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.
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As an actual currency, it’s functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
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Because of that, it’s entirely just funny money. Even further, since it’s entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
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The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn’t an acceptable proposition
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For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
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Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
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It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now. There’s no way to decouple it from that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but since ETH moved to a proof of stake model rather than proof of work (i.e. “mining”), isn’t its environmental footprint now a fraction of the wasteful behemoth it was previously?
(Though I 100% agree given the ‘gas fees’ (transaction costs), it’s still absolutely useless as an actual currency.)
Yes, you can now run an Ethereum validator from a Raspberry Pi
Not recommended though, RPIs aren’t really suited for production, plus I think only Nimbus runs well on RPIs?
I think he’s confusing a validator with a node. You can easily run a node on a Pi.
Ah that would be make sense, but most people wouldn’t see the point in running a node. People automatically think of “mining” or “validator”
You’re right about the environmental footprint - proof of stake dropped the energy consumption by 99.95%
Ether (ETH) was never intended to serve as a digital currency. it was only meant to be the fuel or incentive for computational tasks on the Ethereum network. An L2 like Optimism or Arbitrum runs on top of Ethereum and facilitates transactions that are significantly faster (tens of thousands of transactions per second), for a fraction of the cost (pennies or fractions of pennies)
I have a few bitcoin that I got when it was new, and I was playing around with it; then I forgot about my coins until it exploded and made it into the public (non-tech) news. I luckily still had my wallet, and I bought a quite expensive watch with Bitcoin when it was near its price peak. The transaction was no more difficult than using Paypal. I could have bought a lot of things; at one point, I could have bought a car with it. There are many vendors who’ll accept Bitcoin even today. So, regardless of your other points, saying that it’s funny money that you can’t buy anything with is simply false. It’s worth what people will pay for it, just like the American dollar, or gold, or the artificially inflated price of blood diamonds.
I don’t think promoting falsehoods helps any argument. If that one is obviously wrong, what about your other points? Lots of people want cryptocurrency to fail. Lots of people want to maintain the hegemony of the US dollar. Some people even have valid criticisms of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, and the giant farming installations. It’s certainly something to discuss, as long as it’s kept to facts.
The issue with retail is how long it takes for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. The overhead simply isn’t feasible. A vendor isn’t going to sit around an wait an hour for confirmation that payment has been received. A private seller might not care. But a company that processes millions of transactions per day isn’t going to deal with that. It has nothing to do with the belief in it and its worth.
And yes, let me be perfectly clear: I absolutely do want cryptocurrency to fail. That’s not about being a shill for government hegemony. It’s about there being literally no inherent good in it, either in principle or in practice. From the fact that it consumes more energy than entire countries and pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than entire major industries, to the environmental impact of increased mining for rare earths, increased manufacturing strain, and supply chain disruption due to the demand for the chips to drive the miners.
Also I really don’t appreciate your passive aggressive way of calling me a liar
Your position was clear.
I’m not sure how else you’d prefer someone to call out untruths that you’ve posted. It’s either calling you a liar, or some version of saying you’re talking out your ass, or what not. But you’re right, that’s what I was saying. FWIW, I don’t think it’s lying the way Trump lies; I think there’s just a lot of uninformed knee-jerk reactionism. For example, you talk about processing times; have you ever heard of Lightning? It’s a crypto used a lot in Nostr and which has instant transfer times.
My point is that I you’re arguing a point that is easily refuted, when you have other points that are reasonable and justifiable. I could argue against the other points, too; for example, I could bring up proof-of-stake crypto-currencies which do not have huge energy use, and which haveno more energy footprint than the SSL transactions that you’re using constantly, every day. But it would be a harder arguement for me to make because the original cryptocoin, Bitcoin, is proof-of-work and has had a huge eco impact.
And I might not try to argue that unless I thought you were open to discussing the topic in good faith. Which I don’t believe you are; I think you’ve already made up your mind on the topic, and now all that’s left is evangelism.
I do have a question, though: do you understand how blockchains work, and the what the various kinds of proofs are? Not in the “could you program it” sense, but in general, like could you describe how they work to someone over beer? Or have you just read a lot about how bad they are? How much of your opinion is based on your social media filter biases?
That’s exactly what I was gonna say: @davehtaylor must have no idea of the nearly-cost-free Layer 2 network.
