I was fortunate to have had a religious crisis before I could code for shit. I was inoculated by that experience and got a booster shot during the DotCom boom. Problem is that not going in for fads gets you labeled as a curmudgeon, rather than as a reasonable person.

I&#x27;ve found that looking at some people&#x27;s approach towards tech as a new religion helps me to understand their irrational&#x2F;criticism-free opinions of them - also helps me understand that I&#x27;m not going to change their minds on any of it, and limits my desire to debate it with them.The religion of the Social Graph&#x2F;global connectivity, the religion of the Cryptocurrency, the religion of AI (and the separate religion of AGI). People&#x27;s fixation on UBI leans religious too. All promised transformation into better lives for people around the world, but none have managed to achieve it. We&#x27;d really be better off shipping hundreds of containers of solar panels to the global south than pretending some quantity of code we write will have as big an impact.

My advice is always: invest in the assets I hold, and never sell.It really makes the value of my holdings rise.

well i would hope so, a normal savings account has 0 risk. im not sure this is a great argument to hold some bitcoin lol

Hard to argue with that reasoning, on several layers.

My advice is always: Just hodl some bitcoin, but not in amounts that make you cry when you loose it.It&#x27;s been better for me so far than normal savings accounts.

You can make money from religion. You just have to make sure not to believe in it. No attachment.

Thanks for sharing that unique perspective.How do you feel about similar trends at the moment?

&gt; nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gambleSounds like index futures. I understand wanting to buy fresh corn in one year at a constant price, so you get corn contracts for december 2016 and it gets delivered at that price when the contract expires. You know the cost beforehand and you plan for it.Index futures? They just dump the equivalent dollar amount to your account when it expires. Who benefited? What happened? No physical commodity got exchanged. You&#x27;ve played with numbers, paid commissions, probably some spread and had around 6x leverage. Pretty much checks every box for gambling.

It is basically a big game of hot potato. If you are OK with that, fine, but you are still just gambling on a party game chip.There is a little bit of real value in having a rail that is hard to block, so you can move money across borders or around account freezes, sanctions, or runaway inflation. But that probably only justifies a tiny slice of the current price.Most of the rest is speculation.Fiat is different. A national currency is tied to the economy that uses it. Wages, rent, groceries, taxes, all live in that unit. Even if it crashes on FX markets you can still use it inside that country to buy local goods and services, and over time prices and wages shift along with it. The currency may fall against the dollar, but the local cost of living in that currency moves with it too.The dream was that crypto gets adopted economically in a similar fashion, and even globally, that simply didn&#x27;t happen, so it ended up just being gambling.

&gt;The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money.Make money from what?

Why crypto? Why not one of the millions of other things you can invest in? Should I hold some onion futures as insurance with potential upside, or ride the periodic bulls of the Nepalese rupee and take profits?

Both supporters and critics approach it too religiously. Yes 99% is scams and rugpulls. The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money. Why emotionally sell all your crypto vs holding some higher quality as insurance with potential upside? Or even, ride the periodic bulls and take profits, rinse and repeat? If it&#x27;s full of scammers, why not take some of their money? Does this require &quot;believing&quot; in it? One can not believe in it at all, and thus actually insulate themselves from getting caught up in the hype.

There have been people going back to Turing thinking AI is the future and I don&#x27;t think he was trying to pump his AI stocks.

I feel very different about AI. I have still no clear idea what crypto is good for except money laundering. AI feels very different. It might not live up to all it’s promises. But it is clearly very capable.

The difference is that AI is a huge array of technologies (not only LLMs) and are being used in several fields with different, useful purposes.There&#x27;s a cult and a bubble too, though, and I agree with that part.

You&#x27;re forgetting the true believers.

100%.It&#x27;s similar to AI... the only people trying to tell you &quot;it&#x27;s the future&quot; are those with financial stakes.

It has proven neither to be a store of value nor medium of exchange though it is being used extensively for criminal activities.

I worked in crypto for five years, and this resonates. Sure, you can make money hustling some hype coin, but chances are you are more likely to lose money&#x2F;time in the process. Outside of very specific supply chain blockchains, 99% of the actual value I see in order of value: 1) Stablecoins [faster than ACH!], 2) Bitcoin, and in certain places, 3) Ethereum has its uses.Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.

How is it opposite. In my mind they all fall under the same libertarian fantasy umbrella.The post mentioned the idea of casually sending a billion dollars. Was that ever possible with Bitcoin? AFAIK it&#x27;s less ergonomic to send money using Bitcoin than it is using traditional banking.

Ethereum seems useful as well. But that&#x27;s about it

I&#x27;ve never understood crypto, however I&#x27;m long term Bitcoin fan and user, and don&#x27;t consider it &quot;crypto&quot;. I think Bitcoin is pretty much opposite what the typical crypto project is.

I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It&#x27;s more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but &quot;still believed in crypto&quot; was staggering.

You forgot the money launderers, in both ecosystems. Casinos are the original tumbler.

I worked in blockchain (&quot;builder&quot;) for 5 years. I started &#x27;eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech&#x27; but finished &#x27;holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech&#x27;

&gt; Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.Is there any possibility the presence of the people who are there just for fun still encourages&#x2F;increases the size of the first group?

You also have this quadchotomy in a department store, or in a number of other valuable businesses.

In a casino you have
- The gamblers spending a lot on the casino
- The people coming in for the fun and spending little money
- The owners&#x2F;C-levels
- The operational teamSomeone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.

