Then bitcoin had its very first dip and it became unprofitable to mine bitcoins. When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins.

I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and considered it bullshit. Then when I saw what this guy did it just solidified my opinion that it can't be trusted.

That's not to say that in theory there aren't uses for it, but it's 100% speculative and nothing else. People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical.

If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold). a bitcoin has ZERO inherent value. It's not possible for the value of gold to go to zero, but it's absolutely possible for the value of a bitcoin to go to zero.

crypto will never go away, but it absolutely should.

I like cryptocurrency as an open platform. I don't have a problem with the market clearing out the speculative mania. I do disagree with detractors who admit that they have no use for cryptocurrency demanding regulation. If you like regulated markets, stick to them. If you love the security of the petrodollar, good on you. Live and let live.

Can I just publish a few cryptogames without the obscene generalizations?

The worst part of this is that the entire FTX debacle comes on the heels of SBF demanding even more regulatory capture. Shades of Bernie Madoff. The insider connections to regulatory bodies and SEC board members. History repeats itself.

On the other hand, if it had been heavily regulated from the get-go, there would be tremendous pressure to bail it out now, so maybe it's for the best that it wasn't regulated by the government.

It would have been nice if there was a countervailing force to the billionaire-savior cults promoting it, but unfortunately our media environment promotes those ideas rather than combat them.

That kind of shit gives the scams a legitimacy they can't buy otherwise.

HashCash was invented to make spam expensive and save email.

> Everyone was yelling at people to hold. Don't spend it, it will go to the moon!

No, most of us "in the community" were having fun buying pizzas with it. The vast majority of the people involved early started for the features it unlocked, we didn't foresee being able to ride it to riches like this because nobody could picture our families using it or putting money into it. We thought it would remain a protocol-level thing.

> And sure it keeps your money away from the spooky scary government.

Horses for courses. I like having some "untraceable" internet money for buying things overseas, like servers, etc. If I wanted to have posters put up in Moscow I could find and pay someone in BTC but not from USD.

> But I prefer my government insured bank account using a government managed currency and recourse for any scams/hacks that might happen to me.

Generally, yes. Modulo inflation, "haircuts", forced confiscation, looking suspicious because you have too much money, etc.

Some anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying.

I work at a large health care company. When crypto and blockchain was getting popular, there was a huge push in the company to adopt blockchain and to a degree, crypto. I'm talking hour long presentations by blockchain companies, videos, and trainings. It was heralded as the dawning age of technology where people can be treated and pay in crypto, while at the same time, all their medical files being securely stored on the blockchain. They pushed it as the next step in 100% digitizing health care.

3 months later? It was dropped. Not just dropped, either. It was silenced throughout the entire company. The sharepoint sites promoting it internally were gone, the videos, presentations, and trainings were all scrubbed from the company sites and resources, like it never existed.

I started asking around and found out the executives found out about several exchanges going under and taking millions of people's money and how blockchain was more of a solution in search of a problem. That combination became too toxic for them to invest and be associated with.

But that said, I feel something is fundamentally lacking in our education system that people were convinced to put money into this shithole because Matt Damon or Tom Brady or Giselle Bundchen said it was a good idea. I mean, I have sympathy but part of me is like "Stupid is as stupid does". When celebrities started hawking crypto, it was the definite equivalent of "shoe shine boy giving stock tips" to me.

While those companies are not operated as some sort of common carrier of transactions crypto is essential for a free global society.

Apparently Trump of all people actually tried to make it so[0], but Biden seems to have taken it down.

[0]: https://archive.is/wrpvO

There's a bigger paradigm here that I believe few people understand and that I will desperate attempt to explain. I may be about to write a word salad, but here's hoping.

When the Internet was young, before e-commerce was a thing, it was a delightful space where you could publicly post your e-mail address and never worry about the repercussions. If you ran a server and a hacker gained access, it was on you to improve your security.

