[sennight]

> Crypto has become a very polarizing topic with people...

Certain people. I was involved from the beginning, and most of the OGs just shrug at the present day noise - the convert zeal being long exhausted by all the complaints about how PoW makes Mother Gaia cry. The people who have a crazy level of investment are the tech journalists that took very public positions badmouthing bitcoin. That is probably also true of anyone else who can't resist calculating how much their mistake cost them when they compared bitcoin to beanie babies at $150.

> ...which certainly needs to happen for it to have a future too, but governments...

Firing first in a duel, global economy style - that is why the foot dragging has been so protracted.

[kalleboo]

It's not quite the beginning but I bought Bitcoin anonymously using cash from Mt Gox in the rally up to $15 before it crashed back down to $5, and then ignored my wallet until it added many zeroes before I sold.

I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.

[sennight]

Huh, everything about what you said seems off to me.

How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires. I don't remember them ever having any kind of payment provider that would have accepted anything like pre-paid Visa cards, and in any case: by the time btc was at $15 - there was only one money transmitter (that wasn't a bank) allowing btc related transactions. I know this because I was debanked by two banks and had my paypal account suspended around that time.

How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept? Buying drugs on Silk Road? Because most of the early people came to it from reading the white paper after seeing it posted on the cipherpunk mailing list, or on a board discussing Austrian-economics/anarcho-capitalism... for those people it was a political act - not an investment (as you seem to view it).

[starttoaster]

> I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.

What, specifically, do you find dumb as shit? I don't want to come across as confrontational here, but it's difficult to gauge how much a person knows about blockchain, its uses, current pitfalls, and the technology's mission. And these conversations usually end up in one of two ways for me depending upon how much the person on the other end actually knows. Either they know next to nothing besides how to buy and sell it, in which case, the conversation almost always tends to lean into pointless vitriol; or they actually know a lot about the current crypto industry, see it for all its weaknesses and none of the potential, and are willing to have a civil conversation.

Frankly, like the other user, I'm in the boat of thinking that our current financial system is in desperate need of some kind of overhaul. Blockchain/crypto could be a part of that overhaul, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But it's clear to me that something needs to change.

Anyway, I'm just always curious about other people's thoughts. I'd say the majority of people I talk to on this topic though just jump straight to abusing the person that's pro-blockchain-as-a-concept without having substantial reason for disliking it besides:

1) it's a huge waste of the world's non-renewable energy resources, which is not necessarily true, it's mostly only true for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW, there are blockchains that require substantially fewer resources to be a player on the chain.

2) That crypto prices fluctuate too much when cashing back out to fiat. This argument seems short-sighted, because in a possibly ideal situation you would never need to liquidate to a fiat. In an possible future (for blockchain) you would be able to pay for your morning coffee at a PoS terminal using your crypto wallet directly and there's possibly a government system that lays out the purchasing power of a coin. I use the word "possibly" a lot here to point out that there are probably competing theories on ideal implementations of crypto as a general and worldwide currency.

3) That the transactions per second (TPS) that a blockchain can handle aren't comparable to systems like VISA. That seems true, for now. Blockchain is still very much in the early stages of development, culturally and technologically. Keep in mind, fiat currencies have been around for nearly a millennia. A technical solution to replace an ancient system needs engineering time and public adoption.

If you have other reasons for thinking blockchain/cryptocurrency is dumb as shit, I'm very interested. And genuinely, I'm not being sardonic or anything else when I say that.