The real question is, will the big cryptocurrencies hold? Bitcoin is down almost half from its peak, but it's done that before. What's different this time is that more countries, especially China, have banned cryptocurrency operations. Hard to say.
At some point, Tether is going to crack. The backing isn't there, and everybody knows it now.
It can't survive a net outflow. It's still possible to exit Tether for another stablecoin. USDT and USDC are still trading at 1:1. You can redeem USDC for US dollars. So if you own USDT, get out while you can. When stablecoins crash, they crash all the way to zero.
The SEC continues to bring enforcement actions. 97 so far in the cryptocurrency area.[1] Most recently, "Gold Hawgs". "Instead of using all of the investor funds to develop Gold Hawgs' business, Garcia, the chief financial officer and a 50% owner of the company, allegedly stole approximately $123,000 of the money raised from investors by transferring the funds to another company that he controlled; he then allegedly used the money to pay for various personal and business expenses unrelated to Gold Hawgs."
Before that, "Crowd Machine": "In this offering, which occurred between January and April 2018, Sproule told investors that the ICO proceeds would be used to develop a new technology that would enable Metavine, Inc.’s existing application-development software to run on a decentralized network of users’ own computers. Instead, Crowd Machine and Sproule began diverting more than $5.8 million in ICO proceeds to gold mining entities in South Africa – a use that was never disclosed to investors."
Before that, "Denaro": "Auzins misappropriated all of the ICO’s proceeds."
Before that, "MyMicroProfits": "Defendant Ryan Ginster allegedly engaged in a fraudulent scheme raising millions in cryptocurrency using online investment programs and then converted the cryptocurrency for his own benefit,"
Totally ordinary con game rip-offs. Only the hype is new.
It looks like 2022 will be the big shakeout year for NFTs and the low end of cryptocurrencies.
I don't understand this at all. Shouldn't "cryptocurrency" - I.E. currency based on an understanding of computational complexity and a view into abstract mathematics - appeal to those that have a vague idea of what their money is most-physically represented by?
If so, then why are these logically refutable scams ("Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!": Just think that the person would, if they can generate 4btc of value out their ass like that, simply likely keep it, whether they valued the fiat value of it or not) so common?
I understand the idea that the emotional gain from giving something to someone who has never had anything of that value may be overwhelmingly tempting or fulfilling on the "giver's" part but similarly, aren't there people more deserving of this than you, the "scam" victim? At that point, I don't even know if I would call it a scam.
If someone posed as a verified conveyancer and built a fake profile, payed legitimate businesses and entities off for positive testimonials etc. And encouraged me to hire them to re-mortgage my property for me then I would call that a scam - but someone asking for money with the vague promise that "they need it more than you" not so, similarly not with a "I will give you double the money you give me" scheme. It just feels more like something so stupid that you are entirely at fault if you fall for it.
> appeal to those that have a vague idea of what their money is most-physically represented by?
It attracts people who want to make money easily. A crazy amount of people who have no idea about the tech aspect of crypto are "investing" and active in crypto social groups. Just go on the major subreddits and read a few threads, it won't take long to see that a very large portion of them are kids/teenagers who invested a few hundreds or less in the hope of a 1000x pump, these are the people who get scammed.
Everyone says they're here for "the project", "the future of currencies", &c. most of them are here to make a quick buck
We're well pass bitcoin being a mathematical curiosity. There's plenty invested because line on graph goes up & smart sounding person sounded smart talking about it
Indeed. I'm way too young but I would have loved to be one of the people who, back in the day, thought "there's no way that $1mil of fiat value would exist in the blockchain because SHA256 must be fuckable in some way, if that kind of money was in it".
Sadly, too many smart people are too greedy for their own good.
Stop chasing the easy money. In fact, stop thinking about money all the time.
Stash a little money from your paychecks into a 401k and a Roth IRA and invest in passive, broad market ETFs. Hold no matter how the market is feeling this week. Don't trade on margin, don't stock pick, don't daytrade, and stay away from options.
The buy and forget way to wealth is a much surer path than the risky one.
Are these "intelligent" investments? Or just complex adaptive systems which are theoretically digestible by you but you don't even bother?
Honestly, I wouldn't bother putting my money into a 401k - I would stash it away, let a little rot away with inflation and use it to start a business that provides real people with a real product and pray. That seems like a more sure-fire way to get across the line.
Ostensibly, that can be thought of as a more extreme version of your "pick an index and stick in it" approach. The reality of it is that we don't know which one of these choices is the right one - it may be so that cryptocurrency will make you trillions! Or that the Roth IRA will have 70% of the people who stick their money in it as actual millionaires despite them only making $70k a year for 30 years.
Factually most businesses don’t make it past the 5 years point for different reasons which are not always even solvable by the the starting team. An example would be the market moving at a time where you don’t have enough available capital to adapt. The alternative is doing something relatively predictable and safe like a corner store or a bakery. There is good money to be made there but probably not much more than by doing a well paid engineering job for most.
Don’t get me wrong. Starting a business is a bet in yourself which is always good. I think people who are interested in the life style should definitely do it, just not by using all their retirement savings.
Numerically, most of the scams are rug pulls. "Get in on the ground floor of our hot new web3 token issue that will be the next BAYC or whatever". There are enough such things out there that do make money (a lot of it) that people are willing to bet on them anyway.
Then the owners take the $2M they got in early financing or seed money or reservations or whatever it's called and disappear with it.
I don't think the strictest sense of "logic" has much use outside of pure math. Using commonplace definition of "logical=rational", it's logically refutable. Any rational person should be able to reason out that it's a scam.
Certainly that's incorrect, actual logic is used throughout virtually all sciences to deduce conclusions using methods of proof. The reason we're able to deduce many core truths of reality is by relying on both observation and logic to guide us to truth.
But, to engage with your implied argument in good faith: Do irrational people deserve to have all their money taken from them?
Actual, deductive logic can't be used in any scientific field because we don't have scientific objective truths. Science is based on inductive reasoning and constant hypothesis checking. Plenty of scientific facts we once thought were "true" ended up being false such as Newton's laws of gravity. The only place where true deductive logic really has a use is philosophy and pure mathematics, which are completely abstracted from reality. The laws of physics as we understand can always be overturned at some point; the laws of mathematics cannot.
My argument was that any rational person should be able to conclude it's a scam. That's really the extent of my willingness to engage further.
You do not need objective truths to use deductive logic. That statement shows that you fundamentally misunderstand deductive logic.
You simply need premises (i.e. assumptions) to make use of deductive logic in a standard logical system. Those premises, when used with logic that has no fallacies, implies conclusions. Any real world conclusions are always based on premises, where those premises are based on experimental evidence. It's always the case that there could be problems with the experiments, and there always are limitations of those experiments. That doesn't mean you can't use logic to derive conclusions.
You know what? You're 100% right and I agree with you. I am wrong here.
But still by your definition of logic, anyone can logically conclude it's a scam. Just make the assumption that people don't give out money for free, which is a valid assumption to make given most people's experience with the world.
Well, certainly that would be a logical argument, but it isn't a sound argument and I can give a few examples: a long time ago, people gave out bitcoin for free to anyone that wanted it. I personally received 0.05 BTC back around 2010 simply by providing my wallet to a generous person who ran a website.
It's very common to give away new cryptocurrencies to seed them and build popularity with them, even in a non-scammy way. RaiBlocks (eventually renamed Nano), for example, started this way. Eventually that currency (mostly) ended in a giant heist because the biggest exchange for that currency had its entirety of value "stolen" (embezzled by the exchange's operator). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency)#BitGrail...
Naive users who know very little about cryptocurrencies but who want to get into that market (think your parents, if they're technically literate enough to use the internet) will genuinely be persuaded by giveaways.
It's becoming a common scam practice to give people free cryptocurrency tokens (or at extreme discount), and make it so people can only sell those tokens by buying other tokens. This happens over and over, and actually got some reporting on it with the Squid Game tokens (not associated with the actual Korean media drama): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59129466
So sure, you could technically make a "logical" argument about anything you want with the right premises, but if those premises are not based in reality, then the conclusions don't hold in reality. Those are called apriori arguments. Because the statement that "no one would ever give away cryptocurrency for free" is a strictly false one.
I don't know if I understand what "logic" is, but I clearly used the context of sociology and the game of life. Furthermore, if you want to fight on the ground that this isn't logic - who's to say that a higher number is better? That consent is required for BTC to be sent? That the number of BTC sent is not based on an outside variable?
If you add the context of "More money is better", "Value is gained after gaining money" and "Money has value", it seems to perfectly fit into logic. Prove me wrong if I am, I would appreciate it - I am not a Haskell programmer, so I think I could learn from it.
