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The European Central Bank says bitcoin is on ‘road to irrelevance’ amid crypto collapse - “Since bitcoin appears to be neither suitable as a payment system nor as a form of investment, it should be treated as neither in regulatory terms and thus should not be legitimised.”
Economics
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The following submission statement was provided by u/lughnasadh:
Submission Statement
I've no doubt bitcoin still has a future, with charlatans hawking get-rich-quick schemes.
There was a time when people had much higher hopes for blockchain currencies. They looked at the M-PESA system in Africa and wondered about the possibilities it seemed to suggest. Instead we got an explosion of Ponzi schemes that has drowned out genuine use cases.
Perhaps the collapse in the Ponzi schemes, might create some space for genuine and useful uses for blockchain currencies to grow. Then again maybe not, the same people just seem to be rebranding themselves around NFTs and Web 3.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/z8xx0l/the_european_central_bank_says_bitcoin_is_on_road/iydv7fl/
Pretty sure XMR isn't going anywhere as long as drugs are illegal though.
Yes. I can't buy XMR in my country. So I buy Litecoin and exchange it on chain to XMR lol
But if you used any exchanges that require ID and you've provided real ID, your XMR is no longer anonymous.
Edit: appreciate the responses! Didn't know all this and pretty much left the crypto space years ago!
Right but there's always a way of setting up an annonymous xmr wallet and transfering your coins there. The second it gets transferred anyone watching will have no idea who it went to unless that wallet was registered with an ID through a third party (i.e. on an exchange that requires ID). So you can buy as much xmr as you want with your name attached, as long as you transfer it to a different wallet that doesn't have your name attached before purchasing illegal things.
Well yes but wouldn't the transfer to the other wallet multiple times be a flag?
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Localmonero - cash by mail
Yeah but depending on the country, they don’t give a shit about small fish buying for personal use. Probably some luck involved, but I was buying a ball of blow a week, a half o of weed, and ketamine/acid depending on the funds with btc transferred from Coinbase from 2015-2020. Just buy domestic and don’t buy weight.
Also don’t do this but it was fun as shit
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As long as anything is illegal really
Man, I dunno, buying drugs from dark markets are even more stressful than buying drugs IRL.There is always a risk of markets getting busted, currencies getting devaluated overnight, sellers being scammers, wallets getting stolen, and the worst part, authorities know damn well what's going on so there is an additional risk of getting your stuff confiscated, or police trying to lure you etc.
I find the conventional method of purchasing illicit substances a much more simple method honestly.
My weed guy takes paypal and delivers to my house.
My old weed gal was a prolific gardener and once gave me the most beautiful bouquet of flowers with my purchase.
my weed guy is literally the government
Yup. My weed guy takes Visa and debit but the weed is usually too dry.
Buying irl is crazy expensive though. Where I live 1 tab of lsd will be £10, and god knows what the actual dosage on it is, if it even is lsd in the first place.
Darkweb is much more reliable and cheaper for me. I can order 25 tabs for £60 from a reliable seller.
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Once you get familiar with how the markets work it's a lot easier. My first time was stressful af, and I spent a solid 5 hours making sure I did everything right. Once you figure out which vendors you can trust, which markets are solid and how to go through the steps, it's pretty easy. And darknet is way more reliable than most dealers, at least in my experience, and also a lot cheaper.
Where'd you learn how to do that? Is there like a darknet drugs for dummies guide? Do they take doge haha
It's called the darknet bible
If you're a casual buyer who only buy in small quantity for personal use, you have 0% chance of getting caught. People at risk are vendors and people that buy in bulk, but even then, with PGP nobody is really at risk.
Direct pay is usually the recommended choice nowadays, so you have no currency idling on the market wallet and don't lose anything if it get busted.
In my opinion, buying IRL is 100x more risky and stressful. Black markets are taking over because people are tired of their plug giving them pills THEY even themself have no idea what's in it. If a vendor is dodgy on the market, he will get banned pretty much instantly and his reputation will tank. Reputation is basically the only thing that matters for vendors, so they usually make sure nothing go wrong ever. Scam select is the only thing i can agree on,it sucks.
Nah, at least in my country small-time customers have been fucked over when dealers got busted and handed over the addresses of all their customers. Thats really the weak point; Online security might very well be almost irrelevant for occasional buyers, but you need an anonymous drop, or you’re just asking for trouble.
They hand over your address, then what? When the police knock on your door, just deny knowing anything about it.