Additionally, how much money does it take to power banks? All the staff, the electricity, the Brinks armored cars, the accounting for all that cash, the safety deposit boxes and all of their contents and insurance… Does he think ACH transfers or, worse, checks or money orders, are free on an environmental level? How is USD with all of its nonstop-growing debt safe in any long-term way?
The L2 experience is quite poor at the moment, which is more an indicator of how bright the future is
How so? GameStop’s NFT Marketplace for games has been showcasing Layer 2 tech from Loopring and it’s smooth as fuck.
There are many others that use Layer 2 tech not just LR of course. Which L2 are you talking about?
I’m talking about Loopring itself
Also I really don’t appreciate your passive aggressive way of calling me a liar
They’re not wrong to do so when most of your points are outdated or crap:
the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
Outdated
if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
Bullshit
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
Privacy coins are the best way to live the dream of fungible secure currency, which is why they’re being suppressed. All the others are an experiment in how to monitor transactions more deeply.
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
If I may don a tin foil hat, likely left rampant by design. The proof of concept has been done, the tech works and has been in the hands of the public long enough that it’s normalized. This may be to pave the way for countries to replace their currency with “legit” crypto versions in the next decade or two, which requires putting a bullet in the head of the rest.
It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now.
If you talk in absolutes you’re destined to be wrong.
The issue with retail is how long it takes for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. The overhead simply isn’t feasible. A vendor isn’t going to sit around an wait an hour for confirmation that payment has been received.
Outdated.
And yes, let me be perfectly clear: I absolutely do want cryptocurrency to fail. That’s not about being a shill for government hegemony. It’s about there being literally no inherent good in it, either in principle or in practice. From the fact that it consumes more energy than entire countries and pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than entire major industries, to the environmental impact of increased mining for rare earths, increased manufacturing strain, and supply chain disruption due to the demand for the chips to drive the miners.
At some point PoW will probably die a death and PoS will be all that remains. PoS is cheap.
there are decentralized currencies that work perfectly well without wasting tons of energy, although I agree that none have yet achieved the necessary scale to actually replace current centralized money systems. These currencies might find a niche that doesn’t need the capacity to handle thousands of transactions per second, or perhaps one of the many many different ways to scale these currencies that are currently being worked on will end up being good enough (they aren’t, yet)
Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.
it’s not even just that. if you count the number of transactions across all cryptocurrencies that are confirmed by mining, they are absolutely dwarfed by the number of transactions that are not confirmed by mining. same thing with volume of money moved. the environmental complaint applies to a minority of the total activity.
And shouldn’t the environmental cost of “real” currencies be compared as well? It’s not like printing and minting all those bills and coins is zero energy. Even treating it virtually (direct deposit, etc - we rarely handle cash) has some overhead.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but comments that are obviously trying to grind an ace are suspicious to me.
On the tech side of things, the environmental impact of running traditional, centralized services is inherently lower than running any cryptocurrency off of a blockchain. To overcome the technical limitations would be to create another centralized service.
But yeah, there are almost certainly ways that traditional currency can reduce their environmental impact, too.
Funny how people are creating bullshit by taking about things they don’t know.
Hint: Blockchain is more than just currency and when your centralised e-mail server is taken down with all of your e-mail’s, than you will think back at people who did the switch to decentralisation.
Another hint: Ethereum did lower its CO2 emissions by 99%, just by changing its code. Can your 100% virtual currency, parked at your favorite bank in a country like sweden, where there is no cash anymore, do the same?
As an actual currency, it’s functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
New technologies such as the lightning network will fix this.
Because of that, it’s entirely just funny money. Even further, since it’s entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
If the power goes out, your local ATMs and card readers will stop working as well. It’d have to take a global power outage to bring a crypto network down, and at that point we probably have more important issues to deal with.
The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn’t an acceptable proposition
This is fixed by proof-of-stake.
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how “decentralized” it’s supposed to be, it’s still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
True, but it’s a personal choice. You don’t have to have to store them centralized if you don’t want to. The same cannot be said about traditional currencies, as it’s not feasable to have stacks of cash lying around.
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
Also true, but that has nothing to do with the actual currencies. The public image will improve once people learns how it works.
It’s entirely a speculative investment scam now. There’s no way to decouple it from that.
Maturity will make it decouple from that.
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I don’t know why NFTs ever took off
@Silviecat44 @peanuts4life they really didn’t, no normal person bought them. It was just venture capitalist pushing it. It was the complete opposite of grass roots, which is why it crashed 97% when VCs pulled out. Very normal!