Stuff like "Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!" works better with bitcoin (even if only marginally) because the occasional mark who might actually fall for it has heard so many confusing stories about something called bitcoin making some people rich for reasons that certainly did not make any sense at all to them.
Now they hear another of those stories that don't make any sense at all. But this time with a peculiar tweak, they might perhaps be the protagonist themselves! Two wrongs don't make one right, so far so good. But what about two utterly confusing?
What was once the biggest NFT, Axie Infinity, has tanked. Today, for the first time, their Smooth Love Potion token fell below one cent, to US$0.009954. The peak was around $0.36 last summer. This is the one all those people in the Philippines were playing a grinding game to earn, and paying about US$1000 up front to get into the game.
Axie Infinity combined the worst features of a gig economy, multi-level marketing, and a Ponzi scheme.
I have trouble finding good pro arguments taking on the strongest anti- arguments, it's pretty frustrating. To rebut moxie's OpenSea monopoly criticism, one guy goes and pulls up stats from a week-old competitor that fueled their first week's performance by airdropping tokens on a bunch of nft high-rollers. Apparently they consider this ample evidence of a healthy competitive ecosystem given the amount of words they labored on the point. [0]
Centralization may be a problem, but it's not the biggest problem with NFT land. The big problem is that NFTs aren't being used to do anything. They're mostly closed zero-sum systems for transferring money from suckers to minters.
The metaverse NFT thing has not resulted in much in the way of good 3D worlds. Decentraland and Sominium Space actually got worlds going, but they're not very impressive virtual worlds and few people go there. Many of the later entrants don't even try to implement a product. They just hand-wave that as something scheduled far down the roadmap. They go on and on in their "white papers" about the details of the token system, while saying nothing about how they plan to implement the supposed product. Then there are the people who just sell plots on a 2D map and don't even pretend to have ambitions of making it into a usable virtual world. There are a few NFT promoters who aspire to build a 3D world, or at least talk about it, but they are not seen to be working at the scale required to bring it off.
Now, what props up this house of cards is the success of Bitcoin, Etherium, and Tether. We now have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in memes. So people think that investing in new memes is a real business. The history of financial scams suggests that it is not. It's worth noting that none of this stuff has faced a recession yet. In a recession, there's net outflow from investments. What could possibly go wrong?
> They go on and on in their "white papers" about the details of the token system, while saying nothing about how they plan to implement the supposed product.
Of all of the stuff in crypto that frustrates me, the absolute trashing of the term "white paper" takes the cake. This used to be a term for work that was not published in traditional academic outlets but nevertheless was of similar rigor and intellectual value. Now "whitepaper" means "Welcome to bongcoin, the best coin for ripping huge hits and buying lambos."
Lol. How about "Crypto leads the surge in online scams". Saying that crypto causes the scams, rather than being the scam, is splitting hairs. This is also a report focusing on social-media scams. The net is Inception-level nesting of scams atop each other. Social Media + Crypto ... what else could it be but a scam?
You can't spend cryptocurrency at the grocery store. So your "money" can only at best be _backed_ by cryptocurrency.
But if all you want is your money to be backed by something that intrinsically retains value, there are many standard choices. Like _foreign currency_. Or something more involved, like stocks and bonds and commodities contracts.
Or you could just plain use precious metals.
Cryptocurrency doesn't uniquely solve the problem of inflation, but it does introduce a lot of others. (Including the risk that a country's entire Treasury gets drained because an office worker plugs a USB stick they found in the parking lot into the wrong computer)
In Venezuela and Argentina you can absolutely buy goods at the store with cryptocurrency, if you whisper low enough to the owner. In El Salvador the government mandates it be an option. Money is money where it's accepted, everywhere else it's not. That's not really a point at all.
Governments have fallen for the siren call of inflation ever since Nixon. They won't give it up and adopt any standard, gold or otherwise, because it would imply they have to be accountable for finances.
This is why private individuals have to use more creative ways of storing their value.
This is true about any asset that's not undergoing hyperinflation itself including stocks, bonds, commodities, real-estate, and foreign currencies. What's special about cryptocurrencies in this regard?
What is the advantage of this over investing in GME? Both backed by strength of a meme, both highly speculative, except at least converting GME to actual money doesn't require you to burn energy equivalent to the average US household's monthly consumption.
For anyone interested in seeing what one of these scams looks like:
- http://ark-musk.com
They ran a YouTube Live stream on loop with an Auntie Cathy and Elon interview about crypto and made it look very believable. YouTube finally took down the video after about a day.
Interesting that they seem to have one global address for each coin - so we can go look at their transactions[0][1].
Note that the ticker on the button is obviously fake (the truncated addresses line up with the addresses here but not the txs). 45 ETH transactions and 19 BTC transactions over 3 days. Here[0] we can trace the one time they moved BTC so far: A CoinJoin. I'm not sure how Samourai's joins work these days but it doesn't look like JoinMarket so I'm guessing that or Wasabi.
The majority of incoming are exchange withdrawals.
While they fight over which opinion to cancel half the youtube comments on any investment video is scams, half the promoted tweets on twitter are scams, half the facebook ads are some type of scam. Imagine a traditional news paper publishing a single one of those and what consequences they would face.
The internet lead to a surge of online scams, lasting to this very day. The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them.
I simply can not have any sympathy for idiots so greedy they fall for the "I'll double your cryptos" scam. None.
The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. If this wasn't so deliberately undesired by politics, the world as a whole would be a better place.
People fall for scams/cults/MLMs for all kinds of reasons: because they're bored/lonely, because they're in a bad place in their life, because they put their trust in a person they shouldn't have, etc. Not just because they're idiots.
My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.
Everyone scammed is an idiot until I'm scammed. There are many ways you can undo traditional scam transactions. Even Western Union can be undone. Cryptocurrencies have no such means except for forking which is not going to happen for small amounts.
Did you try to work with your/estonia bank? Police can do something, but usually for small values is too much trouble, but with the police report, most banks are very accommodating (Estonia is in the EU and has to follow EU banking laws, so it isn't like the money went to some backwater, no law country)
Did you talk to your bank? Getting police involved is nice and all but often times the banks themselves are a lot more helpful!
Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be entitled to damages or something, though that heavily depends on your legislation and where your bank is located of course.
A friend's not-so-bright boss was recently scammed into buying Amazon gift cards, scratching to reveal the codes, and then emailing the codes to the scammer. Can that be undone? This isn't intended as a "gotcha" question. I honestly don't know.
it's all about effort/reward. I'm sure "technically" with a police report you can get Amazon to return the money.
I got packages stolen in front of my porch and got my money back from Amazon. Did Amazon go find the thief? Probably not. Will this always work? Probably not. But I had someone to talk to. In blockchain nobody can change the past.
> The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people.
This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works, this is just wishful thinking.
The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're f'd. Sorry there's no trace.
> intelligent, critically thinking people
Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys in....BANKS so they don't get scammed. The irony is hilarious.
Do the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games? Should we make those illegal also because people fall for them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're getting into when you walk into a casino"?
They’re already heavily regulated, the machines inspected, odds posted and support available. You can’t do it online due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far between, outside of most population centers, and broadly not easy to get to for most people.
If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.
We aren't talking about that though, we are talking about whether someone who falla for a scam bears any responsibility for that, at least in this thread started by the parent comment. When you walk into a building with a big sign above it that says "warning: scams ahead" can we really say "blaming the people that walked in here is unequivocally wrong"?
Seems like your lede is “why not victim blame, honestly? Should we really ignore what she was wearing when she walked down that back alley?”
This isn’t an argument that I think is particularly worth entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a criminal robs them it’s the criminals fault.
It's always the criminal's fault. But we aren't trying to blame the criminal in here, we are trying to blame the infrastructure the criminal used. It's a false dichotomy.
If the main thing an infrastructure enables is crime, then it’s ok to blame that infrastructure. For instance if there’s a network of tunnels under the border used exclusively for smuggling, that’s bad infrastructure.
Our reaction wouldn’t be, well, let’s arrest the criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did nothing wrong!!
Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head start.
This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly it’s narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up the tunnels.
It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for. Tunnels under the border are specifically there to smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want, including illegal activity, which is policed separately.
And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder examples are good to address the main point here as well. Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good analogy at all.
> It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for.
It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.
> Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
These are all utterly aside the point. These are matters of law. Law governs. Infrastructure which facilitates that is better than infrastructure which does not. Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.
> Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways.
Again intent is completely irrelevant except for the prosecution of those doing the creation.
Because cryptocurrency is slower, less efficient, more volatile, and incorporates dramatically more counter-party risk than classic payment methods it self-selects primarily for the criminal activity. It's useful as a payments system of last resort in certain cases but that's dwarfed by the illicit use which is in turn dwarfed by speculative use. It actually creates roughly zero value.
> It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.
Then surely you should be able to demonstrate your point with some analogy other than "a smuggling tunnel."
> These are all utterly aside the point.
No, they are the point. This thread was about victim blaming. And you brought up asylum seekers, broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all, or whether we should consider ethical use of a tool regardless of legality. I'm not bringing anything new up in this discussion, I'm only replying directly to points made.
> Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse than one that does not.
Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?
Your entire point in this comment seems to be "everything you bring up is irrelevant" which begs the question, why are we even having this discussion at all?
> Then surely you should be able to demonstrate your point with some analogy other than "a smuggling tunnel."
I don't feel I need to. I think it's pretty apt.
> ...broadening the discussion to include whether legality should apply at all...
I didn't do that, you did. I maintain legality is society's decision to make, and that infrastructure should serve society's goals. Infrastructure that makes it dead easy to undermine societies goals is not something I want to encourage.
> Even if that infrastructure primarily serves (or was created to serve, you choose) the purpose of smuggling, for example, asylum seekers?
This is why I suggested it was a tortured reading.
Again, it only really matters what it's actually used for. Asylum seekers need not be smuggled through tunnels because it is lawful to apply for asylum at a port of entry. You show up and ask for it.
Yes, you will "fairly" lose all your money to games designed to be as addictive as possible. Sure the odds are regulated and posted but they are always against you and the advertising around them makes it seem like you can't lose.
They're actually regulated to be completely unfair. Any regulation ensures no randomness in results. You're guaranteed a percentage loss due to regulation. When you walk into a casino you're wittingly consenting to being scammed.
We could say the same thing about phishing attacks. “Any company that hires idiots so dumb they’ll type their password into a random site without confirming the certificate deserves what’s coming to them”.
Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e. Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group. The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the authenticity check for you.
To elaborate the parent's point, Google switched away from employee training as the primary means to prevent phishing attacks to WebAuthn security keys.
> Humans are always fallible in a large enough group
To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is:
There's always an idiot falling through the cracks.
Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist.
Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem.
The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included.
Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.
You're right, of course. I was excluding people who really aren't at fault. When someone's brain turns into a vegetable he's not capable of thinking things through, so he can not be responsible for the stupid things he's doing.
The internet also created things of value. Connecting people all over the world instantly. Businesses built on leveraging newly created efficiencies.
Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and complexity at every level to obscure what’s actually happening. It’s an ideology not a technology. It’s just a linked list but much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without.
Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no value created. If there’s so many industries ripe and begging for the tech why hasn’t a single one of them gained any value from even one blockchain implementation?
The internet had existed in some iteration for 3 decades before the business world started using it, and was publicly accessible for one entire decade before that. The first businesses to really adopt it were pornographers.
Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.
The internet connected people on day one. That’s all it did.
> Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil.
Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin, its most recent price times supply. It’s got nothing to do with how much money is in the system or how useful any of it is. They’re all priced in USDT which has at numerous times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to institutions who use it to control the marginal price.
As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1]
You must evaluate this from first principles not based on what the other lemmings are up to.
14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto that’s even remotely successful?
It is very relevant, it wouldn't be if I was arguing that this will revolutionize everything, but you specifically said it has no real world business utility whatsoever, and the fact that people are using it, in business, right now, so much so that they pay outrageous prices to do so, that is very relevant.
Built on crypto? By definition you can't name a single business that isn't an exchange built on it. That's like naming a business built on stock trading that isn't a stock exchange or investment fund. But ones that use crypto in some way? I can name a few, not counting black market businesses, overstock.com is one.
Please name one business that is successful thanks to the value created by cryptocurrency that is not a crypto exchange or related MSB.
Overstock doesn’t use crypto, they use Coinbase who gives overstock good old American greenbacks. Like most of the world accepting crypto they don’t actually - it would be impossible due to the massive forex risk. They rely on third party MSBs like Coinbase and Bitpay to liquidate incoming crypto.
I’m thinking of the crowd with a list as long as their arm of ideas including replacing Ticketmaster, supply chain management, voting, all the other broad ideas.
"Nobody uses credit cards except for payment processors." If I accept British Pounds at my online store but only receive dollars to my business account by way of a processor, does that mean I did not use British Pounds in the transaction?
I've never once claimed cryptocurrency would be useful for anything other than money, so I'd be the wrong person to argue with about that. I'm not a web3 evangelist.
