Then they will ask why nobody wants to use their payment cards
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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
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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
Bitcoin is a lot of things, it's not a scam. Some cryptocoins aren't scams either or didn't start as one.
A lot of crypto coins are scams
Bitcoin and any blockchain based payment system is not a viable alternative to payment processors at world scale. Unless power requirements per transaction go down literally exponentially, it will never be.
Having said all that: Bitcoin does work on the current limited scale, it works better and easier and faster han all payment processors, and most importantly: Bitcoin isn't a giant dick wanting to insert itself into every orifice of your body
Fuck Visa, fuck MasterCard, fuck American Express, fuck all of them you fucking psychopathic narcissistic assholes
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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.
Crypto is also accepted as a means of exchange. There are plenty of merchants willing to accept it as payment, but they are just not geographically concentrated in one location like banknote-accepters are. With a banknote, you have a very high concentration of merchants who will accept that as a means of payment in one geographic area (i.e. the country or region whose central bank issued that banknote), while it is not accepted anywhere else. With most cryptocurrencies, they will be acceptable worldwide, but the concentration of people willing to take it in any given geographic area is low.
It is important to note that you can't take properties of the smaller coins (the ones which you are probably thinking of are derisively referred to as "shitcoins" and most are deserving of that epithet) and apply them to every cryptocurrency. Just like you can't use properties of the Zimbabwean dollar to smear all fiat currencies in general.
Bitcoin transactions on its Lightning Network are typically instantaneous, and fees are lower than most credit cards (usually on the order of 0.1%). An on-chain Bitcoin transaction currently has a fee of about 1 USD, which would make it competitive to credit cards for transactions greater than 40 USD. Bitcoin fees, despite being notorious for being the highest among all cryptos, are actually very competitive with most traditional payment methods. This transaction from the most recent block at the time of writing paid about 117 USD to move over 411 BTC worth 48.5 million USD. That means they paid about 0.00024% in fees and this is the highest-fee transaction in this block (meaning they paid the highest fee rate of any transaction in this block). The going rate for this block was actually much lower; whoever sent this transaction overpaid by about 50 times.
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If you do not know a lot about "crypto" then I would say the main thing to understand is that there is Bitcoin (not owned by any single entity) and then there is everything else. Other "coins" are owned by corporations that can make decisions about it and change it to some extent. These are extremely risky.
Bitcoin (btc) does have risk but much less. It is not owned by any company or person or country. It is like the internet, only exists because tens of thousands of internet providers(miners for Bitcoin) around the world make it possible. Bitcoin has, in its codebase, a limitation that any change must be agreed upon by 95% of these providers(miners). This way security patches and bug fixes can be added because everyone agrees those are good. Other harmful changes would never reach 95% agreement therefor could never be implemented. There is a limit of 21 million Bitcoin and this number can never increase unless 95% agree to it... which they never would. This is in stark contrast to normal money which is constantly printed(at random rates depending on who happens to be in control at that moment) so that the supply increases making its value drop.
Scamming happens with cryptos, Bitcoin, euros, dollars,yuan... and always will.
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Stronger argument is that deflationary currency is not something someone with an investment mind wants to spend. Which is why there is the same price fixation and attempts to hype up crypto like stocks because most people got into it not to spend it, but hold onto it like an asset. Its why people encourage rebuying crypto if you use it to buy something to replenish their balance to not regret having wasted what could be a house to get a slice of pizza.
Now sure there are stable coins but that is more used by investors to move assets around exchanges to then go and buy other crypto that they believe will return a profit or move into when they believe a dip is occuring so they can reenter later to expand their assests by buying low. Pretty much most crypto communities are highly fixated on price as opposed to treating it like currency that should be spent. It's always this is the next big thing, it is going to moon, hodl, etc.
So I guess point is as much as people like to act like they are anticapitalist the culture of crypto once prices started going up is pursuit of capitalism and wealth hording. The values people claim to have was most present when crypto was new and people were giving it away, having fun spending it, and transacting it. But, then greed took over as people saw people becoming millionaires and billionaires for holding what they got early.
It's ironic looking at it now given the state of dogecoin but that maintained the original spirit of crypto for a really long time before it too skyrocketed in price and got pulled into the same asset category.
You speak of Gresham's Law, which is "bad money beats good money". For payments, people would rather part with an inflationary asset than deflarionary because of future value. Definitely the thing that has settled the argument over Bitcoin's primary use case.
Agreed re: the faux anticapitalism. I mean, ideologically I think of myself as anticapitalist. But I have to afford things to not be destitute within this economic regime, so I "play the game". But I wouldn't delude myself into thinking that advocating for one sort of money over another is in any way a stance against capitalism. In most cases it isn't even a stance against status quo.
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Bitcoin is its own worst enemy. It's deflationary, speculative, and largely interacted with by centralized entities. Those things means its unlikely to be successful as an actual currency; even one it hopes to be.
It's been surpassed by new blockchains in all dimensions except market cap
