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.
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.
Bitcoin’s in the low $29kus region lately (up from $26kus), so it looks like it’s going to keep going. Also, big real money investors are now pretty long on cryptocurrency, so there is a vested interest in keeping it around.
Plus, you know, folks buying stuff on the black and grey markets with it. Wish I didn’t have to mention drugs, but it’s the easiest way to keep getting insulin for folks these days in addition to the usual recreational compounds.
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.
In the US each time crypto is traded it needs to be reported.
I got free crypto from Coinbase. Then sent it to a wallet, then sold it. So each transaction needed to be reported. It’s too troublesome to be worth it.
Also, if I buy crypto, they have a week hold before I can move it. My idea was to buy crypto in country A and sell it in country B to quickly transfer money between the two countries I live in. Also it would help me beat the bank fees.
But the 7 day hold kinda defeats the purpose of quickly transferring money.
DeFi has added some real value for both project creators and users, not just for myself. I’m not talking about the ‘money making, profit driven’ side of value either, but utility, capital efficiency, flexibility, new financial primitives as well.
All sorts of crazy innovation that you shouldn’t just hand-wave away as a scam or redundant.
You mentioned recent developments, what Loopring is doing with Layer 2/3 technology has been game changing within the ethereum space. GameStop’s NFT marketplace, especially the games shines because of it.
Semi-related, this post reminds me of a recent F1 story I came across on squabbles, where they are using w3 improve their ticketing systems to combat certain things that currently cause issues like scalping while also providing a medium for tailored ticket and fan experiences.
It has actually been a long time coming, I found this article from ‘21 How Non-Fungible Tokens Are Coming To F1 which goes more in-depth with what their vision is and what they believe they can achieve.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these kinds of applications pop up in other sports down the road if it does well for F1.
Given all the negative press in addition to the unfortunate support from GOP fascists, from the outside looking in it must seem like it’s 90% delusional morons being taken advantage of by 10% scammer assholes.
There are delusional morons and scammer assholes, but it’s a loud minority and does not define the technology and the assoc industry.
I tried to like Loopring, but their L2s were hardcoded circuits rather than zkEVM which the Polygon and Matterlabs team (and Starkware to a lesser extent) are pushing ahead with this year. Allowing the community of third party developers to contribute value (sound familiar Reddit?) is going to make the whole L2 space to gangbusters.
As it stands now you can’t do much with Loopring except what the first party devs have built, which is basically a standard excahnge.
It will never die. I believe it will wax and wane over the years. Being incredibly anonymous and deregulated means it will always be a great place for the evil doers to manipulate the market and make money off of it. Because of that there will always be some people using it.
I think one of the biggest failings of cryptocurrency in general is that people view it as a replacement for cash or debit cards when in reality with how slow and expensive the transactions are it is more of a replacement for clearing houses. When you get money sent to your bank you can use it right away because the bank trusts you and provides that service but the money isn’t truly there yet. You may have heard the phrase of “the check cleared” or something similar. It takes a long time for those processes to complete and crypto is faster than it.
For certain values of ‘anonymous’, anyway. There are still folks who don’t think that traffic analysis applies to cryptocurrency.
I still don’t understand why the Bitcoin community (in particular) has been so resistant to increasing the block sizes and the transaction rates. As it stands right now, the Bitcoin network can’t push even a small fraction of what the SWIFT network handles every second. The arguments on the old #bitcoin IRC channel made no sense (and got a lot of us k-lined before we even saw any replies!)
I think really it just hit some kind of critical mass where people lost interest. Like streaming services: at first there was one (Netflix) and everyone wanted it, then there were a few and there was one for everyone, then there were too many and people just got sick.
I was naive enough to get into the crypto games, because I was hoping to earn some crypto for myself. I wasn’t having much luck, and I started to tell myself that crypto was a scam. I enjoyed seeing the web3 browsers emerge, like Brave, Osiris, etc, as they offered a new infrastructure to the internet. Something decentralized, which was cool. I’m also disappointed that we now have AI browsers, which is scary and not a good direction to go in.
I’m also disappointed that we now have AI browsers, which is scary and not a good direction to go in.
Out of pure curiosity, why do you say this? In context of something like ChatGPT, it makes sense, but what do you think about stuff like local LLMs as assistants and embedded in browser infra?
I find this one hilarious as I tend to add techs to my portfolio as they begin to break mainstream. Bascially I build what my customers want.
last year they wanted blockchain games, now they are asking for AI. Some want AI Blockchain games, some want Blockchain AI games. Others, like influencers, just want you to build whatever they think will get conversions.
None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there’s always a very vocal group that’s chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.
there is a group of influencers in tech that seem to jump from topic to topic, re-selling peoples projects and poorly written training/success classes. its sometimes shocking how quickly some of them change. Ive been doing AI on and off for 6 years now and I know a number of these people could not spell “neural network” a couple years ago.
