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From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT (english.elpais.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 31 points 7 months ago (53 children)

As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (52 children)

    Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you've got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (42 children)

    I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (17 children)

    Having a currency not backed by a government or different currency is actually something the world could benefit from. Iranian currency was backed by USD, the US caused a shortage of USD there, and their currency value dropped to under 3% of it's former value. 90 Million people.

    That said, I think most of us have only ever used crypto to buy drugs off the internet.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (15 children)

    Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.

    Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (13 children)

    That's the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can't.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (12 children)

    You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what's preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?

    Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (11 children)

    How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?

    If you mean hoarding it, that's pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (10 children)

    The supply of an asset is the volume of that asset available for purchase.

    If I buy all of that, supply becomes zero.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (9 children)

    The price goes up as you buy it.

    You could attempt to corner the market, but in doing so, you're also going to be massively enriching the current holders.

    What point would taking the entire supply do - especially since you can easily just start another blockchain?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (6 children)

    You buy enough to raise the price, announce that you're buying it, schmucks try to get in on the wave, you dump while tweeting diamond hands.

    Repeat.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    Again, why?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    To make money

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    The government you're talking about can print money at will.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    But that increases the money supply. This way they can take money from other people. For example Russia can get USD without printing and inflating RUB.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's just FOREX with extra steps?

    If Russia controls the entire supply of Bitcoin (which is what you're saying) then why would anyone with USD want to buy it? At that point, being owned by Russia entirely, it's just a Russian currency.

    The whole supposed attraction of Bitcoin is that it's not a government currency, and the supply isn't controlled by a central bank. Ethereum has additional uses to that, but that's still one of the prime factors as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Not the entire supply, just enough to affect prices. Basically the stock market but without even the appearance of it not being manipulated to hell.

    And it's not Russia, or not just them, anyone with enough money to play can fuck people with sub-8 figure net worths over.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    @mattyroses @HK65 starting another blcokchain is not as easy as copy the blockchain unless you convince the majority of people that your fork is better than the previous one

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Sure, there's a large network advantage.

    But here you're talking about a hypothetical where, for some reason, a major government has bought up all blockchain tokens and won't release them. So nobody's on the original one anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation's fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren't being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they're probably not jumping through those hoops.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    To preface: I'm not a gold nut and I believe that it's generally wiser for stable developed nations to use fiat currency to enable them to operate in a generally Keynesian approach with controlled inflation.

    That said while I agree it's unwise for nations unable to do that themselves to back their currency with a stable fiat currency from a different country, I don't think crypto is the solution. Coinage is. And I'm talking old school coinage where the government isn't backing it with metals, they're making it out of them. Probably something like silver.

    A backed currency is because a government can't be trusted not to overinflate. If you want to bypass trust, the answer isn't another currency in which all value is theoretical, it's currency in which the value is in your hand and verifiable, with the government acting as the one setting units, assuring proper valuation, punishing devaluation, and publishing means for institutions and people to confirm valuation, such as physical properties, alloy percentages, and the easiest tests.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we'll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.

    Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I'm afraid we're just at the begin of its initial fallout.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I think the rise of Monero over Bitcoin is a very positive sign. Since it has privacy, the government absolutely cannot stand the fact that it exists, and therefore, institutions don't want to touch it. This means the "number go up", "to the moon", and "compliance", shmucks are all driven away in horror and you are left with the real core who want to see a better money in a digital world. If that sounds interesting, you might want to listen to "darknet Market Maximalism" a manifesto by xenu. You can listen to the audio version of it on YouTube.

    Edit: I'll save you the trouble. Here's the link directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogNg20rGTU

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes

    Yeah, sure, that's why we're all riding Segways.

    The reality is that quite a lot of new technologies have no significant real-life use case and vanish without a trace.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    I tried to make clear that I'm talking about tech with potentially significant impact, case in point: blockchain. Are you suggesting that a quirqy twowheeler is somehow on the same level?

    Unless trolling is all you're about, I can recommend refraining from such offhand dismissive remarks. Sarcasm has its use, but rin an anonymous online discussion it is easy to misunderstand. It does not contribute to a meaningful exchange of ideas.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.

    But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don't care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.

    They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Since the government hates Monero so much, that's actually not as big of a problem with Monero because people want to earn it and trade it for goods and services in the real world. Also, people who use Monero are incredibly against centralized exchanges and would like to see it banned from every single centralized exchange on Earth so that decentralized exchanges would be the only place you could obtain it or through permissionless atomic swaps and peer to peer. The Monero community also mocks number go up people and calls them state plants.

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