutionize the way we pay for things. In which case the fact that it doesn’t work as a currency completely robs it of any legitimacy as a security.
If you want something that does have potential to improve the way we go about buying groceries, look into GNU Taler.
Yeah…Luke with NFTs, the thing really has an Emperors New Suit vibe, to me.
I still don’t understand the “you own it” argument of NFTs. When you buy an art piece from the creator normally, don’t you also own it? Like when you commission a piece from an artist the rights are transferred to you once you pay them right?
Also, trading NFTs is basically the same as rich asshole private collectors trading Van Gogh’s and Pablo Picasso’s, just dumbed down to get normies in on the action. I know NFTs promise to give the artist a cut of the revenue, but one, they’re paid in tokens that are infamously difficult to actually buy anything with other than more crypto, not “real” money that they can spend on food or more art supplies, basically the techbro version of paying in exposure. Two, there is absolutely zero things stopping literally anyone from minting an NFT from stolen art and getting a cut too with, by design, no way for the real artist to take down those NFTs or for people who bought it thinking it’s genuine and that they’re supporting the artist to reverse their transactions. In fact AFAIK that’s the majority of NFTs in existence, so to say it’s “all about artists” while doing nothing to address that means you don’t actually give a shit about artists.
I hope GNU Taler becomes known.
Crypto reality and butt coin will like this
I don’t hodl, i use it. Very convenient with crypto cards etc. I’ve had banks close my accounts before until i explain where money is coming from etc. Banks are cancer. I’m so glad there’s an alternative
Not arguing about the merits of blockchain, but if your money is in a bank, it is on a computer that depends on cryptography (TLS) for controlling access.
edit: Well, ok, at least then it’s not just crypto standing between your assets and someone else. Then there’s going to be at least another layer, like multifactor authentication, VPN/MPLS, etc., depending on the point being attacked.
…and yet here you are making a post about it. :)
