Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
Not dead, just sleeping. It’s a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:
Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.
And that’s it. You don’t have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can’t solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone’s database and hoping nothing happens or they’re too big to fail. It’s just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.
Ok, I’m starting a new cryptocurrency, then, it’s a Google Sheets page.
@Thebazilly @VeeSilverball a “SheetCoin”, as it were
Dear god, I hope so
I hate watching so many people get scammed
No. Bitcoin is the future of money. It really is the best form of money humanity has invented so far. People just need to stop trading shit coins.
Bitcoin (as it uses proof of work) is incapable of handling all transaction of the world without creating insane amounts of wasted energy.
Updating the ledger (actually writing down transactions) is only a fraction of the total computing resources it consumes. Most of it is just spent doing random hashes over and over again (the proof of work part). This is computing power that does not actually do any of the money related tasks, it’s just there to keep the ledger trusted.
This is an awesome idea in theory, but completely unscalable in reality.
Other Blockchain technologies like proof of stake don’t have this issue of energy waste, but they have other hurdles.
But Bitcoin as it is implemented now can never be the money of the future in my opinion.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That’s how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it’s still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.
Trust is one of the most fundamental parts of any monetary system, so brute forcing hashes in this case is directly related to it.
Bitcoin can easily serve the world on 100 Mac Minis. Probably even fewer. The fact that currently people beat themselves into burning ridiculous amounts of electricity to run Bitcoin nodes is a function of the profitability of doing that. If that profitability decreases, so will the electricity burned. If I remember correctly, the protocol is designed to reduce that reward over time and unless the dollar value of Bitcoin dramatically increases, the energy waste should decrease long term.
A secondary point on energy consumption is how that of Bitcoin compares to the traditional financial transaction systems. I don’t have the numbers at the moment but last time I checked it wasn’t pretty for the latter.
With all that said, if PoS is proven to be as robust as PoW, it would probably be adopted by systems currently on PoW, like Bitcoin.
I think you’re missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.
The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.
Can you elaborate on how one could print bitcoins if they controlled 50% of the network?
Bitcoin miners validate transactions on the network, so if one entity controls a majority of all miners, they can validate their own fraudulent transactions
No fucking way haha, imagine having to hang out at the grocery store for an hour waiting for your payment to clear
Yeah man, keep huffing that copium.
Bitcoin has no long term plan for actually securing its chain. The fees don’t add up to enough and the throughout is abysmal. Lightning is centralised and was disrupted because of chain congestion due to Ordinals.
Keep dreaming!
Do you use Bitcoin in real life?
Do you use any gold in real life to pay for stuff?
No, and I also seriously question people’s obsession with gold.
I used to work at a liquor store and we had one regular customer who paid with a bitcoin card. This was around 2015 or so. It was funny because he said it was because of “anonymity” but everyone knew him as “the guy who pays with bitcoin.”
bitcoin will never be the dominant global currency. it couldn’t even maintain its position as the dominant darknet currency. bitcoin is not perfect and you are part of a religious cult that bans people for pointing out its shortcomings.
Yep, first is always best, like my CRT TV.
Ethereum is pretty cool too. I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. That’s pretty much it though. the rest are shitcoins. Edit: Monero is the other good coin.
I’m a fan of cryptocurrencies, and I would dearly love for the “speculative investment scam” aspect of it to be dead. It’s been a massive drag on the technology’s reputation for many years, preventing it from being used for all kinds of applications that would really benefit from some form of cryptocurrency integration. Unfortunately even if the “speculative investment scam” aspect dies the bad reputation will linger, so hopefully those applications will find ways to sneak it in where useful without drawing too much attention.
Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).
If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”
I don’t think transaction fraud or identity theft would disappear overnight, they would just take on different forms.
I think a big part of why cryptocurrencies don’t take off as actual currencies (beyond speculative investors ruining everything), is the fact that there are a lot of clear benefits to a centralized system that blockchains have yet to adequately replace.
1: Scale. The amount of processing power it would require to process all McDonald’s daily credit card transactions on a blockchain is many orders of magnitude greater than that of using Visa or Mastercard. Even when you account for proof-of-stake coins like Ethereum. Maintaining a single large centralized database will always be more energy efficient than maintaining many large decentralized databases, especially when the latter comes wrapped in a dozen layers of cryptography.