Eventually, commerce found the Internet and everything changed. Once money was involved, bad actors started to get involved. This is when we started to experience the delights of e-mail spam, a problem we never really fully solved. And something changed about how we handle those hackers. Now that money is involved, if a hacker gains access to your system, instead of being responsible for your own server you can just call the police. And wow, did they crack down on hackers in the early days. They were bad at catching them, but when they did the punishments were disproportionate. It made things safe enough for commerce to grow, but it didn't make us nor the Internet much "better" in the long run. Rather, it put us in a rut.

Compare that with introduction of Bitcoin - which was money from the moment it was created. Because Bitcoin was about money since the beginning, it also attracted those bad actors from the beginning. However, the Bitcoin paradigm is different. Instead of being connected to the existing financial system, it's a self-contained Internet-native system where the responsibility of security is put (to some degree) in the user's hands. But we users are a bit lazy, especially after being hand-fed dumbed-down UX for decades. That makes us vulnerable because we trust instead of verify. But Bitcoin teaches us to learn, to understand, and hopefully to be more responsible.

I believe that Bitcoin and it's derivative technologies have created something akin to a bug zapper. It attracts bad actors like nothing ever has before. And the only viable retort is to improve technology and educate - the opposite of the traditional system where we give the state a monopoly on violence and then ask them to fix it for us.

If you look over the history of cryptocurrency, you'll see a history of rising and falling value and popularity tied to hacks, exploits, crimes, scams, etc. Often, the news declares the end of the entire enterprise. Yet, each time, the scene not only comes back - it comes back stronger.

What I see is greed and wealth attempting to exploit Bitcoin the way the traditional system gets exploited - but always failing in the long run. And with each failure, the wealth in play gets absorbed into Bitcoin. Meanwhile, we continue to harden and improve Bitcoin and the ecosystem around it. In my mind, it's like a worm that is slowly eating the world's wealth through an ongoing interaction with bad actors. I do not believe it can nor should be stopped.

So this idea that crypto is inherently a scam is the result of scammers being drawn to crypto. It's easy for the public to believe this. But Bitcoin and things like it are, in my opinion, the medicine we need to move through this and on to something else.

You think the "spooky scary government" is harmless? The US government has used its funds to kill over 20 million people since WWII without officially being at war. 90% of those killed in US drone strikes are bystanders.

Domestically, we see unrestrained corruption from nearly all of our elected officials leading to every outcome to its own citizens. Poisoned water supplies, missing disaster response, war. But as long as your bank account is insured, everything is cool?

Cryptocurrency was created for, and remains suitable for, valid uses that are not "drugs and other illegal stuff." But this is a new technology without guardrails. Bad actors are a problem. So is FUD from competition and disinformation like the parent.

This is a growing technology that requires a level of knowledge to safely use until it is mature enough for mass adoption.

If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it’s not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. Argentina is a stable democracy, far from being “a failed state,”† but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it’s basically impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is real estate (“ahorrar en ladrillos”), which of course grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone bought “as an investment”. Historically, Argentines have saved by buying dollars, but that’s limited to US$200 a month now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job (about a third of total employment is under the table):

<https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-cepo-...>

Something like 300,000 people out of a country of 40 million are legally permitted to buy dollars.

You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it’s AR$305. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 79% of their value to peso devaluation. In fact, whatever savings you had in pesos a week ago have lost 4%.

I’ve been using Bitcoin to get paid for several years at this point where I live here in Argentina. It’s currently 14 years after Bitcoin’s invention, and some people think it’s regressing instead of progressing. Well, 14 years after the internet’s invention was 01983; not only couldn’t you get so much as a weather report online, much less IRC, but many of the early interesting experiments like NLS at SRI had shut down, and more and more places were disabling guest access to their hosts—you couldn’t run so much as a game of ADVENT without getting a username. And a password. Things were seriously regressing. The only people you could talk to on the internet were other people who really bought into the subculture.

In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated, "government insured" bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years. The US did something similar in 01933. There was no recourse for this scam.

You might think alternatives to banks like credit unions would protect their customers better, since the customers are the owners, but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That’s more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500.

But we’re not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you’ll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a couple years ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland’s 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.)

Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina, 70% in El Salvador; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked:

<https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-...>

And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise!‡ It’s well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.

