Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
-
As an actual currency, it’s functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
-
Because of that, it’s entirely just funny money. Even further, since it’s entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
-
The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn’t an acceptable proposition
-
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
-
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
-
It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now. There’s no way to decouple it from that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but since ETH moved to a proof of stake model rather than proof of work (i.e. “mining”), isn’t its environmental footprint now a fraction of the wasteful behemoth it was previously?
(Though I 100% agree given the ‘gas fees’ (transaction costs), it’s still absolutely useless as an actual currency.)
You’re right about the environmental footprint - proof of stake dropped the energy consumption by 99.95%
Ether (ETH) was never intended to serve as a digital currency. it was only meant to be the fuel or incentive for computational tasks on the Ethereum network. An L2 like Optimism or Arbitrum runs on top of Ethereum and facilitates transactions that are significantly faster (tens of thousands of transactions per second), for a fraction of the cost (pennies or fractions of pennies)
I’ve found that the same folks who crowed the loudest about cryptocurrencies being decentralized were working the hardest behind the scenes to build the first generation of exchanges and online wallets.
As an actual currency, it’s functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
New technologies such as the lightning network will fix this.
Because of that, it’s entirely just funny money. Even further, since it’s entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
If the power goes out, your local ATMs and card readers will stop working as well. It’d have to take a global power outage to bring a crypto network down, and at that point we probably have more important issues to deal with.
The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn’t an acceptable proposition
This is fixed by proof-of-stake.
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
True, but it’s a personal choice. You don’t have to have to store them centralized if you don’t want to. The same cannot be said about traditional currencies, as it’s not feasable to have stacks of cash lying around.
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
Also true, but that has nothing to do with the actual currencies. The public image will improve once people learns how it works.
It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now. There’s no way to decouple it from that.
Maturity will make it decouple from that.
-
Fuck, let’s pray it is
I’m a fan of cryptocurrencies, and I would dearly love for the “speculative investment scam” aspect of it to be dead. It’s been a massive drag on the technology’s reputation for many years, preventing it from being used for all kinds of applications that would really benefit from some form of cryptocurrency integration. Unfortunately even if the “speculative investment scam” aspect dies the bad reputation will linger, so hopefully those applications will find ways to sneak it in where useful without drawing too much attention.
It’s been 13 years and the only applications found have been in fraud.
Over and over, blockchain is a solution to a question nobody asked.
You might as well say you’re a biplane enthusiast or something.
Hey. Biplanes are actually much more relevant in today’s world than crypto. They aren’t common, but there are still new biplanes made because they are a valid solution for certain problems. Unlike blockchain.
Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).
If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”
I don’t think transaction fraud or identity theft would disappear overnight, they would just take on different forms.
I think a big part of why cryptocurrencies don’t take off as actual currencies (beyond speculative investors ruining everything), is the fact that there are a lot of clear benefits to a centralized system that blockchains have yet to adequately replace.
1: Scale. The amount of processing power it would require to process all McDonald’s daily credit card transactions on a blockchain is many orders of magnitude greater than that of using Visa or Mastercard. Even when you account for proof-of-stake coins like Ethereum. Maintaining a single large centralized database will always be more energy efficient than maintaining many large decentralized databases, especially when the latter comes wrapped in a dozen layers of cryptography.
2: Reversibility. If I buy something from a stranger on the internet and use my debit or credit card, my bank can issue a chargeback if said stranger tries to screw me over. This is fundamentally impossible on a blockchain without relying on some kind of middleman to hold funds in escrow, at which point you’re basically back to using big centralized banks to do all the heavy lifting. Sellers may view this as a positive aspect of using a blockchain, but they can’t realistically force buyers to use a payment processor more amenable to their desires. If they could, PayPal would have vanished years ago.
On top of that, one of the big problems that blockchain solves can be solved through centralized systems as well. The big one that people bring up is credit card fraud, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that credit card fraud is a lot less common outside the US than within. This is because places like the EU have mandated security measures such as chip-and-pin (the US only requires the chip part). Smartphone-based contactless payment systems like Apple Pay also provide effective 2-factor authentication at the point of sale. And while blockchain is theoretically more secure, in practice these mechanisms are “good enough” for everyday use.
