I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth.
Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
I bought €10 bucks of dogecoin all the way back in 2013. Thats the only time i ever did annything remotely close to ”investing”
I still have them and while i initially dreamed of using them to buy a gaming pc, i am a working adult now and the novelty of the coin is worth more then that. Regardless no tech store accepts doge as currency.
I never cared about any other crypto, if the point is to sell them for classical money then what is the point of it.
The price has remained a stable price of 1 Doge = 1 Doge regardless of Elon trying to wreck the system so i remain very happy with my purchase.
All investments are gambles basically. For example, I chose to do the “safe thing” a few years back to “invest” some of my savings into an index fund (stock market diversification basically). This is commonly expected to yield about 5% return on investment over time, historically.
What actually happened is that my Gamble lost about 40% of its value over the past couple years. I’d have been far better off just putting those savings into a good savings account.
Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn’t even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone “brrrrr”.
I don’t trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they’ve found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we’re repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it’s not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn’t contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year’s past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you’re saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it’s really backed by death.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then… Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It’s one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether…
TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)
I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.
I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)
As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It’s a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power
Bitcoin was specifically designed so no small group of actors has the power. That’s also one of the reasons it’s so hard to introduce any fundamental changes to it. Too many groups of people would have to reach a consensus on the new rules. Since each one of them is following their own set of incentives, they keep each other in check.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I’d hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency’s price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they’re part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents.
I didn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s not zero power.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes.
Proof of stake is arguably even worse, but the energy required for proof of work isn’t free either (and that’s by design, if it was free Bitcoin wouldn’t work).
As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction.
There is more than double spending. Who decides how Bitcoin evolves? When new features are added, hard forks, etc. How much power do you have over that?
Which is why focusing on Bitcoin is a red herring. The power consumption issue with crypto was solved a long time ago, and has now shown for years that it’s viable on a massive scale (ETH). People need to stop acting like Proof of Work is all that exists.
So much for nuance. This place is just like reddit: black and white.
It’s not backed by energy usage. It’s backed by pure, empty, meaningless market speculation. It’s a digital baseball card. People use it in the exact same way. It has value because it’s “rare”, limited, and a bunch of people think so.
Yup. And prices go up from a combination of more idiots throwing money into it which is great for investing if you got into the game early and sure you can grab a chair before the music stops on this high energy use game of musical chairs and also because running those farms are getting so expensive the price had to go up to justify it.
Dude when it halves again and it’s suddenly taking the same amount of energy to do half the work I truly don’t know what’s gonna happen. I guess it depends how strong the sunk cost fallacy is in their heads for if it survives another round.
Yeah it’s called a “dead cat bounce”. Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I’ve been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
That’s not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out “despair” period after a crash.
What you’re seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The “despair” phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well…
Anyway, bitcoin etf’s are a new thing and money is pouring in. Only time will tell, but with all the etf money and the impending halfing, the future looks bright.
As a former Bitcoin user and fan, I am also anti-Bitcoin. Until they can figure out how to run the network without drawing the energy equivalent of an entire developing country just to check if some numbers are correct in a database, I can’t morally justify myself using it any more.
Again, I’m not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you’re talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I’ve been through this before, I’m not worried about the despair phase but that’s not what’s coming next.
This is a loss for everyone. Fuck these clowns.
Trump judge.
Bitcoin is currently at $57,000 and it’s up 144% in the last year. Haters gonna hate
Make sure you keep your money in bitcoin so when it crashes we can all laugh at you. Again.
Right now I’m up over 400% on my bitcoin, it’s by far my best performing investment. Come back to this comment in 6 months and see where it’s at.
I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth. Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
Yeah, and it’s easy to tell who are the bitter people who took a known gamble and lost. Gotta blame someone/something.
In case your referring to me, full disclosure.
I bought €10 bucks of dogecoin all the way back in 2013. Thats the only time i ever did annything remotely close to ”investing”
I still have them and while i initially dreamed of using them to buy a gaming pc, i am a working adult now and the novelty of the coin is worth more then that. Regardless no tech store accepts doge as currency.
I never cared about any other crypto, if the point is to sell them for classical money then what is the point of it.
The price has remained a stable price of 1 Doge = 1 Doge regardless of Elon trying to wreck the system so i remain very happy with my purchase.
Oh I will.
popcorn.gif
I was a couple months off, but I wanted to let you know that bitcoin hit a new all time high.
You were right. It is fun to eat popcorn while watching your investment increase in value by an additional 50% in a 9 month period of time. 🍿🤓
How’s that popcorn tasting?
@[email protected] 545 days
Gonna try this out
@[email protected] 180 days
There’s a RemindMe bot on Lemmy?! Now I’ve gotta try this out.
@[email protected] 24 hours
@TheImpressiveX Here is your reminder!
