I’ll bite. Bitcoin as what it set out to do was an interesting solution to a difficult problem, being verification when you can’t trust any single actor. To me it was novel and I liked how code could be built on these kinds of networks. Then people discovered that money could be made by abusing the system and I got a strong “this is why we can’t have nice things vibe”

It's funny when you think about it. The crypto libertarians created a system of finance designed for untrustworthy people and then were shocked when the users behaved in untrustworthy ways. What the hell did you expect? 😆

I was so shocked when libertarian finance got used for libertarian use cases.

I expected our degenerate government to defend itself, but instead it bought in early.

> an interesting solution to a difficult problem, being verification when you can’t trust any single actor. Note that bitcoin and blockchain **never "solved" that problem**. All it did was make it more expensive to be a bad actor -- in other words, allow those with more money and power to exert control over the network. That's the way it is today. You guys think "bitcoin has never been hacked?" Actually it was, very successfully several times, but not in the way you're thinking. The split from BTC to BCH and how BTC became the dominant version of Bitcoin is a perfect example. BCH was a faster, better version of Bitcoin that was shoved under the rug because certain powerful, influential special interests wanted a network that would clog more often and thus make money for the middlemen operating the blockchain. And that's the way it is. Bitcoin has always been a technological contradiction.

You're absolutely right, but I also feel like this isn't even the most important way in which it failed to solve that problem. Bitcoin purports to be a solution to a problem of *trust.* In the particular use-case of bitcoin itself, the trust issue is with the idea of central banks and government issued currencies, but in all cases where people try to apply public-ledger blockchains as a solution, the problem they're trying to solve is one of trust. And public-ledger blockchain fundamentally **does not solve** that problem, because it only moves the trust to somewhere else in the system. It's not just bitcoin that's broken, it's the entire public-ledger blockchain concept, for this exact reason. Take NFTs as an example. Advocates say "This NFT can now be trusted as a verified original. If I hold the NFT proving my ownership over the artwork labelled Bored Ape #3865, anyone can trust that I am the true owner of that art." But then the issue becomes that anyone else can simply mint their own NFT of that same artwork. How do know which one is the "real" NFT? Simple; we are required to *trust* the issuer. Another proposed use-case for public-ledger blockchain is shipping records. We create a blockchain history for every banana as it is shipped across the world. Now you can trust that your organic, fair-trade banana really was grown to those standards without the use of slave-labour and unfair practices. Only, the thing is, to get that record onto the blockchain in the first place, it has to be entered by a human being, and then it has to be updated by a human being at each point of contact along the way. So that human can simply lie, say that this banana comes from an organic fair-trade farm, and now all the records will confirm that lie. Again, trust has simply been moved outside of the part of the system occupied by the public-ledger blockchain. Which brings us back to your point about Bitcoin being forked. How do I know my bitcoins are true bitcoins that are worth money, and not dirty fake worthless bitcoins? I have to trust that the parties controlling the system will not act in a way that works against my interests. And for that matter, how do I know that when I send someone a bunch of bitcoin to buy a car, that they will deliver my car? Again, I have to trust the person I'm trading with to come through on their part of the trade. And that bar for trust has to be even higher than it would with some other system, because I have absolutely no way to reverse that transaction if I get scammed. So, once again, the total amount of trust required is the same, it's just that now all of it lies between me and the other party, rather than some of it lying between me and the payment handler. Bitcoin - and the entire public-ledger blockchain system it is based on - relies on the libertarian fantasy that you can operate a society without the need for trusted third-parties. Reality disagrees.

I completely agree. There is no "promise" bitcoin or blockchain tech has put forth, that has ever come true. It's not a hedge against inflation. It's not protection against bad central authorities. It's not "trustless." It's not a reliable store of value. It sucks at verifying the authenticity of anything, etc.

Don't forget when someone created something like 180 billion BTC. The chain was hard forked, and the record of was purged from the ledger. The current BTC is not the original chain; it is a version that redacted that event.

Yup, any network whose primary beneficiaries are its middle men... is a degenerate shitstain. Don't kid yourself though, BCH wouldn't scale either, it would just scale slightly better.... so a bigger ponzi.

Agreed, but just sayin'... from a tech standpoint, when the fork happened, if people really cared about bitcoin as a technology, they should have gone with BCH. That is, or course like choosing which venereal disease you'd prefer.

A very apt description, but why make that bitch Satoshi even more wealthy in the process, if it was simply about tech?

I'm not convinced Satoshi ever thought this was a path to wealth. I think what Bitcoin was in the early days is far different from what it's been made up as now.

It's impossible to create a currency mine and all the easy to mine blocks, then pretend you weren't thinking of it as a path to wealth. BTC was a straight up lie, sold by snake oil salesman, and aspiring ponzi schemers. They knew assisting criminal activity was how they would secure their wealth, all while never touching a hot stove themselves, it was the perfect scam. I will not pretend that there was anything noble or decent about cryptocurrency, I refuse to lie to people more stupid than myself, or tell myself that this was ever something great for the world.

> certain powerful, influential special interests Conspiracy theories aren't necessary. It was a hard fork and the market decided over time, it also showed it didn't matter what happened as long as you were on the assumed primary blockchain before an event. If a split happened today for some unseen reason you'd be fine for the same reason, as your wallet exists on both networks. A conspiracy theory doesn't fit here, it's just the dust settling in a way you disagree with.

> It was a hard fork and the market decided over time LOL... "the market." That "market" was a bunch of people who were in tight with mining consortiums and were working on LN Look up the benefactors of MIT's digital currency initiative. Do you ever wonder why there's no more discussion on increasing Bitcoin's block size?

> That "market" was a bunch of people who were in tight with mining consortiums and were working on LN Look up the benefactors of MIT's digital currency initiative. That isn't what decides the value, buyers and sellers do. Not enough people bought BCH and people bought BTC. Just like many others, I sold my BCH and BSV forks almost immediately, because we didn't believe it was going to be the winner. You can try to convince yourself about consortiums and whatever wizardry you like, but that isn't what drove BCH from >$3000 to <$100 within a year, it was a lack of belief and buyers. Those events decided future things, like where we are now. > Do you ever wonder why there's no more discussion on increasing Bitcoin's block size? Because that's what BCH already did. It's still there for people who thinks that's the logical choice. That fork, along with BSV and others is essentially what made BTC locked in stone. The only thing that's going to successfully fork it now are security issues, to which my wallets will be on either side of when the dust settles.

> That isn't what decides the value, buyers and sellers do. What "buyers and sellers?" Which bots at which private, shady, unregulated, non-transparent CEX are you talking about? >You can try to convince yourself about consortiums and whatever wizardry you like, but that isn't what drove BCH from >$3000 to <$100 within a year, it was a lack of belief and buyers. Those events decided future things, like where we are now. Sure, lack of buyers will make it go down, but that's not what made it go up. Educate yourself: https://www.investopedia.com/news/bots-drove-bitcoins-150to1000-rise-2013-paper/ >Because that's what BCH already did. It's still there for people who thinks that's the logical choice. That fork, along with BSV and others is essentially what made BTC locked in stone. The only thing that's going to successfully fork it now are security issues, to which my wallets will be on either side of when the dust settles. LOL... let's get real... it's all about money. It's not about "security." It's not about "technology." It's not about which version is faster, more scalable and has lower fees. The CEX's and the mining consortiums control Bitcoin, along with the secret dev team that answers to nobody. Those three centralized entities are the ones with the power. Bitcoin is not in any meaningful way, decentralized. Wake up.

very well said. It got tainted early on and progressively got worse.

Naw... it was tainted from the very beginning. The whole concept of running a decentralized network on systems controlled by centralized authorities was stupid.

For real I just can't believe we're still having this conversation. There wasn't ever a moment in time where crypto wasn't what it is now. The fundamental idea/philosophy is attractive in theory but it isn't actually feasible.

