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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I'd never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
Yeah, it's like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
LOL they love to parade around the 1/10,000 winners and make them spokespeople for the casino for a week.
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
If you did give them advice, would it be different?
The problem is this person was looking at the market as a whole and then investing in some niche coin. At this point any coin that's not well-established is mostly likely pure grift.
Right, why invest in a rug pull coin when I can invest in an ETF of all the rug pull coins!
Fundamentally, no. That's just what it's become.
I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it's like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet... gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So... yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
Apart from all the other deflationary stuff...
I can't get past the adjustable difficulty lottery system they use for mining blocks every 10m... :/ there has to be a better way.
It's like diagonalizing huge matrices repeatedly just as a wait() function.
there's better methods than how Bitcoin works (PoW) like Proof of Stake, but that has its own problems, like bringing more centralization to the network. Like how with bitcoin if a miner controls more than half of the global hash rates, they can mint more money than should be, in a currency with PoS they could just buy half of the coins and do it. They probably wouldn't because its not in their self interest, but its still a problem
A lot of scams are dependent on the presence of regulations.
Frankly movement is all that matters. Too deregulated looks like cryptocurrencies, too regulated looks like PSTN which every phreaker could own, because it relied upon laws for its defense, not technical robustness.
There's no system that remains working when just kept standing, all that matters is that we can quickly rebuild any part of it. Which is why modern legal systems and modern Web suck so much, they've lost that trait.
Idk. I've been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don't think it's necessarily a "scam" the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
It's not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It's not an investment and it's also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that's not your use case, don't buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn't buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It's not going to happen. You can't price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.
That is not what's stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham's Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there's also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are "plug and play" payment processors who can handle it now.. Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they'd have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.
I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It's basically what can be done. You can't decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can't plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).
If I understand that correctly.
Gosh. It's year 2025, I've achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I'll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.
Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.
Here are a few of the problems being solved here:
Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I'm mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn't do either of the last two, it's subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won't get the option of Taler.
I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don't see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that's what I'm excited to see take off.