How does crypto stop identity theft or transaction fraud? Crypto does nothing for credit, which is basically what identity theft is, and if you’re missing how widely there’s transaction fraud on crypto you haven’t been paying attention.
It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.
Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.
Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.
These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.
But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.
I don’t know, this sounds a lot like DNA evidence. Sounds great in theory, but doesn’t actually mean what TV implies it to mean. In terms of a receipt, you still need to tie that to a person, or the wallet to the person. Given how easily people have lost their wallets, it’ll be a similar issue to “My credit card was used at that time”. Yes, the wallet / CC was used at a place at a time, but who was the person using it? In either case, they’ll want to use the security video or clerk witness testimony to tie it together.
I’m not even sure what situation you’re thinking that the airline would not accept their own printed ticket or shot of the ticket PDF or whatever they send you today, but the NFT would make all the difference. Again, either the Airline system reads your ticket data, whether it’s NFT, barcode, or traditional digital and can tie it to a sale in their system or they can’t. They can lose the NFT link just as well as the barcode link, and the gate agent isn’t going to understand or care that you have an NFT that cryptographically proves “blah blah blah”. They’re already checking ID. For someone to fake the barcode version, they would also need a fake ID or Passport to match it.
I sort of see what you’re saying if you went to court, and the airline wouldn’t do discovery or purposefully shredded their records of your ticket for some reason, but we already have receipts and bank statements and the like that do the same thing, and an NFT doesn’t change needing to prove you bought it in this case, presumably via linking a wallet rather than a bank account, though wallets don’t have the ID requirements bank accounts do, so in court that could actually be rather harder to do.
Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.
Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.
It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.
Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.
It mainly lost it appeal as crashes, arrests, lawsuits, and thief keep happeneding. It was shown to be scammy with scammers scamming.
And yeah the new hotness of LLMs also helped. The tech bros who use to be pushing “X but with crypto” are now looking to push “X but with AI”.
Yeah this, mainstream big players in financial markets already figured out crypto is useless, so IT firms switched to selling AI to corporates instead.
yes, everyone likes to talk that USD/EUR is risky, you have inflation, you have banks closing and stock market crashing, but so far it seems crypto is much much riskier. I feel much safer having my money in bank than having it on some blockchain, accessible only if I know private key and if I loose it there is 0 change I will ever see any of my money.
Well, the irony is hard to miss, right? Crypto was born out of this grand idea of decentralization, but then everyone just rushed over to these centralized exchanges. Kinda sounds like a death knell to me. Seems like the original spirit of crypto got lost in the rush for profits.
I do think the tech and the concept will keep evolving, and eventually, it’ll morph into something new, get a new name or something. Here’s hoping that when it does, people will get that it’s better to trust the collective ‘us’ instead of just a select few. After all, these are often the same folks messing things up. But, what can you do, huh?
Weak hands got shaken out, and the economy is teetering on recession. When inflation stops and interest rates fall, and quantitative easing starts back up it’s gonna come roaring back. The SEC and CFTC aren’t trying to kill crypto, they are just trying to decide who’s jurisdiction it falls under. The crypto industry will benefit from regulation, it will get safer, and you’ll feel like an idiot for asking this question instead of buying while it’s cheap. Hit me up in 2025!
Oh boy, wait until you find out about CBDC (Government’s version of cryptocurrency with dypotian spin on it such as deleting your money if they don’t like you.)
They wouldn’t delete your money just because they don’t like you.
They’d “arrest” your money for some crime that may or may not be legit. Paperwork and people getting their cut would be involved.
Well they can delete your money for not liking you, just look at how Republicans have been treating the LGBT community lately. if they have the chance to, they would absolutely love to delete all money owned by LGBT people.
If you think about what side is more tech-savvy, more likely the gays find a way to delete anti-gay money first lol. Even if they are less likely to use it
I mean, this already happens. Most states can easily freeze domestic assets when crimes are suspected
You mean the thing that was a blue sky research effort? From that website it doesn’t even sound like anything exists, it’s just a thought experiment to see if it would make sense. How is that in any way dystopian or nihilistic or whatever tone you appear to be going for?