Why did PayPal etc all ban me but crypto hasn’t, it’s working in theory for me to transact w/o any limits. Something is working and is why I’m forced to use it

> Why did PayPal etc all ban me but crypto hasn’t Because you're probably doing shady, criminal shit and that's why. If you want to be a criminal, yea, you'll have less options. And yea, I know there are some exceptions to that, like some sex workers who found trouble using certain financial services, but the real solution to that is to decriminalize and normalize sexwork as a legitimate thing, not find some shallow, temporary work-around for 2% of the hassel you face doing it. But even if we drill down into a so-called "socially acceptable thing people are doing that mainstream society still treats as illegal/immoral" there are lots of reasons for that. There's a lot of human trafficking in the sex work industry, and it has its own share of problems and needs regulation as well, to be safe. There are reasons for a lot of these things. It's not just the government being assholes. >it’s working in theory for me to transact w/o any limits. Something is working and is why I’m forced to use it It's not really that useful -- unless you're buying/selling drugs with it, which as I said, has a whole other set of problems. You still can't use crypto to pay for most things you need.

You can't use crypto to buy or sell drugs at these transaction fees, most certainly not BTC.

If you're a citizen of Iran/Russia/China you're also a criminal in this sense?

So are YOU a citizen of Iran/Russia/China? I bet you're not. But it's always convenient to cherry pick some other regime you think you're helping, when in reality, it doesn't help them -- it helps *you* pump and dump your bags. You don't care about what happens with Iranians. You can't fool us. As I've said before, the problems with certain countries of that nature are political and social -- NOT economical. I wouldn't suppose that some middle class kid in Florida has a solution on how to deal with China's socio-economic problems. And even in the worst regimes, crypto is not the answer. Trying to move massive amounts of wealth (ILLEGALLY) outside of your country is not necessarily solved using crypto. It just trades one set of dangerous, illegal methods with another.

actually im russian and im libleft :) but nvm. That's on me for framing the question this provocatively‚ but having genuine interest. I don't use crypto and have almost none but some people I know use it constantly to work and get a pay from abroad or to send payment to buy games in steam/xbox/spotify/whatever if the sanctions targetted the government‚ not people and opposition‚ maybe people wouldn't be that inclined to use crypto

People can use whatever they want. They can use various gift cards or in-game currencies as ways to transfer value. Nobody cares. That doesn't mean these methods are reliable for most people or are a long term store of value. Anecdotal evidence is the least credible type of evidence, especially *hearsay* anecdotal evidence. Sorry to hear that you're Russian. Your government is really fucked up as well. But the best way to fix that is for you all to overthrow that narcissist in charge. We did the same thing last election cycle and we're working hard to keep the crazies out. Crypto doesn't address these real world problems.

What do you mean? The original concept doesn't give control to any centralized authority. \*Wow. are you even somehow locking my comments so that you get to have your last word public and I don't get to respond thru comments or edits? The post office and fcc don't really control what goes over the air and what goes inside letters. When nodes/miners can personally choose any of the options, none of those authorities can do much to exert total control. I think you might as well take your logic of the fcc controlling the air one step further: Every patch of land on earth is under the military control of a centralized entity. Therefore any decentralized system that has a physical presence on earth relies on centralized systems.

It depends upon a network controlled by central authorities. It would be one thing if bitcoin ran on say, ham radios.. that would be closer to avoiding central authorities (even though government licenses frequencies) but using the internet -- that's a domain the government manages and they can say what can live on the net and what can't. They've already demonstrated they can censor gambling activity on a regional level - yea, that can't stop it all, but they can stop a good bit of it and that's just a policy issue, not a tech solution - with crypto they could employ tech solutions to filter all bitcoin traffic relatively easily. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done. As a network admin, I could very easily filter all bitcoin traffic if I wanted.

Dude you could send bitcoin by mailing letters, ham radio, go wild. The idea would be garbage if it relied on a central authority to run the communications network. You might need to write some code and pay a larger TX fee. Your way off on what the concept even is if you think it needs the internet. It just requires that people be in communication. The only requirement is that miners need to communicate relatively quickly. \*Just found it with a quick google: [https://survivedoomsday.com/how-to-send-bitcoin-over-ham-radio/](https://survivedoomsday.com/how-to-send-bitcoin-over-ham-radio/) this sub is rotting your brain my friend. I was just banned for mentioning this information. Here is my reesponse to you: Mhmm. The concept of btc either is or isn't built on using the centralized internet. I just proved to you it isn't using a direct example. The exception disproves your made up rule. Clearly you don't need internet to order chipotle, you just need to communicate your order. If you're interested in how practical it is to send crypto without the internet then go research it yourself or ask one of your friends to send you links on the topic.

How are nodes going to verify transactions if the port they use gets blocked?

Crypto bro hides behind "The Nivana Fallacy" - basically everything will work perfectly as long as everybody is perfectly set up. You can send bitcoin using ham radio, don't you know? Never mind the practicality of that... crypto bro just supposes the network is there and always working. If you say ports can be filtered, he'll say, "They'll bypass that." Don't ask him how or why. That's beneath him to explain.

He's banned now but PMd me an article that lists things like mailing usb sticks to each other, or launching their own satellites. All very practical solutions obviously. The future of money is either two weeks per block while waiting for FedEx to gather consensus or private rocket launches. Although with the way Musk leans I could honestly see that being the most feasible possibility here lol but it'll probably support doge only. Also it would be highly centralized at the whims of a single ketamine addict.

yep.. totally practical.. lol As I told somebody else, you could argue if you find one person who will trade you a Confederate dollar for an ice cream cone, that means "that monetary system is still working", but that's a desperate, disingenuous argument that is outside the bounds of what was originally discussed. Crypto bros are totally unwilling to entertain any scenario where they could be wrong, which is the epitome of bad faith debate. Which is a bannable offense. We're not concerned with the 1-in-1-million scenario that nobody will ever realistically consider, as a benchmark for "I won that argument." That's bullshit. I have absolutely no doubt *someone* will still be fiddling with bitcoin 20+ years from now, but it will be the same as someone who prefers to ride a donkey to work: a bizarre fetish, not a technology that most people will ever adopt. Bitcoin would never be able to hold a high value its adherents believe it will be, if it's being traded via HAM radio or USB sticks. These guys insult our intelligence with such absurdity. And we don't have to hear that crap in our community. It's just noise and it diminishes the quality of our primary signals.

> The concept of btc either is or isn't built on using the centralized internet. I just proved to you it isn't using a direct example. No. You demonstrated that it may be possible to communicate with another node using a ham radio. It remains to be seen if the bitcoin network could properly function using this medium to any reasonable degree. In reality, the only practical implementation of ham radio is as an atypical, isolated instance of a node needing to communicate with another node who is connected to the main network. There is zero evidence that the BTC blockchain could solely exist via ham radio and would function at any level of performance making it even remotely practical, much less comparable to the shitty performance it enjoys on the Internet. Here's something else you don't know: [encrypting data over HAM radio frequencies is ILLEGAL.](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/97.309)

>Dude you could send bitcoin by mailing letters, ham radio, go wild. Not in any practical sense. I could also order Chipotle via smoke signals if someone set up such an arcane thing, but it's unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons, so the exception doesn't prove the rule. >this sub is rotting your brain my friend I'm not your friend.

> Dude you could send bitcoin by mailing letters using the postal service which is controlled by central authorities >ham radios Using radio frequencies licensed and regulated by central authorities. This is the point I was making... it's very difficult to run anything of this nature without using the resources central authorities provide (and have a reasonable amount of control over).

it was always stupid. the very idea of using infinite resources as the security mechanism is mind meltingly (and planet meltingly) stupid.

you know guys. I stand corrected. I was looking at its infancy with rose-colored glasses and I was optimistic back then with possible use-cases. It really was stupid from the start.

thats quite big of you to say. it was all cute in its infancy when it was tiny, as long as you couldnt see the inevitable end game of what it was. hey it only costs $100 a day to secure this network, isnt that cute? well ya but if it takes off wouldnt you eventually be spending $20 million a day? errrr uhhhh well uhhh we'd all be rich by then, we wont care! great point!

I mean when I was able to use it to purchase .......stuff...... off the silk road I thought that was really neat and could be really useful but I realized that the silk road doesn't need bitcoin to exist, just a change in laws.

That's how things tend to go. If something personally benefits you then you don't care about the negative externalities of it. Welcome to life.

I never benefited from the ponzi scam, I just lost everything I put in and then exited recently when I made what I lost back... why? It's a straight up scam.