The funny thing is that people are betting on a profile with anime pictures against the ECB representing 500 million people.And yet when they want to actually buy a Lambo they need hard currency...

Ah I see, so the [token holder] hires a [builder] to build something, and uses that to then hire [intellectual] to scam the [&#x27;pragmatic user&#x27;]?To take this a little more seriously, this is computer programming, very famously you don&#x27;t need massive gobs of VC capital to build something. The only reason for the [builder] needs [token holder] is to hire [intellectual] to scam [user].Oh and of course, [token holder] [builder] and [intellectual] are the same guy with 3 different anime profile pics.

Because he is only talking about categories that can contribute to the system. [Scammers] do not. In so far as the system and the diagram is concerned, [scammers] are to be thwarted and their harmful effects mitigated. A lot of the work done in crypto is security which is entirely about thwarting [scammers]. As an example, The original bitcoin paper on double-spending problem is devoted to securing against a particular type of scam.Speculators fall in a gray area and need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. many of them are straight up scams, Some are legit, and the rest are in between. Stratton Oakmont was a scam. Does that mean your index-fund is also one? Or the stock market and financial system as a whole?

Classic Vitalik logic. A giant mountain of word salad and he still somehow magically fails to name the fifth and most important group: Scammers.

From what I understand the Ethereum Foundation has attracted a lot of criticism. I am not sure how much power and influence he has over it.One of the sensitive issue is the price of ETH it seems as it didn&#x27;t perform well over the last 3-4 years. And staking it will only give you about 2.5% today.So in a sense the Ethereum Foundation is the opposite of the criticism we usually hear about crypto: the &quot;stock&quot; doesn&#x27;t perform well but real progress have been made with the technology and in the ecosystem.One thing that is clear is that transactions are cheaper, more reliable and anybody can still participate and build on it.

Has Vitalik fallen of grace? Some time ago I stopped following the crypto culture and now I keep being shown tweets ridiculing him.

He was talking about actors who contribute to the system. See my other reply : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46202319">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46202319</a>

That&#x27;s a very nice categorization, but it seems orthogonal to the categories of: [scammers and hackers that want an untraceable and unrefundable payment method], [scammers that use cryptos themselves to scam and rugpull], ...

And also the most unerasable, and hence traceable, system. You can&#x27;t delete records from a blockchain.

The entire crypto ecosystem is hardly all about deflation these days. If anything, I&#x27;d argue the opposite. Stablecoins, yield, perpetual futures etc. are hardly what Satoshi had in mind.

&gt;criminals, sanction evadersThe definition of both may vary depending on where you are. Being not controlled by governments is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.

There are a lot of places in the world where crypto payments are now prevalent, not because users are the &quot;dumbest people in the world&quot; but because they have no better alternative for electronic finance. Either conventional banking is nonexistent&#x2F;abysmal for this purpose or their national currencies are in such bad condition that it&#x27;s better for them to hold and use cryptocurrencies.

So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don&#x27;t see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn&#x27;t seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.

The only buyers are criminals, sanction evaders, and probably the dumbest people in the world given that the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on one thing and one thing only. Creating the most deflationary monetary system in history.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vitalik.eth.limo&#x2F;general&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;end.html#section-34:~:text=4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vitalik.eth.limo&#x2F;general&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;end.html#section...</a>Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about.
He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.

&gt; Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires &quot;trust&quot; (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I&#x27;m not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn&#x27;t have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.It&#x27;s for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You&#x27;re not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you&#x27;ve already eaten. You&#x27;re not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with &quot;lol&quot; written on it instead of a GPU because they&#x27;re a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they&#x27;d gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.You don&#x27;t always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.

Reading your comment made me think of an ad i saw several years ago.It was an ad that started off like a typical quality coffee ad, nice pictures of beans, people harvesting, some roasting etc. But than it switched to the topic if making sure that &quot;fair trade&quot; was really applied - switching to IBM Blockchain and claiming that through the use of Blockchain there is safety that everything went fair trade.....And i just thought.... sure... your blockchain approves that those workers harvesting got paid fair... or does it? All it actually does is proof that someone inserted the information that they got paid fair. If it really happend? Noone knows. Therefor Blockchain is a representation of what you feed into it nothing more and nothing less. At the moment it touches real life - as in the fair trade&#x2F;payment for coffee bean harvesting - especially in countries where alot of payment is still for dayjob&#x2F;cash - there&#x27;s no way the Blockchain can assure that everything went the way it is stored as.

I believe the “trustless” part is not having to trust a central authority that makes the transaction possible, not about not having to trust the person you are transacting with.With crypto you don’t need to trust the authority that holds your digital money, the authority that executes the transaction, or the authority that manages the issuance of currency and other factors that may affect its value (interest rates, fixed exchange rates…).That being said, I agree that in practice this is a rather niche problem to solve, and among the people with this problem, there are far more bad faith ones that good faith ones.And it is never completely trustless anyway, for most crypto you need to trust a single dodgy implementation, the issuance policy of the founders hoarding the vast majority of the tokens, and whatever backdoors they have put in place for disaster recovery or other purposes. And then there are all the surrounding systems that make crypto actually practical to use, like exchanges, that are absolutely not trustless.It’s absurd how the top exchanges keep their customers crypto in big joint accounts that the exchange controls and transactions mostly just happen in their closed database outside the blockchain, canceling out most advantages of crypto anyway.

Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.

The issue isn&#x27;t that it solves the wrong problem.The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they&#x27;ll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.You can get a loan from those banks. Now there&#x27;s fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it&#x27;s now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.

