Will crypto madness end?

[tikker]

55 minutes ago, MartinTheActor said:

I can see what you're saying, but this is the problem part for me. Explaining to someone why you can trust crypto (if they're not tech inclined) is not an easy task. I honestly don't think it'll gain mainstream traction. I know people younger than myself who just don't understand tech. Despite all the talk about digital natives, my younger brother (there's over 22 years age difference due to different fathers) has a stunning bad grip on tech and even basic concepts. Sure, our IT teaching in the UK is in a dire state, but he's literally never known a world without smart phones or google. For his last birthday (13), I bought the components and got him to build his own computer. As we went I tried to explain what each thing did, how it worked, the basic concepts. His disinterest was complete. He will never, I'm fairly confident, be interested or even capable of understanding crypto or how it works. I don't know that there's anyone who could explain why, as you put it crypto was designed to eliminate the need for trust. 

I think part of the issue is that we've now passed the peak of tech and it has become normal. Before you had the old generation that just didn't want any of it. Then you had the lead up to the peak were we all understood how things worked, computers were almost hardcore to use and programming was normal in a different way. Now we are on the opposite side of that peak where technology has become so complex that is is increasingly difficult to exactly know how it works. Plus practically you don't need to know how your smartphone works, you just need it to work. Being techy or tech-literate has taken on a different meaning from what it used to. You can be into tech, but know nothing about how it works in detail or know how this stuff works in detail, but don't really keep up with tech in general, or a bit of both.

 

Trust is tricky. Why do you trust your bank? Because they say so? Why do you trust them, that when you transfer money, they won't embezel half of it and claim (with their modified records) that you never sent the other half? That is of course overly simplified and conspiracised, but trust was actually a big problem for decenentralised currencies. The problem is known as the Byzantine fault (or Byzantine's general problem) and comes down to being fault tolerant in the presence of malicious actors. In the context of cryptocurrencies this manifests as for example you saying person X transferred $10k to person Y, me maliciously saying person X transferred $9k to person Y, and a bunch of other people saying one or the other. Bitcoin solved this through the math it does. What makes the solution special is that you don't need to trust a central 3rd party with the verdict. In fiat terms this means you don't need to trust your bank to tell you which transaction is correct. Instead, everybody on the street has the book of transactions, so any random person will be able to verify person X did in fact send $10k and not $9k. The only crucial assumption here is that the majority is honest and thus you trust the "thickest" book of transactions. To discourage dishonesty it implemented the proof of work scheme, that is you have to show you put in effort to verify those transactions and would be rewarded for doing so. In Satoshi's own words:

Quote

The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains.

There you can now also see the logic behind the 51% attack: in order to be malicious, you need to outgrow the honest actors. This isn't really an issue currently, as you can see e.g. here. No single pool owns more than 50% of the total hashrate.

 

1 hour ago, MartinTheActor said:

It's worth saying I don't equate crypto with crime. The two are not linked. What I was getting at was digital tech makes crime on a larger scale easier. Look, for example at spam/scam. If a scammer wanted to send out 10,000 phishing letters via post, the cost and logistics are pretty high. If the same scammer wants to send 10,000 emails, well it's almost infinitely easier and cheaper. 1, 10, 100, 100,000 scam emails is essentially the same cost and set-up requirements.

Sadly most people don't look further than "crypto == crime". You are right that it makes it more accessible, and the irreversible nature of transactions and pseudoanonimity do make it tougher to deal with ransomware for example or if someone does decide to transfer some funds to their favourite Nigerian prince that will triple it in return.

1 hour ago, MartinTheActor said:

I resisted digital communications with UK's HMRC (Tax, Customs department) for a very simple reason. Scams and phishing attempts are at record highs currently. Previously HMRC could send out a very clear message: 'We will only communicate by letter, so any digital communication is a scam'. It's expensive, old fashioned, but it's secure. These days they have to communicate a very complex message and shunt responsibility for defending against scams onto the individual. When some phishing attempts are so convincing this is just poorly thought out. Banks are frequently the same on this. Their customers fall victim to easily scalable scams because the banks communicate in predominantly digital methods, and as they're unable to be clear about what is and isn't a legitimate communication they fail to protect their customers. Side note: There are many contender banks that have managed to pull off clear messaging defending customers from fraud by only communicating through their app's built in chat, so it is possible to prove what I'm saying wrong. Sadly, no mainstream bank that I'm aware of does this.