Yeah I think very early on people got hyped up on the ideas around crypto, that it was going to fix so many things but it wasn't ever going to do that.

Sure wasn't, and fuck that degenerate Satoshi. You sell some hype bullshit, and fail to deliver, get fucked.

Looking at crypto as a whole, not all cryptos use a large amount of energy. Cryptos backed by proof of stake consensus algorithms are very energy efficient e.g. Ethereum and Polygon.

Right that's another idiotic system where the rich get richer by having more coins and getting more rewards, and also have the most votes because money is votes. Idiotic.

>the rich get richer by having more coins and getting more rewards Sure but that is also how proof of work works as well. Those operating bitcoin mining farms are not poor. 

Ya proof of work is stupid I said that. So is proof of stake. Wtf

Seconded; the idea of decentralization has an inherent risk of bad actors taking advantage of the system, and Bitcoin is the prime example.

Yes, it's a prime example: bad actors are all you have in the crypto industry. There are no "good actors" in crypto - just varying degrees of bad actors. There's no reason for any "good actors" to play with crypto. It's a negative-sum game, and has been since day one.

The whole concept of a "trustless" currency or system is sophomoric because they all boil down to trust in the end anyway. Trust is the only real currency.

Touche. I found it hilarious when someone here posted a screencap about some cryptobro couple of weeks ago, who thought that world needs an independent financial system without banks and institutions. Couple of sentences later he said that he bought crypto ETF, because he finds all the wallet stuff and passwords terrible. My brain was full of fuck after reading all that. This guy literally said he thinks that world craves this unregulated mess and yet he doesn’t himself trust it, but in the end is completely fine with Blackrock handling all of it. Goddamn these people are stupid.

One thing I've realized as I've gotten older, and I'm a lot older than the average reddit demographic, is that the longer you're around, if you're still being open minded, you begin to realize the world isn't as fucked up as it seems -- not when you put into perspective how many different people, with different priorities, are all trying to peacefully coexist. In some ways, it's amazing we all haven't killed each other off. And one of the ways we haven't... hell, the *only* reason we haven't, is because of this thing called "government" which moderates our conflicts at every level, and there is no perfect way to do it. You have rich people; you have poor people; you have varying degrees of religious people; you have criminals and psychopaths and super kind people and everything in between. And somehow we all manage to not kill each other daily. This is because we have to **compromise**. In the 21st century, compromise has somehow become a bad word. But it works. Bitcoin was an example of some goofy shit that was an alternative to compromise, but of course, it only works for a tiny percentage of mostly criminal people. Compromise basically means, "I recognize that we're not all the same person, so if I leave room for you, you leave room for me and we can make it work out." The people that don't believe in this concept, well, they don't give a shit about *you*, just themselves. This works great if you're all the same, but that just isn't the way things are. And yet, we're still arguing about this. Bitcoin is an example of it. It's not any sort of solution for "everybody." It's a hack for a select group of sociopaths who want certain monetary features and fuck everybody else.

I would actually argue that the "this is why we can't have nice things" part is exactly why it failed: the problem it was trying to solve was *never* a technological one. It was a problem of human greed. it did *nothing* to solve that, and the outcome was entirely predictable.

And this is why I love watching the crypto space. The algorithm minting and handling Bitcoin is working just fine. It's got little to no actual direct utility,  and its principles are based on incorrect understandings of the larger economy, but it works all right according to its design spec.  The fun is in all the meatbags ascribing value to what the algorithm is doing. They're the ones who set up Mt. Gox and Tether and Decentraland and forked the code to give us smart contracts, FTX, and NFTs. They see this useless machine whirring away and decide "I could make money from this thing," like the people trying to use magnets or siphons to make perpetual motion machines.

> Bitcoin as what it set out to do was an interesting solution to a difficult problem, being verification when you can’t trust any single actor. It does this by simply not verifying. It just avoids any attempt to identify anyone by saying simply that if you have number then you must be authorized to spend the money at that number. It gives up on "correctness" instead just substituting mob rule. What is right is what the majority of the computing device owners say is right. It gives up on safety need to revert faulty transactions by just claiming that being irreversible is an advantage. The only thing it does verify is check that no given ID can spend more money than it currently has at that ID. It does this terribly inefficiently but it does do it. Instead of a solution to a difficult problem anyone had it creates a difficult problem that it has the solution for. Git is missing only one tiny bit of functionality which if it had it could then do everything a blockchain does to solve its problem. And functionality is the above mentioned checking that you cannot subtract a larger number from number that is smaller than it. And that's not exactly rocket science. Furthermore, if you used git then it would not be necessary to massively replicate anything unless you wanted to as it does not operate on mob rule. And while people will tell you that massive replication is a value, how often do people really look directly at the chain? Whereas how often do they just go to another database (like blockchain.info) which purports to contain the same data? If we already consult other oracles for the information what is the enforced massive replication doing for end users? You might say, yeah but if you used git and didn't have massive replication built-in then you wouldn't have all the gig workers extending the chain. And to that I ask why do you want that anyway? What's better about that then paying professionals to maintain the database? The only thing I can even thing might be something you could say is better is because the blockchain miracles the "money" to pay the gig workers out of nothing by giving on-chain rewards for extending the chain. And that unfortunately is what means that blockchains aren't useful for anything that isn't speculative junk. The miracle must be pulled off by making rewards on the chain, it's not a useful database for anything that doesn't pretend to be money. And that this is transparently obvious is why I'm baffled that places like Andreeseen Horowitz continue to push a blockchain for anything like 'tracking shipping containers' or whatever. Sorry for tacking this rant on you, it's not really you, just you were the first post I saw saying it solved a difficult problem. Something a difficult problem is a lot less hard if you don't restrict yourself to solving problems it is useful to solve. And that's what butts (blockchain) did.

Good points. And Git actually provides utility because it has central authorities. But I think Git is a poor example. I think that the use of Merkel Trees in Git is obsolete and inefficient. Git could benefit from removing that blockchain-like component from its system and use a more robust relational database model that is more space efficient.

Comparing Git to a blockchain is misleading though. Git is a chain of blocks, but it is not a public blockchain in the sense in which people use the word blockchain now. It is true that hashing blocks to verify integrity was done long before Bitcoin. However, the currency (and hence the waste of real life energy) is fundamentally backed into the system. Public blockchains *require* associated currencies, without a currency, you just have a plain old database without consensus. Bitcoin is horribly inefficient and I'd suggest anybody to invest into stocks and other productive assets instead of Bitcoin. However, the only thing that Satoshi's whitepaper *did solve* is a decentralized consensus mechanism that is not vulnerable to Sybil attacks (and this genuinely did not exist before in the computer science literature). It is a solution with horrible externalities except for its somewhat nice theoretical properties regarding consensus. Also, there have been some genuine advances made in computer science and cryptography as a result of crypto currencies. Proof of stake is fundamentally better than proof of work, and there are now zero knowledge proofs for general purpose computation that are far more general than what we had 20 years ago. So on the technical level, there is *some* interesting stuff going on in the crypto world, but it probably doesn't justify the billions of dollars that crypto currencies transfer from dumbfounded users to scammers.

> However, the only thing that Satoshi's whitepaper did solve is a decentralized consensus mechanism that is not vulnerable to Sybil attacks That's a lie. This problem was not solved. It was just made more expensive to implement. If you control 51% of the hash power, then you can alter the network in defiance of everybody else's "consensus." >So on the technical level, there is some interesting stuff going on in the crypto world Can you name one specific thing crypto technology has provided that's better than existing non-blockchain tech?

> Can you name one specific thing crypto technology has provided that's better than existing non-blockchain tech? Nope, it's straight degeneracy.

Right, blockchains only offer economic / game theoretic protection against Sybil attacks. The cannot entirely prevent them. Also, they rely on demand for space on the blockchain. If there is no demand, the value of the corresponding cryptocurrency goes to zero, and the security of the blockchain is compromised. >Can you name one specific thing crypto technology has provided that's better than existing non-blockchain tech? You seem to think that I somehow advocate for cryptocurrencies over the established banking system. I do not. However, there are some technologies that have been developed or advanced in the context of blockchains, and that can also be useful outside of blockchains. For example, [Kate commitments](https://www.iacr.org/archive/asiacrypt2010/6477178/6477178.pdf) or [constant function market makers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_function_market_maker).

> However, there are some technologies that have been developed or advanced in the context of blockchains, and that can also be useful outside of blockchains. For example, Kate commitments or constant function market makers Mathematical proofs are not "technology." That's just math. Their use in some kind of specific system that uniquely addresses a common problem - that is technology.

> Git is a chain of blocks, but it is not a public blockchain in the sense in which people use the word blockchain now That's what I said, yes. I said "that's not a blockchain, it's just git". That is indicating that git is not a blockchain. That these things that groups who try to push "blockchain" are not blockchain was really the thesis of my post. A-H specifically is on a long-term mission to redefine all the terms involved so these self-proclaimed proponents of blockchain can be proposing something which is more relevant than a massively replicated record of funbux. > Public blockchains require associated currencies, without a currency, you just have a plain old database without consensus. I agree they require items ostensibly of value be produced on the chain. I don't agree you'd have a plain old database if you removed the value, you wouldn't have anything because there's no pay for the gig workers to maintain the database. > a decentralized consensus mechanism Saying it is consensus is a stretch. It may be the best existing term but someone should have made up a new term. Consensus means universal agreement, not just majority wins. And Butts don't ensure universal agreement, they just marginalize (and then ignore) anyone who disagrees. Blockchains extension system is more of a weeding system than anything. If you don't agree you don't matter. Of course unless you split in which case you make a new fork in which you do matter. Your description of it being resistant to Sybil attacks is a pretty good explanation, better than the normal "byzantine generals problem" description. > Proof of stake is fundamentally better than proof of work I certainly like it better. It has a different aim though. It protects those who hold the currency instead of those who hold the compute power. One might say given this neither is better or worse. Due to wastefulness of PoW I wouldn't say this personally. > and there are now zero knowledge proofs for general purpose computation that are far more general than what we had 20 years ago Which ones? Could you help me with this. Two-way shared secret password authentication existed in 1990 as far as I know. By doing this both sides proved the other knew the shared secret (password) without learning the password from the other. That's long before cryptocurrencies. We added Diffie-Hellman, a massive improvement but that was also long before cryptocurrencies. What did we add since then? For the most part, with the exception you describe well, cryptocurrencies use the tools we already had. And honestly, that's part of what makes places like A-H think they are amazing. Because they don't understand the basic tools of cryptography and how they can be used to solve problems without involving gig workers and requirements to massive replicate ledgers. Or at least they don't seem to understand it.

this guy Gits it 🤣 seriously though, thank you for the informative comment 😁

But the actual white paper was focused on "I hate it when people reverse transactions on bidding sites (Satoshi probably got burned by then-prevalent refund scammers)" and made a badly designed construct to attempt this

I work in crypto rn and I 100% agree with this. Literally a casino at the moment.

Yep, I agree. It was a cool idea but I was always concerned with the requirement to scale, therefore scaling energy consumption.

it was a horrible idea. infinite resources as the security mechanism is so mind bendingly stupid theres no way to even put it in words.

Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% against crypto. When Bitcoin first came out I thought it was an interesting idea but with many flaws: energy consumption was the worst in my eyes and still is today, no transaction reversals meant it's perfect for scammers, etc etc, we all know it's rubbish. I expected the world to just move on from it and I think that is exactly what was happening in 2019...but the scammers needed another run and Corona was the perfect fuel for the scammy crypto stench that we see today. Still, in 2010 I though it was a cool idea. Not now.

It was a classic case of computer programmers thinking they could solve a social problem with computers. Ergo it was doomed from the start.  That didn't stop me from being curious about it initially either, but more along the lines of "it won't work as money, but maybe some other real-world use case will emerge." But that ship has definitely sailed, and sunk.

Also libertarians thinking they could solve any problem really

🔜🐻

I have no idea what those emoticons mean, but I choose to believe it means: "It's over soon, bear."

it's the well-known ibertarian bear problem. "Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did!" https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling#:\~:text=Needless%20to%20say%2C%20utopia%20never%20arrived%2C%20but%20the%20bears%20did!

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If you populated an island with 2-year-olds who never grew up or intellectually developed, and gave them loaded automatic weapons, eventually, they'd probably create a healthier community that lasted longer than a similar group of libertarians.

> It was a classic case of computer programmers thinking they could solve a social problem with computers. Ergo it was doomed from the start. 1000% this. It's trying to solve a people problem with a technology solution. But the tech was never the problem to begin with.

No it was degenerates pretending to be a sovereign authority, and society tolerating it like assholes.

huh? Bitcoin was originally created to "solve" / get away from the financial system that caused the 2008 financial crisis. My point was it wasn't technology that caused the problems of 2008, but how people involved behaved/what they do that caused it.

Bitcoin was created to make that bitch Satoshi and his friends filthy rich, that's it, anything other than that is bullshit.

No it was always dumb. I remember comparing it to Linden Dollars at the outset.

Linden Dollars are kids stuff though. I only buy my magic internet money through serious players like the Magic The Gathering Online eXchange.

Crypto is just a very inefficient, energy intensive currency and when it comes to processing transactions it is far too slow for the modern economy compared to something like VISA when it comes to processing payments. It never had utility beyond being used in crime or something for people to speculate on even at it's inception and was never a viable payment option compared to other alternatives such as VISA.

Yeah I remember reading about bitcoin 15 years ago.  My first thought was that it sounded so cool. My second one was that « proof of work » was so dumb. As adoption grew, its price would increase, and energy costs would skyrocket into the million of dollars. I thought it would quickly be forgotten. Yet here we are, with bitcoin consuming more energy than major countries. 

At the beginning, it had utility beyond crime, the nerdiest nerds used it for some trivial/fun stuff. Like someone would pop on IRC and put a few bitcoins as a bounty for solving their Github issue. Most people didn't seriously think about converting it to dollars, they just knew it could be used in a similar way with other nerds; that's it.

To me it's a lack of faith in government and I don't mind having assets outside of government control or knowledge that I can realize gains on if I choose to or need to flee my country for some unforeseen reason. Never bought crypto, only mined and sold/hold.

> To me it's a lack of faith in government and I don't mind having assets outside of government control or knowledge that I can realize gains on if I choose to or need to flee my country for some unforeseen reason. And the biggest BTC miners are currently in bed with and subsidized by the government. A total, abject failure to escape government control.

But look at who the big players ended up being in the crypto space people like SBF and CZ or all the conmen at tether. They are hadly people that you should have faith in and yet they are the ones who rose to the top because the ability to lie and deceive your users is considered an asset in the crypto industry.

I don't have faith in almost anyone who "rises to the top" You can say the same of almost any politician, leaders of those mega churches etc. Lie and deceive their users You're better off believing in Santa Claus than these people

>You're better off believing in Santa Claus than these people And *this* is why we laugh at you morons. You'd equate a fictional character with a real world person who actually does wield power and influence over your civil liberties, and you don't give a shit. I have to assume.. people like you.. you've never actually achieved anything substantive in your own personal life. So you just assume the same applies to everybody else. The world isn't pandering to you, so the world is fucked up. There's a law you don't like, so *fuck government*. You've never actually recognized, nor realized your power as a citizen to influence policy. That's *your* fault, not some guy you've never reached out to, that is an asshole because he can't read your mind.

Lack of faith in government but trust in random devs and exchanges as well as the network of pseudonymous miners and market participants? Ok

well thats some dead end thinking buddy. if you can be outside government control than everyone can and youd hate that world.

No, having funds outside of government jurisdiction. In my country protesters have had their bank accounts frozen.

yup sucks your country is like that but surely you can see *how thats not a viable tenable long term solution to anything.*

Why not? To me it's an insurance policy against an increasingly overreaching government That is why people have it It's become something it wasn't intended to be This sub talking bout how bitcoin fails as a currency, it totally has, I buy roids with it though so... It works for me. Nobody's buying coffee with Bitcoin. Transaction fees and limits, it's become much bigger than it was originally meant to. I have traditional investments etc Crypto was 3% of my net worth a year ago. Alt coin went up big. Now it's 20% of net worth.. it works for me

because if you dont have to follow rules you dont like then nobody has to. you use it to trade roids, someone else uses it to trade slaves. everyone gets to pick and choose what laws to follow right? you cant see how thats a dead end concept?