I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There&#x27;s absolutely no reason that a driver&#x27;s license can&#x27;t derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block&#x27;s information when you finish voting.ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, identity is kept secret, trust is installed with hash checks for each and every voter - etc etc etc.It&#x27;s certainly more airtight than the solution we have today - where trust and efficiency can both be compromised fairly easy.

&gt; Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires &quot;trust&quot;Indeed. Good paper driving the point home:Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2110.09857" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2110.09857</a>

Why should the method of payment solve that problem? A reputation system for sellers and service providers makes more sense to be entirely separate.

It&#x27;s an ingenious solution to achieve a &quot;trustless&quot; currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires &quot;trust&quot; (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

&gt; The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.That&#x27;s the entire point when the goal is to achieve a public, immutable, decentralized ledger that prevents double-payments without needing to trust a third-party to adjudicate properly. It being inconvenient makes it exceptionally difficult to edit history.Whether that&#x27;s a useful goal is less clear when nearly all of modern society relies on trusting parties at some point along the way (will the thing you bought be delivered to you? Will the service you purchased actually be rendered? etc).&gt; Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropologyA financial process being unwieldy hasn&#x27;t really been an issue historically. Why are most publicly issued stocks in the US owned by Cede and Company for example? No one that has stocks really thinks about the underlying system (the fact that they have contractual rights to stocks rather than actually owning stocks), as long as it ultimately works.Where things have broken down in my opinion is how centralized the systems have become with massive exchanges being the only realistic way to interact with them. In the same way that a bicycle wasn&#x27;t designed to be a moving van, these systems weren&#x27;t designed to be centralized. With that being the reality though, the entire blockchain backbone is mostly useless, and at that point it really is an inconvenient database.

&gt; and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they areInteresting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing.Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.

It may be money, but it is definitely not cash. Cash is completely anonymous, BTC is not.

It&#x27;s stupid because blockchains don&#x27;t scale. In most other respects they&#x27;re quite clever.

Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority.Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company).It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.

Early on bitcoin was thought to be pseudoanonymous. Like sure, it&#x27;s all public, but what&#x27;s public is &quot;bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh&quot;, not &quot;John Smith, age 43, living in Florida&quot;.Then two things happened: people figured out that it&#x27;s actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: &quot;donate here: (hash)&quot;.And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we&#x27;ve got real names connected to those random looking numbers.

That visibility could be considered a feature for some use cases. We could use more transparency in many areas, particularly government.

When you start transacting on Bitcoin Lightning network (which is essentially sending pre-signed bitcoin transactions in a smart way, without submitting them on the main chain), then you no longer see each transaction. Lightning introduces decent privacy, not perfect, but decent.

It isn&#x27;t anonymous. Anybody who says bitcoin is anonymous either doesn&#x27;t understand bitcoin or doesn&#x27;t understand anonymity. It&#x27;s pseudonymous.

Technically there is no such thing as a bitcoin. Just unspent transaction outputs. Those get spent as an input of a transaction and then are gone forever. There is no concept of the output of a transaction being the same &quot;bitcoin&quot; as what comes from the input of the transaction. This means if you had 2 inputs and 2 outputs of the same amount there is no way to trace which input became which output. At best you can find which outputs potentially came from an input.

But you (theoretically) cannot know who mined the coin, or who is actually the holder of the coin, thus the anonymity. Though currently this is getting restricted as governments require more ID verification from businesses dealing with crypto, which links up your coin to a real person.

You are confusing anonymity and privacy. Bitcoin can be anonymous, but not private.

The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.

I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)

This utility is what helps stabilise its value, but the side effect of that is that it is a good store of wealth. These two facts make BTC go up. People say Bitcoin isn’t used for anything when in reality it’s being used every day to store and move wealth between big financial players (many of them being organised crime). Why wouldn’t they continue using this useful technology and therefore why won’t its value hold&#x2F;increase? Is it moral to piggy back off this? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth considering that many major banks have been involved with organised crime since forever…

You&#x27;re clearly someone who doesn&#x27;t agree with the quantitive theory of money.

&gt; Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it&#x27;s for doing illegal stuff.What happens when a country&#x27;s banking system fails?

Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it&#x27;s for doing illegal stuff.No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don&#x27;t want you to do.Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can&#x27;t even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.

Agree. Blockchain is good for nothing but crypto (by virtue of the oracle problem, among others), and crypto is good for nothing but crime.It&#x27;s funny, people speak as if decentralisation was a good thing, but very few bother to explain why. Typically, if you dig into it, they cite advantages that you can already get from good old permissioned distributed tech. The only thing that decentralisation gets you (at enormous cost) is that it&#x27;s harder to regulate.

This was already evident 9 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kaistinchcombe&#x2F;ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kaistinchcombe&#x2F;ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...</a>

&gt; Haven&#x27;t seen another application ...You need to get out more.

Yeah and even more crazy: all other applications of blockchains are even more stupid. Haven&#x27;t seen another application that wouldn&#x27;t have been better, faster, cheaper implemented in a &quot;classical&quot; way.

A different metric of comparison isn&#x27;t Bitcoin&#x27;s energy consumption compared to other countries but compared to the existing banking system it&#x27;s trying to replace, which burns more energy than Bitcoin and allegedly burns more energy funding wars with fiat. Mining gold instead of Bitcoin burns more energy than Bitcoin too.Compared to that for energy consumption, Bitcoin is superior really.

I never understood why bitcoin is winning popularity&#x2F;pricing over ie. ethereum - which doesn&#x27;t burn energy anymore and you can actually do programming on it, not just moving money from a to b.

