I was one of the lucky ones who bought bitcoin so I could buy acid on the internet. Years later I put a down payment on a house with the change that I forgot about. DARE was wrong.
It’s the American Dream
Sometimes i feel like im the only one living it, i see it as Karmic justice because i tip really well and try to be nice to animals.
I played around with it for a bit in 08/09. Got a few coins, but didn’t keep going with it and lost the wallet at some point.
2008? are you Satoshi?
All those GWh wasted on “mining” only got us closer to the edge.
Not like the millions or billions of man hours wasted to make 50-ish removed into defacto-gods.
Don’t forget its not just man-hours, but man-lives too
Potentially our future as well considering the carbon and ecological footprint of crypto, both in terms of energy spent mining, and production of single-purpose hardware that can’t really do anything else, rival some medium sized developed countries.
Electricity better spent than what is dimming our night skies with light pollution, IMO, but also proof of stake fixed that.
The GPU mining got me a free GPU and several hundred dollars, for the cost of about 10 cents per KWh. I’d take that “scam” any day of the week, and so I mined until it was over for GPU mining. No regerts.
And that money came from someone. You can’t win in crypto unless someone else loses. Typically it’s vulnerable people wishing for a get rich quick hack who lose.
You probably don’t really know how much of it works. I was paid by a mining pool, for completing blockchain work segments. The mining pool being a for-profit enterprise that pays GPU workers to mine coins that they keep or sell for profit. If you want to extrapolate that to the extent that you imagine I’m harvesting someone else’s wealth, then you’re going to have to warm up for an intense workout of mental gymnastics.
No, you were given a piece of a worthless token by the mining pool. If you ever want to get anything with that worthless token somebody else has to lose money. That somebody makes the bet that another somebody will be an idiot and lose more money so he can get his back.
I bought gold with the crypto haha. Mined me up some gold with a computer.
I’m hoping the gold appreciates in value over time, but I also just wanted to see if I could directly get gold with the crypto and I could.
I have invested a total of $2000 in crypto.
I took out $2000 when I had like $12000.
I have no idea how much what is left is now. Probably $500-$700. Definitely less than a months rent.
Imma let it ride. I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason. Otherwise, whatever.
This is the way to do it. What I’ve got is all profit too, whether that means a million dollars or just one.
I have rss feeds that’ll let me know if any of the coins I own spike for some reason.
Ooh, that sounds handy! Mind if I ask where those feeds are coming from?
Same. I had the money to spare and the means to mine so why not? We made more doing that than I have in working for the last few years and even if it were gone tomorrow it wouldn’t affect our livelihood. It’s just so nice thing to have when we are old.
I sleep well at night knowing nobody will steal my thing I don’t care about because I don’t own any. I just wanted you all to know that.
Like it was basically just digital gold… which is also a terrible currency in physical form.
I mean it is very very useful for specific purposes, like purchasing, uh, certain substances in certain, uh… unregulated online marketplaces.
As far as being a currency for other purposes goes though, I think it is incredibly unfit for purpose. And as far as being an investment vehicle goes it’s essentially a ponzi scheme.
Gold is useful in that it always remains gold but that’s the extent of it.
Wouldn’t say terrible. Just volatile and with a specific use cas. But incaseyour currency loses value you still have some wealth wich you can use for financial interactions (assuming you still have access to it)
I genuinely tried to look for a legit way to make it an option for paying in a small online store without having to depend on paypal or a bank gateway.
Well transaction fees for any big coin are like many dollars per transaction. It’s ridiculous. For smaller transaction fees you have to go to smaller coins that can disappear or lose half their value one day to the next.
And still, if we forget thar people wouls need to pay like a 14€ fee for 1€ transaction. They still have to go to a exange to change their money, and then I have to change it back, because very little things can be bought with crypto, less with cryptos that doesn’t have ridiculous transaction fees.
Did I mention than transaction are not instantaneous either? Unless you pay big transaction fee or use some obscure coin that no one uses.
At the end, I ended up with paypal. I really wanted a way to be “independent” of big companies for transaction. But crypto is completely ruined (if it was ever functional that I doubt it). It’s not a coin, they are just speculation and bets. With cybercrime and drug dealing being the only “real” uses it has.
Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum resolve the issue of high transaction fees and still be able to transact in ETH. I get there is hurdles compared with the simplicity of PayPal, but at least some of us prefer decentralized payment options where possible.
I tried to do the same for an online marketplace I wanted to create so I didn’t have to fuck around with the legal stuff and the sellers could do whatever they wanted with the money and have them deal with legal when exchanging the crypto at an exchange. The closest project with some stability and something was the Blockchain Telos with their pinned Telos USD coin. It seemed promising, but I gave up.
Bitcoin Lightning Network would have solved your fee and speed problem. You can use BTC at many businesses
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Extremely relevant…
Its useful in that it can be used to perpetuate scams
You make more money as the cult leader but you have more fun as a follower
It also helps morons and crooks self-identify.
I have a friend who bought some eth in like 2015 (or whenever) just to see if he could make money on it. Same guy told me he once bought coke on the darkweb. As far as I know, he only did each of these once to see if they were true.
I would not associate with anyone who is an active participant in crypto. Much less anyone who owns and hypes NFTs. That’s like telling me you like cops / are pro-life / believe Jesus needs to save me. All of these are signs that we are not compatible.
MY APES IS GOAN
Someone could just send you a copy
…and yet here you are making a post about it. :)
Yeah…Luke with NFTs, the thing really has an Emperors New Suit vibe, to me.
I still don’t understand the “you own it” argument of NFTs. When you buy an art piece from the creator normally, don’t you also own it? Like when you commission a piece from an artist the rights are transferred to you once you pay them right?
Also, trading NFTs is basically the same as rich asshole private collectors trading Van Gogh’s and Pablo Picasso’s, just dumbed down to get normies in on the action. I know NFTs promise to give the artist a cut of the revenue, but one, they’re paid in tokens that are infamously difficult to actually buy anything with other than more crypto, not “real” money that they can spend on food or more art supplies, basically the techbro version of paying in exposure. Two, there is absolutely zero things stopping literally anyone from minting an NFT from stolen art and getting a cut too with, by design, no way for the real artist to take down those NFTs or for people who bought it thinking it’s genuine and that they’re supporting the artist to reverse their transactions. In fact AFAIK that’s the majority of NFTs in existence, so to say it’s “all about artists” while doing nothing to address that means you don’t actually give a shit about artists.
This is like someone from the 80s telling everyone how dumb the internet is because all there is are BBS full of nerds flaming each other. If all you think NFTs are is internet pictures you don’t understand the technology.
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not even that, but trading URLs to pictures of van gogh and picasso. And you don’t even get a hash or something that allows you to verify that that url points to the thing you bought, on the server that you don’t own and is probably still owned by the seller
Way back when Bitcoin was first being talked about on Slashdot, I mined for a while. On my processor. For like a month. I got about 1/20 of a Bitcoin out of it.
And then I lost interest for a long time. And then it became clear blockchain is an infinite self-similar fractal of scams and ponsis.
I haven’t done anything with my 1/20 of a Bitcoin. I don’t have any expectation it will go up or down. If the bubble takes back off and inflates so much 1/20 of a Bitcoin becomes life-changing money, I might try to sell it. Maybe if a bunch of crypto-owning crypto-skeptics organize a mass sell event to drive it to zero, I’ll take part. Otherwise, it’ll stay where it is for the forseeable future.
Ironic that someone like me who believes wholeheartedly that blockchain is snake oil is such a model hodler.
You’ve basically explained why crypto can’t work.
Deflationary currencies don’t make sense to spend because their future value will be higher.
The outcome is people hold onto them in the hopes they gain value. The exact opposite of what you want for a currency.
A deflationary currency would simply cause people to be more careful with their spending. You still need food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, etc. An inflinflationary currency encourages overconsumption, because material things hold value better than money.
If you’d like a world with zero discretionary spending then yeah, deflationary currency is for you.
I don’t think that’s an economy you want to live in though.
This makes perfect sense in theory, but after multiple years of 8% to 10% inflation I’m not so keen on the “inflation always” line of thinking. Some kind of “generally stable” currency that alternates unpredictably would be best.
I’ll take 8% inflation for life versus 8% deflation for life.
As a counterpoint: From the perspective of the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin is not inherently deflationary as long as mining continues to introduce new coins. Mining rewards do drop over time, but new Bitcoin will continue to be generated until the year ~2140.
I think the view of Bitcoin being deflationary now is based on its increasing/volatile value against other currencies which does encourage people to hold with the expectation that they can sell for more in the future. I’d argue that this is price discovery and not deflation. If it remains where it is now, then I agree that it will just be another casino. If the value stabilizes eventually, then it does offer some benefits, especially in countries where the local currency is a less reliable way to hold money.
Disclosure: I do hold some crypto and obviously would prefer it to go up but it won’t change my life. I just think it’s an interesting experiment at the end of the day.
For sure. Also, the inherent unscalability of blockchain as a technology makes for a payment system far too slow for your typical payment scenarios, which makes transferring Bitcoin a pain in the ass, further incentivising hodling.
(Just to address some of the "akshully"s I’m probably going to get for the above, you can make blockchain fast if you centralize it like Solana does, but if you’re going to centralize it, you’re better off using Postgres than blockchain.)
I think largely the argument that convinces some people that cryptocurrency is worth “investing in” is that it’s going to revolutionize the way we pay for things. In which case the fact that it doesn’t work as a currency completely robs it of any legitimacy as a security.
If you want something that does have potential to improve the way we go about buying groceries, look into GNU Taler.
I hope GNU Taler becomes known.
Crypto reality and butt coin will like this
I don’t hodl, i use it. Very convenient with crypto cards etc. I’ve had banks close my accounts before until i explain where money is coming from etc. Banks are cancer. I’m so glad there’s an alternative