Oh ok, well, there's tons of reasons its bad money. Hard money is no longer the law of the land because it was bad at being money. A fixed supply cannot respond to population changes, cannot respond to shocks, external stimuli. A low, predictable rate of inflation is broadly regarded as a good thing - it incentivizes investment and productive allocation of capital. All of the worst periods in history have been characterized as deflationary.
Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it practically useless as money due to the transaction times, costs and volume capacity.
It's bad at being money too.
The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ... anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.
Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing. Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's limited resources as you can within the budget allotted, and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine for the already wealthy.
Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is huge value-add for customers, the ability to block transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add for the world.
We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it. If it sucks at it's stated purpose but is good for something else, people can use it for that instead. If people are using it for something then it's good for something and not really my business if they use it or not.
The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think you can make good money with the technology, I think it is good that this thing is driving people to make technology with which you can make potentially better money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff by just letting people do what they want with it, and I personally find it useful in my life.
> We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it.
Disagree. You should do whatever you want so long as it doesn't negatively impact society more broadly. As I demonstrated in the Albanian example there is a real chance that allowing people to do as they please can lead to a complete implosion of the economy - and even war. Everything we do as a group is about balancing individual freedoms against their impacts on others. This is the "your right to swing your arms around wildly ends where my face begins" argument.
> You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
None of that is useful without the ability to step in and actively manage it during situations that weren't baked into the original design. Think the DAO.
> I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
The argument I was responding to initially was your assertion that "surely there's something there because the number is so up! Check out that market cap!"
> If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
They do, everyone uses dollars.
> But I do think you can make good money with the technology.
I disagree fundamentally because it cannot handle edge cases and the edge cases are the only thing that really matters in the end.
The internet however had to overcome and deploy worldwide physical infrastructure to succeed. Crypto does not. Roll-out isn’t even remotely comparable due to relative barriers to entry.
Everyone who wants crypto can have it, now. And could have had it on day one.
I think the critical distinction is that the Internet also gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time communication, &c.
It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.
How so many people overlook this, I'm surprised by. Everyone at every level has been distracted by cryptocurrency being either a way to make money or an investment scheme. It'd be nice if it could be those things, but there are already other systems of actual investment. On the other hand, cryptocurrency, whether or not you hate them for their energy consumption, provide a means of independent economies being created outside of whatever regimes are in control. But that's boring.
Then again, hopefully we'll never need to see a future where everyone values the decentralized nature of crypto more than its monetary value at any given moment. If that happens, it might be under a regime where sneezing in public or looking in the wrong direction would lose you enough social credit that your bank account gets terminated.
Er all your transactions are tracked. They want to get rid of cash and they need people to want the technology that enables that. A couple of mining operators control the network and they just need to operate as one to do whatever they want with it. The lizards in charge of fiat probably own those mining companies. All transactions are tracked did I
Mention. So everything you do is tracked. Read that again and think about how cash == freedom ... and crypto == total enslavement
- Miners have tried to prevent changes to the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol more than once and failed due to community consensus of the users. Miners don't get to decide which protocol is run, the users ultimately do. If the miners choose to mine an unpopular protocol, people can and will simply fork the chain to a more favorable protocol. This has happened plenty of times.
A lot more people than just criminals and money launders. But yes, criminals ironically tend to be some of the first adopters of new technology. So the fact that it's so popular with criminals should be the signal that it actually is really powerful technology.
Or do you think criminals are using crypto because they're uninformed reddit HODLRS hoping to moon?
I've legally bought and sold quite a few things on craigslist using cryptocurrencies. I'm personally finding it easier and easier to use cryptocurrency as a payments system as time goes on. You really don't know what you're talking about.
Could have but did not want to? I want to use crypto and so do plenty of other people. That's why the option to use crypto on craigslist even exists.
First, it was criminals, now it's the planet. You are all over the place my guy. I'm doing what's best for me economically speaking; the planet is just gonna have to figure out a way to survive because I'm for sure doing fine.
Thanks for your sacrifice, now I know what kind of tree hugging hippie Im talking to. The unfortunate reality of the world is that sacrificers like you have to live with resource gatherers like me. And your opinion about me, unfortunately for you, doesn't really impact my day to day life in any meaningful way.
And we aren't going to get anywhere in this discussion if your only rebuttal is "the leader of a country using it voluntarily is a dictator so that settles it." Do you have a rebuttal to my point at all?