I have worked with these people. They are very good at skimming the surface of every new thing and convincing others they are experts. Meanwhile, the really smart people are often busy with the projects they’re already deeply immersed in, so they can’t turn on a dime like this, nor do they want to.
It’s true, and it’s not much like real intelligence, all the hype notwithstanding. On the other hand, statistics and calculus are pretty powerful tools and so are the ML systems that use them.
Nope. I use it on a weekly basis to pay for stuff on the internet. It’s got its uses and the concept is sound. What you’re talking about is the hype train that happens ever so often.
Thanks for the response. Aside from the fed responses lol I was wondering what people actually used it for since we can’t deny there is a lack of products you can buy with crypto. I will def start using it for donations and VPN
Actually I’ve had really good success in paying for privacy services with it. I wouldn’t do it any other way, especially for things like a VPN where you don’t want the provider to have to keep your name and address due to legal requirements.
Another great use case is sending money abroad, especially to countries where there’s other sorts of financial restrictions.
I’m glad to see that paying for things is still an option. What I really hope for is that the future of crypto is all payments and the investors fuck off
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.
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.”
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 hack-resistant as PoW, it should probably be adopted and it absolutely can be for systems currently on PoW.
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.
Bitcoin miners validate transactions on the network, so if one entity controls a majority of all miners, they can validate their own fraudulent transactions
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That’s how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it’s still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.
Bitcoin has no long term plan for actually securing its chain. The fees don’t add up to enough and the throughout is abysmal. Lightning is centralised and was disrupted because of chain congestion due to Ordinals.
While the prospect of using it in everyday transactions seems pretty much dead, for some reason the crypto market cap in and of itself is very much alive. Plus it’s interesting that crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and people wanting more control over their assets, so if anything I would think it would be more socially relevant now than ever.
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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.
Bitcoin’s in the low $29kus region lately (up from $26kus), so it looks like it’s going to keep going. Also, big real money investors are now pretty long on cryptocurrency, so there is a vested interest in keeping it around.
Plus, you know, folks buying stuff on the black and grey markets with it. Wish I didn’t have to mention drugs, but it’s the easiest way to keep getting insulin for folks these days in addition to the usual recreational compounds.
As long as Kim needs goods, crypto will exist…
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.
In the US each time crypto is traded it needs to be reported.
I got free crypto from Coinbase. Then sent it to a wallet, then sold it. So each transaction needed to be reported. It’s too troublesome to be worth it.
Also, if I buy crypto, they have a week hold before I can move it. My idea was to buy crypto in country A and sell it in country B to quickly transfer money between the two countries I live in. Also it would help me beat the bank fees.
But the 7 day hold kinda defeats the purpose of quickly transferring money.
Just download your transaction CSVs from Coinbase and throw them into a Git repo.
It’s not just Coinbase though.
I send it from Coinbase elsewhere and those do not provide the data through a csv.
Even if it did, it’s too much trouble. 2023 is the last year I touch crypto.
This is an interesting take. I suppose in hindsight it was naive of us to think the government wouldn’t catch on and track / tax it.
A lot of controversial comments. Here are some of my observations:
undefined> DeFi
All governments and API server owners have shown that this is a wish and not reality.
DeFi has added some real value for both project creators and users, not just for myself. I’m not talking about the ‘money making, profit driven’ side of value either, but utility, capital efficiency, flexibility, new financial primitives as well.
All sorts of crazy innovation that you shouldn’t just hand-wave away as a scam or redundant.
Good points for sure.
You mentioned recent developments, what Loopring is doing with Layer 2/3 technology has been game changing within the ethereum space. GameStop’s NFT marketplace, especially the games shines because of it.
Semi-related, this post reminds me of a recent F1 story I came across on squabbles, where they are using w3 improve their ticketing systems to combat certain things that currently cause issues like scalping while also providing a medium for tailored ticket and fan experiences. It has actually been a long time coming, I found this article from ‘21 How Non-Fungible Tokens Are Coming To F1 which goes more in-depth with what their vision is and what they believe they can achieve.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these kinds of applications pop up in other sports down the road if it does well for F1.
Given all the negative press in addition to the unfortunate support from GOP fascists, from the outside looking in it must seem like it’s 90% delusional morons being taken advantage of by 10% scammer assholes.
There are delusional morons and scammer assholes, but it’s a loud minority and does not define the technology and the assoc industry.
I tried to like Loopring, but their L2s were hardcoded circuits rather than zkEVM which the Polygon and Matterlabs team (and Starkware to a lesser extent) are pushing ahead with this year. Allowing the community of third party developers to contribute value (sound familiar Reddit?) is going to make the whole L2 space to gangbusters.