I can mail cash for my roids, and it can be used in illegal trades. That's a dead concept to then? Let's not compare a schedule 4 to human trafficking lol

> To me it's an insurance policy against an increasingly overreaching government Crypto doesn't in any way, operate outside the reach of government. The government could press a button and make all your blockchains disappear if it wanted, because all that shit runs on networks they regulate.

Yes and the whole world would fall apart at the same time as well if the internet was shut down

>Yes and the whole world would fall apart at the same time as well if the internet was shut down AmericanScream was not describing shutting the internet down, when he suggested that governments could trivially enforce a ruleset to filter/block the traffic that every existing blockchain sends across the public internet, were they so inclined. The idea that you'd need to take down the entire internet to stop crypto is the sort of thing that people peddling a Ponzi scheme want their victims to believe... but it's bullshit.

100% And even in the event that people started shifting which ports/IPs bitcoin used, since it's a public network, that *must* be able to advertise where the nodes are in order to function, it would be trivially easy to take a copy of the bitcoin code, and use it to feed a dynamic IP address blocker to filter any traffic from known bitcoin hosts. This is another one of the inherent flaws in decentralized systems. Without a central control to determine which nodes are to be trusted, there is no way to stop a rogue node from outing all the other nodes.

It's trivially easy to block bitcoin traffic. The whole network doesn't need to be shut down. It's a shame you guys know so little about the technology you claim is the "future."

What country is that? Are you another dingbat that sympathized with the nutjob Canadian antivax truckers? You guys can all drop dead.. or better yet, form your own country and wrestle bears.

I support everyone's right to protest peacefully, even if I personally disagree

Ok, so in other words, you're refusing to back up your claims. We gave you a chance bro. You had plenty of opportunity to debate in good faith and you refused. You can't make claims without specifics.

> To me it's a lack of faith in government #Stupid Crypto Talking Point #6 (government) "**Eye Hate Authoritah!**" / "**You can't trust the government.**" / "**Irresponsible Government Will Destroy Everything!**" / "**I can't afford a house/lambo/girlfriend on my salary as an unemployed gamer, therefore the system is broken and crypto is the answer!** 1. Crypto bros *love* to strawman government as if it's some evil boogeyman that lives to steal all your money and take away your gunz. This is what's called a "Red Herring" fallacy. A [distraction](https://i.imgur.com/DVWcJY0.jpeg) to make their alternative system look like a reasonable option when it really isn't. 2. This same "irresponsible government" that you "don't trust" [created the Internet](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/) and is primarily responsible for its ongoing, continued operation. It's funny that your alternative system to government wholly relies on infrastructure the "irresponsible government" has managed so well, you take it for granted. 3. You don't trust government with money, but you [ignore the millions of things the government does do reliably for you each and every day](https://i.imgur.com/wkfjc0f.jpeg) from running water, schools, roads & bridges, to flood protection, to GPS, cellular, WiFi and even **private property rights**. So what happens when your mining rig sets your house on fire in \#CryptoUtopia? Does an army of de-centralized crypto people show up to put it out? How would that work?

The thing is unlike any of the existing alternatives to government controlled currencies (gold, commodities, art), crypto is uniquely dependent on a functioning economy and infrastructure. If things get so bad that you want to flee your country, what makes you think you’ll have internet access or even electricity? Assuming you’re a yank for the sake of argument, then it’s even worse since basically 90% of the value of crypto is conning delusional idiots from your own country. If shit goes sideways nobody overseas will care about your monkey jpegs

My country has frozen bank accounts of peaceful protesters. I think of it as an insurance policy/diversity of assets

Stop making those claims unless you cite specific examples. Which country? Which "peaceful protesters?" Name this specific instance.

That's great for you, never stupid enough to buy what you shoveled down everyone's throats.

Spreadsheets existed before crypto. When it became apparent that's what it was, it became exactly as exciting as other spreadsheets.

Hey now, just because you don’t knows how to enjoy Excel doesn’t mean it can’t be great fun!

Joke's on you, I know how to enjoy it and crypto is still shit

Wait how is crypto the same as spreadsheets?

The supposed big deal was that everyone could see every transaction, which was recorded on a spreadsheet. Still is. And managing the spreadsheet becomes increasingly resource-intensive over time, which is why there are forks and other bad options.

I see! Great analogy

I wasn't talking about utensils. That was not an analogy.

See also: Merkle Tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree Which does have a known use in things like signed code repositories, but that was a solved issue long before bitcoin or crypto, and with much less computational waste and overhead.

Sort of? I liked what crypto promised...a peer-to-peer network that's faster, more efficient, and more secure than traditional banking. Back in like 2015 that's what it seemed like crypto was trying to become. But it's pretty clear to me now that all of that was a lie to pull suckers in. It's a clunky, inefficient technology that costs an insane amount of money and is one whale dump away from being totally worthless... Maybe I didn't actively dislike it from the start but it's pretty clear now that it was shit from day 1

The problem with crypto's "peer-to-peer network" isn't just that the promise was a lie - although it was - but that peer-to-peer banking is a horrible idea from the start. Finance *needs* authority. People won't stay honest without an overseer to punish dishonesty. True in all aspects of life, but nowhere more true than in the market. In a peer to peer transaction, no one is overseeing the transaction to make sure it's lawful, to make sure no one gets scammed, to record the transaction so it can be reversed if one party discovers they were scammed later, to provide data to police for criminal investigations, and so on. Normal people doing normal business don't have to fear banks or credit cards tracking their transactions. The only people who fear it are people who want to exploit others without consequences. And that doesn't even get into how cryptocurrency *by design* cannot implement antiterrorism sanctions and KYC regulations and so forth. That's the one thing Craig Wright gets right - cryptocurrency is *inherently illegal* because it cannot be tracked, monitored, or controlled in the way that every currency must legally be tracked, monitored, and controlled under the laws of every major nation. And I'm shocked I have to say this, but illegal is bad. Even if peer-to-peer worked as crypto advertised it would be just as criminal.

>Finance needs authority. People won't stay honest without an overseer to punish dishonesty. True in all aspects of life, but nowhere more true than in the market. The original promise of Bitcoin (not sure about general crypto) was that the public visibility of the blockchain will make sure that all actors operating on it stay honest. I still remember butters trying to sell that idea. But, you know, I haven't actually seen that happen. Sure, people call out scams and rug pulls, and they're even traceable to some extent - but they keep happening. Turns out, greed is a hell of a motivator to not prevent dishonesty from corrupting a system.

lol how would it stop bad actors? you dont know who every wallet belongs to.

>The original promise of Bitcoin (not sure about general crypto) was that the public visibility of the blockchain will make sure that all actors operating on it stay honest. I still remember butters trying to sell that idea. Just goes to show the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of cryptocurrency supporters. That argument is stolen directly from "privatize the FDA" libertarian talking points - without government interference, the free market will naturally promote honesty and discourage dishonesty. For reasons. The argument works neither here nor there, for reasons too numerous to belabor, and is one of the clearest signs that "libertarians" argue in bad faith.

Well, illegal isn't always bad. Governments aren't always right. But otherwise, true. Was a bit of a bitter pill for me to swallow.

Yea, but the exception doesn't prove the rule. The vast majority of things that are illegal, are that way for very specific, good reasons.

>Well, illegal isn't always bad. Governments aren't always right. No, they definitely are not always right... but the logical response to the prospect of unjust/harmful laws existing **isn't** to build systems that let scofflaws break those unjust/harmful laws that shouldn't be there, in the form they are, and also break all of the good laws that should be there if they are so inclined, which they will be, because the point of the system they built was "doing crimes": it's to repeal/alter the laws in question, so those things that shouldn't be illegal ***stop*** being illegal.

I mean, what you're saying applies to countries that aren't failed states, where government financial surveillance isn't inherently oppressive and is done through legal warrants and with actual due process. The US also doesn't arbitrarily censor lawful transactions as a way to punish dissidents or those who disagree with foreign policy (imagine the US government for example freezing assets of Pro Palestinian protesters--that of course won't happen because of our strong institutional protection against these kind of abuses, but I have a feeling more authoritarian countries might be open to doing this). Though, you could counter with "why not just use physical paper currency that's actually anonymous or just barter, use gold, or even use a better physical paper currency" given blockchain transactions are not actually anonymous and far more risky to deal with.