Idiots saw the explosion of speculation on crypto and a few people got lucky and got rich. They jumped on the next new buzzword in tech expecting it to have an equivalent speculative boom, which obviously never happened.
The Beeple sale got a lot of press. That was the extent of the novelty, but then the money-eyed scammers figured they had a new grift in the making. But it started with the media surprise and interest over how big the Beeple sale was.
Negative interest rates do funny things to capitalism.
- P2P is the new hotness
- LAMP is the new hotness
- Ruby on Rails is the new hotness
- Big data is the new hotness
- Machine Learning is the new hotness
- Crypto is the new hotness
- AI is the net hotness
None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there’s always a very vocal group that’s chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.
Spoiler alert: AI is ML is Big Data.
Also, ML is just statistics and calculus.
It’s true, and it’s not much like real intelligence, all the hype notwithstanding. On the other hand, statistics and calculus are pretty powerful tools and so are the ML systems that use them.
there is a group of influencers in tech that seem to jump from topic to topic, re-selling peoples projects and poorly written training/success classes. its sometimes shocking how quickly some of them change. Ive been doing AI on and off for 6 years now and I know a number of these people could not spell “neural network” a couple years ago.
I have worked with these people. They are very good at skimming the surface of every new thing and convincing others they are experts. Meanwhile, the really smart people are often busy with the projects they’re already deeply immersed in, so they can’t turn on a dime like this, nor do they want to.
I find this one hilarious as I tend to add techs to my portfolio as they begin to break mainstream. Bascially I build what my customers want.
last year they wanted blockchain games, now they are asking for AI. Some want AI Blockchain games, some want Blockchain AI games. Others, like influencers, just want you to build whatever they think will get conversions.
A lot of controversial comments. Here are some of my observations:
- Not a single mention of decentralised finance/DeFi in the comments, which is a game-changer.
- A lot of outdated information or misunderstanding of recent developments in the industry
- A large focus on scams and crypto bros, who are the loudest but definitely not the majority
undefined> DeFi
All governments and API server owners have shown that this is a wish and not reality.
DeFi has added some real value for both project creators and users, not just for myself. I’m not talking about the ‘money making, profit driven’ side of value either, but utility, capital efficiency, flexibility, new financial primitives as well.
All sorts of crazy innovation that you shouldn’t just hand-wave away as a scam or redundant.
Good points for sure.
You mentioned recent developments, what Loopring is doing with Layer 2/3 technology has been game changing within the ethereum space. GameStop’s NFT marketplace, especially the games shines because of it.
Semi-related, this post reminds me of a recent F1 story I came across on squabbles, where they are using w3 improve their ticketing systems to combat certain things that currently cause issues like scalping while also providing a medium for tailored ticket and fan experiences. It has actually been a long time coming, I found this article from ‘21 How Non-Fungible Tokens Are Coming To F1 which goes more in-depth with what their vision is and what they believe they can achieve.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these kinds of applications pop up in other sports down the road if it does well for F1.
Given all the negative press in addition to the unfortunate support from GOP fascists, from the outside looking in it must seem like it’s 90% delusional morons being taken advantage of by 10% scammer assholes.
There are delusional morons and scammer assholes, but it’s a loud minority and does not define the technology and the assoc industry.
I tried to like Loopring, but their L2s were hardcoded circuits rather than zkEVM which the Polygon and Matterlabs team (and Starkware to a lesser extent) are pushing ahead with this year. Allowing the community of third party developers to contribute value (sound familiar Reddit?) is going to make the whole L2 space to gangbusters.
As it stands now you can’t do much with Loopring except what the first party devs have built, which is basically a standard excahnge.
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
The problem is that cash itself is already decentralised currency, work on building what you have, not reinventing the wheel, unless there’s a good reason or advantage.
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.
but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen.
One aspect might be, that the scam stories are much more popular and easier to circulate on social media than are actual usages. It’s a strong online virality bias. Scams and phishing also happen a lot in fiat and cash (albeit relatively lower), but since most of it is so secret and banks really don’t want to get bad media, then try to keep such things hidden.
Look at Monero (privacy coin) for example. There is no news on whales, scams etc. there, because it’s private so there is no attention given to that. That makes is easier to simply use it and not get an overly negative news bias.
At the same time, cryptos were successfully used during Ukraine for quick money Donations. This was also reported in news, but it doesn’t stick so long into the minds of the people as the controversial scams/ftx etc.
