I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.
Worth it!
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I seriously wonder how much brain damage I avoided by squeaking in my teenage years before the invention of smart phones.
Honestly I understand better now why old people complained about computers so much. We don't even know what we lost.
FUCK YOU! I understand crypto and STILL have a VHS tape I never returned. pfft. arrogant youth. now where do i push to send this to reddit?
I was born in 1983 and I’m old enough to remember having only 5 tv channels, vcr’s, and you couldn’t get on the internet if your mom was in the phone.
I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.
It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.
Listen here you little shit: you think you’re superior because you rebranded Ponzi schemes with AI merde?
Crypto is an EMP away from being worthless
I'm against crypto but this logic seems same as money is one fire away from being worthless.
Which is true. We just give worth to things to make it easy for transactions.
Also, modern money is also susceptible to an emp, arguably more so than crypto.
Cryptocurrency or cryptography?
The former you don’t really need to understand fully to use, but the latter is vital and indeed brain-melting.
Cryptozoology
I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
See, this guy gets it
Then you don't understand crypto.
I don't think there is one legal use case that can only be solved by a blockchain and not cheaper and faster with a classic database.
Except money laundering, crapto is fantastic for that.
I am sure scamming people out of their money with crypto is legal in a few jurisdictions.
But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.
What?
No, that's basically it.
The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn't backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can't trust the other computers that you're talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can't suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.
It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it's worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it's supposed to replace.
So it's just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that's supposedly worth something because...of reasons?
It's decentralized, so how do you prevent people from making up bullshit lies that didn't happen about where the money is? You do it by incorporating a difficult math problem. Then to incentivize people to actually work on that instead of just using the money, people who solve it get a reward.
I am not pro crypto, just explaining.
Fiat currency is just as silly. As is all money, really.
"I trade numbers for food. The numbers are accessible via a magnetic strip on some plastic in my pocket." or "I trade paper for clothing but the number of papers isn't as important as the number printed ON the papers." Both of these realities are absurd. :)
As a store of value representing labor rendered: neither of those are terrible systems and most people don't understand either of them anyway. Fiat seems "normal" because we grew up with it. That said: I'm no apologist. Popular crypto currencies offer little novelty for the layperson, no true improvement on the concept of currency generally, and cost orders of magnitude more to maintain their required infrastructure. I fail to see the appeal.
There are some projects which focus on the practical utility of decentralized currency (I remember thinking Nano (wikipedia.com) was cool back in the day) but they don't get the same kind of attention as meme coins because they can't be abused as easily. I've heard stories of these kinds of tools facilitating commerce in places where the local currency collapsed. Neat as that may be it isn't revolutionary... Still more convenient than bartering via cigarette though.
the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong
but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html
When I think of crypto I think of that bloke grubbing through landfill for a lost hard drive. I think of Sam Bankman Fried. I think of Trump's meme coin. Yes, I'm sure someone must be explaining it wrong to this old lady.
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It's a speculative asset that fluctuates based on the whims of billionaire hedge funds and early crypto investors. There is zero value in owning it unless you got in early enough. And even then it's a situation of the last man holding the bag. Someone will end up losing their asses.
On average the value of any crypto token is less than 0 because of the high cost to produce and transfer them. Ironically it seems people find the most wasteful tokens more valuable. "It's hard to make so it must be valuable" or some such nonsense.
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....why is he replying to himself?
Character limits and/or not being able to edit the tweet to add more thoughts once posted.
As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.
I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.
When I was a kid I always was amazed at things like my grandparents going from no electricity to microwave ovens and VCRs. I often wondered about huge cultural shifts and what that was like, going from preindustrial production to industrial or major shifts in religion that affected whole societies. Now I am experiencing it and it's very uneasy but exciting at the same time. Weirdness.
It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.
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Why you gotta do me dirty like that?
8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.
6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers
4th grade for me, so barely old enough to understand the significance, but definitely old enough to remember airports without TSA, and being able to go all the way to the gate with whomever was flying.
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Yeah, let’s see you write a new autoexec.bat file with whatever text editor came on a DOS3.2 floppy that’s infected the the Stoned virus after you stupidly deleted autoexec.bat from your 386 by going to the library and checking out some books.
Umm the rest of us has to write it own autoexec.bat, not because we were idiots that deleted stuff or got viruses, but to change the keyboard language and a few other things to have enough memory to play Doom.
Don't forget config.sys! Who all here can get a Soundblaster working without disabling anything else? (IRQ 5 typically?)
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