The point therefore was that if someone does find an exploit, or attack against a crypto or digital currency, I can only imagine that it'll be similarly easy to scale up.

I'm also not sure if crypto in its current decentralised form will or should become the de facto. No offense to anyone in particular, but people are idiots in general so you probably don't even want 100% of the financial responsibility in people's hands. Most of us would probably like to not have to worry about manually paying rent, bills, etc. every month because it can't be charged and if it can be charged for it to be irreversible.

 

[Error 504]

it's a scam, and it will never end, because it's no longer a scam if enough people believe in it and keep it alive.

 

decentralized: elon musk alone can tank the crypto market, or take it to the moon.

store of value: really? if the world ended, at least you could pick up a gold brick and defend yourself from zombies.

anonymous: you can stay anonymous if you don't plan on cashing it out.

 

and i wonder how long it takes to conduct a crypto transaction...... 

 

but hey, i have two asic's myself, because like everybody else, i'm trying to make a quick buck, and i'm betting on the fact that i won't be the last person holding the bag.

[wseaton]

There's bitcoin the transactional currency and bitcoin the investment.

 

The harsh reality is if we haven't had such massive amounts of centralized money printing the past 14years bitcoin wouldn't be worth squat. It's massive quantitative easing that has elevated crypto prices because there's excessive cash to invest in bitcoin. 

 

Same harsh reality exists for the stock market. No wealth is created. It just gets pushed around and is based on the Feds money printer. Prior to covid the only reason inflation wasn't out of control is over all velocity in the US economy kept up with inflation. It was a nice balancing act....while it lasted. 

 

Buffet and the rest of the Billionaire boys club are investing in tangibles like land, etc. Things that have physical value and not value based on a speculative investment because somebody else thinks its a speculative investment.

[tikker]

20 hours ago, Error 504 said:

decentralized: elon musk alone can tank the crypto market, or take it to the moon.

That's not what decentralised means.

20 hours ago, Error 504 said:

store of value: really? if the world ended, at least you could pick up a gold brick and defend yourself from zombies.

Probably also holds for your normal fiat money and from an investment point of view it is a risky bet to profit in a highly volatile market, not a store of value.

20 hours ago, Error 504 said:

anonymous: you can stay anonymous if you don't plan on cashing it out.

Another hard-to-kill misconception. It has always been pseudonymous. Only things like Monero that explicitely focus on being anonymous are anonymous.

20 hours ago, Error 504 said:

and i wonder how long it takes to conduct a crypto transaction...... 

It'll depend on how busy the network is, but mine have never taken long. Can be seconds, can be minutes, or longer if you're unlucky and its congested. All my XLM transfers have been pretty much instant; practically indistinguishable from my normal bank transfers.

20 hours ago, Error 504 said:

but hey, i have two asic's myself, because like everybody else, i'm trying to make a quick buck, and i'm betting on the fact that i won't be the last person holding the bag.

Even for crypto the whole quick buck is a fat lie and reserved for the few lucky people that were at the right place at the right time. Unless you're involved in pump & dumps of course

[rafe_28]

Oh no...

 

Well anyway i have said a lot of stupid shit in this topic... damn i was stupid.

 

I dont stand to a lot of those things i said here anymore.

 

Anyway just let this thread die out again. Why let this carry on

[RTX 3090]

On 5/5/2022 at 11:22 PM, Error 504 said:

decentralized: elon musk alone can tank the crypto market, or take it to the moon.

 

decentralised does not equal unmaniputable (in the case of elons price manipulation)

On 5/5/2022 at 11:22 PM, Error 504 said:

anonymous: you can stay anonymous if you don't plan on cashing it out.

 

not really anonymous, wallet addresses (public) are visible meaning in most cryptos (apart from monero)

[Error 504]

8 hours ago, Caroline said:

Less than 30K today.