Finally, at least with Ethereum there is still around 10 years of development in front of it with exciting new capabilities. Until a few years from now, we’ll finally have a system with scalability ans high security as well.
However, until then ethereum will grow slowly.
Also, unfortunately I think the focus of many people has shifted from p2p currency and adoption to money making and investment - which isn’t too bad, but adoption still sucks and makes it less useful for now.
It mainly lost it appeal as crashes, arrests, lawsuits, and thief keep happeneding. It was shown to be scammy with scammers scamming.
And yeah the new hotness of LLMs also helped. The tech bros who use to be pushing “X but with crypto” are now looking to push “X but with AI”.
Yeah this, mainstream big players in financial markets already figured out crypto is useless, so IT firms switched to selling AI to corporates instead.
yes, everyone likes to talk that USD/EUR is risky, you have inflation, you have banks closing and stock market crashing, but so far it seems crypto is much much riskier. I feel much safer having my money in bank than having it on some blockchain, accessible only if I know private key and if I loose it there is 0 change I will ever see any of my money.
Metaverse came first to replace the crypto hype, but yeah, LLMs definitely gave the crypto hype the rest.
Crypto won’t ever die, too many people have too much money invested in it for it to die.
But it’s going nowhere. If I can’t buy groceries with a bitcoin, then it’s worthless. It got popular because people used it to trade drugs. I don’t even think you can do that on tor anymore.
Without practical uses it’s nothing but a Ponzi scheme, which is why every thread about crypto has a few true believers urging others to “invest”.
You could not be more incorrect about that last point
No, twitter just shit the bed is all and thats where the scams were primarily spread, but now that so many people have dropped twitter you don’t hear about it as much.
Pretty much 1/3rd of the ads I get on Reddit, for example, are still crypto scams.
I will agree though that it lost the crypto-bro sheen, thank god, and companies stopped trying to shoehorn it into everywhere it had no use case for.
There are use cases for it but they are extremely specific and most of the time a normal database is the right tool for the job. You need to satisfy multiple conditions for a blockchain to be the right tool for the job over a normal DB.
Furthermore, even if you do satisfy the requirements and use blockchain tech, its annoying to try and market that. Just as an example, how often do you see video game companies or gambling companies or other websites touting the fact they have, I dunno, a Redis mem server on their backend as a “selling point” of their service?
No one. No one does that, no one cares. No one tries to market what database their backend uses as a way to make their product sound better, because no one gives a shit what your backend is built on top of. They care about the actual features and functionality of your product, not the tech your developers used.
So hopefully we have now entered the era where some services do use blockchain on the backend when its the right tool or the job, but they don’t bother to try and market it and no one gives a shit if its MSSQL, Blockchain, Mongo, or whatever else that is used to store data.
Agreed
Weak hands got shaken out, and the economy is teetering on recession. When inflation stops and interest rates fall, and quantitative easing starts back up it’s gonna come roaring back. The SEC and CFTC aren’t trying to kill crypto, they are just trying to decide who’s jurisdiction it falls under. The crypto industry will benefit from regulation, it will get safer, and you’ll feel like an idiot for asking this question instead of buying while it’s cheap. Hit me up in 2025!
I am not sure if you are actually drinking the Kool-Aid or if this is some top tier shit posting. If it’s the latter, kudos to you!
Haha, it’s funny how people think centralization will do any good for something that was designed to be decentralized from the ground up. I swear, it’s like folks have totally forgotten what crypto was initially intended to solve.
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
Ah yes. Another entry to the list: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
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
I don’t think anyone minds people buying fly crap with a currency that has no credible base. What galls people is when we loose billions of dollars from the world economy from a group of con artist with no restraint in how low they would have gone. Or how we have morons racing to earn cash by running climate killing mining rigs.
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.
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.
I guess it depends on your time-frame and your risk profile. BTC/ETH over the medium term has done much better than pretty much any other asset in the world. Altcoins didn’t even factor into my brain when I made that comment.
While the prospect of using it in everyday transactions seems pretty much dead, for some reason the crypto market cap in and of itself is very much alive. Plus it’s interesting that crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and people wanting more control over their assets, so if anything I would think it would be more socially relevant now than ever.
@peanuts4life@beehaw.org It’s called a bear market. Every 3-4 years, it’s the same thing. Patience…:blobcatthinksmart:
