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Hell no.
They're almost entirely scams. I don't support tricking people out of their money.
They also ruined crypto as an abbreviation for cryptography, and spam every cryptography-related discussion forum. Even the NIST post-quantum standardization list has been getting their spam.
Just a legal pump and dump and a great example of why we let the SEC regulate markets.
What about Monero? It seems to be the only one that gives a shit about anonymity and privacy.
Monero's ring signatures are an actually interesting bit of cryptography. And it does provide a real benefit (private transactions) that other payment systems don't. Of course that means it breaks all the anti-money-laundering laws to exchange money to/from Monero, but it's less of a joke than the rest. Still PoW though, so inherently destructive and not something I'll support.
It's destroying the environment with the way it works, so it's still an extremely shitty thing to promote.
Nope. Crypto is clearly a scam
No
I'm a fan. Go ahead and downvote me.
Unlikely. The hype for crypto scams had fallen off hard in the last year. It peaked like two years ago.
The technology has potential but right now it's mainly being used either to buy illicit goods or separate fools from money.
Lemmy is free to use. If you give money to an instance owner, at least you know it's a donation and that you'll never get it back.
God, I hope not. Crypto is an interesting technology that's been used to promote what's essentially a scam. Just ask yourself this: Are the people into crypto using it to buy things? Or are they going to sell it for dollars at a high value and then walk away?
Most are the latter. Very few people even bother setting up software wallets. They just keep their crypto on markets and try to sell high.
That means that for most people, it's not a currency at all, it's an investment. But a normal investment is backed by something of value, while crypto is just backed by pure speculation - that is, it's backed by all the other people who are trying to sell high, too. The name for a system where you get people to buy valueless assets and drive up their price so you can sell yours and leave others holding the bag is: "Ponzi scheme."
The name for a system where you get people to buy valueless assets and drive up their price so you can sell yours and leave others holding the bag is: "Ponzi scheme."
No, that's a Greater Fool scheme. A Ponzi is more centralized and the people who get paid out are not supposed to be aware that the money is coming from new investors. Ponzi schemes hide that aspect of it. In a Greater Fool you are betting on someone being dumber than yourself enough to buy your worthless investment at a higher price.
A lot of crypto is Greater Fool, but there have been crypto Ponzi schemes.
As a side note, there is a cultural tendency to call all scams Ponzis when they are not. It is a specific type of scam.
Huh. I was thinking of the whole scheme being centralized around a few core people who push crypto, but I think you're right. "Greater fool" is a better label for it. Thanks!
I appreciate the philosophy, resilience, resistance to censorship, and individual control that both types of decentralization provide.
Crypto has many scams only because it is intended to be traded or used as currency. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few others have held their value over time because of the network effect: more people use it to transact, so it maintains it's worth as a means of transaction. All those shit coins and alt coins were absolute scams because there was no way to use them (you can use Bitcoin to actually buy products and services).
Decentralized platforms that promote beans are also cool, but their currency is lulz. There's not much value for that outside the platform.
I've generally been seeing the opposite sentiment on Lemmy and I'm here for it. Crypto bros can stay on the other site.
The hivemind of Lemmy has been the opposite so far in my experience. I'm probably what most here would call a "crypto bro," though I wouldn't call myself that.
It's weird to me that the occupy wallstreet folks are all like "banks do it better." It's also weird to me that it's gotten so polarizing. You don't have to be a libertarian to see its benefits, and you don't have to be a communist to want scammers locked up.
I use Monero to pay for online services such as VPN, hosting, domains, VPS, E2EE cloud hosting, solely because I don't want to be on someone's list of customers and I don't want constant spam. Same reason I pay cash in stores and don't have loyalty cards. Might be very slightly more pricey that way but the reward for me is no marketing teams to deal with.
No? There's definitely some overlap but they're completely different concepts, just because I like Lemmy doesn't mean I enjoy unstable coins that use up a ton of energy for no reason and can lose their value by the end of the day
Lmao, this guy lightly flaming the crypto Bois in the fediverse.
I honestly see* more overlap with the open-source community than with the crypto community
See, that was my response too! Federated servers will waste a bit of energy with duplicate fetch requests, sure, but it’s a far cry from the decades of compute time wasted with adversarial validation and cryptographic mathematics. And that doesn’t even deal with the shitty coins themselves.
Was very confused why they seemed to think the concepts were the same, and thought maybe I was the idiot.
I think the person you were talking to had not really given as much thought into the subject.
Thinking about it too much makes them feel uncomfortable and less optimistic, so they avoid it and try to just focus on the many things they will buy when the value of their crypto coins inexplicably goes really high (which it might if a lot of money needs laundering, though I wonder if previous rounds worked out as well as they were hoping or if they got fucked by exchanges disappearing with their money in the night and decided to just go back to 3 mattress stores on one corner in various cities.
I've run into a couple of cryptobros on Lemmy, but not many.
Absolutely not. Hell my whole instance is vehemently anti crypto
Only reason I want to get into crypto is being able to donate to heroes like fitgirl
i’m generally anti-crypto. i’m not against it fully, i think it has a purpose but that purpose is not unstable, highly volatile investments, meme coins, or play-to-earn games.
What is the purpose then? To me it just seems like a solution looking for a problem, and that's not a good way to make solutions.
i suppose i should have said it could have had a purpose. i think it was initially conceived as a way to make private purchases, perhaps of things one might not want tracked back to them. for a simple example, i always pay cash when i visit a dispensary, even though many of them take cards now, because i don’t care for my bank to know that i am making that purchase. if i could pay with cryptocurrency at the dispensary, keeping that transaction more private, i would. but crypto has ceased to be a private currency, and turned into extremely volatile investments. who would want to make a purchase with crypto when it could skyrocket in value the next day and you’ve suddenly spent more than you thought, or the vendor has made less than they thought when the values plummet?
as it is now, it has no real purpose. it could have though. you are right that as it stands it is a solution looking for a problem.
right now it’s purpose is to tell me who i should avoid
Private? It's in a public ledger right, I think monero does some scrambling, but most crypto is a lot less private than paying in cash.
your comment is a moot point. i was saying that it could be private and while it is probably mostly associated with people trying to purchase illegal goods crypto tumblers are a thing so that is something that can anonymize your crypto. also, you can’t pay with cash online so there is a utility of something that can facilitate anonymity in transactions online.