Simply put:Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina.Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.

&gt; there is no central bank that can print more BitcoinIt turns out this doesn&#x27;t matter: you can&#x27;t hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It&#x27;s just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that&#x27;s not actually guaranteed!Also, you can&#x27;t print more Bitcoin, but that doesn&#x27;t matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.

but there&#x27;s no compounding interest. no dividend based on future cashflows.holding stocks of a diverse index seems better on the long run, no?

If you only care about inflation, real-estate in desirable locations is also inflation-proof. You can&#x27;t print more land in San Francisco, London or Hong Kong.

To understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text:The Times 03&#x2F;Jan&#x2F;2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banksIn many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.

This is only a selling point in places like USA. Even before moving to the USA 13 years ago I was able to send money via wire transfer domestically for free, and it settled within 1 business day (to me that&#x27;s fast enough). IIUC nowadays intra-EU wire transfers also are free (but I kinda view them as &quot;domestic&quot;), however I&#x27;m not sure how quickly they settle. The way how banking worked in the US was definitely one of the biggest culture shocks I&#x27;ve experienced when moving (and not in a positive way).

Yep, that&#x27;s what I thought nano had done:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nano.org&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nano.org&#x2F;en</a>instant, fee&#x27;s a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don&#x27;t rely on visa&#x2F;mastercard!and then it just went no where :\

At least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow.And, mind you, I only purchased&#x2F;sold legal stuff.

&gt; bitcoin is great for criminalsNever understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash.The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn&#x27;t make that easier, it makes that part harder. But &quot;Bitcoin is great for criminals&quot; is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don&#x27;t actually know what they&#x27;re talking about.

1) I mean, also great for anyone who sells stuff on places like Craigslist, where the recommendation is to take cash? Taking the standpoint &quot;the consumer is always always correct and refunds should be trivial&quot; sort of works for larger companies that can amortize scams, but you enable a different form of crime (fraud) by adding that feature to small-scale transactions. Hell: many of the modern payment rails you now have to use to buy stuff from vendors at fairs don&#x27;t have user-accessible refund mechanisms, including Zelle.2) To the extent to which you really want those features, they are no different than any other in their ability to be built on top of a decentralized database, but now can be done in a way where the rules can be open and anyone can experiment: as an example, you could put your funds into a smart contract that only can transfer money to other people through an escrow mechanism which holds onto the funds for a net-30 period and pays a small fee to the protocol; you then could have the people who own the protocol governance token (and would receive the fees) vote on members to sit on a refund arbitration council (which needs to be somewhat fair or people will stop using the network, crashing the fees they are paid, aligning the incentives in a similar manner to a centralized business doing the same).

&gt; let&#x27;s make this simple: people who murder and steal.So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I&#x27;m so confused about how you&#x27;re able to make the delineation of those who &quot;murder and steal&quot; to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many of the people whom they spend relatively insane amount of resources to target target: drug users&#x2F;pushers, political activists, immigrants, etc.Distributed ledgers are good for... targeted activists, people who don&#x27;t want the government to have the power to arbitrarily weaken their buying power, people seeking safe drugs and medicines, just about anyone needing to be anonymous, and regular people who don&#x27;t need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted. This &quot;criminals&quot; angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you&#x27;re not the first to suggest it.

well actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it&#x27;s kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors
you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independenceas unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say &quot;who decides what is a criminal&quot;, well let&#x27;s make this simple: people who murder and steal.edit: by &quot;murder and steal&quot; I generally mean something that is &quot;lawfully and&#x2F;or morally disallowed&quot;

It might have been for first few months. And then it kinda got into becoming rich or kings of future world...

Ideology can be blinding. It was never about the technology.

&gt; Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...</a>

Okay, let&#x27;s image that I&#x27;ve sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the &quot;money&quot; I&#x27;ve sent you into bread and milk?Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade&#x2F;send&#x2F;receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to &quot;food&quot; all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer.I&#x27;m telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country

How exactly can you send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda using Bitcoin?Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there.So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?

A lot of countries don&#x27;t have access to bank-accounts, by not having valid id&#x27;s for example. But they do have cellphones so they can download crypto apps to accept payment for jobs etc. And then there is the money receiving from relatives in other countries, yes.

I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.

Apparently, some fraction of the population is willing to believe whatever makes them rich.

Deflationary &quot;currencies&quot; like crypto are significantly worse (why spend when you can HODL). Regular crypto &quot;currencies&quot; will have the exact same effects.

You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorerIt doesn&#x27;t take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can&#x27;t ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.

my naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing:<pre><code> - waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store)
 - sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too)
 - emit very small amount of data
 - struggle with security
 - reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network
</code></pre>
somehow (and again, i&#x27;m naive and not knowledgeable) i felt that a lot of useful processing for society would be better if there was a global encrypted network that would enact the same simple things but without the human layer round trip. you get 24&#x2F;7 operations, globally, open, encrypted.in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it&#x27;s 10pm, the system was ready to fire.and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..but maybe it&#x27;s really just a fools errand i don&#x27;t know

You wouldn’t put your house “in a blockchain”, either. What is it you think you’re saying, here?

What do you mean? Technically it works, no?it is an incovenient database, for sure, but the fact that people can trust it enough that they put billions of dollars in it is remarkable.I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…

How does Jerome Powell decide the price of a dollar? How does an algorithm fix that? What is being fixed?

If by “price of the US dollar” you mean “direction of financial sentiment”, then yes.But that’s a big mistake.

Someone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.

&gt; you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can&#x27;t treat it like &quot;money&quot; ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability&#x2F;fraud prevention. &quot;we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid.&quot;

I never got the whole larger &quot;crypto&quot; economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?

&gt;&gt;
 I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects.
&lt;&lt;could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?

I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it&#x27;s only a problem for some people. If you&#x27;re connected to the money printers, then it&#x27;s useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, &#x27;honest accounting&#x27; would not be a solution for you; &#x27;honest accounting&#x27; would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for &#x27;choosing this&#x27;.I&#x27;ve worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn&#x27;t build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it&#x27;s basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

&gt; extremely inconvenient databaseYou can wake up with your bank &#x2F; broker &#x2F; PayPal balance = 0, what do you do?

Because... Nothing else achieves that? Besides a centralised database, which is extremely vulnerable to censorship - as seen when Visa blocked Steam from selling porn games.

&gt; The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.Care to elaborate? I have been using Bitcoin now 10+ to store my wealth and make payments, and it has been very convenient - not much time needed to use it, and I think I&#x27;ve gotten plenty of value for my time-investment.What kind of database would you recommend to make it more convenient? Maybe you can write a guide how to implement decentralized value transfer and storage system on top of PostgreSQL, so that the amount of tokens is limited to 21 Million, with similar security guarantees?

I&#x27;ve recently used Bitcoin to pay for several legitimate items because the fiat financial system just decided not to let me pay with my debit card, for no apparent reason.

&gt; I&#x27;ve never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they&#x27;ve been explained to me.This may not help much, but it&#x27;s really a (self-)governance thing. That&#x27;s why they start their article like so:&gt; I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. (...) Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me.It is also why you keep hearing about crypto transactions being primarily used for illegal stuff. Just like with the uber-free-speech p2p platforms, it primaily benefits those who&#x27;d be otherwise hampered. Who, contrary to the usual talking points, are usually not actually so innocent or respectable.But then we do keep sliding back, so maybe it&#x27;s only a matter of time the proportions shift, and the claims of these technologies&#x27; justness stop being so false and hollow. And maybe these events and processes are further not actually uncorrelated. Trust is at an all time low and dwindling, after all.

&gt; just scams and speculationThe &quot;currency&quot; part is actually the only one that is not a scam, as long as you understand what it is and the trade-offs it makes.If you do actually have a legitimate reason to use it (because conventional payment rails are not available, or you&#x27;re doing crime, or need pseudonymity), it is a perfectly fine tool.

I agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it&#x27;s amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation.Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that&#x27;s true, but if you&#x27;d ever want to connect to banking backend, you&#x27;d get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you&#x27;d just run or connect to a node.

The funny thing is that a lot of early Bitcoin advocates did recognize the blockchain&#x27;s inefficiency

Market cap is pretty hypothetical though - if somebody actually tried to liquidate $50bn of bitcoin into fiat money you&#x27;d probably send the BTC price to about zero...

South Sea Company at its height was worth almost 3x British GDP. Not bad for a company &quot;with negligible business activities&quot;!

Slippage yo. Market cap means jack shit if the true order book is thin like a slice of carpaccio.

So the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion.You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion.Not bad for an &quot;extremely inconvenient database&quot;.

I think a lot more important for understanding crypto is learning the first bitcoin was minted in January 2009, months off of the heel of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, and more notably the &quot;start&quot; of the 2008 financial crisis

To understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America&#x27;s various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power.Russia&#x27;s invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.

I think the sort of libertarian mythos of crypto is very appealing to a lot of people. Escape the big bad man and so on.The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...

regardless, they found a way for two parties to exchange wealth without trusting each other. the failures were letting it diverge from being a currency into a speculation instrument. It failed in being a low-cost wallet that we can pay our restaurant tab with.

The blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path.It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café.That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-gaslit-asset-class.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-gaslit-asset-class.html</a>

&gt; sound moneyPerhaps they&#x27;re the new incarnation of audiophiles.

I think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn&#x27;t inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that&#x27;s also true for gold, and I&#x27;ve yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle &#x2F; speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they&#x27;ll reply with something about &quot;sound money&quot;, seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It&#x27;s rather disheartening.

&gt;I&#x27;ve never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they&#x27;ve been explained to me.&gt;Proceeds to provide their opinion.At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular&#x2F;first&#x2F;best coin is completely useless.I&#x27;d invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.

Amen. Bitcoin barely manages to continue to function, while currently handling 0.0000001% of the worlds money transfers. The idea that we could base any substantial part of our financial system on a globally serialized transaction ledger is a laughable joke.As a technical experiment, I love bitcoin, and I have thoroughly enjoyed wasting some of my own time on it. But it&#x27;s not mainstream, and it never will be.

&gt; I&#x27;ve never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they&#x27;ve been explained to me.Because it&#x27;s a cult, like the &quot;AGI is coming in 2027&quot; cult thinks we&#x27;re on the brink of skynet level world destruction, it&#x27;ll come and go and 99% of the people who fell for it will tell you they never really truly actually believed

The whitepaper has some problems. Satoshi isn&#x27;t automatically right and virtually no one uses Bitcoin&#x2F;crypto the way Satoshi envisioned. Arguably if you judge Bitcoin based on the whitepaper it is a complete failure.