<https://archive.fo/ZRXzS>

Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. A few billion dollars a year might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it’s enough to keep several million people alive.

Even in the US, it’s common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can (“civil forfeiture”); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don’t seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.)

Transaction fees are usually high enough that you wouldn’t want to use Bitcoin to pay for a can of Red Bull or even a restaurant dinner. But it’s extremely practical as an alternative to Western Union or US$100 bills or gold; even when transaction fees are high, they're low compared to the black-market spread.

So, Bitcoin doesn’t have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like “instant and extremely low-fee ACHs” and “decentralized utopia”, this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon—the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn’t expect that in 15 years they’d be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later.

I think that, by providing workarounds to the people who need them, cryptocurrencies probably not only ameliorate the most immediate and pressing concerns of poor parts of the population like Venezuelan immigrants and MS-13 victims, but probably also adjust the power balance in a more liberal and democratic direction. This will improve the chance of those concerns being ameliorated by public policy over the next decades as well. But it’s hard to tell what will really happen.

Of course, when saving money or making a living becomes illegal, I guess they count as "buying illegal shit". But that doesn't make them bad.

The potential disaster scenario is that, by making most taxation impossible, cryptocurrencies destroy the modern welfare state without providing anything to replace it. So the public hospitals close, the enormous police force starts to support itself by extracting tribute, and the infrastructure decays. Pretty similar to what’s happened in the US over the last 50 years, in fact, only more so.

However, at this point I think the modern welfare state is already doing a good enough job of destroying itself without any significant help from cryptocurrencies—as evidence, I can point to Maduro, Macri, Bolsonaro, Trump, and Brexit, and metonymically to the social changes they betoken. So at this point I’m more worried about cushioning the collapse than preventing it.

____

† We’ve remained democratic since 01983, electing presidents from three different political parties (UCR, PJ, and PRO), and there’s no serious insurgency. It’s the economy and government policy that are ruinously unstable, to a point that seems satirical to anyone accustomed to the US, but is lamentably common worldwide. Rich people sometimes say they don’t know of legitimate uses of Bitcoin outside of “failed states”.

‡ Family remittances are specifically exempted from the US sanctions on Iran, but good luck finding a US bank that’s willing and able to take that risk: <https://www.wiggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/26580_advi...>

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.

A fool and his money…

This is an exercise in pure ideology, conveys no information, and presents the scam sales-pitch around crypto entirely verbatim.

It is that most common of trap that classical liberals fall into, defending private forces of unfreedom on the basis that they underpin the "free" market. What a bleak picture, and as a defender of free markets, a betray of that world view.

Freedom, as a contingent property of markets, is a careful and precious thing. It requires us to be on the guard against a variety of feudal forces, the pinnace of which could be nothing other than crypto.

Here, The Economist, on the basis of classical liberalism, advocates for a feudalist scam. It's quite saddening.

The 'risk' is that the developers don't successfully implement withdrawal or that the whole network goes down. Two, imho, huge risks and part of the reason I don't personally stake at this time. That said, eip-1559 and 'the merge' did happen, without much of a hitch at all, which are pretty major accomplishments. Confidence in the developers is a bit higher now as a result.

source: validator rewards section of https://ultrasound.money/

I don't disagree with the other points but... That one remains to be seen. Bitcoin was precisely created as a gigantic middle finger to the central bank's endless money printing to bail out the financial system. That's the message in the genesis block ("Chancellor on the brink of second bank bail out": it's as political as it gets). The early adopters, before the poker players (Bitcoin was used to facilitate players-to-players transfer on poker sites before Silkroad and drugs where I thing IIRC), were libertarians and anarchists fed up with the FED.

This hasn't changed, so far. There are only going to ever be 21 million Bitcoin. Ethereum, at the moment, is deflationary (more ETHs are burned than created through proof-of-stake).

You get, what, 5% on your USD: great. But real inflation is, say, 12%. So that's still 7% down.

There's a price at which people are going to enter BTC and Ethereum with the promise that it won't be inflated to death.

