Is Crypto Finally Dead?
Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but...
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM "prompts?" Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
As an actual currency, it's functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
Because of that, it's entirely just funny money. Even further, since it's entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn't an acceptable proposition
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how "decentralized" it's supposed to be, it's still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
It's entirely a speculative investment scam now. There's no way to decouple it from that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since ETH moved to a proof of stake model rather than proof of work (i.e. "mining"), isn't its environmental footprint now a fraction of the wasteful behemoth it was previously?
(Though I 100% agree given the 'gas fees' (transaction costs), it's still absolutely useless as an actual currency.)
Yes, you can now run an Ethereum validator from a Raspberry Pi
Not recommended though, RPIs aren't really suited for production, plus I think only Nimbus runs well on RPIs?
I think he's confusing a validator with a node. You can easily run a node on a Pi.
Ah that would be make sense, but most people wouldn't see the point in running a node. People automatically think of "mining" or "validator"
I have a few bitcoin that I got when it was new, and I was playing around with it; then I forgot about my coins until it exploded and made it into the public (non-tech) news. I luckily still had my wallet, and I bought a quite expensive watch with Bitcoin when it was near its price peak. The transaction was no more difficult than using Paypal. I could have bought a lot of things; at one point, I could have bought a car with it. There are many vendors who'll accept Bitcoin even today. So, regardless of your other points, saying that it's funny money that you can't buy anything with is simply false. It's worth what people will pay for it, just like the American dollar, or gold, or the artificially inflated price of blood diamonds.
I don't think promoting falsehoods helps any argument. If that one is obviously wrong, what about your other points? Lots of people want cryptocurrency to fail. Lots of people want to maintain the hegemony of the US dollar. Some people even have valid criticisms of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, and the giant farming installations. It's certainly something to discuss, as long as it's kept to facts.
The issue with retail is how long it takes for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. The overhead simply isn't feasible. A vendor isn't going to sit around an wait an hour for confirmation that payment has been received. A private seller might not care. But a company that processes millions of transactions per day isn't going to deal with that. It has nothing to do with the belief in it and its worth.
And yes, let me be perfectly clear: I absolutely do want cryptocurrency to fail. That's not about being a shill for government hegemony. It's about there being literally no inherent good in it, either in principle or in practice. From the fact that it consumes more energy than entire countries and pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than entire major industries, to the environmental impact of increased mining for rare earths, increased manufacturing strain, and supply chain disruption due to the demand for the chips to drive the miners.
Also I really don't appreciate your passive aggressive way of calling me a liar
Your position was clear.
I'm not sure how else you'd prefer someone to call out untruths that you've posted. It's either calling you a liar, or some version of saying you're talking out your ass, or what not. But you're right, that's what I was saying. FWIW, I don't think it's lying the way Trump lies; I think there's just a lot of uninformed knee-jerk reactionism. For example, you talk about processing times; have you ever heard of Lightning? It's a crypto used a lot in Nostr and which has instant transfer times.
My point is that I you're arguing a point that is easily refuted, when you have other points that are reasonable and justifiable. I could argue against the other points, too; for example, I could bring up proof-of-stake crypto-currencies which do not have huge energy use, and which haveno more energy footprint than the SSL transactions that you're using constantly, every day. But it would be a harder arguement for me to make because the original cryptocoin, Bitcoin, is proof-of-work and has had a huge eco impact.
And I might not try to argue that unless I thought you were open to discussing the topic in good faith. Which I don't believe you are; I think you've already made up your mind on the topic, and now all that's left is evangelism.
I do have a question, though: do you understand how blockchains work, and the what the various kinds of proofs are? Not in the "could you program it" sense, but in general, like could you describe how they work to someone over beer? Or have you just read a lot about how bad they are? How much of your opinion is based on your social media filter biases?
That's exactly what I was gonna say: @davehtaylor must have no idea of the nearly-cost-free Layer 2 network.
Additionally, how much money does it take to power banks? All the staff, the electricity, the Brinks armored cars, the accounting for all that cash, the safety deposit boxes and all of their contents and insurance... Does he think ACH transfers or, worse, checks or money orders, are free on an environmental level? How is USD with all of its nonstop-growing debt safe in any long-term way?
The L2 experience is quite poor at the moment, which is more an indicator of how bright the future is
How so? GameStop’s NFT Marketplace for games has been showcasing Layer 2 tech from Loopring and it’s smooth as fuck.
There are many others that use Layer 2 tech not just LR of course. Which L2 are you talking about?
I'm talking about Loopring itself
there are decentralized currencies that work perfectly well without wasting tons of energy, although I agree that none have yet achieved the necessary scale to actually replace current centralized money systems. These currencies might find a niche that doesn't need the capacity to handle thousands of transactions per second, or perhaps one of the many many different ways to scale these currencies that are currently being worked on will end up being good enough (they aren't, yet)
Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.
it's not even just that. if you count the number of transactions across all cryptocurrencies that are confirmed by mining, they are absolutely dwarfed by the number of transactions that are not confirmed by mining. same thing with volume of money moved. the environmental complaint applies to a minority of the total activity.
And shouldn't the environmental cost of "real" currencies be compared as well? It's not like printing and minting all those bills and coins is zero energy. Even treating it virtually (direct deposit, etc - we rarely handle cash) has some overhead.
I don't have a horse in this race, but comments that are obviously trying to grind an ace are suspicious to me.
On the tech side of things, the environmental impact of running traditional, centralized services is inherently lower than running any cryptocurrency off of a blockchain. To overcome the technical limitations would be to create another centralized service.
But yeah, there are almost certainly ways that traditional currency can reduce their environmental impact, too.
I've found that the same folks who crowed the loudest about cryptocurrencies being decentralized were working the hardest behind the scenes to build the first generation of exchanges and online wallets.
Funny how people are creating bullshit by taking about things they don’t know.
Hint: Blockchain is more than just currency and when your centralised e-mail server is taken down with all of your e-mail's, than you will think back at people who did the switch to decentralisation.
Another hint: Ethereum did lower its CO2 emissions by 99%, just by changing its code. Can your 100% virtual currency, parked at your favorite bank in a country like sweden, where there is no cash anymore, do the same?
New technologies such as the lightning network will fix this.
If the power goes out, your local ATMs and card readers will stop working as well. It'd have to take a global power outage to bring a crypto network down, and at that point we probably have more important issues to deal with.
This is fixed by proof-of-stake.
True, but it's a personal choice. You don't have to have to store them centralized if you don't want to. The same cannot be said about traditional currencies, as it's not feasable to have stacks of cash lying around.
Also true, but that has nothing to do with the actual currencies. The public image will improve once people learns how it works.
Maturity will make it decouple from that.
I'm a fan of cryptocurrencies, and I would dearly love for the "speculative investment scam" aspect of it to be dead. It's been a massive drag on the technology's reputation for many years, preventing it from being used for all kinds of applications that would really benefit from some form of cryptocurrency integration. Unfortunately even if the "speculative investment scam" aspect dies the bad reputation will linger, so hopefully those applications will find ways to sneak it in where useful without drawing too much attention.
