Meta shareholders rejected the Bitcoin plan with less than 1% in favour. The proposal called Bitcoin a hedge against inflation and weak bonds. GameStop and Metaplanet are among firms copying Saylor’s Bitcoin play.
I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I’d never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
If you did give them advice, would it be different?
some coin I’d never heard of
The problem is this person was looking at the market as a whole and then investing in some niche coin. At this point any coin that’s not well-established is mostly likely pure grift.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it’s like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet… gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So… yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Crypto is used to bypass regulations, generally for illegal or immoral things. Its also been used as a ponzi scheme over and over, I guess we call them rug pulls now but its the same bullshit.
Crypto is for gamblers or drug addicts, generally. Sometimes they are both. Sort of reminds me of the mortgage crisis in 2008 with people saying it wasnt the system just people abusing it. The system was built and modified to enable abuse.
Crypto is not used to bypass regulations. Failure to regulate is on the state, not the crypto. It is easier to regulate crypto because of the public multiple ledger system that is the Blockchain, allowing you to trace tokens all the way back to their conception.
The purpose of Crypto is that it removes the need for a bank for transactions and holding of nonphysical currency. Adoption rate proportional to total population is what gives them stability and makes them less susceptible to scams or pump and dumps.
From the very beginning it was sold as a way to work outside the existing banking system and all it did was recreate the earlier days of banking with little-to-no regulation.
It is easier to regulate crypto because of the public multiple ledger system that is the Blockchain, allowing you to trace tokens all the way back to their conception.
The key to regulation is enforcement. While some regulation was put on the books, the government has been very lax with enforcement. Obvious pump and dump schemes, which would be illegal with securities, are left completely alone with crypto. Ridiculous amounts of leverage has been used to pump up the value of bitcoin, including fraudulent printing (see Tether). Also, while the bitcoin ledger is public, you can shuffle and obscure entry and exit points enough to make it anonymous.
The purpose of Crypto is that it removes the need for a bank for transactions and holding of nonphysical currency. Adoption rate proportional to total population is what gives them stability and makes them less susceptible to scams or pump and dumps.
It removes the bank and introduces mining consensus. In the case of bitcoin, this consensus is slow and costly so people have built more centralized networks on top of it. Those are your new banks right there. Plus there is the issue of mining pools becoming too large and thus having more say in the consensus. Now talk about Proof of Stake and you’ll find it’s just a system where the more you hold, the more power you have (i.e. like the rich who hold more money).
Right, reminds me of the hacker mindset or more recently the workshop I did on “Future wheel foresight” with Karin Hannes. One can try their best to predict how an invention might be used but in practice it goes beyond what its inventors want it to be, it is truly about how what “it” does through actual usage.
there’s better methods than how Bitcoin works (PoW) like Proof of Stake, but that has its own problems, like bringing more centralization to the network. Like how with bitcoin if a miner controls more than half of the global hash rates, they can mint more money than should be, in a currency with PoS they could just buy half of the coins and do it. They probably wouldn’t because its not in their self interest, but its still a problem
Idk. I’ve been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a “scam” the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
BECAUSE CRYPTO IS A SCAM
I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I’d never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
Yeah, it’s like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
LOL they love to parade around the 1/10,000 winners and make them spokespeople for the casino for a week.
It is the way all lottery works.
You are more likely to be hit by lightning than to win the lottery. Yet people believe they will win every time.
If you did give them advice, would it be different?
The problem is this person was looking at the market as a whole and then investing in some niche coin. At this point any coin that’s not well-established is mostly likely pure grift.
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
Fundamentally, no. That’s just what it’s become.
I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it’s like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet… gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So… yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Crypto is used to bypass regulations, generally for illegal or immoral things. Its also been used as a ponzi scheme over and over, I guess we call them rug pulls now but its the same bullshit.
Crypto is for gamblers or drug addicts, generally. Sometimes they are both. Sort of reminds me of the mortgage crisis in 2008 with people saying it wasnt the system just people abusing it. The system was built and modified to enable abuse.
Crypto is not used to bypass regulations. Failure to regulate is on the state, not the crypto. It is easier to regulate crypto because of the public multiple ledger system that is the Blockchain, allowing you to trace tokens all the way back to their conception.
The purpose of Crypto is that it removes the need for a bank for transactions and holding of nonphysical currency. Adoption rate proportional to total population is what gives them stability and makes them less susceptible to scams or pump and dumps.
From the very beginning it was sold as a way to work outside the existing banking system and all it did was recreate the earlier days of banking with little-to-no regulation.
The key to regulation is enforcement. While some regulation was put on the books, the government has been very lax with enforcement. Obvious pump and dump schemes, which would be illegal with securities, are left completely alone with crypto. Ridiculous amounts of leverage has been used to pump up the value of bitcoin, including fraudulent printing (see Tether). Also, while the bitcoin ledger is public, you can shuffle and obscure entry and exit points enough to make it anonymous.
It removes the bank and introduces mining consensus. In the case of bitcoin, this consensus is slow and costly so people have built more centralized networks on top of it. Those are your new banks right there. Plus there is the issue of mining pools becoming too large and thus having more say in the consensus. Now talk about Proof of Stake and you’ll find it’s just a system where the more you hold, the more power you have (i.e. like the rich who hold more money).
Right, reminds me of the hacker mindset or more recently the workshop I did on “Future wheel foresight” with Karin Hannes. One can try their best to predict how an invention might be used but in practice it goes beyond what its inventors want it to be, it is truly about how what “it” does through actual usage.
Apart from all the other deflationary stuff…
I can’t get past the adjustable difficulty lottery system they use for mining blocks every 10m… :/ there has to be a better way.
It’s like diagonalizing huge matrices repeatedly just as a wait() function.
there’s better methods than how Bitcoin works (PoW) like Proof of Stake, but that has its own problems, like bringing more centralization to the network. Like how with bitcoin if a miner controls more than half of the global hash rates, they can mint more money than should be, in a currency with PoS they could just buy half of the coins and do it. They probably wouldn’t because its not in their self interest, but its still a problem
Idk. I’ve been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a “scam” the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
What any unregulated market becomes.
My portfolio disagrees.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
It won’t crash indeed, cause it is too useful to scam people.
My Enron stock disagrees.
Your attack missed!
You can pull the Enron card when talking about investments in general; your comments do 0 damage.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
deleted by creator
What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
Same way fiat is.
Édit: damn, and I thought bitcoiners were obnoxious You guys take the cake with so much copium.
Oh stop it
What’s the GDP of Bitcoinistan?
Probably the same as North Korea, with the amount of money laundering, ransomware, propaganda and scams they do 😄
Can’t be any worse than the GDP of the 2025 fascist USA
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
I’m sure that if they found a set of keys for a Bitcoin wallet, they would just throw it away.
Monero is the only good crypto
No, but one of the good ones