Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn’t even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone “brrrrr”.
I don’t trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they’ve found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we’re repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it’s not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn’t contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year’s past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you’re saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it’s really backed by death.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then… Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It’s one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether…
TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)
I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.
I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)
As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It’s a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine
This is actually 100% wrong, miners are not in control, they depend on the users of the network. This has been demonstrated during the block size conflict where miners tried to get their way and couldn’t.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I’d hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency’s price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they’re part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
He was in early on the pyramid so he’s just got to keep selling it as if all the next people are gonna be super rich so that the pyramid scheme keeps going.
I mean I get it. It was super successful and made so much fucking money for whales and people who did Tupperware parties real early but they are so committed to the idea now.
Who knew you could get a bunch of men to happily sell MLM products though as long as you used a bunch of tech jargon and made it seem like you are smart for getting it. I mean I guess anyone that knows men right?
Is it sexist because you aren’t a male shilling this and wrongly assumed your gender based on the stereotype or are you just pretending it’s sexist so you don’t get hurt by the realization that this really is just the MLM for the male gender who makes up a grand majority of the base?
And sure you consider it undervalued because people still aren’t in the pyramid scheme so it can go up if only wasn’t for all the pesky people agreeing this is a scheme that’s gonna burst and not wanting in.
A pyramid scheme only gains value if you can lure in more people. Bitcoin gains value even if the number of people is constant because the measuring stick you use, the USD, constantly shrinks through inflation. Happy to clear that up.
Yeah it’s called a “dead cat bounce”. Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I’ve been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
That’s not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out “despair” period after a crash.
What you’re seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The “despair” phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well…
Again, I’m not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you’re talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I’ve been through this before, I’m not worried about the despair phase but that’s not what’s coming next.
I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth.
Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
This is a loss for everyone. Fuck these clowns.
Bitcoin is currently at $57,000 and it’s up 144% in the last year. Haters gonna hate
Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
What is fiat backed by?
Militaries, usually.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
And the military is backed by fiat currency. It’s turtles all the way down!
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn’t even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone “brrrrr”.
I don’t trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they’ve found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we’re repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it’s not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn’t contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year’s past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you’re saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it’s really backed by death.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then… Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It’s one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether…
TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)
I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.
I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)
As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It’s a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
This is actually 100% wrong, miners are not in control, they depend on the users of the network. This has been demonstrated during the block size conflict where miners tried to get their way and couldn’t.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I’d hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency’s price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they’re part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
Surely this time it won’t crash and burn right?
You’re right
Yeah, it always crashes. So what, then I’m only up 10000%, not 20000%.
Haha, you guys really live in an alternative universe, don’t you?
He was in early on the pyramid so he’s just got to keep selling it as if all the next people are gonna be super rich so that the pyramid scheme keeps going.
I mean I get it. It was super successful and made so much fucking money for whales and people who did Tupperware parties real early but they are so committed to the idea now.
Who knew you could get a bunch of men to happily sell MLM products though as long as you used a bunch of tech jargon and made it seem like you are smart for getting it. I mean I guess anyone that knows men right?
I understood why bitcoin is valuable in 2013 and I know that it is still massively undervalued, people like you are the clear proof.
Lol, of course somebody like you is also a sexist.
Is it sexist because you aren’t a male shilling this and wrongly assumed your gender based on the stereotype or are you just pretending it’s sexist so you don’t get hurt by the realization that this really is just the MLM for the male gender who makes up a grand majority of the base?
And sure you consider it undervalued because people still aren’t in the pyramid scheme so it can go up if only wasn’t for all the pesky people agreeing this is a scheme that’s gonna burst and not wanting in.
A pyramid scheme only gains value if you can lure in more people. Bitcoin gains value even if the number of people is constant because the measuring stick you use, the USD, constantly shrinks through inflation. Happy to clear that up.
Not sure which point you’re trying to make.
The point I am trying to make is fully explained on this website:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
Yeah, you don’t even understand that Bitcoin isn’t web3.
Yeah it’s called a “dead cat bounce”. Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I’ve been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
I don’t know how much you know about bitcoin, but 7 years ago it was worth $1,100.
That’s not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out “despair” period after a crash.
What you’re seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The “despair” phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well…
Again, I’m not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you’re talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I’ve been through this before, I’m not worried about the despair phase but that’s not what’s coming next.
True, but keep in mind that the effect of each halving on price is smaller.
That makes sense, since each halving reduces the supply by a smaller amount. But it will still have an upward pressure on the price.
Make sure you keep your money in bitcoin so when it crashes we can all laugh at you. Again.
Right now I’m up over 400% on my bitcoin, it’s by far my best performing investment. Come back to this comment in 6 months and see where it’s at.
Oh I will.
popcorn.gif
Gonna try this out
@[email protected] 180 days
There’s a RemindMe bot on Lemmy?! Now I’ve gotta try this out.
@[email protected] 24 hours
@TheImpressiveX Here is your reminder!
@TheImpressiveX Ok, I will remind you on Wednesday Feb 28, 2024 at 1:39 PM PST.
@Gigan Ok, I will remind you on Sunday Aug 25, 2024 at 2:18 PM PDT.
I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth. Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
Yeah, and it’s easy to tell who are the bitter people who took a known gamble and lost. Gotta blame someone/something.
Sure, no problem, have been doing that since 2013.