Wow, it worked. Thanks, @[email protected]!
@TheImpressiveX Ok, I will remind you on Wednesday Feb 28, 2024 at 1:39 PM PST.
@Gigan Ok, I will remind you on Sunday Aug 25, 2024 at 2:18 PM PDT.
@Gigan Here is your reminder!
@[email protected] 180 days
If i recall correctly, the stock to flow model predicts that this cycle should peak in late 2025.
FTFY
All investments are gambles basically. For example, I chose to do the “safe thing” a few years back to “invest” some of my savings into an index fund (stock market diversification basically). This is commonly expected to yield about 5% return on investment over time, historically.
What actually happened is that my Gamble lost about 40% of its value over the past couple years. I’d have been far better off just putting those savings into a good savings account.
Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
What is fiat backed by?
Militaries, usually.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
Crypto’s backed up by the gravy seals, the special farces
I tried to withdraw my troops the other day, but the lady at the banks just stared at me like I was speaking a different language…
That is a normal reaction when encountering a sovcit
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn’t even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone “brrrrr”.
I don’t trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they’ve found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we’re repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it’s not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn’t contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year’s past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you’re saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it’s really backed by death.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then… Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It’s one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether…
TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)
I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.
I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)
As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It’s a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
that’s how proof of stake works too. more money, more votes
Bitcoin was specifically designed so no small group of actors has the power. That’s also one of the reasons it’s so hard to introduce any fundamental changes to it. Too many groups of people would have to reach a consensus on the new rules. Since each one of them is following their own set of incentives, they keep each other in check.
Exactly, in the best case a shitty form of democracy.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I’d hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency’s price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they’re part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
I didn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s not zero power.
Proof of stake is arguably even worse, but the energy required for proof of work isn’t free either (and that’s by design, if it was free Bitcoin wouldn’t work).
There is more than double spending. Who decides how Bitcoin evolves? When new features are added, hard forks, etc. How much power do you have over that?
https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/what-is-bitcoin-governance/#what-is-a-bitcoin-hard-fork
How ever you turn it, at best it’s a shitty version of democracy.
Fundamentally money is all about trust, and I, despite all it’s flaws trust my government much more than a random group of developers and miners.
Which is why focusing on Bitcoin is a red herring. The power consumption issue with crypto was solved a long time ago, and has now shown for years that it’s viable on a massive scale (ETH). People need to stop acting like Proof of Work is all that exists.
So much for nuance. This place is just like reddit: black and white.
proof of stake is a ponzi scheme
We focus on Bitcoin because even though there are plenty of better alternatives, it is still the biggest crypto on the market by a long shot.
Governments guarantee that their currency is worth something in various ways. Bitcoin is backed by the energy usage it costs to mine
It’s not backed by energy usage. It’s backed by pure, empty, meaningless market speculation. It’s a digital baseball card. People use it in the exact same way. It has value because it’s “rare”, limited, and a bunch of people think so.
It also has the additional property of being able to easily transfer that asserted value anywhere in the world, free of censorship.
Yup. And prices go up from a combination of more idiots throwing money into it which is great for investing if you got into the game early and sure you can grab a chair before the music stops on this high energy use game of musical chairs and also because running those farms are getting so expensive the price had to go up to justify it.
Dude when it halves again and it’s suddenly taking the same amount of energy to do half the work I truly don’t know what’s gonna happen. I guess it depends how strong the sunk cost fallacy is in their heads for if it survives another round.
Yeah it’s called a “dead cat bounce”. Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I’ve been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
I don’t know how much you know about bitcoin, but 7 years ago it was worth $1,100.
That’s not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out “despair” period after a crash.
What you’re seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The “despair” phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well…
I hadn’t realized Lemmy was so anti-bitcoin.
Anyway, bitcoin etf’s are a new thing and money is pouring in. Only time will tell, but with all the etf money and the impending halfing, the future looks bright.
Is bitcoin volatile? Undoubtedly.
Buy during the dispair period.
As a former Bitcoin user and fan, I am also anti-Bitcoin. Until they can figure out how to run the network without drawing the energy equivalent of an entire developing country just to check if some numbers are correct in a database, I can’t morally justify myself using it any more.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to figure anything out, alternatives that cost essentially 0 energy in comparison already exist on a massive scale.
Ooh, better go vegan then.
Who says they haven’t?
Again, I’m not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you’re talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I’ve been through this before, I’m not worried about the despair phase but that’s not what’s coming next.
True, but keep in mind that the effect of each halving on price is smaller.
That makes sense, since each halving reduces the supply by a smaller amount. But it will still have an upward pressure on the price.
They probably don’t know much about Bitcoin, seeing how they have only been using it for 12 fucking years…
/s
Spoken like a true moron with zero insight.
Ransoms gotta get paid
Surely this time it won’t crash and burn right?
You’re right
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