All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?
But there’s a fairly active BTC derivatives market (depending on what passport you carry), so you could hedge against him getting/staying rich by getting a little creative with long-dated DOOM stuff.
This. A lot of comments in here spewing hatred toward crypto seem to come from a psychological defense mechanism. People were wrong and decided not to move to crypto and are now doubling down on that position to feel better about their poor choices.
It doesn’t seem obvious that people who didn’t put money into cryptocurrencies were wrong. Even if you happened to through sheer luck buy low, sell high during one of the pops, that doesn’t mean everyone else was wrong any more than saying someone else was wrong for not playing roulette and selecting the right ending slot.
Your “buy low sell high” take is pretty short-sighted. For many, it’s a change in currency from fiat to digital. You on-ramp in but you don’t back out into fiat.
You're speaking about a subset of crypto traders that go right back to fiat.
I assumed making money was your metric, but if the metric is “change in currency from fiat to digital” I would argue that after nearly fifteen years of little adoption for mainstream, lack of ability to use cryptocurrency for anything but black market goods and super niche products, and what seems like an utter chaotic ecosystem dominated by con artists, cryptocurrencies are a pretty abject failure on that metric as well.
You can transact at any store that accepts credit cards with a crypto credit card.
There are countless uses for blockchains now from DeFi, gaming, social networks, NFTs, entertainment streaming, DAO’s and decentralized governance, and on and on the list goes.
I recommend you catch up to 2022 crypto if you don’t already know that.
The other poster roundly dispatched your comment about using a “crypto credit card” so I’ll defer commentary on that.
On the others: the crux of my argument was adoption and usage, with the implication that cryptocurrency was better for the usecase than traditional methods. Of course you can shoehorn a blockchain or “the chain” into any usecase, just like I can use C to write a frontend service, but it doesn’t make sense because C isn’t the best or even a good tool for the job. I can buy bananas and put them on the blockchain, doesn’t mean there is any reason to do so aside from pumping up any cryptocurrency holdings I might have, perhaps BananaCoin or BananaICO or Gorilla NFTs, which I just invented right now.
In the end your pithy comments aren’t going to convince me to start shoehorning blockchain into my day to day transactions — as much as I might long for a decentralized currency — and my fact-based analyses aren’t going to convince someone who has a financial or psychological interest in bitcoins or cryptocurrency or NFTs to abandon them. I suggest we just agree to disagree.
This is such a bad faith argument - you are transacting at any store in the fiat currency that store accepts and not crypto. That a service exists to seamlessly deduct an amount of crypto equivalent to that fiat is no more novel than one providing the same service between two fiat currencies, gold or Nuka cola caps.
If they'd just outlaw proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, I'd shut up and you can continue gambling your proof-of-stake digital chuck-e-cheese tokens to your heart's content.
But you're wasting more power than Argentina to do it. So yes, I hate this garbage and want it to fail.
I wonder how much energy YouTube or Facebook use compared to Bitcoin?
We could argue that Facebook and YouTube are only providing entertainment value. They don't do anything especially novel or provide critical infrastructure.
Rockets that deliver payloads into space are INCREDIBLY bad for the environment. But it provides critical services and infrastructure for now and the future.
Bitcoin provides a novel, decentralised, secure, electronic digital currency. It's being used for that purpose currently.
The FUD is unreal. We accept that certain use cases can persist and use tonnes of energy, but others we think is a crime against humanity.
Use of energy should not be a measure of shame on its own. What use case is it providing now and in the future for that energy usage?
The future will require a lot more energy for things we don't even know about yet. We need to ensure reliable renewable energy will provide for us now and in the future. We should not shut down new technologies just because it uses a lot of energy. When energy is cheap and clean and plentiful, we shouldn't worry about using it.
Nuclear Fusion reactor technology currently uses much more energy than it provides in output. But when that technology is viable it will help us to produce reliable and clean energy. Should we outlaw nuclear fusion because it uses shitloads of energy for no benefit (currently)?
Please educate yourself: PoW cryptocurrency is a red queen's race that is deliberately inefficient. I can't think of any other technology that continuously and deliberately wastes more and more energy. The only analogy I can even think of might be a nuclear arms' race: you have to keep building more and more missiles or there's a risk your enemy might get the jump on you.
Any engineer worthy of the title should be appalled by this inept and abusive design.
How exactly is it luck to recognize the value in crypto and buy a bunch? Because that's not exactly luck. That's recognizing value and managing risk successfully.
It's true that some people just FOMO into anything going up. But those types will end up losing all their "gains" in due time anyways.
No, it’s nothing at all like that. The value of crypto was obvious very very early on. It was never going to crash and burn. Sure a black swan event could have wiped it out and still may. But based on what’s knowable, the value has been obvious since day 1 of bitcoin.
This seems to be true of most people period. If there is a lump of people where a majority do understand crypto I haven't found it, possibly outside of tiny academic circles.