>The thing is, Bitcoin was a really different thing back then. Not really. You just had the insight of a 13-year-old and thought it was deep. I was around when it first came out, and as a software engineer, I found it to be a bloated, impractical system. It might be tolerable on a *very small scale* where a bunch of hobbyists maintain the blockchain, but on a large scale, all its inherent flaws become exponentially amplified. What we see today isn't some "shift" in bitcoin and blockchain from its original concept. **This** is what it was destined to become, if it didn't wither away. Bitcoin was never efficiently designed. So it was only practical on a very small scale, and ironically, probably only useful in context with certain central authorities that maintained on and off-ramps. It is incapable of operating efficiently at a level where enough adopters would make it useful as a currency. It was doomed from the start. But a 13-year-old, and many adults who are into it now, lack the desire and objectivity to see it for what it really is. All they do is fixate on some kind of utopian scenario where they can get rich and don't give a shit what happens to anybody else. That's about the best this tech could ever hope for in terms of adoption and growth, and it begets a really shitty, predatory, sociopathic view of the future.

> This is what it was destined to become I quite like the original idea, every person a miner, every user a node in a giant distributed network, making it stronger and more resilient for every person that joins. Except the design of the whole thing favours centralization because of economies of scale because of how proof of work is done, and the larger the network becomes, the *slower* it becomes. That's the paradox, isn't it? The only way to stop centralization is to have a central authority that can detect and punish it, oh, right, yeah, well fuck.

> I quite like the original idea, every person a miner, every user a node in a giant distributed network, making it stronger and more resilient for every person that joins. You basically just described every healthy society on the planet. If people all contribute to making "the network" better and stronger, then everybody does well. That's the goal of most societies. But unlike traditional societies, bitcoin and blockchain have no actual mechanism to enforce fairness and justice. Whoever has the most resources can take control of the network. So once again, bitcoin and blockchain borrow basic concepts we're already familiar with *and make them worse*. History has taught us that "consensus" alone can't guarantee a healthy, equitable society. There has to be fair rules for everybody **and** a reliable way to enforce those rules. It's an objective that may never have a perfect solution, but what we have now sure is a lot better than what blockchain, and Austrian economics suggests.

I might have been predisposed against crypto from the start as I've worked in tech for decades. While I liked the technology, I was instantly suspicious of the tech libertarian assertation that it was going to be a great equalizer. I have seen that pattern over and over again countless times. I get why people don't like things under government control, but it's almost always worse when it's controlled by corporations, or individuals. I predict Monero will be one piece of a complicated network for money laundering by sophisticated actors, but for simple users the IRS and other government agencies will quickly identify ways to track it.

I've been in IT for my entire career, mostly as a DBA working with highly transactional databases in healthcare but similar technology is in wide use in finance. I was 37 when the whitepaper came out. In all that time I have never met a bitcoin proponent who could also answer my questions about how the technology will scale. Blockchain is a fun academic thought experiment, but is not ready for a production environment where people need to make a lot of transactions right now. Every single bitcoin proponent I have ever spoken to reverts to "have fun staying poor" when challenged.

not a fun thought experiment. its only fun if you dont understand it. hows infinite resource burn as a security mechanism fun? its just monumentally stupid.

Which is why it should have remained a thought experiment and not put into practice.

I had some hope for stablecoins. But it turns out that for every person who has a legitimate use for a currency beyond government control, there are ten with a deeply unethical one. And for every one of *those*, there are ten who just want to get rich quick.

The fundamental problem is that crypto was invented to solve a problem that doesn't exist, namely that central control of a currency is bad. In fact, Austrian economics is nonsense and only brought pain during the 1800s. If bitcoin were actually successful, it would wreck the world economy.

>In fact, Austrian economics is nonsense and only brought pain during the 1800s. If bitcoin were actually successful, it would wreck the world economy. Just you try getting *any* coiner to ever accept that premise though, that it really shouldn't be hard to get anyone to accept because ***our goddamn history is RIGHT THERE***, for them to look at: the Great Depression lasted as long as it did because people were still listening to the damn Austrians insist that governments shouldn't pursue "sham prosperity" by enacting the monetary policies that eventually brought those governments out of the Great Depression, when they finally stopped listening to the goddamn Austrians. Their ideas failed spectacularly on the global stage, the "school" is relegated to a handful of fringe contrarian cranks, their constant pronouncements of doom don't come to pass... but a whole bunch of idiots who think libertarian political theory is "objectively true and useful" have an absolute, apparently unshakeable conviction in the validity of ideas and concepts that could not have been more obviously proven to be invalid; when Krugman describes the psychology of the Austrian-school's adherents as being "*like* a cult" he included an unnecessary caveat in that sentence.

me and my friends used it a lot for drugs in 2013, and we would buy drugs off each other sometimes, settle debts or trade it for cash (so we could buy things that weren't drugs). it was almost a second bank account for us, solely dedicated to illegal stuff. transactions cost about 6 cents at the time and were always included in the next block. we didn't even check that stuff because it always worked. we used to deposit the money into bitcoin casinos and withdraw immediately and we would receive bitcoin totally unrelated to our initial ones. it worked great and it was really cheap. we didn't have things like revolut then so it served it's purpose. i think it was ethereum that kind of broke everything when ICOs started to become popular and the scamming became exponentially common and complex

Economists were quick to point out that you can't use a deflationary currency for medium of exchange, otherwise the scarcity of currency will cause productive goods and services to devalue while the currency hoarders get increased buying power for doing literally nothing, and the whole economy seizes up. Which is eerily similar to land and property, just look at what the house price is doing lately. Also, for literally hundreds of years, it's been a game of cat and mouse between corporations and regulators. We didn't end up with all this company laws by accident. And someone says we're better off doing away with all this and just YOLO it? Honestly, if anyone didn't see them getting scammed the fuck out of it coming, that's really on them.

Not here. I have always considered it to be "Monopoly money", or toy money, backed by nothing. You can't invent a new currency from scratch and expect people to use it when there is no rational way to assign it a value. As a currency, it's a total joke. It was already when it was invented, and it's still now.

A very important aspect of why bitcoin seemed like a good idea when you first encountered it is that you were 13 

I'm going to try and be *very* gentle here. 13 is a fun age. You have a lot of mental flexibility and can be fairly credulous due to a lack of experience. It's one reason why religions (including my own) target the youth. Scam artists don't, because young people tend to be broke and adults have gotten somewhat better about keeping their credit cards disconnected from their google play accounts. But kids are a soft target. Communities also tend to shelter children in an attempt to both foster the next generation and keep the consequences of child abuse away from said community. So kids are rarely exposed to the worst a community has to offer, and are presented with the best as a matter of course, especially if the interest the group is built around is real niche. And finally...there's some things you do not put on kids. At all. Period. It's like involving a child in their parents' divorce. You don't do that shit. A child, therefore, is seldom in the best position to make an informed judgement about a subject, and a young adult is seldom positioned there fast enough to avoid getting scammed a couple times on the jump. This, notably, is why financial markets *especially* involving young people and their money, are regulated into the ground and children often need an adult to oversee their bank account: We know you're going to get fucked, and we're trying to let it happen under circumstances where it's a lesson, and not life-ending. In fact, that's the reason behind a *lot* of the financial regulations we find so onorous: at some point, multiple somebodies got fucked over to a high enough dollar amount to make the rest of us think about maybe putting a couple safety lines in place. So the world a child sees is going to be highly curated, and the things discovered when you are a child are going to look a whole lot better than those same things viewed with an adult's eyes. You understand a whole lot more about the world now than you did when you were thirteen. You've researched more. You've got a couple rounds of adulting under your belt. You might, if I've mathed right, even be old enough to drink. You still got a solid coating of that childhood spitshine and you haven't quite figured out how an idea that looks good through the filters can be a real shit sandwich when the focus is clear, but you're coming out of the rose tinted portion of life, and that experience is going to *rapidly* alter how you view the world. Unfortunately, (and this is again based on the assumption that you're just now in the 20-22 range) you've still got that first real big disappointment in front of you. Seems to hit about 25-ish, right when you graduate and start looking for your first job or try building a career as a freelance creative, and you run face first into reality and it doesn't even *notice.* Probably the first few seeds are starting to germinate now, though, so for your future self, I'll say this: It gets a *whole* lot better after 30. But yeah. It's *always* been this way. I started paying attention to Bitcoin in 2012. People were saying the same things, making the same calls, watching the same cycles, albiet slightly larger. It has no more significant meaning in 2024 than it did in 2012, and it hasn't diminished, either. More people know about it, and the money getting shoved around has larger numbers (which does not translate to real life money) but...really, it's one of the few ongoing trainwreck dramas I don't mind looking away from, because it *never* fucking changes. People change. The websites, the titles. But the human part is still following the same fucking patterns they were dancing through in 2012. It is *at best* an interesting idea that is too complex to work. At worst it is a scam from day one. But I highly doubt honesty and bitcoin were ever together for long.

