[danaos]

I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these abductions. Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society.

[onion2k]

Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society.

Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the original idea lost all its meaning so the well-meaning folk left.

[jazzyjackson]

Bitcoin was invented with a number go up mechanic, and the idea that a single Bitcoin would be immensely valuable were the currency to gain traction was a point of discussion from the start

Fact is it became popular with speculators faster than it did with anybody else, but the hodlers weren't doing anything to stop people from using it to buy pizza.

[Dlemo]

The flaws of crypto were clear very early on.

Major issues, still existing, were never solved

[Gigachad]

It only highlighted why all these laws and regulations exist in the first place.

[rchaud]

The early promise of crypto is not why Coinbase, Binance, Crypto etc have lots of highly paid, highly skilled employees today. They're there because of the money, the same way electrical engineering grads go to Wall Street in droves.

[Yizahi]

After MtGox the trajectory was pretty clear imo. And when Tethers emerged the whole pyramid was exposed for all to see. It's just pure gambling at this point.

[elevaet]

I had a similar experience, and also have zero regrets about missing out on gains. The baked-in energy wastage and the scams and memes were a complete turnoff. That's not the way I want to get rich. Similarly I wouldn't invest in an arms manufacturer or a plastic bag company. Money that doesn't align with your values is just bad mojo.

[dgrr19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet

[AndrewKemendo]

I had a similar experience and lost I think like one coin to mtgox - thinking nothing of it, it’s on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.

I think more crucially though is that crypto people just have absolutely zero understanding of the concept of money in a political sense.

Money is not real - it’s a social experience - and the fact is monetary sovereignty is by far the most important thing for any state to maintain.

If bitcoin or any other of the cryptocurrencies were actually useful, they would be immediately outlawed because they would subvert the control the state has over economics

Even if they didn’t or couldn’t make it illegal, they would make it dollar parity, and then tax it such that it just gets absorbed into the local financial system

Fully realized cryptocurrency would destabilize the entire economic system of intermediaries and that’s entirely the purpose of it - per the white paper

So anybody who has an undergraduate or masters degree in economics (me) or rather somebody who had a holistic view of economics in the political and monetary sense - immediately understood that there was a limit to how far this could go before state intervention

The reality is, it never actually took off as a medium of exchange - and so never challenged the domination of the US dollar or any other reserve currency. That itself has proof that it doesn’t actually have the social momentum necessary to do what it intended to do.

[rokkamokka]

I'm glad you've made peace with your financial loss. It is an important thing not to dwell on the past in order to be able to move forward, a lesson it took me long to internalize myself.

[razakel]

Hindsight is always 20/20. You mustn't judge your past decisions based on information you didn't have at the time. That way lies madness.

[tm-guimaraes]

Stablecoins are actually the future of remittances, the problem is which stablecoin is safe and has enough adoption. (When a big or central bank decides to have a stablecoin, things will change a lot)

I work in “traditional” (as in, non crypto) payment systems, and i can tell you that plenty of companies are looking into using cryto rails for complex remmitance routes.

The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. For these “small” banks it can be extremely hard to get better banking partners for better network (as in banking not IT) connection (multiple reasons, from price to available business partner, and company bandwith to go with the project)

Stable coins are much simper by comparison, you just need a wallet, and you ate a n a global network with automated settlement. Now whats lacking is standardizing how to send a message “ your crypto X received money from our crypto wallet Y, from our customer with acct number yyy, intended to your customer with acct number xxx”

Still some guys send iso message via swift to semd those intents and then settle via crypto.

This is a non existing problem for intra-eu payments due to all eu members being part of TARGET settlement system, and there are pan-EU clearing systems, but as soon as you get to more “disconnected “ countries, or “smaller” banks cross continent, it’s a pain.

[hiq]

> The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time.

But why is this complicated? Isn't it mostly about regulations / KYC / AML, rather than anything technical?

Stablecoins are much simpler because they don't do anything with respect to regulations, they're just a dumb ledger. For those who don't want to bypass regulations and the legal system, stablecoins bring as much as yet another database / ledger, which are not the problem in the first place.

[soco]

And there it is: the first valid use case for a coin I have ever heard! (nb: I'm not much into crypto, there may be more I have missed)

[dgrr19]

> Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society

Decentralization doesn't benefit society? umh...

[buran77]

"Decentralization" is a generic principle and a very selective choice in this case. What was the specific practical implementation that was so beneficial to society to this day?

Centralization is what enabled today's societies to thrive. So when talking about decentralization you have to get into the specifics to show the value.

[Yizahi]

Decentralization benefit society. Trust-less systems - don't. Trust-less systems lead to libertarianism and anarcho capitalism, both are just fancy words for feudalism. We all know how that works, there are even modern day re-enactment which all end up massive fraud and crime. I prefer semi-trusted democracy to the feudalism any time.

[dgrr19]

memecoins have nothing to do with BTC. Talk about the price was always a thing because BTC is a currency, thus price is key. The tech is good, or it was at the time. I don't see the case for money laundering in BTC, only one could be XMR and mixers in ETH. Apart from that, in general cryptocurrency is not good for laundering since the blockchain can be tracked.

[satanfirst]

Watching how it is working. That the laundering can be tracked is just an expense to the process of recruiting suckers to be the visible parties who eventually do time and don't know about anything but the other visible parties.

[mvdtnz]

> because BTC is a currency

The big narrative I keep hearing about bitcoin the past ~8 years is that it's no longer considered a currency even by the true believers.

[vkou]

> Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society.

To be fair, almost nothing that most techies work on benefits society.

[AaronAPU]

I often ask myself, if not crypto what other things would those same people be ruining?

[NoOn3]

If you think about it deeply, it's still not entirely clear who consumes more energy: the traditional banking sector and servicing of visa, mastercard, etc. cards, or cryptocurrency technologies. At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.

[aredox]

Except that the traditional banking sector does much more than cryptocurrencies do. Bitcoin still runs only around 5-7 transactions per seconds - several orders of magnitude less than Visa alone.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transactions-per-... https://crypto.com/en/university/blockchain-scalability

[Ekaros]

At least banking I believe if someone went out and said we could save 100 million on energy cost by spending 10 million. They would at least consider doing it, if it looked realistic enough.

On other hand efficiency for BTC mining does not matter. The energy expenditure always approaches the value of mined coins. When efficiency increase same energy is spend just to do more hashes, which are really not useful.

[matkoniecz]

> At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.

in total? or per transaction?

How many transaction BTC makes compared to Visa/Mastercard/bank transfers?