Then they will ask why nobody wants to use their payment cards
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I honestly never understood how Lemmy, a privacy and decentralisation focused community, is so vehemently anti-crypto. It's worse than genAI. Every time it is mentioned, everyone goes "crypto is a scam". I don't think I've ever seen any good faith discussion around it, just "scam", "pyramid scheme", and "only criminals use it".
Let's get something out of the way immediately: shitcoins are a literal pyramid scheme and a scam. Anyone can make their own cryptocurrency in an evening, and anyone who throws money at them is either a fool or a gambler.
But I really don't understand what people mean when they say Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or Monero are a scam. Sure they can be used to scam you, just like Amazon gift cards can. Maybe it's about the price volatility, but the price of all 3 mentioned before is up on a day, week, month, 6 months, year, and 5 year scale. It's volatile, but is not a scam. If you bought and sold at two random points in time, it's more likely you made a profit than "got scammed".
You know what actually is a scam? Credit scores, overdraft fees, having to pay to check your balance, and so many other fucked up practices in the US banking system."Criminals use them" is just the worst fucking argument, especially in a space like this. Are PGP, VPNs and TOR for criminals too? Do you think getting rid of crypto would stop crime?
And yes, proof of work fucking sucks. The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is a problem. I am not a cryptobro who spends all his time making trades and is here to tell you that crypto is the salvation. They are far from being "good" for everyday use. I just wanted to point out how it seems that critical thought gets shut down at the sight of those 6 letters, and I hope someone can explain to me what they find so terrible about crypto (aside from environmental concerns and shitcoins)
You forgot shoes! Criminals use shoes, too! So everyone wearing shoes must be a criminal. Either that, or they were scammed into wearing shoes.
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Crypto is to peacocking men what MLMs is to american housemoms.
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Crypto remains a pyramid scheme masquerading as a resistance against tyranny
Ironically you know what ACTUALLY protects from powergrabs by payment processors? A fully centralised, government backed form of digital cash that is fully equivalent to paper money.
Ask a Brazilian about pix. Super low fees (often feeling non existant). And transactions can't be invalidated on the whims of a corporate board. For something to not be buyable by pix it has to be illegal, thus having to go through every layer of checks and balances a democracy has.
The problem with visa and their ilk is that finance has been privatised. Too much power in the hands of corporations that have deftly dodged regulation that would keep them neutral and honest. Thinking privatising things further and turning everyone into a fully unregulated petty digital landlord is gonna solve anything rather than make it worse is foolhardy.
As far as I know monero didn't really have that issue, of being a pyarmid scheme, while also being privacy-respecting way more than Bitcoin.
Which is also why it's starting to get banned in Europe. As far as I know, most brokers don't even sell it.
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Have you noticed that people who work in tech tend to be less excited about cool new flashy tech developments than the average person?
It's similar to how people who have worked in fast food aren't quite as keen on eating out than the average person.
Same as watching your co-worker who hasn't washed his hands after his last shit collect the pieces of a burger that dropped on the dirty floor to sell them to a customer isn't exactly appetizing, knowing what goes on behind the scenes with tech developments doesn't really get you on board for that either.
I think it's because we get excited super early, and by the time it goes mainstream we're tired of seeing it shoved into every place it doesn't belong
And it's probably still not being used for what we looked forward to about it
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The latest that drives me mad is the 1.5 surcharge they're putting on pay wave transactions now.
They pushed it free convenient etc etc and now charge extra for it regardless of debit or credit card
whaaaat? where is doing this? i haven’t seen it, and would ABSOLUTELY boycott the shit out of it
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It was far less valuable when it first started becoming trendy. 1 BTC for a pizza, or whatever. Now it's turned into a hyperinflation wheelbarrow kind of situation.
1 BTC for a pizza, or whatever
10 000 BTC for 1 pizza...
hyperinflation
Deflation . This is literally what happens to any volute that cannot be printed indefinitely. The situation is complicated by the fact that many wallets are simply lost and bitcoins will never be recovered from them.
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Ideally, no one controls it. It's just exists as a medium for exchange.
There are both good and bad points to currency have value that can be adjusted by gov'ts; crypto currency solves one set of problems, but has it's own, inherent issues.
You're not really selling it for me, which I guess is the point aye?
What I imagine as ideal is an open-source and transparent bank and payment system that issues its own currency backed by ties to its investment portfolio that is properly regulated by its host country. i.e. you would use their currency to trade among others on the platform according to the percentage value of their portfolio that you own as measured by the currency to which you which to convert your holdings for a given purchase. You could select different tiers of risk if you'd like your "savings" to grow in value over time but experience potential dips or even loss of value if there is major market stability.
I am not an expert on such things, but this at least has real links to tangible asset worth, and isn't based on the artificial scarcity of an increasingly unsolvable math problem.
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i do think they hold some value for things like bank to bank, where each party is kiiiiind of untrusted and unrelated (not on a public chain - it’s just a private consensus between collaborating parties)
it also undeniably provides payment outside of standard card networks and the finance sector (people have been using crypto to buy drugs for decades now), so can be used to circumvent things like this mastercard/visa morality police garbage… i think in that, it’d be useful to have a strongish cryptocurrency somewhere at least to be able to provide uncensorable competition (the alternative to that being some global EU network that everyone accepted in the same manner)
but i think the value in blockchain in general is minimally about currency: that was just the first implementation… it’s a distributed, trustworthy log between untrusted individual entities. the benefits of that are honestly pretty niche, but i think it does solve some valuable problems… just most people should never even know that blockchain was involved
Fair points, cheers.