This is how public policy should work. It would be foolish and irresponsible not to investigate if a new technology has a valid and useful application.
This is like noticing that the Army has plans for a Zombie invasion without applying any of the context and then using that as evidence that zombies are real and the gubment is covering it up. Instead of applying a tiny bit of actual research and finding out it’s a common way that the military plans for politically unsavory possibilities like Canada invading the US. Also known as doing their actual job in a professional and not-at-all-suspicious way.
That’s a reasonable response, but the other guy’s concerns are absolutely not meritless. Tech platforms demonstrating and offering up these kinds of currencies or tokens do explicitly talk about ideas such as limiting certain currencies from being spent on certain things, or enabling/disabling from a central authority.
China is already rolling out this type of currency albeit with limited success, and while I haven’t heard anything about the e-CNY being tied to their social credit system, or punishments being inflicted in the shape of limiting access to funds, it’s absolutely a possible option.
The problem with CBDC is that they are actively developing it in a way they intended on rolling it out to the public (they are trying to set up campaign to roll it out) and we would be very screwed if it ever goes live, because it is not decentralized, there is going to be no due process and the authority is controlled by the government which historically have screwed people over repeatedly, just look at civil forfeiture surpassing robbery in USA, they could just do it with a mouse click in CBDC.
Even Yermack points out the risk of political abuse of CBDC and yet they are still going for it.
Why does the US even need crypto though? What problem is that solving? All they need to do is make a government version of Zelle that every bank in the US has to use (in addition to any private tools they like) to settle electric funds transfers and do it for free to the end user and bam, everything from digital cash, with none of the crypto overhead.
You’re asking the right question, this is something they don’t need and yet they have been pushing this for years.
I guess I thought it was just because of hype, and to say re China - look, we’re doing it too. We’re not falling behind. I.e. entirely optics and eventually it’ll fade away as one of those things that no one cares about.
The phrasing I like is “crypto is a solution searching for a problem”.
Crypto enthusiasts start with the existence of crypto and try to fit it as a solution to some problems rather than trying to solve those problems without already having chosen the solution. The reasoning is often flimsy as a result. They’re not actually trying to solve a problem and thus won’t consider things like “how is this better than a centralized system?”.
Ok, so how would you purchase something like something from Wakfu MMO or other services when at the time they were blacklisted by credit card or payment processing gateway? Literally the only way at that time is to purchase crypto like dogecoin so that you could actually buy something on those services. It still happen today where other services are classified as “high risk” depending on what they offers, where they are, and so forth. They get blacklisted by credit card company and payment processing company, so they literally have to resort to using crypto to work around this problem, because what else are they supposed to do?
But go ahead and make up crap about crypto like how it solve nothing. I am honestly tired of people whining about “muh energy efficiency”, if you cared that much about energy efficiency, why don’t you use the same energy protesting the crypto and instead protest the billionaire flying in their private jets or even better, why not ban computer games altogether? Stop being a hypocrite, I am honestly tired of this.
Maybe people understood, that instead of freedom as advertised, crypto brings out even more oppressive forms of capitalism.
It’s just another kind of MLM right now. It always has been. The superbowl Larry David add was the swan song for crypto mainstream appeal.
And you are right, most of the people that were telling you to buy cryptocurrency for reasons, now are into the “prompt engineering” fad.
Por metaverse, only the really unicorn-chasing and completely clueless about technology marketing “gurus” got into it.
the pyramid scheme of crypto is dead. Partially because there are no suckers left to buy in and partially because interest rates have gone up, meaning that money is no longer free and investments need to promise a return, which crypto can’t provide as it lacks meaningful utility.
The long and short of it is that crypto was never a good idea, a currency where no one is “in charge” Is a currency where no one is responsible, so if something goes wrong no one is to be expected to fix it.
I’m not about to say that the federal reserve is the perfect system, but it is much better than anything the crypto world has come up with. Bitcoin is deflationary and inefficient, ethereum is undemocratic and has it’s attention split, and everything else lacks a broad base.