It's been 13 years and the only applications found have been in fraud.
Over and over, blockchain is a solution to a question nobody asked.
You might as well say you're a biplane enthusiast or something.
Hey. Biplanes are actually much more relevant in today's world than crypto. They aren't common, but there are still new biplanes made because they are a valid solution for certain problems. Unlike blockchain.
It’s nice-to-have if shit really did hit the fan economically and hyper inflation took over. Glad the hype is over though.
I'm not actually interested in the value of the tokens, I only own a few tens of dollars' worth myself. I'm interested in the application-related aspects of it.
For example, something applicable to the Fediverse that comes to mind is the Ethereum Name System. That's a blockchain-based mechanism that allows for DNS-like "domain names" to be claimed by users. Something like it could serve as a way of registering a username for the Fediverse and then having it be completely portable between instances without the need to rely on any centralized authentication provider. Since they do cost a small amount of actual money to register they'd make for a good spam prevention method - a regular user only needs to register a name every once in a rare while, but a spammer needs to register a new one each time their existing name gets blocked. It'd get expensive real fast for a spammer.
Unfortunately this adds some complication to the registration process that the Fediverse really can't afford right now. And worse, it has the dreaded "NFT" label hanging around its neck because technically a username registration is indeed an NFT if you want to categorize it like that. So I can only sigh and watch a perfectly useful technology go unused due to the bad name it's been given.
Oh well. Someday the usefulness will overcome the perception.
The one SIMPLE trick crypto bros HATE: Blockchain -> "Distributed Ledger" NFT -> "Unique Identifier"
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Tons of people already can't handle signing up for a simple account. You think having to get a crypto wallet, figure out how to use it, and pay money into it before you can even start actually signing up for a social media account is ever gonna fly? Not in a million years.
NFTs truly are the best imaginable example of a solution in search of a problem. Every single use case I've ever heard someone pitch is something that already exists and already works. But like.. what if your hotel key was an NFT, bro? Whoa. What if your softball team's schedule was an NFT? What if your social media account was an NFT? 🤯
I explicitly said in my comment:
You don't appear to have actually read it all the way through, just triggered a standard anti-NFT rant off of the fact that the word "NFT" was present in it. Which is ironically exactly the problem I was complaining about.
I read it. And I disagree.
It isn't that it can't handle it "right now." It will never handle it. Nobody wants it.
But I bet "you can't read, you're just triggered by a word" is way easier to fantasize about than actually paying attention to reality.
Have you heard of hashcash, it’s POW precursor to bitcoin. It stops spam, was originally developed for email but could be incorporated into Lemmy eventually on sign up. Principal is similar to what you suggest.
@Senseibu @FaceDeer POW was one of the biggest issues with crypto in general. Let's not kill a tree everytime someone wants to sign up
@shipp Ethereum switched to Proof-of-Stake consensus nine months ago, it no longer burns a significant amount of energy to operate. I'm primarily interested in Ethereum because it's got smart contracts, allowing a huge variety of applications that older, simpler cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can't handle.
It’s a small foot print for a real user and expensive for bots who are generating enmasse. It worked on Windows 98 PCs so isn’t really an issue like you describe.
@Senseibu PoW should just be straight up illegal everywhere. It's a plague on the planet.
Except it’s been around for decades and put to good use but you’ve only heard of it from crypto and are referring to crypto.
@Senseibu so has crime lol, doesn't mean it's good. There's also a reason it hasn't caught on. If you ignore the whole killing the planet thing, it's very inaccessible.
Hasn’t caught on pfft dude why are you even replying when you clearly know nothing about the tech except for it’s bad for the planet we haven’t even got into how it could be powered with renewables (when its applied within a crypto currency that is)
Good day to you sir
PoW is indeed an interesting solution to protect against DDoS in some situation, like how Tor Onion Services does it.
Not all applications of PoW are bad.
Yeah i guess you're right, a biplane would be pretty useful in that scenario.
Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).
If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren't marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight... but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it's ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than "dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money"
I don't think transaction fraud or identity theft would disappear overnight, they would just take on different forms.
I think a big part of why cryptocurrencies don't take off as actual currencies (beyond speculative investors ruining everything), is the fact that there are a lot of clear benefits to a centralized system that blockchains have yet to adequately replace.
Scale. The amount of processing power it would require for all McDonald's global credit card transactions on a blockchain is many orders of magnitude greater than that of using Visa or Mastercard. Even when you account for proof-of-stake coins like Ethereum.
Reversibility. If I buy something from a stranger on the internet and use my debit or credit card, my bank can issue a chargeback if said stranger tries to screw me over. This is fundamentally impossible on a blockchain without relying on some kind of middleman to hold funds in escrow, at which point you're basically back to using big centralized banks to do all the heavy lifting.
On top of that, one of the big problems that blockchain solves can be solved through centralized systems as well. The big one that people bring up is credit card fraud, but what a lot of people don't realize is that credit card fraud is a lot less common outside the US than within. This is because places like the EU have mandated security measures such as chip-and-pin (the US only requires the chip part). Smartphone-based contactless payment systems like Apple Pay also provide effective 2-factor authentication at the point of sale. And while blockchain is theoretically more secure, in practice these mechanisms are "good enough" for everyday use.
How does crypto stop identity theft or transaction fraud? Crypto does nothing for credit, which is basically what identity theft is, and if you're missing how widely there's transaction fraud on crypto you haven't been paying attention.
It's not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it's the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.
Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it's actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn't have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.
Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn't have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.
These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here's my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.
But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.
I don't know, this sounds a lot like DNA evidence. Sounds great in theory, but doesn't actually mean what TV implies it to mean. In terms of a receipt, you still need to tie that to a person, or the wallet to the person. Given how easily people have lost their wallets, it'll be a similar issue to "My credit card was used at that time". Yes, the wallet / CC was used at a place at a time, but who was the person using it? In either case, they'll want to use the security video or clerk witness testimony to tie it together.
I'm not even sure what situation you're thinking that the airline would not accept their own printed ticket or shot of the ticket PDF or whatever they send you today, but the NFT would make all the difference. Again, either the Airline system reads your ticket data, whether it's NFT, barcode, or traditional digital and can tie it to a sale in their system or they can't. They can lose the NFT link just as well as the barcode link, and the gate agent isn't going to understand or care that you have an NFT that cryptographically proves "blah blah blah". They're already checking ID. For someone to fake the barcode version, they would also need a fake ID or Passport to match it.
I sort of see what you're saying if you went to court, and the airline wouldn't do discovery or purposefully shredded their records of your ticket for some reason, but we already have receipts and bank statements and the like that do the same thing, and an NFT doesn't change needing to prove you bought it in this case, presumably via linking a wallet rather than a bank account, though wallets don't have the ID requirements bank accounts do, so in court that could actually be rather harder to do.