I’m not sure the paper or the character Satoshi himself matter anymore. Once you have a preeminent coin with fiat power behind it, the details of a paper and the wherewithal to reinvent that coin more purely are irrelevant. Once a particular political family signaled that control starting in Sept 2024, keeping close to that family reassured you of a bailout or pardon.

read the original Satoshi paperall the 3rd party summaries&#x2F;interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.

Most of my transactions go through credit card, that means every time I exchange money for services&#x2F;goods a private corporation takes a 3% cut. That makes sense to you but the dream of BTC doesn&#x27;t?Of course it turned into a gambling scam filled cesspool like most human endeavours, but the initial dream was sound.

&gt; The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.It&#x27;s the cost of it being out of control of any single party. Efficiency and convenience are worth nothing if you have a system someone can just wipe out or manipulate.Have you experienced hyperinflation in your lifetime? Have the generational assets of your family been seized by totalitarian government? I think you&#x27;d understand better if you lived through events where your wealth very painfully was just an &quot;entry&quot; in the efficient system someone else controls (badly).

&gt; The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient databaseThe point is to be a database that isn’t controlled by a central authority, rather by the majority of its users.

Your comment assumes that the purpose of an economic system is to preserve a financial status quo. It isn&#x27;t, and shouldn&#x27;t be. Inflation incentivizes people to put their money to productive uses in the economy (capital formation) rather than hoarding resources.

Alas, any comments trying to talk about the problem are getting buried. They don&#x27;t understand the solution because they stick their fingers in their ears when someone tries to show the problem. Of course a solution doesn&#x27;t make sense if there is no problem.We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were born during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisis. We blew it 17 years ago. We didn&#x27;t fix anything. People stopped talking about financial reform about a decade ago. So now we might just have to live with a system where a few elites are creaming the top of the money supply. A system where the brightest and most talented people go and work for something like Jane Street, spending their days playing games and trading bits of paper with each other, causing real effects for people doing actual work, but adding nothing of value themselves but taking loads.This Douglas Adams quote explains a lot:&gt; I&#x27;ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that&#x27;s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you&#x27;re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Bitcoin is also money printed out of thin air. Bitcoin is also a fiat currency. It may be impossible to change the rate of Bitcoin printing, but it&#x27;s definitely possible to print more cryptocurrencies (see Ethereum, Monero, Solana, Tron, etc), it&#x27;s definitely the case that bitcoin&#x27;s non-deflationary nature is terrible for it as a medium of exchange as it encourages hoarding and destabilises the value, and it&#x27;s definitely the case that it&#x27;s impossible for any currency with a fixed issuing rate to maintain a stable value.

TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it&#x27;s solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;saylor&#x2F;status&#x2F;1878154748353818932" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;saylor&#x2F;status&#x2F;1878154748353818932</a>&gt; &quot;The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.&quot;The answer to your question is humans&#x27; inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it&#x27;s possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can&#x27;t be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).It&#x27;s one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin&#x27;s positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.

You say bitcoin is &quot;so silly&quot;. Please give me an example of anything better for nation states to hold as reserves and to transact with other nations with.I&#x27;ll even allow you an imaginary thing as long as it&#x27;s constrained by the real world.

&gt; I&#x27;ve never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they&#x27;ve been explained to me.Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the &quot;story&quot; that made it succeed. Its about taking back &quot;control&quot; from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren&#x27;t selling merkle-trees, they are selling &quot;freedom&quot;.I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.&gt; How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)

It is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn&#x27;t work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn&#x27;t scale.The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.

&gt;How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.&quot;It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.&quot;

No, but it doesn’t mean they’re correct either.

The Emperor was very pleased that everyone was admiring his new clothes, even if he couldn’t see them himself!

It&#x27;s funny that you think of crypto bros as &quot;everyone&quot;, when in reality they are very much the few.

That you don&#x27;t understand something doesn&#x27;t mean everyone else is wrong.

OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great.Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses.The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.

To understand Bitcoin you need to forget the technology and first understand the problem. You need to understand what caused the 2008 financial crisis and how it resulted in us collectively funnelling more value into the hands of useless bankers. You need to understand that there are people who are literally spending their days playing games with each other, trading bits of paper and making silly deals and bets. If you don&#x27;t understand the word &quot;literally&quot; or don&#x27;t believe it, read more, study harder. If you don&#x27;t understand a zero sum game or how this nonsense fucks up the lives of regular people, read more.Read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read Other People&#x27;s Money by John Kay.Only once you understand the problem can you begin to understand why a trustless digital cash would be good for us. Bitcoin is simply the first viable solution to the problem. If you can come up with a better one you&#x27;ll change the world.

The currency is absolutely not used by anyone serious as currency. Market caps are, quite obviously, representative of nothing, given the current state of the S&amp;P. Let’s be serious.

&gt;How anyone, especially many &quot;intelligent&quot; people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top...However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.

I&#x27;ve never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they&#x27;ve been explained to me.The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.That being said, I&#x27;m sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

&quot;Freedom enables crime&quot; is an entirely true argument, and a gift from heaven for The Powers That Be who need to justify the taking-away of Freedom.

Anonymous crypto, yes.But if you&#x27;re suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that&#x27;s not the case for bitcoin at least. It&#x27;s a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.

The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.

It&#x27;s nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it&#x27;s destination.But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they&#x27;d pay for payment processing otherwise. I&#x27;m not sure that really makes a difference though.

Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime. Having transcations on a ledger forever, works against your criminal take. You are just repeating.