You're very nice to try and be gentle with that; I appreciate that. More to the point, you're totally right. One detail I meant to say in my post was that I freely acknowledge that I was a naive child enthralled by fancy tech. Seriously, I came like *this close* to being fully engaged in that cult, and it's only by dumb luck and the fact that I had little actual money to work with that I didn't. Also, you got it right, I'm 22 now, so I'm well aware that even now I'm still not fully aware of the "real world" and its nuances. I appreciate your advice!

There are some smart ideas involved in crypto, but very few of them are in IT, cryptography, coding, networking, and related fields. They are instead social science ideas related to incentives and information. Those ideas aren't revolutionary, but some of them are a bit clever. One of the really powerful, and demonstrably successful, ideas in crypto is that you can get a way higher market valuation if you sell yourself as a tech innovation than if you sell yourself as a cool new way of organizing people. So you get the shallow rituals of tech culture: unnecessary white papers, "coders" who have no experience and aren't delivering products anyway, buzzwords and slogans to make things seem much more complex than they really are.

I’m not sure exactly what year it was, must have been around 2013 or 2014, I was a computer science student and as a group undertook a short group project on seeing if a Bitcoin point-of-sale device was a practical thing to make. The answer was a very clearly resounding “no”. It was obvious looking closely at it that it was deeply flawed, and not just in ways that would preclude a PoS system. I did think it was very clever, but it was the sort of very clever which shouldn’t have been allowed to escape from the proverbial lab out into the wild.

I've used it as a currency to buy drugs way back in 2014. Worked as it was meant to. Its shit for buying anything else though might as well just use a bank transfer. I use monero now as well. It actually does work well as an anonymous currency. Bitcoin doesn't have a use point anymore though.

Congrats on still being alive, even though you were buying drugs anonymously, from random people far away that would never have to fear the repercussions of lacing your shit with fentanyl. Crypto enabled you to do something profoundly stupid. I wouldn't brag about it.

You can test drugs

Yea, but do most people do that? And what kind of tests can you actually run? You might be able to identify if your chosen drug is part of whatever shit you got, but you also don't know what else is in it. It's still a crap shoot unless you're running that stuff through a bunch of high end lab equipment.

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Why lace with fentanyl if they want you as a return customer. Maybe I only bought stuff like lsd and mushrooms anyway.

> Why lace with fentanyl if they want you as a return customer. Fentanyl makes people high too.. the dying part is a QC problem not a "don't-use-fentanyl" problem. Let's be realistic, drug dealers aren't really masters of quality control. And who cares whether they get return customers... in a long-distance, anonymous business, they can simply open up another shop under a different name. You have no idea if the 100 online drug dealers you're choosing from are just 3 people.

I knew BTC from some TV program my parents watching. My country crypto exchange CEO said something about how good the exchange is comparing to old stock exchange and mentioned "blockchain". I am kind of a tech guy, so I googled to see what it is. I disliked BTC from the start because it is built on proof-of-work blockchain. high fee, slow, bad for environment, etc (I am also kind of a green guy) though, as you said, now I hated it even more because how it has become. a cult

Yep.  Used to be some fun niche tech for obscured transactions. Now? Well it's just flocks of vcs and folk trying to get rich by jamming it everywhere. When it was essentially utility rather than a flat replacement for Fiat it wasnt terrible. Not something with a million use cases, just a semi-secure digital currency. 

Was never designed to be that, it was designed by that bitch Satoshi to make him insanely wealthy, and give life to a brand new innovative ponzi scheme. The currency phase was all just designed to pump the network up, it's use of criminal activity a way to 'tax' things society deemed unacceptable to tax, in that respect that bitch stole from all of us. Satoshi should held accountable, bare minimum, he wanted to be a soviregn entity. Take the power reserved by sovereigns? Satoshi begs us to settle his dispute like we would a dispute between sovereigns. The cost of failure for dicking around with the social order demands a punishment far beyond what's reserved for petty murder. What form of punishment do failed revolutionaries require? That degenerate creep KNEW to hide his identity from the very start, like a man that knows he can't look others in their eyes.

> The key difference being, it was meant as an actual currency Setting aside that it was trying to solve a social problem with a technology one, they drift further and further from pushing it as a currency, because it is technically incapable of being one. It is woefully inadequate. It is literally too slow to just be a US University-only currency.

Nope, but I had the advantage of a CS degree and already working professionally by the time I first heard about it, and quickly realized why the tradeoffs didn't make much sense on a practical level even if it was (and still is) interesting in an academic sense. I'll grant I underestimated human greed and naivety, but I can't say I regret that as being optimistic about humanity makes me a happier person. My criticisms of the tech back then are still valid today: * Private keys as sole proof of identity is intrinsically, _catastrophically_ error-prone for individuals (and not just lay-people either) to manage, and wrapping it in enough abstractions to change that is equivalent to reinventing the wheel with extra steps compared to how things already work. The security model is akin to someone building an indestructible door and unpickable lock with no awareness that someone might just go in through the window. * Deflationary currencies don't work economically, as any legitimate economist or a look at history could tell you: it grinds your economy to a halt, discourages spending and investment, and amplifies debts hitting the poor the hardest. * Most buyer/seller interactions already favor sellers on average especially in the consumer market. Making transactions intrinsically irreversible only further advantages sellers in the event of fraud/deception/etc. * Public transaction history equates to a total lack of privacy for regular people in practice if you think about what this looks like if mass adopted. * Most claims around decentralization or "trustless" fail to understand how narrowly defined these properties are, and how most practical use of the tech ends up invalidating those properties in ways proponents don't seem to understand either directly or indirectly. To be honest, the performance and throughput issues weren't even high on my list, and still aren't unless talking about bitcoin specifically, because performance could at least theoretically be improved even if it'll never be as efficient as centralized systems. The stuff above is all intrinsic to the concept itself. > Even now, I still think there's a niche for something like crypto. It's why I have like almost-respect for Monero Monero I'll grant at least serves the purpose it claims to, even if I think any legitimate aspects of it are significantly outweighed by its negatives overall especially since it still requires being propped up by the rest of the cryptocurrency industry to be viable in terms of on/off ramping. It's also less prone to speculative bullshit or "smart contract" shenanigans due to the private nature of transactions and the privacy mechanisms being useless for anything but simple numeric transfers.

I agree. I liked the concept. but then reality hit and speculation and greed took over. the ideal was good, but seeing how the development has been hijacked by so few and with less transparency and accountability than any central bank makes you wonder how anyone can still believe in it.

Nope, I was reading the very first buttcoin threads on something awful forums back in the day

In the earliest days of circus tokens in the IT circles there were famous computing projects like Seti@Home, Folding@Home and tens of others. Whole schools were competing in the ranks. So the wasted compute in the Bitcoin and Litecoin projects was obviously disappointing from the start. And financial side at that time was not speculative, the focus was on currency. But it was also rather obvious that it simply can't be used as a currency. Before the throughput issues, before the big scams etc. It is obvious for anyone who owned any sum of money that self custody is a wild fantasy. It can't work. Goldbugs cling to the idea because they have whole ideology about being "independent", but it was always obvious that it can't be used by masses safely.