Looking at each piece in isolation it's hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let's do the airline ticket example.
Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn't walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can't be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.
It's simple because it's familiar, but it's really ridiculously complicated and error prone.
Let's introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking "approve."
Now you approach the airport kiosk and there's a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it's their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can't match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it's their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it's for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.
The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.
It's effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don't need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It's complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.
@dreadgoat@kbin.social @beefcat@beehaw.org there's a whole insurance industry for covering legal fees regarding improperly titled real estate and it generated over $20 BILLION dollars in premiums in 2022!
If the title to a house were an #NFT, you could verify it's validity in seconds!
I don't see why a distributed blockchain is actually necessary to solve this problem though. Basic public-key cryptography is enough to sign and validate documents like real estate titles, without all the overhead incurred by NFTs. Our problem is that we aren't even making effective use of technology we've already had for decades to solve this.
I don’t know why NFTs ever took off
@Silviecat44 @peanuts4life they really didn't, no normal person bought them. It was just venture capitalist pushing it. It was the complete opposite of grass roots, which is why it crashed 97% when VCs pulled out. Very normal!
The Beeple sale got a lot of press. That was the extent of the novelty, but then the money-eyed scammers figured they had a new grift in the making. But it started with the media surprise and interest over how big the Beeple sale was.
Idiots saw the explosion of speculation on crypto and a few people got lucky and got rich. They jumped on the next new buzzword in tech expecting it to have an equivalent speculative boom, which obviously never happened.
Negative interest rates do funny things to capitalism.
Folding Ideas did an incredibly good documentary about NFTs that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there's always a very vocal group that's chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.
Spoiler alert: AI is ML is Big Data.
Also, ML is just statistics and calculus.
It's true, and it's not much like real intelligence, all the hype notwithstanding. On the other hand, statistics and calculus are pretty powerful tools and so are the ML systems that use them.
there is a group of influencers in tech that seem to jump from topic to topic, re-selling peoples projects and poorly written training/success classes. its sometimes shocking how quickly some of them change. Ive been doing AI on and off for 6 years now and I know a number of these people could not spell "neural network" a couple years ago.
I have worked with these people. They are very good at skimming the surface of every new thing and convincing others they are experts. Meanwhile, the really smart people are often busy with the projects they're already deeply immersed in, so they can't turn on a dime like this, nor do they want to.
I find this one hilarious as I tend to add techs to my portfolio as they begin to break mainstream. Bascially I build what my customers want.
last year they wanted blockchain games, now they are asking for AI. Some want AI Blockchain games, some want Blockchain AI games. Others, like influencers, just want you to build whatever they think will get conversions.
Fuck, let's pray it is
Well, the irony is hard to miss, right? Crypto was born out of this grand idea of decentralization, but then everyone just rushed over to these centralized exchanges. Kinda sounds like a death knell to me. Seems like the original spirit of crypto got lost in the rush for profits.
I do think the tech and the concept will keep evolving, and eventually, it'll morph into something new, get a new name or something. Here's hoping that when it does, people will get that it's better to trust the collective 'us' instead of just a select few. After all, these are often the same folks messing things up. But, what can you do, huh?
This almost sounds like what could happen to the Fediverse. It's decentralized just like crypto, but the majority of people won't know or care about how the Fediverse works, they will just want to communicate online.
I mean, most Lemmings (lol) hang out in Beehaw anyway, so centralised fediverse is already here
Now say it again but replace crytpocurrecy with Website aggregation. Its honestly not that different from leaving the big centralized reddit for the Fediverse... only to mostly end up in a few relatively huge alternatives in the name of decentralizing. Its just... human nature.
One aspect might be, that the scam stories are much more popular and easier to circulate on social media than are actual usages. It's a strong online virality bias. Scams and phishing also happen a lot in fiat and cash (albeit relatively lower), but since most of it is so secret and banks really don't want to get bad media, then try to keep such things hidden.
Look at Monero (privacy coin) for example. There is no news on whales, scams etc. there, because it's private so there is no attention given to that. That makes is easier to simply use it and not get an overly negative news bias.
At the same time, cryptos were successfully used during Ukraine for quick money Donations. This was also reported in news, but it doesn't stick so long into the minds of the people as the controversial scams/ftx etc.
Finally, at least with Ethereum there is still around 10 years of development in front of it with exciting new capabilities. Until a few years from now, we'll finally have a system with scalability ans high security as well.
However, until then ethereum will grow slowly.
Also, unfortunately I think the focus of many people has shifted from p2p currency and adoption to money making and investment - which isn't too bad, but adoption still sucks and makes it less useful for now.
It mainly lost it appeal as crashes, arrests, lawsuits, and thief keep happeneding. It was shown to be scammy with scammers scamming.
And yeah the new hotness of LLMs also helped. The tech bros who use to be pushing "X but with crypto" are now looking to push "X but with AI".
Yeah this, mainstream big players in financial markets already figured out crypto is useless, so IT firms switched to selling AI to corporates instead.
yes, everyone likes to talk that USD/EUR is risky, you have inflation, you have banks closing and stock market crashing, but so far it seems crypto is much much riskier. I feel much safer having my money in bank than having it on some blockchain, accessible only if I know private key and if I loose it there is 0 change I will ever see any of my money.
Crypto won't ever die, too many people have too much money invested in it for it to die.
But it's going nowhere. If I can't buy groceries with a bitcoin, then it's worthless. It got popular because people used it to trade drugs. I don't even think you can do that on tor anymore.
You could not be more incorrect about that last point
Yeah. It might put me on a watchlist or something but, I've went on the Dark Web. I've never purchased anything or went too deep into it, but the only things I found are:
some privacy services,
some crypto "cleaning" (whatever the phrase is) services,
some Tor mirrors of regular websites,
a Luke-Smith-esque (only taken even further to the extreme) privacy related blog,
a porn website (all of it legal, and it was all just indexed from clearnet porn sites, not even pirated, funnily enough)
And there seemed to be a lot of drug websites. When I say a lot, I mean a LOT. Like, all of the websites listed above (can we even call them websites if they're not on the worldwide web?) times 2 would be a lower number than the websites related to drugs that were listed on the various versions of the Hidden Wiki. And all of that by just using a page that acts as an indexer of the more popular pages. I didn't even use a dark web search engine. So, yeah. Who knows what else might be hiding there? Some guys on YouTube go on the dark web, like this guy, John Hammond, and find some fun stuff there, like ransomware gangs. That is to say there is more serious stuff on there, but I haven't looked for it.
You probably saw some (mostly fraudulent) ads. Dread is where most of Tor's public content can be found; but, yeah, crypto (specifically Bitcoin and Monero) are the standards there.
And this place isn't going away any time soon. Also, is it Dread or Dredd because I always thought it's the latter?
Without practical uses it's nothing but a Ponzi scheme, which is why every thread about crypto has a few true believers urging others to "invest".
It’s just another kind of MLM right now. It always has been. The superbowl Larry David add was the swan song for crypto mainstream appeal.
And you are right, most of the people that were telling you to buy cryptocurrency for reasons, now are into the “prompt engineering” fad.
Por metaverse, only the really unicorn-chasing and completely clueless about technology marketing “gurus” got into it.
A lot of controversial comments. Here are some of my observations:
undefined> DeFi
All governments and API server owners have shown that this is a wish and not reality.
DeFi has added some real value for both project creators and users, not just for myself. I'm not talking about the 'money making, profit driven' side of value either, but utility, capital efficiency, flexibility, new financial primitives as well.
All sorts of crazy innovation that you shouldn't just hand-wave away as a scam or redundant.
Good points for sure.
You mentioned recent developments, what Loopring is doing with Layer 2/3 technology has been game changing within the ethereum space. GameStop’s NFT marketplace, especially the games shines because of it.
Semi-related, this post reminds me of a recent F1 story I came across on squabbles, where they are using w3 improve their ticketing systems to combat certain things that currently cause issues like scalping while also providing a medium for tailored ticket and fan experiences. It has actually been a long time coming, I found this article from ‘21 How Non-Fungible Tokens Are Coming To F1 which goes more in-depth with what their vision is and what they believe they can achieve.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these kinds of applications pop up in other sports down the road if it does well for F1.
Given all the negative press in addition to the unfortunate support from GOP fascists, from the outside looking in it must seem like it’s 90% delusional morons being taken advantage of by 10% scammer assholes.
There are delusional morons and scammer assholes, but it’s a loud minority and does not define the technology and the assoc industry.
I tried to like Loopring, but their L2s were hardcoded circuits rather than zkEVM which the Polygon and Matterlabs team (and Starkware to a lesser extent) are pushing ahead with this year. Allowing the community of third party developers to contribute value (sound familiar Reddit?) is going to make the whole L2 space to gangbusters.
As it stands now you can't do much with Loopring except what the first party devs have built, which is basically a standard excahnge.
No, twitter just shit the bed is all and thats where the scams were primarily spread, but now that so many people have dropped twitter you don't hear about it as much.
Pretty much 1/3rd of the ads I get on Reddit, for example, are still crypto scams.
I will agree though that it lost the crypto-bro sheen, thank god, and companies stopped trying to shoehorn it into everywhere it had no use case for.
There are use cases for it but they are extremely specific and most of the time a normal database is the right tool for the job. You need to satisfy multiple conditions for a blockchain to be the right tool for the job over a normal DB.
Furthermore, even if you do satisfy the requirements and use blockchain tech, its annoying to try and market that. Just as an example, how often do you see video game companies or gambling companies or other websites touting the fact they have, I dunno, a Redis mem server on their backend as a "selling point" of their service?
No one. No one does that, no one cares. No one tries to market what database their backend uses as a way to make their product sound better, because no one gives a shit what your backend is built on top of. They care about the actual features and functionality of your product, not the tech your developers used.
So hopefully we have now entered the era where some services do use blockchain on the backend when its the right tool or the job, but they don't bother to try and market it and no one gives a shit if its MSSQL, Blockchain, Mongo, or whatever else that is used to store data.
Ads?! On my Reddit!?
I think the bubble has certainly burst. COVID resulted in loads of new consumer investers, and the visibility of crypto had never been higher. Exchanges were being advertised by major celebrities on Superbowl ads!
Then the market crashed, and all those investers realised what a mistake they'd made. I don't think it's a mistake many will make twice.
It was such a bizarre time, with major governments talking about minting their own NFTs or even their own digital currencies. That all seems to have quietly gone away now, thankfully.
Maybe people understood, that instead of freedom as advertised, crypto brings out even more oppressive forms of capitalism.
I'm not a crypto-bro, but how are they oppressed? It's just a infinitely more volatile Gold replacement and you don't have to sell on the big places
"Infinitely more oppressive forms of capitalism," not "Bitcoin users are oppressed."
Nope. I use it on a weekly basis to pay for stuff on the internet. It's got its uses and the concept is sound. What you're talking about is the hype train that happens ever so often.
What do you use crypto to pay for on the internet every week?
Nice try FBI
Wouldn't you like to know, fedboi.
"Did you know if you ask me if I'm a cop that I legally have to answer you truthfully if I'm a cop? So relax! What do you spend it on?"
Servers, VPN, domain names and recurring donations. Mostly donations every week. Servers and VPN on a monthly basis.
Thanks for the response. Aside from the fed responses lol I was wondering what people actually used it for since we can’t deny there is a lack of products you can buy with crypto. I will def start using it for donations and VPN
Actually I've had really good success in paying for privacy services with it. I wouldn't do it any other way, especially for things like a VPN where you don't want the provider to have to keep your name and address due to legal requirements.
Another great use case is sending money abroad, especially to countries where there's other sorts of financial restrictions.
Look up crypto wallets and use the ones you can use on your local computer (don't bank your coins in exchanges)
I'm glad to see that paying for things is still an option. What I really hope for is that the future of crypto is all payments and the investors fuck off
Weak hands got shaken out, and the economy is teetering on recession. When inflation stops and interest rates fall, and quantitative easing starts back up it's gonna come roaring back. The SEC and CFTC aren't trying to kill crypto, they are just trying to decide who's jurisdiction it falls under. The crypto industry will benefit from regulation, it will get safer, and you'll feel like an idiot for asking this question instead of buying while it's cheap. Hit me up in 2025!
I am not sure if you are actually drinking the Kool-Aid or if this is some top tier shit posting. If it's the latter, kudos to you!
Haha, it's funny how people think centralization will do any good for something that was designed to be decentralized from the ground up. I swear, it's like folks have totally forgotten what crypto was initially intended to solve.
I find it odd people who want their social media decentralised but are disgusted when money is decentralised.
This is a weird take and not the "gotcha" you might think it is.
Cryptos are a scam where nobody but very few at the top of the fraud actually win. While some crypto bros might be beyond help, they are actively endangering other people by trying to sell them their snake oil and drag them down with them. And the most tragic thing is, they stop applying any form of reason before making dangerous monetary decisions. People have and will continue to lose all their savings, so I would definitely agree with you that this shit is disgusting.
Decentralised social media on the other hand does not and can not endanger people's lifes like that. Yes, social media has dangers in itself. But I'd wager those dangers are far less pronounced, despite having a share of wackos.
