Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs.<p>NFTs aren&#x27;t money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn&#x27;t make them so.<p>I also don&#x27;t see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.<p>Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.<p>The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years &quot;normal&quot; (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.<p>The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won&#x27;t take an open source competitor lying down.

I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.<p>The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people&#x27;s life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.<p>I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.

I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy).<p>For example, authentication&#x2F;identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ipfs.io&#x2F;decentralizing-the-internet-s-root&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ipfs.io&#x2F;decentralizing-the-internet-s-root&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer<p>An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.

Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don&#x27;t even need a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm. If I am simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an adolescence of B and mature into A.

The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter.<p>Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won&#x27;t become a noble tradition.

Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who.<p>But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn&#x27;t actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:<p>1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.<p>2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren&#x27;t the ones in control of the money supply.<p>In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.

Selling a future that hasn&#x27;t happened is fine. If you saw the initial version of the internet or a cell phone you&#x27;d likely dismiss them.<p>Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws&#x2F;rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That&#x27;s the future of money and it&#x27;s exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.<p>The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.

The fomo is real tho.<p>Everyone imagines &quot;just imagine if I invested when BTC was &lt; $100 just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now.<p>And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze.<p>All &quot;doom and gloom&quot; has bounced off the market. I am still expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment.<p>It is insanely profitable.<p>Thats the fun part of all this :)

In absence of real economic growth winning at zero and negative sum games is the only realistic chance at making it in the broadly defined West. The ponzi trend is only going to grow until the whole system collapses under itself. People not playing the game are going to lose the most, as unfair as it is, because rich executives are going to exploit their positions and dump their bags on public companies they control. In more corrupt cases, countries instead of companies. It&#x27;s only going to grow.<p>Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook, twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize best ai&#x2F;ml in existence to steal people&#x27;s attention, at this point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best years on making ads even more effective instead of creating actual wealth.<p>In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without long term damage to real productivity.<p>This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates until there&#x27;s nothing left, after which everything stops with no system energy reserves. That&#x27;s how Soviet Union ended.

The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn&#x27;t use &quot;blockchain&quot;. &quot;Blockchain&quot; only works for money and nothing else

&gt; the insistence that cryptocurrency is a boon for all of humanity quickly collapses into the assertion that it will become one<p>This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board. Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn&#x27;t actually matter because it will be true <i>some day.</i> Social media is healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another thread: bitcoin isn&#x27;t bad for the environment (well, it could be better, therefore it&#x27;s fine).

New technology often goes through a phase of wild speculation, touting by liars, and impractical business models that people throw money because they are afraid of missing out. The bubble eventually pops. But people keep improving the tech and it becomes practical and eats the world.<p>First there was Railroad Mania <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Railway_Mania" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Railway_Mania</a><p>After the initial bubble, rail roads changed the world<p>First there was the dot-com bubble, and then internet changed the world.<p>Both sides can be right in this debate. Crypto can be a bubble and a scam and it can also change the world.

I won&#x27;t pretend I&#x27;m a computer genius or anything, but I feel like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at least, I&#x27;m the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by anyone I know.<p>The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can&#x27;t seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it&#x27;s functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.<p>If it&#x27;s not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn&#x27;t exist, right?<p>Basically what I&#x27;m saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call &quot;the economy&quot; is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!

The title is 100% true for much of the cryptocurrency sector, but the body of the article is a shameless bad-faith attempt to rationalize an extremely heavy handed government response that would criminalize entire classes of voluntary interactions between consenting adults, and turn the future of the internet into a much darker place with much more government repression.<p>Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited article. There isn&#x27;t an even an attempt by the author to give the subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators, but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article unconscionable.

I was thinking like the headline until I witnessed that a government seized assets of thousands and left them pennyless in a very short time. After coup attempt in Turkey, 1.5 million people are investigated with accusation of being a member of armed terrorist organization (population of Turkey is ~80 million). Lots of people who could run away found their assets were frozen, and eventually legally or illegally seized. All of a sudden they were poor. Were they kept some of their assets in Bitcoin, they could easily move them out of the country. Yes, the state can still go after them but it becomes much more difficult. This alone is sufficient for me to &quot;invest&quot; a percentage of my assets in Bitcoin in case something bad happens. Yes, it is unlikely but anything that makes a state stronger bully should be done.