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I honestly never understood how Lemmy, a privacy and decentralisation focused community, is so vehemently anti-crypto. It's worse than genAI. Every time it is mentioned, everyone goes "crypto is a scam". I don't think I've ever seen any good faith discussion around it, just "scam", "pyramid scheme", and "only criminals use it".
Let's get something out of the way immediately: shitcoins are a literal pyramid scheme and a scam. Anyone can make their own cryptocurrency in an evening, and anyone who throws money at them is either a fool or a gambler.
But I really don't understand what people mean when they say Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or Monero are a scam. Sure they can be used to scam you, just like Amazon gift cards can. Maybe it's about the price volatility, but the price of all 3 mentioned before is up on a day, week, month, 6 months, year, and 5 year scale. It's volatile, but is not a scam. If you bought and sold at two random points in time, it's more likely you made a profit than "got scammed".
You know what actually is a scam? Credit scores, overdraft fees, having to pay to check your balance, and so many other fucked up practices in the US banking system."Criminals use them" is just the worst fucking argument, especially in a space like this. Are PGP, VPNs and TOR for criminals too? Do you think getting rid of crypto would stop crime?
And yes, proof of work fucking sucks. The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is a problem. I am not a cryptobro who spends all his time making trades and is here to tell you that crypto is the salvation. They are far from being "good" for everyday use. I just wanted to point out how it seems that critical thought gets shut down at the sight of those 6 letters, and I hope someone can explain to me what they find so terrible about crypto (aside from environmental concerns and shitcoins)
Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme because it only keeps its value as long as people are constantly buying it. If no one wants to buy it, the value of any amount of bitcoin is zero. This is why people who have bitcoin are trying to convince anyone else to keep buying.
Your local government-backed currency does not have this problem, because you get paid with it, you pay taxes with it and vendors in your country have to accept it.
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Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme because it only keeps its value as long as people are constantly buying it. If no one wants to buy it, the value of any amount of bitcoin is zero. This is why people who have bitcoin are trying to convince anyone else to keep buying.
Your local government-backed currency does not have this problem, because you get paid with it, you pay taxes with it and vendors in your country have to accept it.
Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme because it only keeps its value as long as people are constantly buying it. If no one wants to buy it, the value of any amount of bitcoin is zero. This is why people who have bitcoin are trying to convince anyone else to keep buying.
any currency is initially a bank's promissory notes, and then a promise to exchange the paper for some kind of labor. As a person who has experienced at least one default in his life and whose entire toilet is covered with USSR money, I can say that in this regard, no currency is different from bitcoin.
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The main reason I don't care for bitcoin is I have to count a bunch zeros after the decimal point, before reaching a useful number.
$1 = 0.000006128921 btc? Really? Screw those zeroes. Bitcoin is inefficient in so many ways.Things are often measured in mBTC or µBTC for this exact reason.
Just as you don't measure the length of an ant in meters, you measure it in millimeters.
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The main reason I don't care for bitcoin is I have to count a bunch zeros after the decimal point, before reaching a useful number.
$1 = 0.000006128921 btc? Really? Screw those zeroes. Bitcoin is inefficient in so many ways.If you're paying for small good (25-50$) you usually pay in "Satoshis" 0.00000001 BTC. If you convert it to dollars, 10 satoshis is 1 cent.
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Why use them and not.. normal fiat currency?
- You're a criminal who wants to evade tracking by law enforcement
- You live in a country subject to sanctions and need to move a large sum of money transnationally
- You are the tinfoil-hat type who doesn't trust Government-issued money for one of many real or imagined reasons
- You want to make digital purchases while staying relatively anonymous
- You're a gambler who went all-in on crypto and are hoping it will increase in value later on
- You just think it's more fun to pay with futuristic magic Internet money (yes, some people actually do it for this reason)
- You are a business in a (the) country whose laws legally require the acceptance of Bitcoin
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I think it's because, at least in the case of bitcoin, it has no practical real world use other than hoarding like beanie babies, and therefore no real value. As a currency it's entirely useless.
I have a bit more sympathy for ETH, maybe someday DeFi will produce something truly useful enough to justify the money in crypto, but it hasn't so far.
This is really getting into the weeds of what you define "value" to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).
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Things are often measured in mBTC or µBTC for this exact reason.
Just as you don't measure the length of an ant in meters, you measure it in millimeters.
But you never see milliBTC or µBTC. Your post is literally the first time I see µBTC. No normal person knows how to type µ, let alone knowing what it means or how many eggs that buys. My crypto currency converter doesn't even use µBTC.
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If you're paying for small good (25-50$) you usually pay in "Satoshis" 0.00000001 BTC. If you convert it to dollars, 10 satoshis is 1 cent.
And twenty bucks to the Chinese miners as a “transaction free”.
Lightning network, taproot, all that shit, just paper over the fact that Bitcoin cannot, by design, handle enough transaction volume to become a general purpose currency without reinventing a lot of mostly centralized payment infrastructure.
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And twenty bucks to the Chinese miners as a “transaction free”.
Lightning network, taproot, all that shit, just paper over the fact that Bitcoin cannot, by design, handle enough transaction volume to become a general purpose currency without reinventing a lot of mostly centralized payment infrastructure.
Lightning is generally pretty stupid
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Credit card companies should be nonprofits under democratic control.
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This is really getting into the weeds of what you define "value" to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).
A banknote is accepted as a means of exchange, ie a currency in a way that bitcoin and other crypto coins are not and cannot ever be due to the fees and delays in the system, not to mention the absurd volatility or lack of liquidity in the smaller coins.
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Yes let’s definitely side with the scam that’s been around for two decades and its only practical use is to rug pull chumps yes this is good advice