As it stands now you can’t do much with Loopring except what the first party devs have built, which is basically a standard excahnge.
It will never die. I believe it will wax and wane over the years. Being incredibly anonymous and deregulated means it will always be a great place for the evil doers to manipulate the market and make money off of it. Because of that there will always be some people using it.
I think one of the biggest failings of cryptocurrency in general is that people view it as a replacement for cash or debit cards when in reality with how slow and expensive the transactions are it is more of a replacement for clearing houses. When you get money sent to your bank you can use it right away because the bank trusts you and provides that service but the money isn’t truly there yet. You may have heard the phrase of “the check cleared” or something similar. It takes a long time for those processes to complete and crypto is faster than it.
For certain values of ‘anonymous’, anyway. There are still folks who don’t think that traffic analysis applies to cryptocurrency.
I still don’t understand why the Bitcoin community (in particular) has been so resistant to increasing the block sizes and the transaction rates. As it stands right now, the Bitcoin network can’t push even a small fraction of what the SWIFT network handles every second. The arguments on the old #bitcoin IRC channel made no sense (and got a lot of us k-lined before we even saw any replies!)
Fuck, let’s pray it is
Crypto is dead, long live bitcoin.
I think really it just hit some kind of critical mass where people lost interest. Like streaming services: at first there was one (Netflix) and everyone wanted it, then there were a few and there was one for everyone, then there were too many and people just got sick.
I was naive enough to get into the crypto games, because I was hoping to earn some crypto for myself. I wasn’t having much luck, and I started to tell myself that crypto was a scam. I enjoyed seeing the web3 browsers emerge, like Brave, Osiris, etc, as they offered a new infrastructure to the internet. Something decentralized, which was cool. I’m also disappointed that we now have AI browsers, which is scary and not a good direction to go in.
Out of pure curiosity, why do you say this? In context of something like ChatGPT, it makes sense, but what do you think about stuff like local LLMs as assistants and embedded in browser infra?
I find this one hilarious as I tend to add techs to my portfolio as they begin to break mainstream. Bascially I build what my customers want.
last year they wanted blockchain games, now they are asking for AI. Some want AI Blockchain games, some want Blockchain AI games. Others, like influencers, just want you to build whatever they think will get conversions.
None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there’s always a very vocal group that’s chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.
there is a group of influencers in tech that seem to jump from topic to topic, re-selling peoples projects and poorly written training/success classes. its sometimes shocking how quickly some of them change. Ive been doing AI on and off for 6 years now and I know a number of these people could not spell “neural network” a couple years ago.
I have worked with these people. They are very good at skimming the surface of every new thing and convincing others they are experts. Meanwhile, the really smart people are often busy with the projects they’re already deeply immersed in, so they can’t turn on a dime like this, nor do they want to.
Spoiler alert: AI is ML is Big Data.
Also, ML is just statistics and calculus.
It’s true, and it’s not much like real intelligence, all the hype notwithstanding. On the other hand, statistics and calculus are pretty powerful tools and so are the ML systems that use them.
Nope. I use it on a weekly basis to pay for stuff on the internet. It’s got its uses and the concept is sound. What you’re talking about is the hype train that happens ever so often.
What do you use crypto to pay for on the internet every week?
Nice try FBI
Wouldn’t you like to know, fedboi.
“Did you know if you ask me if I’m a cop that I legally have to answer you truthfully if I’m a cop? So relax! What do you spend it on?”
Servers, VPN, domain names and recurring donations. Mostly donations every week. Servers and VPN on a monthly basis.
Thanks for the response. Aside from the fed responses lol I was wondering what people actually used it for since we can’t deny there is a lack of products you can buy with crypto. I will def start using it for donations and VPN
Actually I’ve had really good success in paying for privacy services with it. I wouldn’t do it any other way, especially for things like a VPN where you don’t want the provider to have to keep your name and address due to legal requirements.
Another great use case is sending money abroad, especially to countries where there’s other sorts of financial restrictions.
Look up crypto wallets and use the ones you can use on your local computer (don’t bank your coins in exchanges)
I’m glad to see that paying for things is still an option. What I really hope for is that the future of crypto is all payments and the investors fuck off
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 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.
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.”
No, just virtually.
spoiler
it’s_a_joke
No fucking way haha, imagine having to hang out at the grocery store for an hour waiting for your payment to clear
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 hack-resistant as PoW, it should probably be adopted and it absolutely can be for systems currently on PoW.
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
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That’s how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it’s still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.
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.
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 throughout is abysmal. Lightning is centralised and was disrupted because of chain congestion due to Ordinals.
Keep dreaming!
While the prospect of using it in everyday transactions seems pretty much dead, for some reason the crypto market cap in and of itself is very much alive. Plus it’s interesting that crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and people wanting more control over their assets, so if anything I would think it would be more socially relevant now than ever.