 

It's over Anakin.

i think it's tethered to people's belief.

as i keep telling people, it's not a scam if enough people believe in it.

 

i'm guessing, btc and eth dropped because those companies sold their shares to maintain the 1:1 peg to the us dollar. of course some people might get spooked and get out of the crypto, but i think in the long run, the long long run, there will be opportunities for people to unload.

 

but it is a scam, and at some point, some whales will pump it back up, and dump again.

[wasab]

On 5/9/2022 at 11:24 PM, Error 504 said:

i think it's tethered to people's belief.

as i keep telling people, it's not a scam if enough people believe in it.

 

i'm guessing, btc and eth dropped because those companies sold their shares to maintain the 1:1 peg to the us dollar. of course some people might get spooked and get out of the crypto, but i think in the long run, the long long run, there will be opportunities for people to unload.

 

but it is a scam, and at some point, some whales will pump it back up, and dump again.

cryotos tanked. i lost a bit over 50% on all my crytos position. Crazy thing was back in april, it was up like over 200% over my initial investment, aboslutely volatile. 

 

The recent crash was dued to the implosion of the UST. It was a "stable" coin whose value was pegged through some shaky financial engineering. It worked until it doesnt and to defend the pegged, its governing organization sold shit tons of bitcoins to pop up its value. This sell pressure drive down bitcoin prices and still didnt save UST. Investors get scare seeing price drop, leading to just massive sells all across the crypto world, tanking values of various coins even more. 

 

There will be another crypto bubble in the future when price will reach all time high and the moon again, and another crash as well. i am sure of it. There is huge opportunities when these events come to past but you should always buy with money you are willing to lose. 

[Error 504]

3 hours ago, wasab said:

There will be another crypto bubble in the future when price will reach all time high and the moon again, and another crash as well. i am sure of it. There is huge opportunities when these events come to past but you should always buy with money you are willing to lose. 

i still think it's a scam, except this one has too many people involved. it's got regular people like you and me, and it's got influencers like musk and some famous celebrities, the mayor of new york and some professional athletes, and the crypto.com arena in LA??

 

crypto is a gamble, kind of like the stock market, or the futures. everybody has their own plausible analyses to support their theories. the world is going green, so tesla stock will up. more people are driving tesla, so lithium/cobalt price will go up, the world is sanctioning russia, so gold price will up..... crypto is the future blockchain this and decentralization that, so crypto will go up.....

 

it's just all guesses. their analyses may be sound, but, still just gambling. but many people play this game with the money they can not afford to lose.

 

and most people don't even know what they are doing. i asked one miner what would happen if one person in the world ended up owning all the bitcoins. and he said that person would become the richest person in the world.

[ultimatebob]

I've always been amazed that there hasn't been a "family friendly" version of Cryptocurrency for church-going folks. It seems like an untapped market that hasn't really been all that exposed to crypto before.

 

Perhaps they could call it "Holy Coin"?

[ultimatebob]

On 5/9/2022 at 11:16 PM, Caroline said:

Less than 30K today.

 

It's over Anakin.

If I remember right, this was the point in the Star Wars saga where Anakin went from being a whiny little teenage apprentice to eventually becoming a badass cyborg Jedi killing machine.

 

If that's what ends up happening to crypto, it won't be all bad!

[Error 504]

 

time stamp 4:08

 

colbert is awesome......

 

[wasab]

On 5/16/2022 at 2:29 PM, Error 504 said:

 

crypto is a gamble, kind of like the stock market, or the futures.

Well no. Unless you think everyone who contribute to 401k is gambling or many of the US government pension funds is in a gambling casinos. Most of these capitals are invested in equities like stocks and sometimes even cryptos. Billionaires net worth is almost all lock in stocks, 99% in fact. They aren't getting that rich by any other means. 

 

If you buy s&p 500 index funds and hold it for 30 years, your money would've multiply by 8x assuming average 7% real gains per year. The longer you hold, the less likely you won't see returns and even less likely you will lose your initial principals. What becomes gambling is when you trade instead of invest and even then only if you trade like degenerates on r/wallstreetbets. Professionals traders are making ridiculous money in the stock market.