There is zero proof the dealer didn't make it up to get a lighter sentence.
based department
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XMR is the king of the dark web, but it should also be the king of P2P transactions between all regular users. Privacy is for everyone and not just for "criminals".
It’s funny they put this statement out the same day Brazil passed a law making Bitcoin a legal form of payment lol.
Lol, this is a lie. They literally just set out a regulatory framework for Virtual Asset Providers registrations and operations, similar to what many EU countries already do. Stop believing what the crypto cult says on the Internet.
Legal form of payment, lmao. Crypto bros truly are special.
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2022/11/camara-aprova-regulamentacao-de-operacoes-com-criptomoedas.shtml
Bolsonaro's last dumb act before going back into irrelevance again.
I really need to get educated on this. I sold all my bitcoin (500) in 2011. Not all early adopters did well...
RIP
you have our condolences friend XD
500 x 19,000 = 😭😭😭
ITT: people who have no idea what a bank actually does talking about how crypto is a major threat to banks.
Lol it was the same on the crypto sub. They were all taking this as a sign to BUY BUY BUY
Dammit, there goes that €40 invested! There was a time it was €400 though! That was a good day!
I turned $30 into $400 with Dogecoin. I thought I was just throwing $30 away but then I I sold at $400 and bought into the coin base IPO. So instead of throwing $30 away, I threw away $400! Woohoo! Actually, just cheeked, if I sold my CB stock today I’d have $49 so I guess I made $19 overall.
That is a decent return. I bet you are kicking yourself for not throwing down 3 million.
He's not crazy he probably put that 3 million in sTaBleCoiNs
"Unrugpullable, untiltable, safe, secure, backed up and endorsed by Lil Pump" crashes after 3 months
CB is one of the few exchanges that are actually legitimate (Sell for tax and then buy back ) In a year you'll be reminded and maybe be surprised. Or lose 49 bucks
Yeah, I put $100 towards it. It's now about $10. Good thing it was only $100 as I was tempted to put around $1000 at the time.
Going to invest in something that's a lot less risky and much more stable.
EDIT: Since I've got a few questions about this. This is with Dogecoin. I put in $100 and now have slightly more than $16.
I put in about $1000 and took out about $1000 when it started plummeting. I still have $200 or so left. Just leaving that there because gambling though.
I think this counts as success
Since you broke even, everything else is profit, don’t see how this can be interpret as anything other than success, even if a minor one
20% profit too is actually a crazy good return on any normal standards too
How is that even possible? You'd have had to have bought in at $160k wouldn't you?
Threw in about $600 i to crypto. I may never recover the money, but the roller coaster ride may equal money spent in about 6 years time.
Just invest 70% domestic and 30% foreign vanguard ETFs.
Like voo, vxus, etc. Just have it follow the market and you can't lose long term.
Agree with this guy or gal. ETFs are the way to go, minimal (long term) risk, just set it and forget it
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How'd you lose 90% when it's "only" 70% down from the absolute top?
Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.. . ✦ ˚ * . . ✦ ,
. . ﾟ . .
, . ☀️ . . . ✦ , 🚀 , . . ˚ , . . . * ✦ . . . . 🌑 . .
˚ ﾟ . . 🌎 , * . . ✦ ˚ * . .
Wait... that's all just punctuation and emojis?? That's amazing
Bot said my original comment wasn't long enough...
so you just casually create a masterpiece ok
I’m usually casually creating a masterpiece while browsing Reddit. It’s the only alone time I get at work.
And you took that personally, and we're all the richer for it.
This is the definition of malicious compliance
It’s a work of art. I will be selling an nft of this.
Edit: actually will be selling 5 versions of this nft (all the same)
If you move the rocket a single spot in each image, they're all technically unique, you could create dozens of super valuable nfts from that alone. Might even be able to buy Twitter off of Elon.
It’s beautiful, but no way my man scrapes up seven hundred whole dollars
You can just make one NFT and use four slurp juices on it
Idk what that means but I’ll consider it.
Always has been 🔫
Fun fact the underlying technology of Bitcoin the Blockchain was a solution to a very tricky cyber security problem called the Byzantine Generals!
The whole premise is how do you authenticate an agreement between decentralized users without any centralized body.
The story goes during the last leg of a siege of an important city by multiple Byzantine Generals they were about to assault the city for one last massive push but in order to succeed all generals need to attack at the same time. However they have no means of direct communication other than messengers that can be intercepted by the enemy city and change the message and then send it to any other general they please. If at least one of general messes the timing or doesnt commit the attack will fail and all of the generals will lose.
Tldr the Blockchain was the solution to that problem
Quick, someone let the Byzantine military leaders know about the blockchain! Before it’s too late!
I saw the rocket move...
You should probably let someone else drive
More like a scam in search of a sucker
Yo, that's cool.
Is anyone just tired of hearing about the latest scheme? It feels like whenever I hang with a group of guys, age 20-40, everyone has all read the same articles, watched the same YouTube videos, followed the same guides, all on the latest scam. Almost like clockwork it's a new one every year that everyone is into.
I'm gonna learn to code and go to a coding bootcamp and get a FAANG job.
Buying crypto
Drop shipping
GME short squeeze
eBooks
NFTs
Tim Ferriss 4 hour work week
this whole thing with providing "liquidity" to crypto
Gary V, quickly become a business consultant
real estate investing
Draftkings and sports betting
I don't think it's just my circle. Whether I'm at a friend's wedding and meeting new people, or going to a work thing, or in a bar in a new city, there is just an army of millennial and Gen Z "guys" tripping over themselves for this stuff.
And most heartbreakingly, it seems to be the slight underachievers who just drift from scam to scam, always thinking they just heard the secret knowledge that's going to make them the multi-millionaire they know they deserve to be. It's sad to see people spend their lives chasing this stuff.
Of course it's a broader point on late stage capitalism and how there is vanishingly fewer life opportunities for a man who can't quite keep up with the social or intellectual demands of the market.
But my point is I can't take anything seriously (as something an average person off the street has any business getting into) if it's being bandied about by those circles, and bitcoin is one of those things.
I'm so confused by ebooks being there
It's very much a current scam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
I don't want to watch a 1.25+ hour YouTube video. Can you tldr it for us?
That's the scam! He's trying to drive advertising traffic!!
you say that, and I initially had the same notion, but this guy's pettiness is something that genuinely impresses the hell out of me, I wish I had the same amount of vitriol. Man basically wrote a 25k word book out of spite for the sake of the topic.
The scam is selling a different, unprofitable scam lol. They make you think you can “write” eBooks by hiring ghost writers and doing nothing but research what garbage will sell well on Audible. And when you inevitably don’t get a return on investment they say you didn’t put out the right type of book, and you just need to buy their new course that guarantees success.
Folding ideas. Again!
Has Dan literally ever missed?
He might be one of the most thoughtful and talented intellectual communicators I think ever seen. His examination of Crypto and NFTs might be a hall of fame piece of YouTube content of all time.
That's pretty much it. Wages stagnating, inflation, impossible housing prices, a very bolatile jobmsrket that needs absurd qualifications for entry level jobs.
Mlre and more people are just getting desperate enough to hope for a miracle, not realizing that every time they hear about those mkracles, they are already too late and will hold thr bag for others sooner or later.
People are just looking for ways to make money at a time where wages are stagnant and even going to university and securing an advanced degree in a profession doesn’t guarantee a good life. Let’s not act like the degenerate cocaine addicts running billions in a hedge fund are some type of overachieving geniuses or that there aren’t huge regulatory hurdles blocking people without large financial backing from participating in many business sectors. This is a very blind opinion about people trying to make the most out of the shit cards they have been dealt during some of the worst times of economic inequality in US history.
What you are describing is a generation fighting to get some wealth from an ever shrinking pool of opportunities. The housing market is unreachable for most, families need more than two jobs, and prices are ever increasing. A lot of them cant even afford to move out even with professional roles in society.
People are looking to make fast money. Not to take anything away from your post, but people aren't interested in slow and steady wins the race. The lack of financial literacy in young adults is disheartening.
I agree, and I advocate for wealth distribution from those hedge fund bros to the people who are struggling. I explicitly said this is the result of a broken capitalist system. I am literally one of those people who got a STEM masters degree and can't afford a house in their 30s. My comment was more about how it has shaded personal and social interactions.
I have a question for americans:
How come you are so black pilled about your country? Millions of migrants risk their lives to get into the US and work low paying jobs and without being citizens or even speaking the language they are successful?
My sister is overstaying her visa right now and working 2 shifts as a bartender and waitress and she already boght a car and is even saving money to come back to Dominican Republic and start a business.
I might be ignorant on the issue, but I just don't understand how migrants can do fairly good in the US while I just read complains from American citizens.
perspective. to an American who has grown up in a society/culture driven by having more/nicer things, just that car might not be enough. to an immigrant who came from Ecuador and busted their ass doing tough jobs, the value of that car means a lot more.
i will say that MOST Americans are hardworking people that just want a better life for themselves and their families. so who makes angry posts about America? people who have the TIME to make angry posts every other day. your average American doesn’t have the time to know what an NFT is. nor do they care. nor should they care. the future of this country will be carried on the backs of those hard- working immigrants and Americans, not the schemers, scammers, and duped that broadcast their crap on social media.
my parents arrived in this country in 1980 hoping to go back home one day. they’re still here and they never want to go back. says a lot.
Question for you:
Do you have any complaints about DR? How would you answer someone coming from Yemen where people starve in the streets asking this same question?
What I'm getting at is comparing struggles between countries that are different in many ways is useless. You have struggles that we wouldn't understand and vice versa.
We've set a different standard for ourselves. I won't disrespect other countries but if you worked 12 hour days for low wages under a bloodthirsty dictator, then of course working 12 hour days for low wages almost anywhere else is going to seem nice no matter what that places standards are.
I was into a lot of this. Easy money… I was actually making more money trading than at my software dev job for a while. I worked hard though, I had no life. I lost almost all of it eventually. Should have just studied for certifications and bought bonds.
My new rule is if it doesn’t bring value to society, don’t make it your livelihood. Trading is useless.
The studying for coding is legit though. Very low chance you’ll get FAANG but you can get 6 figures if you’re competent and not a weirdo.
The faang thing is so funny cus the vast majority of it people and programmers work for random no name companies, my self included. Every kid who prints hello world for the first time think they can get a job at at Facebook which employs like a fraction not a percent of the work force.
Idk, in todays day and age you can’t just be some guy, everyone wants to be the main character and they think “I’m the special one” but in reality I’ve seen dozens of those people in my fields and almost all of them are still on LinkedIn doing coursera or some goofy ahh test
These schemes are basically MLMs for men.
I just recently done something like the first one. No FAANG job. But really I just wanted to wfh and stop doing labouring.
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What you're experiencing is people realizing they've been sold a false bill of goods about hard work and happiness desperately searching for the path out of the rat race. Or people that lack creativity LARPING as entrepreneurs. Their significant others are probably selling essential oils.
real estate investing, why this one? it looks good to me?
There is a horde of MLM Real Estate schemes. True real estate investing is from people with high capital who can invest in property and are preserving and diversifying their principle.
There has been a wave of old scams and dodgy practices getting rehashed as apps and digital products because it ignores the fact that they’re shitty scams.
There’s literally a company called BeforePay which pays you a portion of your salary in advance. It’s a fucking loan shark app, trying to make people overextend themselves so they can collect fees.
Also rent-to-own housing is becoming a thing in Australia? Rent-a-center for a house basically.
The world is so full of frauds and shysters I’m fucking tired of it.
Agreed with your comment in general, but just a note on the Australia bit - young people over here (especially in the big cities like Sydney or Melbourne) find it extremely challenging to come up with the money to put down a deposit for their first home as prices are soaring ever higher each day. A lot of the lucky ones get help from their family.
It’s kind of ridiculous but that’s where these kinds of app/companies come in and offer the not so ridiculous alternative.
Why are you roping coding with all these bullshit? That's an actual legit way to make a living
There was a surge of boot camps in the late 2010s that promised 12 weeks to turn you into an elite full stack software developer and get you a 6 figure FAANG career. For the low low price of 20k. Then they’d teach you a bit of html and you’d go back to driving for doordash.
I'm talking about the people who say they're going to go to a coding bootcamp and become the next Mark Zuckerberg, and then 3 months later it's all about real estate and 90% of millionaires are made through real estate. And then 3 months later it's Draft kings.
Is this an American thing maybe? I definitely can't relate to this. My friends are just a chill bunch of people I hang out with either irl or on discord. We play videogames, watch movies - and occasionally we arrange going out for dinner or drinks. We help eachother out when someone needs it. I can't imagine hanging out with a bunch of people who are constantly being driven to find "the next best thing", jumping from crypto to nfts to MLM (or whatever) and that being their whole personality. I have friends who range from being on benefits to making more money than you can shake a stick at. It really doesn't matter to how we interact with eachother.
It might be American. I'm older, and live in the USA and see some younger guys doing this. They talk a lot and are super into stuff so I think they're over represented in the data.
But America is a terrific place if you're wealthy, and pretty terrible if you're not. So a lot of folks are always trying to get from poor to rich, and other people know of that group so they will try to profit from it as well.
I know people who got into Bitcoin very early on, including a couple of people who got it when a normal person could mine Bitcoin for free.
You know what they’ve all got in common? They pretty much all lost it to some kind of scam, hack or dodgy exchange. Or in the case of my friends who got in really early and cheap, because they lost their keys or got rid of the computer which they needed to access their coins.
On the other hand, I’ve got friends who’ve got full access to the coins they bought more recently. They’re the ones who are annoyed that it’s fallen by 60% or more since they “invested” in Bitcoin!
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I made a few thousand profit buying it early and selling it when it was at $1,000/btc. I was posting about it in 2012 on my Facebook feed.
I’m constantly kick myself for not holding it longer, but at the same time, I never predicted it would skyrocket to its peak, and I still did come out ahead.
Thats all that matters tbh. Good job.
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Shhh Sssszexxex, don't tell zem!
My friend was trying to buy half my pizza for 20 btc when I first heard of it.
Back in 2011, there was a StarCraft tournament where the 1st prize was $500... the 5th-8th consolation prize was 25 bitcoin 🤣
Friend remortgaged his house to buy Bitcoin at $400 ea. Sold them at $3000 ea.
Then decided to try again later on and lost majority of his money.
I guess if you got it good then don't get greedy.
But the bubble is definitely way past gone and people are just playing ponzi regret at this point.
In protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history. -- mass edited with redact.dev
I bought a ghost recon game with the bitcoin I mined. At the time i felt like I'd pulled off a bank heist. Couldn't believe I was getting away with printing free money.
"buy low sell high" is fine advice and all, but unless you have prophetic visions, it's the same as "gamble on the hand that will win".
If it's starting to sink, and you buy too soon or too late, then you paid too much.
If it's rising and you wait too short, you didnt make enough, and if you wait too long, you lost it.
The only person I know who made bank on Bitcoin mined a ton in 2011 and forget about it. Found the wallet saved on an old hard drive - luckily, their wallet predated the widespread use of passphrases and encryption so they didn't need to remember an old password.
Anyone who actually made millions would be smart not to brag about it.
I personally know of only one, who is now well off by investing early into bitcoin. He was holding onto them until they hit the 40k. He bought a few multi apartment homes and is now renting out those apartments on the side while still working his main job. He‘s pretty much settled for life with this, because he uses the decent, additional income to invest in a much broader and larger scale compared to what most of us would be able to.
But like I said, that’s just one guy among a few dozen. And like you said, it’s not the reality for most, who played around with bitcoin.
Getting rich has more to do with persistence and luck than any kind of intelligence or rational thought process. And those who research lizard people tend to be very persistent.
In protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history. -- mass edited with redact.dev
logically, the private keys for bitcoin will continue to be lost over time at a steady rate. like carbon-14 decay.
Somewhere in my stack of dead harddrives sits a couple of bitcoins. I lost a few when Mt Gox (whatever the first largest exchange was at that time) peaced out. ☹️
Lizard people released Bitcoin so he knows what's up
I sold a few hundred when it was $1 each, because no way would it ever get much more than that.
Thankfully I had a couple randomly saved on a flash drive that weren’t worth hunting down when I sold at $1, because those were the ones I sold at $10k each.
Fully out with no regrets and a bunch of free money on the way.
I remember mining about 50000 dogecoins when it first released in a night, stored it in my computer, and then promptly forgot about it. It's gone now. Sad!
I got into Bitcoin back around 2010.
Crazy to think I spent hundreds of thousands dollars on a 10 strip of acid.
It was good acid though.
Yep. I was literally given 10 bitcoins for free really early on. They were worth less than £1 at that point. I know I put them on a drive and set up a wallet and made an encryption key. But. It was a long time ago and by the time I thought to look into it again I knew I’d drive myself mad if I even attempted to retrieve them.
I still don’t see “pay with BTC” in any store. Online or in physical stores to this day. I understand the need for decentralized currency, but it’s never going to be mainstream and it’s always going to seem like a scam to most people.
I mined 12 btc on my CPU very early on and didn't think twice about it when I formatted my drive to do a fresh os install. No biggie, it was barely enough to order a pizza at the time.
Typical human fallacies at work.
People want to believe that what happened then is related to what they are doing now. They convince themselves that because some digital currency is worth ten thousand times what it was worth 10 years ago that somehow that is relevant to them buying some now.
The people doing this would be doing the exact same thing on the stock market if not for crypto, or probably are as well, and/or playing their luck at the casino.
They're making bad decisions based on emotion, not knowledge and fact.
At one point I had a drive with a few dozen bitcoin on it I mined myself. Long gone now. I don't dwell on missing out on hitting the bitcoin jackpot because that is pure emotion based on ZERO fact or logic.
My bitcoin I mined back then was just as likely to make me a millionaire as buying into crypto today is. IE: Not very likely and a pretty bad gamble.
I remember the first time I heard about crypto it was something like $10 a coin and it was a story about someone who had either bought a bunch for pennies or mined some. Enough that they cashed out and bought a condo or whatever (not millions, I think they had about $300k worth) and I remember thinking damn I already missed the boat, no point investing in it now. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I probably would have sold way too early anyway.
I mined Bitcoin back when it was possible and you could get full Bitcoins just casually mining with your daily rig. I had like 7 and it was worth nothing back then, so I eventually upgraded and threw away that HDD with the wallet in it.
On the one side damn, I lost a ton of money, but on the other side I would have absolutely sold at $100, $300, and even if not those, definitely at $1000. I would have never held til the peak or anything like that so it doesn't matter.
The biggest "loss" is that I never got into Bitcoin and other crypto so maybe there's some opportunity loss there, but the 7 Bitcoin itself wouldn't have been worth much to me ever.
And that is perfectly fine.
You dont have to maximize profits.
Even professional traders don't try to do that. Its a bad strategy.
Its a kind of currency that is unregulated. Unregulated money crashes pretty easily I guess?
I bought BTC when it was $8. I had bought a couple hundreds. Sold them at $32 and was really happy with myself. Little did I know that years later, I could have retired a rich man.
Who am I kidding though, I would have sold way before it peaked.
Oh well, that was a fun experience regardless hehe.
I got 50 bitcoin early on and then did not know what it means or what it does. I reinstalled my computer the next day, erasing the disk.
Dude I bought 20 coins in 2009 for questionable use; my computer broke and ended up being lost. Never gave a shit until recently as I only spent $4 on each coin.
Edit: I was 17 with a love for DMT.
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I’m thinking it was more 2010-2011, it’ll go check my emails for the exchange if you’re interested
I bought a bunch of drugs on silk road when bitcoin was between $8-20. Money well spent, no regrets. Still even have some of the drugs left!
My buddy made more on BTC than a few years of his salary as a mid-level engineer at a huge SoCal based tech company we all know and love.
Actually knowing someone like that made it a no-brainer. Sadly, it tanked as soon as I bought in and he was way out of it by then. He lost a few grand and cashed out. Lol pennies.
Pfff. I effectively smoked, ate, or snorted most of mine..
Remember when there was a Bitcoin bot on Reddit and people were sending each other coin as a proto Reddit award system.
They'll conclude that the only legitimised digital currency will be one of their own making.
They're not saying that cryptocurrencies in theory can't be considered a valid form of currency, they're saying that all current cryptocurrencies of any sizeable volume (basically bitcoin) is pretty unusable as a currency, and they'd be correct in their assessment. Bitcoin is absolute trash as a currency. Even bitcoin maximalists acknowledge that bitcoin shouldn't really be used as a currency since it's too expensive, slow and ineffective as soon as the number of transactions increase even slightly more than today.
That was my concern when I first heard about crypto years ago. My initial reaction was that decisions was a cool idea because it takes power away from established entities and edge nodes can service locals more cheaply than a company trying to minimize costs with a few servers around the globe.
But the more details I got the less interested I was. Every node has the full history of Bitcoin? What an exceptional waste of bytes and electricity, I thought. And there's no point at which it is truncated? No plan for the future as that ledger grows to infinity? That's going to fail at some point.
Fast forward to today and we have people building arbitrage bots scanning across networks and pools or whatever adding more garbage to the ledger to extract as much value as they can while degrading the network's purpose.
It really saddens me that the cost of Ethereum will go up not because people are using it as the distributed cloud computer it's meant to be, but because people are playing with it like a stock and trying to make a quick buck.
--edit: as some local experts have pointed out, some of these concerns have been addressed with time. I want to remind anyone reading that this is an old perspective of why I never got into crypto in the first place and am in no way an expert myself.
It makes me sad to think how many good things are ruined by speculators because we're all so focused on chasing wealth because life becomes increasingly difficult to live and we all want to get to that place where we don't have to worry anymore. What a joke.
Economics be cray.
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It’s terrible for buying illegal shit compared to coins designed for buying illegal shit.
Fiat currencies already are digital.
Too late. The vast majority of dollars don't exist in the physical world, but digitally in banking computers. I'd imagine it is similar for euros and all major currencies. I believe this has been the case for a long time now.
You mean, the dollar?
The European Central Bank and dollars?
You must mean the Euro.
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You know, eddies
Eurodollars are just offshore dollars. Nothing to do with euros
Lol. Creating 1 billion shitcoin, sell 1 for $1 then call yourself a billionaire is not a legitimate way to be anything. That’s basically what most crypto bros are.
Cash is already digital. I can’t remember the last time I paid for something with physical money. You crypto bros are so unbelievably delusional.
Sounds very much like something a central bank would say...
Bank scolds competition as irrelevant. More news at 11.
Pretty sure this has been said after every crash then 4 years later, boom its worth 10x what it was before lol
actually it has been said 466 times already now..
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
Lmao. Apparently centralized monetary authorities do not like decentralized money.
It’s a fair point, but they have decisive influence over what governments consider appropriate commodities for the payment of taxes. Historically, “money” has been hard to define, but the closest thing we have is the inferred descriptive definition: “stuff you can use to pay your taxes”. The “fiat” in fiat currency is being spoken by a very powerful entity. Not a god in this case, but governments are pretty close in terms of the power they can wield.
No sensible government wants to accept payment for taxes in a commodity whose value they have no control over. So long as every person in an economy doesn’t need to acquire it regularly for tax purposes, it’s not money.
I feel like this is so overlooked. I assume because most redditors don't run businesses. Bitcoin fluctuates wildly. Even in the hypothetical case that all vendors accept bitcoin for their products it all stops at the tax man.
That’s an interesting read, thanks for sharing
Except the first spike was more like 100x, then the next was 50x and this last one was 20x.
Yes, the next spike may be 10x, but we're moving into a realm where crypto gains won't necessarily be any better than normal financial markets.
Congratulations, you just explained how Bitcoin is stabilizing as a commodity.
The nigerian prince scam has been around for over 100 years now. Does that mean the nigerian prince exists and will make you rich? Probably not.
But there are always new rubes.
Crypto currency will only die when major governments crack down on it.
Ive seen these crashes twice already. Its time to buy.
Unless people use it as actual currency and not just an investment, what's the point? It would make sense for it to fade away... hopefully as it fades, though, we'll find better uses for the blockchain technology than cryptocurrency and stupid images and color swatches.
It's an example of why deflationary currency is bad. When it will be worth even more later on it discourages everyone from using it except when absolutely necessary.
You still have to be careful and avoid going full Weimar Republic but slow inflation encourages actually spending and investing the money instead of just hoarding it.
Oh no BTC is dead again for the 528th time in the last decade
My boss invested 60k into Bitcoin like a year and a half ago. We laugh about it at work on a daily basis.
He will laught on you for the next 50 years 🤣🤣
Submission Statement
I've no doubt bitcoin still has a future, with charlatans hawking get-rich-quick schemes.
There was a time when people had much higher hopes for blockchain currencies. They looked at the M-PESA system in Africa and wondered about the possibilities it seemed to suggest. Instead we got an explosion of Ponzi schemes that has drowned out genuine use cases.
Perhaps the collapse in the Ponzi schemes, might create some space for genuine and useful uses for blockchain currencies to grow. Then again maybe not, the same people just seem to be rebranding themselves around NFTs and Web 3.
Maybe Blockchain shouldn't be used for currencies but something useful.
It's a solution in search of a problem.
Every time someone has tried to hype me up on crypto over the years, I simply ask them this:
"What problem does it solve, and the problem can't be a technical feature of crypto/blockchain."
It shuts the conversation down preeetty fast.
The problem of a need for open ledger for things like securities. Currnlently stocks are kept on the DTCC servers (which is a private company) that arent subject to direct federal regulation. The government also just can pop on and take a look because the DTCC is a private company. We just have to trust that the DTCC servers are running in an honest and truthful manner.
OR, every stock that exists is tokenized on a blockchain that is decentralized, and the tokens now represent the physical shares. Now you will trade insantly and publicly, and know EXACTLY what share you own right down to the serial number. Right now as it stands when you buy a share through a broker you dont own the share, you have a contract for the rights, which you're supposed to think is the same thing but its really not.
Naked short selling stops happening, no more rehypothecation nonsense, no more borrowing and selling more shares than exist.
Moving $50k from my wallet to my friends wallet in a few minutes.
This might sound stupid, but banks really freak out when you want to move big chunks of money around. When I wanted to cash out an account I had that was worth ~$50k - it literally took over a month+ before I was able to get/use the money
Took 2-3 weeks for me to get the initial check when I closed the account, took 2 weeks for the check to clear my bank, I wanted to move the money into another bank - had to write a check and wait another 2 weeks for that check to clear (the bank would only allow bank transfer of $1.5k a day) - then I was able to use it for the time critical task I was waiting over a month for (and I got fucked because of the wait - really did make me bullish on some applications of crypto a few years ago).
Now we have Zelle, Venmo, etc that didn't exist before crypto, but I don't really know if there are any gotchas with those apps and moving big money around.
People in crypto slowly learning why we have regulations and systems in traditional finance.
Crypto is speedrunning history of money and regulations around money
It really is and it's so fascinating to watch in real time.
In traditional finance, retail gets fleeced by the big fishes because the regulations don't get enforced on them in any meaningful way. Heck, 2008 showed us that you don't even have to be investing in anything to get fleeced by the big fishes while they get bailouts for their foul play.
I don’t like the idea of a cashless society but this is just the banks trying to crush crypto
Crypto doesn't need the help. Face it, currencies exist as exchanges because everyone trusts their value. Crypto doesn't have that anymore, if it ever did.
Yup. Until crypto currencies can actually stop people running blatant ponzi schemes, which they seem to have less than 0 desire to, Crypto is just the newer version of selling you a deed on the moon. A novelty at best, and throwing your money into someone else's pocket at worse.
Why should a government regulate a currency that isn't even theirs? Crypto, and especially Bitcoin, as a currency just doesn't make sense to me.
the cant. they can only regulate it being bought and sold with fiat
If people actually used it as currency, which it’s meant to be, rather than an investment, bitcoin could be another mobile payment platform, but it’s being hoarded for wealth purposes, not transactional.
How it’s designed prevents it being used as a currency though. There are a finite amount. The more people want one, the higher the price will be. So therefore, it’s deflationary in nature. Because it’s better to hold than to transact because the value trends upwards, people are incentivized not to spend. This makes it harder to get and the cycle repeats which makes it more like an asset than a currency. The only issue is that it’s a virtual asset with no real world value or government backing. So unlike other assets people’s trust that another person is willing to buy it is the only thing up. (Currencies rely on trust as well but we just discussed why it’s more like an asset than a currency). So it has the negatives of a currency (value completely relies on trust/no intrinsic value)and the negatives of an asset, deflationary in nature and volatile. That’s why 2-3% inflation is healthy and why the FED in general wants to increase money supply slowly. That’s also why the FED and central banks are (when properly utilized) a very useful tool.
Crypto people secretly realize this. If they were holy faithful in crypto they wouldn’t say things like, one day bitcoin might be 1 million dollars a coin….they still describe the value in dollars, because there no real value in crypto.
Edit: this is not to say crypto folks are all malicious. It’s a subconscious realization not a conscious one. They also stand to make money (dollars) off their beliefs so the rationalizations are easier to make.
"Gresham's law says that legally overvalued currency will tend to drive legally undervalued currency out of circulation." Bad money drives out of circulation the good money until there's no bad remaining to be spent.
Bitcoin can’t scale, transactions are too slow or expensive
There are examples with less fortunate countries, where people receive their paychecks in their local currencies, which then they immediately use to purchase necessities that very day and/or exchange it for USD or other goods to barter with, because it won't hold value otherwise in time.
For me I actively avoided using it for transactions after realizing that the first few times I DID pay for things with Bitcoin I ended up overpaying by like 10-20x in the long run. If the market was a bit more stable I'd use it constantly.
It needs to remain deregulated. Right now when it crashes it has 0 impact on thr real economy. The only losers are the gamblers.
If regulated, the major financial firms will get involved. And Crypto fuckeries will impact the real economy, possibly with systemic risk.
Don't tie the world economy to Crypto bros scamming people.
Wow, who would have thought something worthless has no future?
My only surprise is that it took 12 years for a serious entity to laid it out clearly