The centralization or currency was never the problem and these alternatives are worse in just about every way.
No. Bitcoin is the future of money. It really is the best form of money humanity has invented so far. People just need to stop trading shit coins.
Bitcoin (as it uses proof of work) is incapable of handling all transaction of the world without creating insane amounts of wasted energy.
Updating the ledger (actually writing down transactions) is only a fraction of the total computing resources it consumes. Most of it is just spent doing random hashes over and over again (the proof of work part). This is computing power that does not actually do any of the money related tasks, it’s just there to keep the ledger trusted.
This is an awesome idea in theory, but completely unscalable in reality.
Other Blockchain technologies like proof of stake don’t have this issue of energy waste, but they have other hurdles.
But Bitcoin as it is implemented now can never be the money of the future in my opinion.
Trust is one of the most fundamental parts of any monetary system, so brute forcing hashes in this case is directly related to it.
Bitcoin can easily serve the world on 100 Mac Minis. Probably even fewer. The fact that currently people beat themselves into burning ridiculous amounts of electricity to run Bitcoin nodes is a function of the profitability of doing that. If that profitability decreases, so will the electricity burned. If I remember correctly, the protocol is designed to reduce that reward over time and unless the dollar value of Bitcoin dramatically increases, the energy waste should decrease long term.
A secondary point on energy consumption is how that of Bitcoin compares to the traditional financial transaction systems. I don’t have the numbers at the moment but last time I checked it wasn’t pretty for the latter.
With all that said, if PoS is proven to be as robust as PoW, it would probably be adopted by systems currently on PoW, like Bitcoin.
I think you’re missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.
The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.
Can you elaborate on how one could print bitcoins if they controlled 50% of the network?
Bitcoin miners validate transactions on the network, so if one entity controls a majority of all miners, they can validate their own fraudulent transactions
Yep, first is always best, like my CRT TV.
Ethereum is pretty cool too. I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. That’s pretty much it though. the rest are shitcoins. Edit: Monero is the other good coin.
bitcoin will never be the dominant global currency. it couldn’t even maintain its position as the dominant darknet currency. bitcoin is not perfect and you are part of a religious cult that bans people for pointing out its shortcomings.
Do you use Bitcoin in real life?
Do you use any gold in real life to pay for stuff?
No, and I also seriously question people’s obsession with gold.
No, just virtually.
spoiler
it’s_a_joke
I used to work at a liquor store and we had one regular customer who paid with a bitcoin card. This was around 2015 or so. It was funny because he said it was because of “anonymity” but everyone knew him as “the guy who pays with bitcoin.”
Yeah man, keep huffing that copium.
Bitcoin has no long term plan for actually securing its chain. The fees don’t add up to enough and the throughput is abysmal. Lightning is centralised and was disrupted because of chain congestion due to Ordinals.
Keep dreaming!
No fucking way haha, imagine having to hang out at the grocery store for an hour waiting for your payment to clear
I’m glad I never got into cryptocurrency. For all intents & purposes, it might as well be Monopoly money.
I’m not a big fan of crypto for a number of reasons but that “for all intents and purposes” bit applies to all fiat cash.
Cash is monopoly money, with the key distinction of being backed by a government.
Crypto won’t ever die, too many people have too much money invested in it for it to die.
But it’s going nowhere. If I can’t buy groceries with a bitcoin, then it’s worthless. It got popular because people used it to trade drugs. I don’t even think you can do that on tor anymore.
You could not be more incorrect about that last point
Without practical uses it’s nothing but a Ponzi scheme, which is why every thread about crypto has a few true believers urging others to “invest”.
Ah yes. Another entry to the list: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
I think the bubble has certainly burst. COVID resulted in loads of new consumer investers, and the visibility of crypto had never been higher. Exchanges were being advertised by major celebrities on Superbowl ads!
Then the market crashed, and all those investers realised what a mistake they’d made. I don’t think it’s a mistake many will make twice.
It was such a bizarre time, with major governments talking about minting their own NFTs or even their own digital currencies. That all seems to have quietly gone away now, thankfully.