To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

Folks, the word &quot;fiat&quot; is not an initialism, unless you&#x27;re referring to the car brand.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;fiat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;fiat</a>

Yeah... say what you will about FIAT currencies, but at least they can be used as currencies. I always chuckle at people who insist their transactions on exchanges are secret. With the &quot;Know Your Customer&quot; rules, FINCEN knows what you&#x27;re doing (or at least has the option of looking into what you&#x27;re doing.)

This. The moment dex’s started allowing speculation is when it all when bottoms up.When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.

It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc.Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it&#x27;s not).

You you do the last, you deserve to get found out and punished accordingly. Pay your taxes people, like everybody else.

&gt; Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency&#x2F;-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don&#x27;t like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.If you&#x27;re going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you&#x27;re at it?

&gt; The risk is NOT only &quot;will this go up or down&quot; but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency&#x2F;-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean- hiring personal security- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets &quot;linked&quot;, the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...- think about what mitigations you have in place against &quot;rubber hose attacks&quot;- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don&#x27;t get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don&#x27;t boast about your richness- ...

You&#x27;re right that the risk profile isn&#x27;t just volatility. In a system where &quot;you are your own bank,&quot; losing a seed phrase, signing the wrong transaction, or getting phished is equivalent to someone draining your checking account with no recourse

It was inevitable and trivial to predict, which people did, and the cryptbros laughed at them coz that&#x27;s how old people think.We put so much law and limitations about anything money purely because at times when we did not, stuff went wrong.The whole idea of currency without any laws and limitations around it means any and every problem that those law were supposed (some do it better, some worse, some make actual problem worse, not trying to pretend they are perfect here) to help with will happen, easily, with the &quot;new money&quot;.The fact that on top of all the old problems the crypto invented a whole set of new problems is just a little turd cherry on top of a manure cake.Okay, that was harsh, manure have some actual positive use

The issue is also that people refuse technological advancement and get stuck at bitcoin.One pyramid scheme to rule them all, One pyramid scheme to find them, One pyramid scheme to bring them all and to the pump and dumps bind them.

Another risk is just loosing your keys.I bet it happens a lot more than people like to talk about.

Sure, but if i have investments they cant be stolen, and if they are im pretty much compensated (given im not straight up giving my account away, hell even then there is usually a 24h window with a limit on withdrawls).Bottom line is no one takes responsibility in the world of bitcoin.

Proof of work was innovative when it was created in 1997 as an anti-spam email solution.

lol. No, PoW existed before. Putting it all together in this specific form was an innovation, if only a minor incremental one on the large body of work of state machine replication, enabling for the first time sybil resistance and thus permissionless distributed consensus. But all that gave us were crime tokens; haven&#x27;t seen a use case but crypto yet.Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.

&gt; its nothing more than a high risk stockNothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn&#x27;t innovative?With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD&#x27;s purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.

The existence of fraud, toxicity and misinformation around bitcoin doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that bitcoin itself is broken. It&#x27;s a very poorly understood technology, centering around money that once spent cannot be reversed. It&#x27;s natural that MANY people would come along and attempt to exploit that gap. Over time though the bag of tricks will start to wear a bit thin, and people will learn what to look for.Many people in the bitcoin community have been and are still calling out wallets that rely on 3rd party trust, decentralized exchanges that are build on a house of cards, alternative coins that are created purely for the purpose of pump and dump etc.Meanwhile the core technology progresses and deals with functioning at larger scales, with lower entry and exit friction, improved safety guarantees.

Offtopic but zerotier is really good software that I used but I am in India and its pings were high which is when I started to look around at free vps&#x27;s in the form of jupyter notebooks like intel tiber and others using things like pinggy and trying to find a non rooted version of ssh (dropbear) etc.Technically it was one of my &quot;first&quot; achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trulyfoss.mataroa.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;self-hosting-vanilla-minecraft-server-has-never-been-this-easy-before-gui-right-in-minecraft-while-being-open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trulyfoss.mataroa.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;self-hosting-vanilla-min...</a>I didn&#x27;t know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews &quot;hacking&quot; community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)It uses (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e4mc.link&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e4mc.link&#x2F;</a>), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvementmaybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into itI know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I &quot;wished&quot; to create a product in this market but I don&#x27;t have the funds and&#x2F;or I wouldn&#x27;t have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify&#x2F;ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p

Some printed materials, perhaps most are garbage. That doesn’t mean the printing press is bad.

It was started as an alternative to fiat casino capitalism. It became an absurdist parody of fiat casino capitalism.

You can&#x27;t convince me bitcoin wasn&#x27;t simply a psyop to get criminals to commit crimes on a global, immutable ledger.

The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only &quot;will this go up or down&quot; but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.

Here, I&#x27;ll keep it for you instead. I&#x27;m already insane so it&#x27;s safe.

You didnt make a mistake. There is no reason to believe 40k of coins becomes 10M... and if you keep that much on a USB drive I think it would send most insane!

The worst thing about crypto is these &quot;had I done this&quot; calculations, which are crucifying for some.

I got into crypto back in 2011&#x2F;2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC.Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I owned. I cashed in around $40k or so from the coins, which helped me pay off my debts and get a down payment for my house. To be honest, I personally don&#x27;t know anyone from way back then that became filthy rich off crypto, most sold off their stuff when every boom cycle started again, afraid that it would be the last one...the people I know that became rich, were those that went all-in on crypto around 2017&#x2F;2018. They dumped everything they had, and managed to 10x-100x their investments.Of course, had I held onto those, I&#x27;d be set for life now. But hindsight is 20&#x2F;20But with that said, I remember around 2017&#x2F;2018 when the first &quot;real&quot; boom occurred - that&#x27;s when everyone pretty much abandoned ideals, and went into it for the money. Lots of people made life-changing money back then, and the idealistic dream was pretty much dead. &quot;Store of value&quot; won the war, and soon after &quot;moon lambo&quot;.At least for me, the writing on the wall was clearly that crypto would evolve into just another financial instrument that big finance would pump and dump periodically. Though I could not foresee a crypto-friendly US gov. entering the picture.

