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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I'd never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
Yeah, it's like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
LOL they love to parade around the 1/10,000 winners and make them spokespeople for the casino for a week.
If you did give them advice, would it be different?
The problem is this person was looking at the market as a whole and then investing in some niche coin. At this point any coin that's not well-established is mostly likely pure grift.
Right, why invest in a rug pull coin when I can invest in an ETF of all the rug pull coins!
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
Fundamentally, no. That's just what it's become.
I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it's like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet... gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So... yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
Apart from all the other deflationary stuff...
I can't get past the adjustable difficulty lottery system they use for mining blocks every 10m... :/ there has to be a better way.
It's like diagonalizing huge matrices repeatedly just as a wait() function.
there's better methods than how Bitcoin works (PoW) like Proof of Stake, but that has its own problems, like bringing more centralization to the network. Like how with bitcoin if a miner controls more than half of the global hash rates, they can mint more money than should be, in a currency with PoS they could just buy half of the coins and do it. They probably wouldn't because its not in their self interest, but its still a problem
Idk. I've been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don't think it's necessarily a "scam" the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
In what way is Bitcoin not fundamentally a scam? There are multiple interpretations of "Bitcoin is a scam" you can take, and honestly with most of them I think it's been true the whole time.
Edit: I think some folks are parsing my sentence incorrectly, and I can't blame them. I didn't do a great job communicating. When I said "in what way is it not a scam" I didn't mean to make it sound like an exclamation like "how can you not think it's a scam!?", I am saying, "which specific way of people referring to it as a scam do you believe is wrong?"
It would be better to state how it is a scam
Apart from that, well no big company or country profits from it. You’re not paying someone that’s actively trying to fuck you over. You’re not paying to fund a capitalistic villain that wants all the world money. You’re paying for an, at least the original goal was, uncensurable means of payment that’s decentralized and doesn’t rely on a government or a company.
A pseudonymous and trustless way of paying people. Believe in the maths, not a regulated entity that might seize your money at any time.
It’s the cypherpunk's wet dream and I view it as such.
Most people only view it as investment and "ponzi scheme" because they don’t care about this. They don’t care about not giving too much power to a few individuals and don’t hate banks.
Any country can just print money and make what you have worthless, and it’s often done in poor countries as a way to wipe debts or similar bs. Crypto can shield them against that, which is probably the reason why it’s more used in those kind of countries (or in countries with oppressive governments)
Bitcoin is one of the cleanest cryptos. It’s old, doesn’t work that well, but it’s not owned by anyone and it has a strong identity
For anyone saying it’s only perceived value and doesn’t rely on anything, well it’s a bit like any market. How does it really differ from stocks for example? And crypto actually relies on the way of creating coins: mining, minting… which is known. If you don’t agree with it, don’t use it. The limited number of coins plays an important role in the price.
For example, I mainly hold crypto that I’ll be using for payments, or those I deem technologically interesting.
I’ve already made many crypto payments, know how they pretty much work, and prefer using them than paying by card, because fuck the banking system and those greedy visa/mastercard that takes huge cuts from payments. Also, anonymity benefit: don’t always want my name to be known, for example when donating to an individual or particular cause
I do hope you're being real careful with your opsec if anonymity is important to you. Generally speaking, more people will know who paid who with crypto compared to bank transfers. Chains like Monero are an exception of course and yes, there are ways to anonymize other wallets too, but it requires a great deal of care, more than I personally trust myself.
You've got a valid point for the card payments where there are huge fees the merchant has to pay (nearly 2% for many I think), but bank transfers are infinitely cheaper (free) and instant, compared to paying gas fees and waiting. Obviously this is not true for all banking systems yet, but it's getting there.
In what way is it?
Decentralised currencies are fundamentally too expensive to operate, while providing dangerously little safety and a far worse user experience than fiat.
The scam part is the idea that any crypto coin is an asset with inherent value, when in fact the price is created entirely by new investment, in other words it's just a ponzi scheme
It's not a scam. It's also not immune from valid criticism, but people who call it a scam don't understand it well enough to make those criticisms.
I think you're doing a disservice by saying everyone who calls it a scam doesn't understand it well enough. It's not like everyone saying it is a scam are doing it for the same reason. There's a variety of reasons people have for doing it.
People can all have different reasons for a thing and yet all still come to the wrong conclusion. Bitcoin just doesn't meet the criteria for a scam. It's one thing to not like or trust it for legitimate reasons. It's another thing to denounce the thing you don't like or trust with an invalid accusation.
It's not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It's not an investment and it's also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that's not your use case, don't buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn't buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It's not going to happen. You can't price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?
I don't know what you're saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the cryptocurrency value drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don't have the money.
The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.
Vendors can immediately sell upon receipt. And prices rarely change that much in a day, usually it's a few percent at most (within the credit card fee range), especially for the currencies targeted at actually being currencies instead of scams.
This ^
Most vendors do frequently sell or convert to stablecoins to avoid this problem, and in times of uncertainty, they often charge more to cover the eventual losses
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are "plug and play" payment processors who can handle it now.. Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they'd have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
That is not what's stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham's Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there's also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
Same way fiat is.
Édit: damn, and I thought bitcoiners were obnoxious You guys take the cake with so much copium.
Oh stop it
What’s the GDP of Bitcoinistan?
Probably the same as North Korea, with the amount of money laundering, ransomware, propaganda and scams they do 😄
They're the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it's garbage. Now it's just sunk costs for them
imagine not being able to read
they literally said some is a scam
therefore they don't consider all of it to be good, and therefore they don't 'simp' for it
Monero is the only good crypto
No, but one of the good ones