Many may not like it. "Inflation in the two digits, good!. Helicopter Ben: savior of the economy. Bank bail outs mutualizing losses: perfection by our beloved state!".

But there are still people out there who see the value in something that cannot be printed at will.

I'd say especially so when the FTX and Tether of this world, at times in bed with officials, are printing at will their worthless token and dumping them on retail with the blessing of the New York Times.

> There are still inflation worries in the economy.

Precisely.

I'm certainly not keeping all my life savings in cryptocurrencies. I was all in cash after the war in Ukraine started and I'm certainly enjoying the firesales on many stocks right now (Stanley, Makita, ASML, Intel, 3M and a shitload of stocks I handpicked are totally on sale: it was time to sale when everybody was yelling "TINA" and the war in Ukraine started and it's time to buy now that everybody is yelling "falling knifes, it may fall another 90%"... Yeah, sure. If all the companies I handpicked are falling 90% more, I'll load up the truck and retire in a fancy yacht in a few years).

But this entire USDT/FTX scam (with the blessing of the SEC and CFTC), these shitty tokens created out of SBF's farts (sorry but it's how it is) and these centralized exchanges makes me want to go bullish on BTC / ETH. I'm waiting for tether to go bust to go in bigger.

Many hate it here: BTC may not be worth much but "your keys your coins" and as long as it's not totally outlawed, nobody is going to prevent me from storing BTC (mo matter their value) on a hardware wallet.

And f--k fractional reserve banking, f--k bail-ins (Cyprus), f--k the vicious states stealing people's money (Spain, where banks offered crazy return rates to their customers then defaulted on the principal) and certainly f--k mutualized bank bailouts.

I have zero confidence in USD / EUR. I have zero confidence in banks. I believe in stocks and, yes, in BTC and ETH on my own hardware wallet.

From the same comic sansesk article you posted:

"Even though crypto-mining cracked down in China many miners have come out with several ways to continue the operations and escape detection. Twenty percent of the bitcoin network remains in China according to experts’ report."

Doesnt exactly seem like they have ended crypto if 20% of the bitcoin network remains there. It sounds like they cracked down on some and let others keep running.

China has banned a lot of things that continue to exist outside China. For example, gambling is officially banned in China. Yet we wouldn't predict the end of gambling worldwide as a result, since we don't think of gambling as being dependent on China. Is there reason to believe cryptocurrency is?

That $10,000 Avon "investment" by a teacher making $30k is similar to a $100,000 crypto "investment" by a tech bro making $300k.

We're getting there and you can already use our product at 50k+ stores in the US.

Even in this market, merchants are still interested. We launched new ones this week.

Comparing us to Visa or Paypal we are rinky dinky af, no denying that. But we are definitely growing.

Your lens of investment vs currency is also very US based. Consider countries that frequently experience huge rates of inflation. Non-fiat money can be valuable for them.

Which makes sense considering its volatility. Why would I make transactions with a unit of currency that sees hundreds of percentage change over just a few years?

And as others say, there is no real value to it other than speculation. This gets argued to death, but it's true. At least fiat has stability, and the USD is used to settle basically all energy (and most commodity) transactions. Do people actually expect the commodity market to be settled with crypto in the future?

Cryptocurrency payments is a flourishing market, btw.

Not surprising, considering the technology isn't there yet. Scalability (and thus fees) are still unsolved. UX has so much to improve as well.

It's advancing, but it takes time.

It is a speculative vehicle.

3D TVs AR glasses Luggage that follows you around phones with projectors built in Segway etc

Bitcoin absolutely needs exchanges. Sure, it's a self contained decentralized system that could keep churning along without needing anything but computation and the internet, but the day you can't exchange btc for fiat is the day bitcoin goes back to 2010, when it was a curiosity that isn't useful for much of anything. The only reason crypto is interesting to anyone except the most true of true believers is that you can exchange it for real money. What is the point of it without exchanges?

The last handful of True Believers can shuffle Bitcoin among themselves indefinitely, this is true. But does that have any more significance to the world than a multiplayer game someone creates for only them and their friends to play, handing game items back and forth among themselves?