2: Reversibility. If I buy something from a stranger on the internet and use my debit or credit card, my bank can issue a chargeback if said stranger tries to screw me over. This is fundamentally impossible on a blockchain without relying on some kind of middleman to hold funds in escrow, at which point you’re basically back to using big centralized banks to do all the heavy lifting. Sellers may view this as a positive aspect of using a blockchain, but they can’t realistically force buyers to use a payment processor more amenable to their desires. If they could, PayPal would have vanished years ago.
On top of that, one of the big problems that blockchain solves can be solved through centralized systems as well. The big one that people bring up is credit card fraud, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that credit card fraud is a lot less common outside the US than within. This is because places like the EU have mandated security measures such as chip-and-pin (the US only requires the chip part). Smartphone-based contactless payment systems like Apple Pay also provide effective 2-factor authentication at the point of sale. And while blockchain is theoretically more secure, in practice these mechanisms are “good enough” for everyday use.
How does crypto stop identity theft or transaction fraud? Crypto does nothing for credit, which is basically what identity theft is, and if you’re missing how widely there’s transaction fraud on crypto you haven’t been paying attention.
It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.
Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.
Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.
These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.
But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.
@dreadgoat@kbin.social @beefcat@beehaw.org there’s a whole insurance industry for covering legal fees regarding improperly titled real estate and it generated over $20 BILLION dollars in premiums in 2022!
If the title to a house were an #NFT, you could verify it’s validity in seconds!
I don’t know, this sounds a lot like DNA evidence. Sounds great in theory, but doesn’t actually mean what TV implies it to mean. In terms of a receipt, you still need to tie that to a person, or the wallet to the person. Given how easily people have lost their wallets, it’ll be a similar issue to “My credit card was used at that time”. Yes, the wallet / CC was used at a place at a time, but who was the person using it? In either case, they’ll want to use the security video or clerk witness testimony to tie it together.
I’m not even sure what situation you’re thinking that the airline would not accept their own printed ticket or shot of the ticket PDF or whatever they send you today, but the NFT would make all the difference. Again, either the Airline system reads your ticket data, whether it’s NFT, barcode, or traditional digital and can tie it to a sale in their system or they can’t. They can lose the NFT link just as well as the barcode link, and the gate agent isn’t going to understand or care that you have an NFT that cryptographically proves “blah blah blah”. They’re already checking ID. For someone to fake the barcode version, they would also need a fake ID or Passport to match it.
I sort of see what you’re saying if you went to court, and the airline wouldn’t do discovery or purposefully shredded their records of your ticket for some reason, but we already have receipts and bank statements and the like that do the same thing, and an NFT doesn’t change needing to prove you bought it in this case, presumably via linking a wallet rather than a bank account, though wallets don’t have the ID requirements bank accounts do, so in court that could actually be rather harder to do.
Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.
Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.
It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.
Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.
You’re talking like this happens all the time though, or specifically the airline loses your ticket record. I can’t even think of a bank error that would somehow be involved in a way that this helps you really - banks have every incentive to be as close as humanly possible to perfect in their record keeping, because when they aren’t, they get sued, they get slapped with fines from the government, and they lose customers. The entire sales pitch of a bank is trust.
But what really seems to be happening here is you’re suggesting that someone has both lost their ticket, and the airline at the same time lost their record of the ticket. This is exactly the same as
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
You can stand there with your NFT all you want, the airline can still say - we don’t recognize it as valid due to a screwup in their system, same as they do with a CC receipt or a printed ticket I guess. They can and do bump people from flights they agree have valid tickets all the time. And now you’re back to what? Complaining to customer service or suing them (cause you can’t force a bank to get back your crypto from the airline like you can dispute a CC charge).
Maybe you’re right and it’s ticket forgery that this would prevent, but I really question if that’s a big driver here of any issues for anyone.
It’s been 13 years and the only applications found have been in fraud.
Over and over, blockchain is a solution to a question nobody asked.
You might as well say you’re a biplane enthusiast or something.
Hey. Biplanes are actually much more relevant in today’s world than crypto. They aren’t common, but there are still new biplanes made because they are a valid solution for certain problems. Unlike blockchain.
It’s nice-to-have if shit really did hit the fan economically and hyper inflation took over. Glad the hype is over though.
I’m not actually interested in the value of the tokens, I only own a few tens of dollars’ worth myself. I’m interested in the application-related aspects of it.
For example, something applicable to the Fediverse that comes to mind is the Ethereum Name System. That’s a blockchain-based mechanism that allows for DNS-like “domain names” to be claimed by users. Something like it could serve as a way of registering a username for the Fediverse and then having it be completely portable between instances without the need to rely on any centralized authentication provider. Since they do cost a small amount of actual money to register they’d make for a good spam prevention method - a regular user only needs to register a name every once in a rare while, but a spammer needs to register a new one each time their existing name gets blocked. It’d get expensive real fast for a spammer.