If you are into cryptos and don't realise it is among the worst forms of gambling on it's best days, maybe you should take a couple of steps back and reevaluate if you actually understand everything that's going on, including the umcanny risks: Do you actually, for real, understand how it all works on the technological side or do you just pretend to or take someone's word for it? Do you actually make your own decisions or are those influenced by forces outside of your control (e.g. "diamond hands", "hodl" etc.)? Do you have a concrete and detailed financial plan that incorporates the worst scenarios as well ad exit strategies or is your "investment strategy" mostly determined by chance? How is your investment secured? Could you actually and factually sue in court and win in case bad actors try to prevent you from cashing out? How exactly is anything supposed to turn a profit and who's pocket is that magical profit supposed to come out of? Is anyone standing to make a profit from you and can you guarantee it won't happen? How?
Those are just a few (but not even all) considerations where cryptos usually should ring enormous alarm bells for anyone with a modicum of financial education. But not to crypto bros. To them all of this is weirdly enough just dandy and questioning anything is greatly discouraged. At some point they stop all critical thinking and just throw money into the fire, so some grifters can grift.
I'd personally rather use the money in cash to light a real fire. At least that will provide some warmth for a hot second.
Lol, somebody could write an opinion piece like this on decentralised social media and be just as wrong as you. Crypto is happily humming along and for some reason you are bitter that people like to use it.
I didn't write my reply for you, but for the people not yet aware of the inherent dangers of an unregulated financial market such as cryptos.
You can continue LARPing on the internet that you are some sort of mastermind investor. If that makes you happy, it is your money. I am just asking you politely to not try and sell your financial and tech illiteracy to your friends and family, only for them to inevitably lose all the money they invested trusting you.
If people are actually interested in decentralised technology to escape abusive corporations then your insults to cryptocurrency users and assumed bad intentions of cryptocurrency users are not very convincing arguments.
Contrary to what you keep claiming like a broken record, I am very much in favour of decentralisation. I am however against the enourmous amount of shitfuckery going on in the crypto space. And all I care about is warning people.
If you are of the opinion that cryptos - despite all rational - somehow have a future outside of a very few fringe use cases (e.g. black market transactions), then be my guest. You are mistaken, but I am also aware that there is no convincing crypto bros.
In well over a decade the crypto space has caused multiple economical desasters that left a lot of people destitute. It's kinda weird to ignore this fact, but you do you. Maybe believing harder in cryptos and doubling down will help this time. Best of luck, you will need it!
No one is claiming to be a mastermind except you declaring a thing you don't like as bad because of vague reasons.
I am very much against scams, yes. They target vunerable people. How is that a bad thing?
Umm social media has literally led to genocide in Myanmar leading to a flood of refugees in my country...
Decentralised social media would be even worse because people can set up their own instance and spew hate with no moderation.
How many genocides has crypto caused?
People fled the war in Ukraine with their crypto intact because it's borderless and empowers the public. Can't say the same for the banksters you're batting for.
Facebook infamously played a role in the genocide of the Rohingya. Please elaborate what the systematic persecution and murder of a group of people has to do with cryptos and this whole topic about their decline?
While the prospect of using it in everyday transactions seems pretty much dead, for some reason the crypto market cap in and of itself is very much alive. Plus it's interesting that crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and people wanting more control over their assets, so if anything I would think it would be more socially relevant now than ever.
Oh boy, wait until you find out about CBDC (Government's version of cryptocurrency with dystopian spin on it such as deleting your money if they don't like you.)
They wouldn't delete your money just because they don't like you.
They'd "arrest" your money for some crime that may or may not be legit. Paperwork and people getting their cut would be involved.
I mean, this already happens. Most states can easily freeze domestic assets when crimes are suspected
Well they can delete your money for not liking you, just look at how Republicans have been treating the LGBT community lately. if they have the chance to, they would absolutely love to delete all money owned by LGBT people.
If you think about what side is more tech-savvy, more likely the gays find a way to delete anti-gay money first lol. Even if they are less likely to use it
You mean the thing that was a blue sky research effort? From that website it doesn't even sound like anything exists, it's just a thought experiment to see if it would make sense. How is that in any way dystopian or nihilistic or whatever tone you appear to be going for?
This is how public policy should work. It would be foolish and irresponsible not to investigate if a new technology has a valid and useful application.
This is like noticing that the Army has plans for a Zombie invasion without applying any of the context and then using that as evidence that zombies are real and the gubment is covering it up. Instead of applying a tiny bit of actual research and finding out it's a common way that the military plans for politically unsavory possibilities like Canada invading the US. Also known as doing their actual job in a professional and not-at-all-suspicious way.
More fact info
The problem with CBDC is that they are actively developing it in a way they intended on rolling it out to the public (they are trying to set up campaign to roll it out) and we would be very screwed if it ever goes live, because it is not decentralized, there is going to be no due process and the authority is controlled by the government which historically have screwed people over repeatedly, just look at civil forfeiture surpassing robbery in USA, they could just do it with a mouse click in CBDC.
Even Yermack points out the risk of political abuse of CBDC and yet they are still going for it.
Why does the US even need crypto though? What problem is that solving? All they need to do is make a government version of Zelle that every bank in the US has to use (in addition to any private tools they like) to settle electric funds transfers and do it for free to the end user and bam, everything from digital cash, with none of the crypto overhead.
You're asking the right question, this is something they don't need and yet they have been pushing this for years.
I guess I thought it was just because of hype, and to say re China - look, we're doing it too. We're not falling behind. I.e. entirely optics and eventually it'll fade away as one of those things that no one cares about.
The phrasing I like is "crypto is a solution searching for a problem".
Crypto enthusiasts start with the existence of crypto and try to fit it as a solution to some problems rather than trying to solve those problems without already having chosen the solution. The reasoning is often flimsy as a result. They're not actually trying to solve a problem and thus won't consider things like "how is this better than a centralized system?".
Ok, so how would you purchase something like something from Wakfu MMO or other services when at the time they were blacklisted by credit card or payment processing gateway? Literally the only way at that time is to purchase crypto like dogecoin so that you could actually buy something on those services. It still happen today where other services are classified as "high risk" depending on what they offers, where they are, and so forth. They get blacklisted by credit card company and payment processing company, so they literally have to resort to using crypto to work around this problem, because what else are they supposed to do?
But go ahead and make up crap about crypto like how it solve nothing. I am honestly tired of people whining about "muh energy efficiency", if you cared that much about energy efficiency, why don't you use the same energy protesting the crypto and instead protest the billionaire flying in their private jets or even better, why not ban computer games altogether? Stop being a hypocrite, I am honestly tired of this.
That's a reasonable response, but the other guy's concerns are absolutely not meritless. Tech platforms demonstrating and offering up these kinds of currencies or tokens do explicitly talk about ideas such as limiting certain currencies from being spent on certain things, or enabling/disabling from a central authority.
China is already rolling out this type of currency albeit with limited success, and while I haven't heard anything about the e-CNY being tied to their social credit system, or punishments being inflicted in the shape of limiting access to funds, it's absolutely a possible option.
The concern in concept is totally valid, yes, but presenting it as if something that is being actively pursued for nefarious purposes is just misleading.