&gt; The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening.<p>There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn&#x27;t been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.

I think NFTs are really dumb, a scam, and&#x2F;or vectors for money laundering. Then again, I think the same thing about multimillion dollar private artwork and politicians&#x27; &quot;nonprofits&quot;.<p>I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.<p>But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They&#x27;re working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It&#x27;s tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.<p>Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they&#x27;re somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;SRr5X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;SRr5X</a>

How long before Amazon starts paying their workers in a BezosBucks cryptocurrency that can only be redeemed at the Amazon company store? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacobinmag.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;amazon-warehouse-communities-towns-geography-warehouse-fulfillment-jfk8-cajon-inland-empire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacobinmag.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;amazon-warehouse-communities-...</a>

One thing funny about cryptocurrency is that it&#x27;s built for highly technical group of audience. But in my peers, a majority of people who get benefit from it are non-tech user.<p>Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn&#x27;t a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow?<p>Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don&#x27;t buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff.<p>Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)...<p>all of that made crypto looks really bad.<p>But now let&#x27;s see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It&#x27;s a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it&#x27;s what you write into it.<p>Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.<p>But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn&#x27;t have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...

ICANN isn&#x27;t perfect (not even close, lol) - but I wish a consortium of countries would just create their own crypto. Unfortunately this would probably devolve to what we currently have with individual fiat.<p>Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed &quot;crypto&quot;? I don&#x27;t mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN&#x2F;gift-cards&#x2F;points globally distributed sense.

Cryptocurrency was a broken concept from the very start. It assumed that you can build a financial system by engineering &quot;trust&quot; in purely technical terms.<p>Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that the &quot;system&quot; is not ripping them off there is no amount of cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you.<p>The very anonymity of the bitcoin founder(s?) shows this was never an honest-to-goodness project. Its not surprising then that crypto never solved any real economic problem. As in: making any economy a tiny bit healthier, more resilient, less unequal. Not a single one.<p>But had it stayed a failed financial reform project would have been one thing. It is heartbreaking to witness the amount of fraud, waste of resources and manipulation it unleashed. Its ongoing amoral adoption by the formal financial system as &quot;yet another asset class offering diversification to our customers&quot; is a fitting closure.<p>The chicken came home to roost.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with all these scams like NFTs and &quot;internet computers&quot; like Ethereum, which are pushed by tech gurus, influencers and marketers. It&#x27;s time to stop conflating these under the same umbrella. Bitcoiners are not the same people who push these useless things.

If you think about crypto as a MMOG, people’s behaviors start to make a lot more sense.

Thanks for posting that. I hadn’t seen Jack’s pro-Bitcoin tweet, and seeing it here allowed me to like and share it.<p>This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.

Here&#x27;s your seemingly month reminder that there is only one cryptocurrency. Bitcoin.<p>NFTs are epitome of tulip mania. Bitcoin, while it does increase in value due to low supply, is the only secure and actually fair escape hatch to the global monetary system and holds value globally. Proof of Stake, and every single coin below Bitcoin, copied from Bitcoin, are similar to fiat and centralized. Ethereum is the worst of the bunch and is scamming millions.

Off topic. Did anyone else&#x27;s AI generated text radar go off on this article? Seems like too many fancy words.<p>I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate content.

More like deflector.com.<p>I&#x27;m not going to claim that cryptocurrency is going to change the world for the better, but this is an article almost entirely composed of straw men. Whether you like cryptocurrency or not, if you understand it at all and have actually heard the evangelists&#x27; arguments and understood them almost every single point made in this article doesn&#x27;t really apply.

Not going to say that no one lies about it but I had to transfer a sizable amount of money between two banks at about the same time I did a transaction from my home with BTC that took all but 20 minutes without the need for fax machines.<p>There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much want a future where currencies they would use isn&#x27;t hampered by government.

It’s pretty clear from the article that the author thinks markets are intrinsically bad, most entrepreneurs and founders are generally bad, and that economic activity is generally better coordinated and controlled by the state. And it’s pretty clear from the upvotes and comments that many here agree with this viewpoint.<p>And that’s fine. That’s a completely defensible world view, that many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?