Unfortunately this adds some complication to the registration process that the Fediverse really can’t afford right now. And worse, it has the dreaded “NFT” label hanging around its neck because technically a username registration is indeed an NFT if you want to categorize it like that. So I can only sigh and watch a perfectly useful technology go unused due to the bad name it’s been given.
Oh well. Someday the usefulness will overcome the perception.
The one SIMPLE trick crypto bros HATE: Blockchain -> “Distributed Ledger” NFT -> “Unique Identifier”
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Tons of people already can’t handle signing up for a simple account. You think having to get a crypto wallet, figure out how to use it, and pay money into it before you can even start actually signing up for a social media account is ever gonna fly? Not in a million years.
NFTs truly are the best imaginable example of a solution in search of a problem. Every single use case I’ve ever heard someone pitch is something that already exists and already works. But like… what if your hotel key was an NFT, bro? Whoa. What if your softball team’s schedule was an NFT? What if your social media account was an NFT? 🤯
I explicitly said in my comment:
Unfortunately this adds some complication to the registration process that the Fediverse really can’t afford right now.
You don’t appear to have actually read it all the way through, just triggered a standard anti-NFT rant off of the fact that the word “NFT” was present in it. Which is ironically exactly the problem I was complaining about.
I read it. And I disagree.
It isn’t that it can’t handle it “right now.” It will never handle it. Nobody wants it.
But I bet “you can’t read, you’re just triggered by a word” is way easier to fantasize about than actually paying attention to reality.
Have you heard of hashcash, it’s POW precursor to bitcoin. It stops spam, was originally developed for email but could be incorporated into Lemmy eventually on sign up. Principal is similar to what you suggest.
@shipp Ethereum switched to Proof-of-Stake consensus nine months ago, it no longer burns a significant amount of energy to operate. I’m primarily interested in Ethereum because it’s got smart contracts, allowing a huge variety of applications that older, simpler cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can’t handle.
It’s a small foot print for a real user and expensive for bots who are generating enmasse. It worked on Windows 98 PCs so isn’t really an issue like you describe.
PoW is indeed an interesting solution to protect against DDoS in some situation, like how Tor Onion Services does it.
Not all applications of PoW are bad.
It’s nice-to-have if shit really did hit the fan economically and hyper inflation took over. Glad the hype is over though.
Yeah i guess you’re right, a biplane would be pretty useful in that scenario.
It’s just another kind of MLM right now. It always has been. The superbowl Larry David add was the swan song for crypto mainstream appeal.
And you are right, most of the people that were telling you to buy cryptocurrency for reasons, now are into the “prompt engineering” fad.
Por metaverse, only the really unicorn-chasing and completely clueless about technology marketing “gurus” got into it.
I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen
Oh I don’t know maybe it has something to do with Sam Bankman-Fried swindling $8 billion.
Well, the irony is hard to miss, right? Crypto was born out of this grand idea of decentralization, but then everyone just rushed over to these centralized exchanges. Kinda sounds like a death knell to me. Seems like the original spirit of crypto got lost in the rush for profits.
I do think the tech and the concept will keep evolving, and eventually, it’ll morph into something new, get a new name or something. Here’s hoping that when it does, people will get that it’s better to trust the collective ‘us’ instead of just a select few. After all, these are often the same folks messing things up. But, what can you do, huh?
This almost sounds like what could happen to the Fediverse. It’s decentralized just like crypto, but the majority of people won’t know or care about how the Fediverse works, they will just want to communicate online.
I mean, most Lemmings (lol) hang out in Beehaw anyway, so centralised fediverse is already here
Now say it again but replace crytpocurrecy with Website aggregation. Its honestly not that different from leaving the big centralized reddit for the Fediverse… only to mostly end up in a few relatively huge alternatives in the name of decentralizing. Its just… human nature.
I know one crypto bro IRL. He acknowledges that it’s all just a pyramid scheme, but he enjoys it because it’s like gambling but with more strategy involved I guess.
Would you also consider GameStop’s NFT marketplace for games part of a pyramid scheme?
Or maybe what F1 is doing to evolve how they handling ticketing? Here’s a recent follow up on F1’s NFT ideas I came across recently.
It’s… just not all a pyramid scheme. To say it’s all a pyramid scheme is missing the forest for the trees. It’s n o t
While I think you’re right in that neither of those seem to be pyramid scheme, I disagree with the implication that they are any better (apologies if that was not the implication).