@TheTrueLinuxDev @peanuts4life Have you not heard of a bank account before lol. They can already freeze your assets at will.
And we have the option to use the paper dollars, by depreciating that, you have no safety net during a bank run. GG.
@TheTrueLinuxDev I haven't used cash in ages lol
That's good and all, but if you haven't diversify your assets, equity, and capitals, then you are still putting all of your eggs in one basket.
@TheTrueLinuxDev you can't do any of that with cash. Where are you investing with cash?
I could go on and on, you absolutely can with cash and people do it all the time.
We almost had a bank run in America a few times now, cash is good to have if you're in the middle of a bank run in America and you have to buy things now.
Too many scams. Too many ads advertising companies who ended up being scams as well. The pivot to NFTs was short-lived (because they were scams). The high-profile exchanges (FTX et al) going belly up, and the their founders in jail.
I don't think it is dead, but the hype certainly seems to be over. It is important to realize that as long as the crypto value trend is strongly linked to value of other commodities, it is still being treated as an investment, rather than a currency. Increasing the places where crypto can be actually used to pay will allow for unlinking crypto from being an investment to a currency. I guess there most people are currently not interested in that as much, which I think is unfortunate.
i think the shitcoin trend and NFT shit is over, but crypto as a technology and cryptocurrency certainly isn't. I don't see BTC, ETH, XMR dying aaanytime soon, especially the former and the latter - they're gold standard on the net already. Overengineered crypto like ETH seems to be less popular now.
Mid-bear-cycle. It'll be back in a year or two.
In the majority of people's eyes crypto is seen as a scam and something to avoid. The only thing crypto ever did for me was make things I actually care about more expensive.
I think it would take a lot to recover from the bad reputation it has gotten.
It was kinda shocking how negative public sentiment is. I am deep in crypto world so I am used to much more positive feedback on the stuff I am working on, because I guess I mostly hang out with crypto people
I think this is concentrated in the West. In Asia, the sentiment ranges from huh? to ooh that's nifty.
Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore are quickly rolling out the red carpet for crypto businesses and coming up with actually feasible regulations around them.
I know one crypto bro IRL. He acknowledges that it's all just a pyramid scheme, but he enjoys it because it's like gambling but with more strategy involved I guess.
Would you also consider GameStop’s NFT marketplace for games part of a pyramid scheme?
Or maybe what F1 is doing to evolve how they handling ticketing? Here’s a recent follow up on F1’s NFT ideas I came across recently.
It’s… just not all a pyramid scheme. To say it’s all a pyramid scheme is missing the forest for the trees. It’s n o t
While I think you're right in that neither of those seem to be pyramid scheme, I disagree with the implication that they are any better (apologies if that was not the implication).
They seem to just be creating an avenue for monotization of something that, I assume (but I could be wrong here), was previously free by nature, hence the necessity for an NFT to monetize it.
I guess really that's just what NFTs do, or at least their main use case. But I guess I just fundamentaly disagree with that idea.
Gambling except the expected value is higher than 0
Is it really though? If I were to go and buy my first ever crypto coin today would you really say the expected value is greater than 0?
I have no doubt those who got in years ago or mine coins using other's resources have an expected value greater than 0 but that's not the entire market. I hope.
I guess it depends on your time-frame and your risk profile. BTC/ETH over the medium term has done much better than pretty much any other asset in the world. Altcoins didn't even factor into my brain when I made that comment.
Well, are MLMs dead? Audible book spamming? The nigerian prince scam? Hell, mail scams are still running to this day.
As long as there's a hook, I doubt cryptomoney scams are going to be leaving any time soon. It is rare we'll see scams of the same magnitude as before, but they'll always be around in those sorts of communities. Just a matter of principle, whenever money's involved.
You could probably go back to buying pokemon cards, though. The fact that crypto's greatest investors have a vested interest in not having their cash vanish into thin air, it's best used for it's purpose-- as currency-- unless another FTX fumbles the bag.
Those whales likely still have reserves to dump, too. Hell, they can probably create reserves. For a long time it will still be worth it for them to keep marketing crypto to dumb victims.
Ah yes. Another entry to the list: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
Crypto scams burnt up all their market, i.e. pretty much everyone who want going to get into the crypto bubble, did. You can tell because crypto went mainstream, buying stadiums and advertising through Matt Damon.
So when the bubble burst that time, there's no one left to start a new bubble with.
I still know permabulls that at least say they are buying with every paycheque. I doubt there are enough dollars doing that to keep the price afloat, if I were a whale I'd probably be selling, personally.
Dear god, I hope so
I hate watching so many people get scammed
No. Bitcoin is the future of money. It really is the best form of money humanity has invented so far. People just need to stop trading shit coins.
Bitcoin (as it uses proof of work) is incapable of handling all transaction of the world without creating insane amounts of wasted energy.
Updating the ledger (actually writing down transactions) is only a fraction of the total computing resources it consumes. Most of it is just spent doing random hashes over and over again (the proof of work part). This is computing power that does not actually do any of the money related tasks, it's just there to keep the ledger trusted.
This is an awesome idea in theory, but completely unscalable in reality.
Other Blockchain technologies like proof of stake don't have this issue of energy waste, but they have other hurdles.
But Bitcoin as it is implemented now can never be the money of the future in my opinion.
Trust is one of the most fundamental parts of any monetary system, so brute forcing hashes in this case is directly related to it.
Bitcoin can easily serve the world on 100 Mac Minis. Probably even fewer. The fact that currently people beat themselves into burning ridiculous amounts of electricity to run Bitcoin nodes is a function of the profitability of doing that. If that profitability decreases, so will the electricity burned. If I remember correctly, the protocol is designed to reduce that reward over time and unless the dollar value of Bitcoin dramatically increases, the energy waste should decrease long term.
A secondary point on energy consumption is how that of Bitcoin compares to the traditional financial transaction systems. I don't have the numbers at the moment but last time I checked it wasn't pretty for the latter.
With all that said, if PoS is proven to be as robust as PoW, it would probably be adopted by systems currently on PoW, like Bitcoin.
I think you're missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.
The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.
Can you elaborate on how one could print bitcoins if they controlled 50% of the network?
Bitcoin miners validate transactions on the network, so if one entity controls a majority of all miners, they can validate their own fraudulent transactions
One couldn't, somebody who controls 51% might get away with a few double spends until they are caught, that's all.
"A few double spends" is underestimating the impact. When this has happened in the past, the whole network gets fragmented, and at some point everyone needs to decide which version of history to throw out, allowing potentially anyone to double-spend in that time frame. A bad actor with enough compute could cause a network split and put whatever they want in the ledger. Getting caught isn't really a concern if it's all anonymous wallets, and it only takes 1 unnoticed transaction to move millions.
The entire basis for trust in Bitcoin (and any proof of work blockchain) is that the network is so big, no single actor has the resources to become a majority and influence the ledger.
I don't know if you've heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That's how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it's still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.