I think the "power guzzling" claim is kind of ridiculous, considering that crypto currency consumes a tiny fraction of power compared to that of fiat currency.
Disliking the hype and speculative aspects makes sense, but consideration for comparison shows energy use isn't a concern
How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.
Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc...
I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.
There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked together except through using them together in a single transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.
Completely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims. Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy shitcoins.
This is snark that does not contribute to the discussion and I would like to see less of this on HN. There is a difference between an investment doomed to failure and a scam that was never meant to even try to succeed. Regardless of your views on crypto, there exist projects that are not fraud and you know this.
If you actually read the article, most of the scams of all types start on social media. Why is it so easy for a scammer to talk to my nephew on the same places he talks to his friends? If you look at actually consumer fraud (1) according to the FTC, crypto isn't even mentioned.
The abundance of crypto hate is confusing to me as one hand HN believes it's a pointless & worthless technology but also somehow this unstoppable force giving criminals limitless power to burn all the trees and rob the youth.
Why do you think that is some kind of contradiction? It is technology that is largely useless for legitimate projects, as other solutions are always better and less inefficient. And it is inefficient, because it does use 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet, which is not something people imagine, it is very real. The only benefits it has are mainly useful for criminal purposes, thus it does help criminals.
All of this is consistent, factual, and a huge problem.
Okay, that's a change in the narrative. It's not useless. It's only useless if you're not a criminal. But that's sort of backwards. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't decide how it's going to be used. Humans decide the ways in which tools are used, adding morality & legality.
What about this tool makes it criminal by nature?
It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted?
Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
"Mechanism to scam leads to surge in scams in place where mechanism exists" yeah they scam you at the carnival too but you still go to the carnival. What matters is if you choose to ride the rides or play the games.
It amuses me how much of an anti-crypto sentiment HN has. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a more nefarious agenda behind it. It's kind of a joke at this point.
Where is the joke?
You have technology designed to be inefficient (proof of waste) and you are amused that there is sentiment against it on Hacker News.
This prompts an interesting question! Even though I'm a crypto fan I have a hard time thinking that this will cause some giant rift in tech. But it seems like it may already have!
If theoretically many anti-crypto people do turn out to be the dying tribe, what does that mean? What does that future world look like? What does the living tribe end up looking like?
I don't think HN hates crypto itself, at least speaking for myself, I hate the community that formed around it. It is impossible to even have honest conversations about the it because they are drowned out by all the dishonesty and noise about 1000x gains and it being the future of finance which will somehow replace the whole financial system.
Have you heard of this internet thing? it's full of SCAMS and people trying to get advantage of you (with penny stocks, nigerian prince, get-rich-quick websites, and all sort of crap).
We are getting so many 'crypto=bad' basic articles (this one seems particularly devoid of relevant content) that I'm surprised the topic isn't auto-downweighed by now.
At some point, Tether is going to crack. The backing isn't there, and everybody knows it now. It can't survive a net outflow. It's still possible to exit Tether for another stablecoin. USDT and USDC are still trading at 1:1. You can redeem USDC for US dollars. So if you own USDT, get out while you can. When stablecoins crash, they crash all the way to zero.
The SEC continues to bring enforcement actions. 97 so far in the cryptocurrency area.[1] Most recently, "Gold Hawgs". "Instead of using all of the investor funds to develop Gold Hawgs' business, Garcia, the chief financial officer and a 50% owner of the company, allegedly stole approximately $123,000 of the money raised from investors by transferring the funds to another company that he controlled; he then allegedly used the money to pay for various personal and business expenses unrelated to Gold Hawgs."
Before that, "Crowd Machine": "In this offering, which occurred between January and April 2018, Sproule told investors that the ICO proceeds would be used to develop a new technology that would enable Metavine, Inc.’s existing application-development software to run on a decentralized network of users’ own computers. Instead, Crowd Machine and Sproule began diverting more than $5.8 million in ICO proceeds to gold mining entities in South Africa – a use that was never disclosed to investors."
Before that, "Denaro": "Auzins misappropriated all of the ICO’s proceeds."
Before that, "MyMicroProfits": "Defendant Ryan Ginster allegedly engaged in a fraudulent scheme raising millions in cryptocurrency using online investment programs and then converted the cryptocurrency for his own benefit,"
Totally ordinary con game rip-offs. Only the hype is new.
It looks like 2022 will be the big shakeout year for NFTs and the low end of cryptocurrencies.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...