They seem to just be creating an avenue for monotization of something that, I assume (but I could be wrong here), was previously free by nature, hence the necessity for an NFT to monetize it.
I guess really that’s just what NFTs do, or at least their main use case. But I guess I just fundamentaly disagree with that idea.
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And because he gets a decent cut of the profits. Coming out ahead (for a while) has a way of assuaging one’s worries.
Gambling except the expected value is higher than 0
Is it really though? If I were to go and buy my first ever crypto coin today would you really say the expected value is greater than 0?
I have no doubt those who got in years ago or mine coins using other’s resources have an expected value greater than 0 but that’s not the entire market. I hope.
It is humming along nicely for those that use it. There could be another speculative pump filled with scams, that would be no surprise.
Too many scams. Too many ads advertising companies who ended up being scams as well. The pivot to NFTs was short-lived (because they were scams). The high-profile exchanges (FTX et al) going belly up, and the their founders in jail.
Bitcoin is still around 30k a pop, so I wouldn’t say it’s dead yet. But I foresee a big crash in the months or years to come: the hype has passed, and the real uses of crypto are very few. It’s also not a good investment since the expected returns are 0. Once people finally realize that, I see the price falling to 1k or even less.
You know that this was being said multiple times in the last 10 years?
I was there when it hit $50 and said that the bubble has to pop soon, so at what time are we accepting crypto coins as just an alternative if you want to gamble?
expected returns are 0
That’s the same thing with gold though. There are other reasons to invest in something than just returns. Some folks want something to maintain its value. Bitcoin being deflationary is supposed to be a good hedge against inflation. (But it’s far to volatile to really serve that purpose in my opinion.)
Well, gold has the added benefit that it has served this purpose for thousands of years.
Would you really count on an extremely complex electronic currency requiring a distributed array of machines to get you through a major crisis?
You mistake me, I’m not saying Bitcoin is better than gold. I was just pointing out that returns are not the only reason.
Maybe people understood, that instead of freedom as advertised, crypto brings out even more oppressive forms of capitalism.
I’m not a crypto-bro, but how are they oppressed? It’s just a infinitely more volatile Gold replacement and you don’t have to sell on the big places
“Infinitely more oppressive forms of capitalism,” not “Bitcoin users are oppressed.”
I use crypto for its real intention, as money. I buy my groceries with crypto and pay most of my bills in crypto on a monthly basis. Crypto itself is not a problem. Its the FTX’s and Mt Gox’s of the world trying to graft old banking norms onto crypto that is the majority of the problem. “not your keys, not your coins.” Exchanges are like gas station bathrooms, you go in, do your business, and get the heck out. You dont just hang around.
Your bank being named “Magic the gathering online exchange” really should have been a red flag…
Right! I practice what i preach. I put fiat in an exchange, wait a few days for it to clear, biy crypto, and take the crypto off the exchange into a wallet i fully control
The transaction costs are killer though.
Not on ethereum layer 2s.
This just makes me think the fediverse is simple (and costs you way less money) compared to crypto. I do not want an OSI model for a Fricken currency.
I am still left with I have USD and anyone I want to pay or give money to wants USD, GBP, or EUR. Adding exchange fees isn’t exactly compelling.
I dont use bitcoin as i want privacy. I use monero where fees are $0.01
I’ve never met anyone taking monero, but I do think it’s the only one that may sort of live up to some of the promises. But again, a currency no one accepts isn’t useful to me.
I use monero and if i need to pay in another crypto i just use an instant swap to convert monero to their crypto of choice
i think the shitcoin trend and NFT shit is over, but crypto as a technology and cryptocurrency certainly isn’t. I don’t see BTC, ETH, XMR dying aaanytime soon, especially the former and the latter - they’re gold standard on the net already. Overengineered crypto like ETH seems to be less popular now.
In the US each time crypto is traded it needs to be reported.
I got free crypto from Coinbase. Then sent it to a wallet, then sold it. So each transaction needed to be reported. It’s too troublesome to be worth it.
Also, if I buy crypto, they have a week hold before I can move it. My idea was to buy crypto in country A and sell it in country B to quickly transfer money between the two countries I live in. Also it would help me beat the bank fees.
But the 7 day hold kinda defeats the purpose of quickly transferring money.
Just download your transaction CSVs from Coinbase and throw them into a Git repo.
This is an interesting take. I suppose in hindsight it was naive of us to think the government wouldn’t catch on and track / tax it.