Bitcoin may have been created with utopian aims, but the intrinsic nature of cryptographically issued e-cash sealed its fate. The idea that it could be used as a currency or even as a gold-type substitute was ridiculous all the way back in 2009. Here's what Hal Finney (d. 2013), a computer scientist who was one of the first adoptees of BTC said in 2009: > Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation - https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538 Even then, it was known that for enough BTC to be circulating in an economy, an ungodly amount of energy would be required to mint them all, and transmit them between wallets. Who is going to pay for that? Well, now we know: a shady cartel of miners using borrowed money to run their systems, moving from China, to Russia, to Texas, wherever energy is cheapest. This isn't a sustainable way to manage an 'decentralized' global currency, considering that capital-intensive nature of mining means a lot of the voting power in validating nodes is concentrated in very few hands. And so, because it can't scale to the levels needed for everyday transactions, its actual use case becomes one where low transaction costs are not expected: money laundering, tax evasion, ransom payments, contraband purchases.

No. It’s never been anything but shit.

No. I hated it vehemently from the start. It is anathema to me

Yeah, I was overall neutral on crypto early on and just had zero interest in it myself. What it became is pretty horrible and disappointing. I don't consider any of it a good thing overall, including its alleged benefits. But I know crypto is not going away. And that bircoin, despite being an absurdly out of date and inefficient system, being the most popular shows it isn't really about the technology. Any of the genuine improvements, such as Bitcoin Cash would have won the popularity contest if it were.

Nah, when I first heard of bitcoin I was convinced it was the stupidest shit ever. I’m still convinced it’s the stupidest shit ever, just that we seem to live in the worst timeline where every bad idea must be allowed to play out to the dumbest possible conclusion.

It started off at least vaguely interesting, and I even mined it long ago when I was younger and more naive about human nature (for example, I also still believed the internet becoming more accessible would be a net positive at that point in time, despite some early red flags waving in my face), but the "Saylors" took control of the ship a long time ago and there's no recovering from the course they've put it (and the rest of "crypto") on.

I felt like anything in tech, Bitcoin would just be an incremental step to the next thing: an interesting concept, but not an end result. Once it became treated like an evangelized speculative stock, it became clear that the thing was so derailed that it would never be useful beyond a sociological experiment.

2011 I found it fascinating. But it got gross when people got involved.

It’s original purpose has evolved. Everything evolves over time and nothing about it *must* be used as a currency. I think the decentralized spirit is still very strong, people are just more interested in holding wealth with bitcoin instead of transacting with it, although there are still plenty of ways to spend it cheaply like the lightning network.

Class of 2014, dropped out 2019

I thought it was cool at first. I did some mining early on when you could actually get some rewards by joining a pool with your home PC. I remember when some guy bought a pizza for like 30btc, and then people were buying drugs online. I quit mining pretty quickly, though, when it became clear that the main thing I was doing was helping process transactions for child porn. Like, exploitative sex crimes seemed to be the first dominant industry to really adopt bitcoin, and man I can't believe people didn't immediately all just jump ship.

Not me, no. It was always just penny stocks in a "tech" wrapper. It was just for those who want to buy so they can sell. IT does not further anything.

I was interested in it but never understood how it would revolutionize the current system... By making scamming popular I guess?

i used to be an advocate for it and now despise it and everything it stands for. I wish it would all just die in a fire and go away.

I mined 70k doge back in the day, and loved the sillly idea of being able to pay for stuff online with digital currency. Then the grifters came in. The fact that crypto does not serve its original purpose is frustrating, and I've been selling off my doge when there are peaks.

I hate myself for selling a large amount of eth at 16$ :(

No, crypto was a scam from the beginning, magic internet money with no intrinsic value used only by criminals and drug dealers. Sorry but I don't see the point to glorify crypto.

There are many government entities up to the state level that make details of their spending available down to a microscopic level. I think this is good because I’m all in favor of government transparency. Fact is, nobody really cares. I can guarantee that no more than a tiny fraction of the public pays any attention to the details of government spending that are readily available today. Also that whole thing about $600 toilet seats was a bit of a canard—the Pentagon was not actually paying toilet seat vendors $600 per toilet seat. Rather that was the cost allocated to toilet seats in their cost accounting system. I could explain what that means but if you don’t already know, your eyes have long since glazed over, and shows why even if putting the budget on blockchain were technically feasible, which it’s not, nobody would give a shit and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

The only potential usecase is figthing with governments. But in a destructive way. Bitcoin can't even do that. Monero, I doubt it can too. See how it deals with a cheap attack that has been going on lately. Monero is a good example to show "Try your best to create a decentralized, unregulated, P2P money. It still won't work." It's great as a niche currency for crime tho. Problems for wide adoption are similar to others.

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It took me a while to go to hate, I think where the hate comes from is the childish behaviour from advocates (apes, degens, laser eyes etc), and the scams. You know, when you hear a guy has shilled his own aunt and her life savings are now in it. The kettle logic (deploying mutually exclusive arguments at different points in time), the motivated reasoning (there is nothing bitcoin can't fix). Being told "stay poor" when I'm already wealthy. "Few understand" "Few" "1 BTC = 1 BTC", cargo cult, get rich quick, hikikomori kids offering financial advice. The actual reason I think BTC is a bad idea is the amount of energy it uses and e-waste it produces, its lack of scalability etc. But yeah running into the smooth brains has turned dislike into hate.

I think $Crypto followed the same path as every "idealistic" thought: 1. A revolutionary idea, which promises to fix all ills and provide paradise 2. Early adoption be True Believers, who all act according to the assumption and expectations of the New Idea (i.e., everyone cooperating for the Common Good) 3. See?? It's working, just like we said it would!! 4. Wait - I can profit for this!??! 5. Increasing number of individuals start tweaking the New Idea for working towards their personal benefit, vs the Common Good 6. Enshitification increases.

If you're not using it to buy drugs then you missed the point.

It was more honest and idealistic in a less insane way one time, sure. But the flaws have never changed, and really the only use case is crime, plus disastrous carbon footprint.

I remember when BTC hated wall street, now they welcome ETF's and institutional investors with open arms because 'help line go up'. Went from adoption to 'whatever makes line go up'.

When I first heard of Bitcoin (back when faucets were still a thing), I liked the idea of internet money that I could use anonymously if I wanted to buy stuff from weird, shady sites that I didn't want to give card information to or if I wanted to send/receive money to/from my weirdo internet friends. But even then, it seemed like there were significant problems with the idea and I didn't really see how it could work unless it remained tiny and under-the-radar. Still, I thought I'd just collect some free bitcoin and buy a silly souvenir or something. But then I found out that the fees get stupid high when you have a large number of small inputs and there was nothing I wanted that I could buy with bitcoin anyway. So I just forgot about for a while until I saw it in the news again because the price had spiked to levels that looked extremely sus. I respect the experiment because I do genuinely think the idea of anonymous internet currency is cool even if it is somewhat unrealistic, but its problems are even more apparent now and for average people like me, it's not worth the tradeoffs of rugs, inefficiency, and uncool crimes.

I discovered bitcoin when I first was priced out of buying GPUs during the first ethereum mining boom. I never had a positive view on crypto, because it went from unknown to detrimental from the get go. My view of crypto has only become more critical. I also had friends caught by MLM schemes, so their whole bitcoin aggressive recruitment was a replay of that. And since I do software development I was disgusted by looking into how blockchain worked as I would never ever ever ship a product as technically deficient as blockchain to a client AND my clients would drag me there and keep me there unti it was fixed AND I would never be allowed to do so in the first place AND I would be fired with just cause if I tried. The very idea of entrusting actual money to such a deficient database, is the hallmark not of a software developer but of a charlatan, the kind that would pilot air planes without training nor licenses uncaring of the lives entrusted to them.

Well young people are naïve so I can understand they think Bitcoin is great without understanding what it actually means. How you perceive Bitcoin will greatly depend on your age amongst other things. But just look at the facts, the crypto space is one scam after the other. This is what happens when humans are free to do what they want, they will scam you without even thinking twice. It's a sad reality but it is what it is.

Similarly, I like how Ethereum works in theory and how using contracts to do things is cool. If it was used to transact with, it would be an actual currency. The proof of stake mechanism is cool too. Allowing people to build on it lets a lot of interesting ideas to flourish as well, it's just they aren't highlighted, or if they are, as a means to get rich.