&gt; Ok, if that&#x27;s really your thinking then you need to lay out: here&#x27;s an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn&#x27;t be possible without this thing.There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.

&gt; Ok, if that&#x27;s really your thinking then you need to lay out: here&#x27;s an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn&#x27;t be possible without this thing.These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.If you google &quot;network state&quot; you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like.
It&#x27;s not up to you whether other people create these things.
You can only control your own participation.Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly.
If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.

&gt; I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn&#x27;t involve money.Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool?&gt; It&#x27;s not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.Ok, if that&#x27;s really your thinking then you need to lay out: here&#x27;s an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn&#x27;t be possible without this thing.

&gt; The problems with the technologies is that the &quot;robust database&quot; guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.I agree that economic incentives are important for robustness, but I don&#x27;t agree with this use of the word &quot;currency&quot;.
The tokens have value in that they can be used to write to the ledger.
That is the consumer aspect of the token, you can give it up in exchange for the ability to edit the ledger.
The producer aspect of the token is that if you help participate in running the network, you can earn tokens, to edit the ledger yourself later.
The tokens have to store value (ledger write access), and there needs to be a market for them, because the producers can&#x27;t use them all themselves.Just because something can store value, in this case the specific ability to write to the ledger, doesn&#x27;t mean that thing is suitable as a currency.
Copper ingots let you make cat6 cables, the are objectively valuable, but we don&#x27;t use them as a currency.
And as the world found out over the last decade, the distance from store of value to functioning currency is significant.The store of value is sufficient to run the networks though, you don&#x27;t need the tokens to work as a currency, and I think that has been empirically proven.
The Ethereum mainnet is unlikely to disappear for a very long time, but Ethereum is also unlikely to ever be widely used as a currency.The takeaway is that you should have as much of these tokens as you are likely to need for writing to the ledger.
If you hold them in Coinbase and never use them to operate the ledger then you are participating in the speculative overvaluing of the tokens.

&gt; If you&#x27;ve been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn&#x27;t involve money.The problems with the technologies is that the &quot;robust database&quot; guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches&#x2F;forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a &quot;robust database&quot; which is easily branched&#x2F;forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a &quot;chain&quot; somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed&#x2F;transactional&#x2F;&quot;robust&quot;) useful to making a &quot;blockchain&quot; out of a merkle tree.

&gt; Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn&#x27;t involve money.People have been saying this for nearly a decade and many people with a great deal of motivation have failed to find any that worked and couldn’t be done better with traditional databases. It’s past time to ask if there’s actually any gold in them hills.

I think this is a huge misconception.
I certainly don&#x27;t view this issue as grounded in &#x27;rights&#x27; or what governments should or should not do.It&#x27;s entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology.
It&#x27;s a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don&#x27;t see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population.
As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don&#x27;t see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.

IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences:Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.

No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them.
If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger.
Paying for a token to use the ledger is not speculative, it&#x27;s pragmatic.
Holding the token and not using it to write to the ledger is speculative, and encouraging people to do that in order to make money yourself is a scam.If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed?
You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use.
But if you actually use Postgres, and it&#x27;s cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it&#x27;s not really a scam.I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically.
For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology.
They don&#x27;t have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves.
Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity.
They aren&#x27;t processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.

Imagine you have a home on Airbnb , your guest sends you a payment, but its not directly to you, the payment goes through the payment rails stipulated and controlled by airbnb. This amounts to what is often 25-35% of your listening fee (payment charges, visa network, listing fee, etc, etc.) This is the middle men crypto is supposed to replace.Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That&#x27;s not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive&#x2F;disincentive mechanism.People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that&#x27;s its still filled with fraud.

What&#x27;s the incentive for keeping these &quot;robust&quot; databases online, if not for making a lot of money by running scams?

IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions.
It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus.
Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the network very difficult to understand and build confidence in.
So I don&#x27;t see upgrading to faster consensus to be a small incremental improvement, it&#x27;s fundamental.A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are.
The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken.
At that point it seems like it&#x27;s better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.

What do you think about zcash? They seem to have solved the private transactions problem, have a better anonymity set than monero (and are accepted at exchanges) and are actively working on faster consensus.Disclaimer, I currently work at a zcash corp.

Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There&#x27;s no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can&#x27;t have far more efficient real-time payments. It&#x27;s already the case in most countries (UK &amp; EU).Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn&#x27;t be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn&#x27;t work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.

I&#x27;ll do you one better in your prediction : there will be a global decentralized 24&#x2F;7 multi assets marketplace built on something like Hedera in the next 10 years.

The only thing I could think to build on blockchain is electric utility metering &#x2F; settlements data, but I fear I&#x27;d be laughed out of the room at this point

It&#x27;s good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don&#x27;t see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the &quot;digital gold&quot; scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge.
The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility.
Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility.
Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It&#x27;s likely to be an Ethereum L2.That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers.
It&#x27;s just one use case that we don&#x27;t yet have the technology to properly address.
The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions.
These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before.
Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers.
It&#x27;s not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.If you&#x27;ve been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down.
Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn&#x27;t involve money.

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