Comment by Kapura
7 days ago
When i look around at all the positive innovations cryptocurrency has failed to deliver, it really does seem like they invented a currency exclusively useful for doing crimes.
7 days ago
When i look around at all the positive innovations cryptocurrency has failed to deliver, it really does seem like they invented a currency exclusively useful for doing crimes.
I got into bitcoin around 2011ish for some time. I was never a True Believer but I was a 'soft believer'. At the time, when people asked me if Bitcoin is the future I would always say "I think it or something like it will be very useful". Fast forward 10 years and there's been no actual use of crypto. No killer app. No disrupting the finance world. It seems to be used exclusively by smart people as a means of extracting wealth from people who don't understand it.
We built useful, legitimate services off crypto (think paying people out for doing work online). But the regulation became insurmountable.
I will admit however, almost everyone "interested" in crypto has never made a transaction.
How did crypto solve something that Zelle,PayPayl,cashapp,venmo, etc did not also solve for paying people remotely?
> It seems to be used exclusively by smart people as a means of extracting wealth from people who don't understand it.
How is that any different from other financial markets? A fool and his money are easily parted, while targeting desperate people with get rich quick schemes are also an easy play. The crypto/stocks/etc are just different tools to achieve the same result.
> How is that any different from other financial markets?
It's unregulated.
Although to be fair, it seems everything else is going in that direction too (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/doge-targets-sec-next-for-...)
Please try and think for a second. You're telling me you can't see the difference in investing in a S&P ETF vs. crypto investing? Really? There is no difference there for you?
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Cryptocurrencies is one of those things that makes me embarrassed for the whole tech industry. I wish it was the only thing...
The quiet majority who avoids such things are easily lost among all the pump and dump nonsense. A ~single digit percentage of the general population has basically zero morality, but they can have a huge impact.
I realized it was likely a profitable long term investment back when bitcoin was ~10-15$, but I objected to it on moral grounds and didn’t get involved. It’s not even something I regret, just another life choice.
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Well at least we redeemed ourselves with NFTs huh?
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> Fast forward 10 years and there's been no actual use of crypto. No killer app. No disrupting the finance world.
Just today I answered call on my mom's phone from unknown number. Regarding payout from blockchain investment account. Not the killer app and disruption we deserve, but the only one we got.
The killer app is crime. Old scams have flourished. Entire new forms of scam have been invented. Crypto currency has been a game changer for criminal organizations.
> It seems to be used exclusively by smart people as a means of extracting wealth from people who don't understand it.
I'm all for an era of crypto feudalists
My pet theory is some government agency created bitcoin for one of two reasons:
Tracking financial transactions (open ledger).
Funding dark ops.
The whole Natoshi riding into the sunset after bitcoin booms, like an old Western movie, is not very plausible IMHO.
It is certainly odd there's been nothing from the inventors not even using the vast wealth they have squirreled away. The alternative which is honestly kind of funny is that they lost their keys so can't access the coins and thus coming forward as the inventor would just put a target on their back for people who might want to steal their keys.
Lost keys is the most probable explanation, considering it was near worthless for a good chunk of its start. They likely didn't have backups or shrugged and moved on.
I like this idea. They should’ve been able to do some decent mining early on after losing the keys and make money.
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This is the opinion of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman too, in his post Crypto is for Criming https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crypto-is-for-criming.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman famously estimated in 1998 that the impact of the Internet on the economy will be no more than that of the fax machine.
Krugman's response:
> First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
> But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-int...
That's fair. Making predictions is risky business, economist or not. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
Same Krugman who wrote "Bitcoin is Evil" in 2013.
Most of the time, the difference between crimes and ventures depends on the hand holding the stick.
Obviously - if you are doing things that are legal - you have no need for Crypto.
Now, I think some crypto people will argue that there are many good and ethical things you could do which are illegal that you now can do with crypto.
However, all none of those things are happening. All that is happening is speculation and unethical crime.
The only obvious mainstream "success" to come out of crypto is stable coins (Tether/Bitfinex is something like the 5th or 6th largest buyer of US treasuries ...and amusingly keeps all the yield from them). Ironically, this use case also happens to be one that doesn't really require a decentralised ledger (would work equally well with a few cross-border validators, ala DNS root server approach) and lends itself very well to tradfi involvement (since you need pegging to fiat).
For me crypto today looks like ~1998/~2000 ish internet. Big, powerful traditional entities have fully woken up to it and will now take it over and ensure whatever useful use cases exist will be controlled by them with profits also accruing to them. The speculative, lawless days of the crypto wild west (fuelled by oceans of QE & stimmy money); and promises of a satoshi enabled future are well and truly over.
In terms of ushering in a new decentralised monetary order, it has failed completely.
This is so incredibly ill-informed it's hard to respond to. Thanksfully, it's incumbent on the person making the extraordinary claim...
> currency exclusively used for doing crimes
... to provide extraordinary evidence.
On my end, my home is financed by a trust-minimized loan against my BTC, using a stablecoin. And I greatly prefer stablecoins to wires for paying international vendors.
I’ve never see a “good” crypto millionaire/billionaire.
They’re always a smug racist/sexist/misogynist/ablist tech bro with fucked up visions of the future.
Hm, is that perhaps how you feel about all billionaires? Can you name one you think is "good"?
I've made some money in the space, have kids and a family, and care deeply about special needs and access (partner is a former SpEd teacher, I've volunteered and donate to related causes), and have invested heavily in reproductive rights. Does that make me "good"?
In my experience, and by my values, there are plenty of good and neutral people in the space. They aren't often the ones that ham it up for the media, but it should be obvious why that is.
Probably not a crypto millionaire/billionaire.
Isn't that tech billionaires in general?
Sure, but crypto millionaires are acting like they’re billionaires.
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Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Cuban....they're not like this. Granted it's a pathetically short list.
And how much money was made off of companies that were created to support cryptocurrencies?
Does anyone around here know of any?
Bueller?
Dirty money for dirty deeds...
and these dirty deeds weren't even done dirt cheap!