We are currently transitioning from the part where they laugh at you, to the part where they fight you.

I think you can sub in the word Money or Currency in this headline and it would still ring true or perhaps even more true

&gt; Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet...<p>Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the FUD.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin is vulnerable to cracking by quantum computers some time in the next couple decades.

Q4 is set to be an amazing crypto run because all I see is lots of last minute FUD right now on all media channels, and of course from China. The OG FUD source has blown its final wad and banned all crypto “for real this time.” Let’s hope the USA isn’t as backwards thinking and sees that banning crypto is removing yourself from the new world economy.

Not necessarily, but to be honest I haven&#x27;t seen a single cryptocurrency that made sense so far.<p>I wrote about how misleading the crypto ecosystem is a while ago here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;henvic.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;henvic.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;</a>

This is as boring and ignorant an article as I&#x27;ve seen in 10 years of participating in blockchain. Please, if you&#x27;re going to hate on bitcoin, try to bring something new or interesting to the convo.

If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning acceptance of government officials, you get this article.<p>If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the space, they could read something with real data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nydig.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;NYDIG-Bitcoin-Net-Zero.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nydig.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...</a>

What this article does is let me take a mental not to take anything too seriously from this source that pops up in the future.

Regarding an interesting counter-example to blockchain hype, check out Omnichains:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omnichains.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omnichains.com&#x2F;</a><p>They initially argued that they could provide an unrivaled form of transparency because they kept all the data on the blockchain. But now I&#x27;m working for a customer of their&#x27;s, and I realize there is no blockchain. I believe they now run a standard service backed up by a standard SQL database.<p>But look at their marketing:<p>&quot;<i>Omnichain has earned the prestigious recognition for its innovative solution that is helping brands and retailers create more transparent, connected supply chains and drive intelligent process automation.</i>&quot;<p>Or check out this blog post:<p>&quot;<i>Lack of visibility is not a new problem. Supply chains have long dealt with fragmented management systems and data siloes—barriers that limit transparency, efficiency, and collaboration between stakeholders. The pandemic only magnified these challenges.</i><p><i>...Moving forward, end-to-end visibility solutions—made possible by technologies like blockchain—will be instrumental in helping businesses proactively identify risks and pivot accordingly. So going back to suppliers, manufacturers can use blockchain to connect and share data with their suppliers. With accurate, real-time visibility into available resources upstream, they can quickly identify alternate sources if needed, and ultimately prevent costly production delays.</i>&quot;<p>I have the impression this company started off hoping to use the blockchain to create a more transparent supply chain. I also have the impression they have pivoted away from that vision.<p>And that&#x27;s fine, of course. I&#x27;m not criticizing them. A startup starts with one hypothesis, tests it, and then pivots when that first hypothesis fails. This is good management.<p>But I think, in a small way, it indicates what is happening with those startups that got started when blockchain hype was at its peak. Two or three years ago you could get money from investors by promising to revolutionize an industry by using the blockchain. And now it&#x27;s turning out that the blockchain is less useful than was supposed for creating new kinds of transparency.<p>As it turns out, supply chain transparency is limited by each companies unwillingness to share it weaknesses, it&#x27;s lack of cash flow, it&#x27;s lack of inventory, and it&#x27;s slow shipping times. Blockchain can not fix any of those things.<p>And as I&#x27;ve said elsewhere, with these industrial applications of blockchain, I&#x27;ve yet to see a service that could not have been done more easily with a standard framework (Ruby On Rails or Django or Symfony or NodeJS) sitting in front of a standard SQL database.<p>A final point: this is my first time working on a big retail&#x2F;warehouse project, and I am absolutely shocked at the primitive technology that is currently in use. Most of these companies lack APIs, which, in the year 2021, I find shocking. For our warehouse, for instance, there is no way to do an API call to find how much of a particular item is still in inventory. And this clearly limits how much the blockchain is able to change anything.<p>And this is especially wild: I&#x27;ve spoken to the good folks at Omnichains, and they tell me that they do not have an API. Rather, they can send us a CSV file at regular times, but that is it. In the year 2021!<p>Just amazing.