Yep, first is always best, like my CRT TV.
Ethereum is pretty cool too. I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist. That's pretty much it though. the rest are shitcoins. Edit: Monero is the other good coin.
Do you use Bitcoin in real life?
Do you use any gold in real life to pay for stuff?
No, and I also seriously question people's obsession with gold.
I used to work at a liquor store and we had one regular customer who paid with a bitcoin card. This was around 2015 or so. It was funny because he said it was because of "anonymity" but everyone knew him as "the guy who pays with bitcoin."
No, just virtually.
::: spoiler spoiler it's_a_joke :::
bitcoin will never be the dominant global currency. it couldn't even maintain its position as the dominant darknet currency. bitcoin is not perfect and you are part of a religious cult that bans people for pointing out its shortcomings.
Yeah man, keep huffing that copium.
Bitcoin has no long term plan for actually securing its chain. The fees don't add up to enough and the throughput is abysmal. Lightning is centralised and was disrupted because of chain congestion due to Ordinals.
Keep dreaming!
No fucking way haha, imagine having to hang out at the grocery store for an hour waiting for your payment to clear
Nah. This happens every few years, has been since 2014. Buy a GPU before they rise up and use all of our electricity again. An new SBF will crash it sometime.
there are no more notable projects that rely on GPU mining. you should be more worried about taiwan getting invaded.
What is keeping prices high now is particularly nvidia but also amd transitioning more to an AI/ML pro/server/datacentre market, consumer GPU's are not a big let alone majority of the pie. They're simply not making enough consumer cards and don't care that very little cards are sold because they're getting ludicrous prices on what does sell. intel gen 2 needs to be good in the mid range to provide competition again, the problem is a distinct lack of competition.
I'm glad I never got into cryptocurrency. For all intents & purposes, it might as well be Monopoly money.
I'm not a big fan of crypto for a number of reasons but that "for all intents and purposes" bit applies to all fiat cash.
Cash is monopoly money, with the key distinction of being backed by a government.
That's not entirely true. The US dollar is backed up by it being mandated as (I believe the only) acceptable payment for US taxes. So long as the US government exists, US currency will have value to anyone who has to pay those taxes.
I specifically said cash, maybe people use it differently but cash to me means paper money. I haven't paid for anything with US paper bills in possibly a decade. All my money is just numbers on a screen. I'd wager a lot of people are similar, especially when it comes to taxes. Are you actually paying taxes or receiving refunds in cash?
I am confused that you think cash is fiat, but a checking account also denominated in dollars isn't? Or else your responses seem to be a nonsequitur.
I am constantly surprised where the need for cash pops up. The local ice-cream stand. Any used purchase from another individual found on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Even just reimbursement for family and friends you don't want to set up accounts for.
Monero has real world use
It is humming along nicely for those that use it. There could be another speculative pump filled with scams, that would be no surprise.
No, it'll never go away, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective.
The A.I. "Grift Shift" is Underway
Oh I don't know maybe it has something to do with Sam Bankman-Fried swindling $8 billion.
you can’t get a real discussion of crypto here because downvotes are impossible and the simps are legion
You really shouldn't care about internet points, give your opinion and move on
Not dead, just sleeping. It's a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:
Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.
And that's it. You don't have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can't solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone's database and hoping nothing happens or they're too big to fail. It's just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.
Ok, I'm starting a new cryptocurrency, then, it's a Google Sheets page.
@Thebazilly @VeeSilverball a "SheetCoin", as it were
@peanuts4life@beehaw.org It's called a bear market. Every 3-4 years, it's the same thing. Patience...:blobcatthinksmart:
I think really it just hit some kind of critical mass where people lost interest. Like streaming services: at first there was one (Netflix) and everyone wanted it, then there were a few and there was one for everyone, then there were too many and people just got sick.
it should be
Cryptography? No it's not, any more than math is dead.
Cryptocurrency? I don't know.
I use crypto for its real intention, as money. I buy my groceries with crypto and pay most of my bills in crypto on a monthly basis. Crypto itself is not a problem. Its the FTX's and Mt Gox's of the world trying to graft old banking norms onto crypto that is the majority of the problem. "not your keys, not your coins." Exchanges are like gas station bathrooms, you go in, do your business, and get the heck out. You dont just hang around.
Your bank being named "Magic the gathering online exchange" really should have been a red flag..
Right! I practice what i preach. I put fiat in an exchange, wait a few days for it to clear, biy crypto, and take the crypto off the exchange into a wallet i fully control
The transaction costs are killer though.
I dont use bitcoin as i want privacy. I use monero where fees are $0.01
I've never met anyone taking monero, but I do think it's the only one that may sort of live up to some of the promises. But again, a currency no one accepts isn't useful to me.
I use monero and if i need to pay in another crypto i just use an instant swap to convert monero to their crypto of choice
I see monero pretty widely adopted! But not near Bitcoin and even BCH might have a little more traction.
I've kinda seen monero as a truly peer-to-peer currency because most central exchanges don't ever want to touch it :)
Crypto is dead, long live bitcoin.
It will never die. I believe it will wax and wane over the years. Being incredibly anonymous and deregulated means it will always be a great place for the evil doers to manipulate the market and make money off of it. Because of that there will always be some people using it.
I think one of the biggest failings of cryptocurrency in general is that people view it as a replacement for cash or debit cards when in reality with how slow and expensive the transactions are it is more of a replacement for clearing houses. When you get money sent to your bank you can use it right away because the bank trusts you and provides that service but the money isn't truly there yet. You may have heard the phrase of "the check cleared" or something similar. It takes a long time for those processes to complete and crypto is faster than it.
For certain values of 'anonymous', anyway. There are still folks who don't think that traffic analysis applies to cryptocurrency.
I still don't understand why the Bitcoin community (in particular) has been so resistant to increasing the block sizes and the transaction rates. As it stands right now, the Bitcoin network can't push even a small fraction of what the SWIFT network handles every second. The arguments on the old #bitcoin IRC channel made no sense (and got a lot of us k-lined before we even saw any replies!)
the pyramid scheme of crypto is dead. Partially because there are no suckers left to buy in and partially because interest rates have gone up, meaning that money is no longer free and investments need to promise a return, which crypto can’t provide as it lacks meaningful utility.
The long and short of it is that crypto was never a good idea, a currency where no one is “in charge” Is a currency where no one is responsible, so if something goes wrong no one is to be expected to fix it.
I’m not about to say that the federal reserve is the perfect system, but it is much better than anything the crypto world has come up with. Bitcoin is deflationary and inefficient, ethereum is undemocratic and has it’s attention split, and everything else lacks a broad base.
The centralization or currency was never the problem and these alternatives are worse in just about every way.
It's definitely not dead. Market cycles come and go. It's just a matter of time until the next round.
There are always some new people who believe they can get rich quick by investing in stocks, crypto, NFTs or something else. Why don’t we just write numbers on ping pong balls, throw them in huge transparent plastic sphere, shuffle the balls a few times, pull out a few and give some money to anyone who guessed the right numbers. Oh, wait we’ve already invented the stupidity tax centuries ago.
Most existing cryptocurrencies have no inherent value, they might make sense as a currency, but having a cell in a distributed spreadsheet assigned shouldn't be considered a growth investment and it's absurd how many treated it that way. The only way that sort of thing works is with an endless supply of greater fools, and evidently they ran out.
as long as there are easily accessible networks with money on them there will be scammers to try and exploit them, this is no different than what we have seen with fiat, the biggest difference being that usually you have to use cash only to put out a shingle and be shady. Crypto allowed anyone to "look" legit and have easy access to settlement.
if anything people are learning WHY you want to at minimum control the ramps and ensure there are channels through which there can be trade using strong identity systems. next phase of crypto will look a bit more grown up as it will very likely be coming to the party as an enabler of multiple VRF style auth systems, helping break dependance on social login systems.
as long as there are suckers out there, crypto will live.
In the US each time crypto is traded it needs to be reported.
I got free crypto from Coinbase. Then sent it to a wallet, then sold it. So each transaction needed to be reported. It’s too troublesome to be worth it.
Also, if I buy crypto, they have a week hold before I can move it. My idea was to buy crypto in country A and sell it in country B to quickly transfer money between the two countries I live in. Also it would help me beat the bank fees.
But the 7 day hold kinda defeats the purpose of quickly transferring money.
This is an interesting take. I suppose in hindsight it was naive of us to think the government wouldn't catch on and track / tax it.
Just download your transaction CSVs from Coinbase and throw them into a Git repo.
This is good for Bitcoin.
As a bitcoiner I certainly hope so.
Bitcoin is still around 30k a pop, so I wouldn't say it's dead yet. But I foresee a big crash in the months or years to come: the hype has passed, and the real uses of crypto are very few. It's also not a good investment since the expected returns are 0. Once people finally realize that, I see the price falling to 1k or even less.
You know that this was being said multiple times in the last 10 years?
I was there when it hit $50 and said that the bubble has to pop soon, so at what time are we accepting crypto coins as just an alternative if you want to gamble?
People have realized it, and they don't seem to care.
Every time there is a market correction, the prices fall such that more folks can buy in. Folks might not be able to buy in right now at $29kus, but if and when the price falls back to $25kus at some point the price point might be more conducive.
That's the same thing with gold though. There are other reasons to invest in something than just returns. Some folks want something to maintain its value. Bitcoin being deflationary is supposed to be a good hedge against inflation. (But it's far to volatile to really serve that purpose in my opinion.)
Well, gold has the added benefit that it has served this purpose for thousands of years.
Would you really count on an extremely complex electronic currency requiring a distributed array of machines to get you through a major crisis?
You mistake me, I'm not saying Bitcoin is better than gold. I was just pointing out that returns are not the only reason.
Bitcoin's in the low $29kus region lately (up from $26kus), so it looks like it's going to keep going. Also, big real money investors are now pretty long on cryptocurrency, so there is a vested interest in keeping it around.
Plus, you know, folks buying stuff on the black and grey markets with it. Wish I didn't have to mention drugs, but it's the easiest way to keep getting insulin for folks these days in addition to the usual recreational compounds.
My partner just got a DM on Instagram about... cryptomoney! Funny thing is, if you search the company, the entire first page is about scandals and negative things. And it is on some MLM list too.
So, the grifters are still out grifting.
There are also a lot of crypto scam sites popping up, where a scammer will set up a fake crypto exchange site that looks real on first glance, hoping you make an account, give them all your identity information, and "deposit" a bunch of money/crypto into it, which they run off with.
not really. the stupid stuff, like nfts, are dying, but the rest is still the same.
No, one thing is the use cases of some to bypass laws.
The other thing is, there will always be people to fall for all kinds of scams, cults, hypes, pyramid schemes so many are still alive as well, there is people out there buying sugar pills and energy healing and Reddit gold.
I am just really happy that storage-based crypto died. It made getting hard drives, and used-servers with drive-bays pretty expensive....
Although, https://cryptoslate.com/cryptos/storage/ I guess many more rose to take its place. :-/
I think the real problem with crypto, everyone and their mother has decided to make another stupid cryptos.... and most of them, are completely stupid. The only person profiting, is the person who created it and minted themselves a bunch of coins to hold onto until the value went up.
Don't get me wrong, I think crypto has its place. But, buying pizza at pizza hut isn't it.
you do mind explaining where crypto might have its place?
If you can't buy pizza at pizza hut with it, it's pretty useless as a currency. Which doesn't surprise me, as it doesn't solve any problems with electronic transactions better than traditional existing tools except if you're undertaking illegal purchases.
Hopefully. The only thing it was ever useful for was buying illegal drugs via Silk Road.
The Silk Road did more for harm reduction and harm management than anything else in the last ten years. Have to give 'em credit for that.
It still is useful for that, and until we have a better way to buy drugs online, i don't see it going away.
Most people are shifting towards the AI trend instead. Read a post which somewhat describes it well, people integrate the new trends into their projects to get more investor money. Nothing looks better to investors other than 'We have AI Blockchain nano technology behind our service'.
Last year, 'we have blockchain' earned lots of money. Now it's 'we have AI'. In both cases, the technology probably isn't needed, it is there just to be there.
Read the article, and gonna be honest I feel like the sudden push for "AI" development and marketing is to keep the stock prices up amid layoffs from hiring too much since the pandemic.
considering the comments, it’s right now the best time to buy some eth
It's not dead, but the SEC sure has been really helping the consumers basically tanking the market about everytime they help....
I hope the hype is dead. What are people buying drugs on the deep net with these days?
Monero
That makes good sense. See, illegal remote purchases was a very real practical application all along, so there's definitely a floor price on crypto. It's not dying completely.
No, the market is down. stocks are down.
As long as Kim needs goods, crypto will exist...
On our breakfast TV during the news segment they touch on international markets, e.g. "the DOW is xyz". They also have a slide on crypto and as well as listing Bitcoin and Etherium (or whatever it's called), I still can't believe they seriously show Dogecoin.
I don't think it's dead, just dormant right now. It kicked up a looot of buzz and got a lot of attention, especially from bad actors and govs. I can see it getting big, again, I just don't know when.
I was naive enough to get into the crypto games, because I was hoping to earn some crypto for myself. I wasn't having much luck, and I started to tell myself that crypto was a scam. I enjoyed seeing the web3 browsers emerge, like Brave, Osiris, etc, as they offered a new infrastructure to the internet. Something decentralized, which was cool. I'm also disappointed that we now have AI browsers, which is scary and not a good direction to go in.
Out of pure curiosity, why do you say this? In context of something like ChatGPT, it makes sense, but what do you think about stuff like local LLMs as assistants and embedded in browser infra?