All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?
But there’s a fairly active BTC derivatives market (depending on what passport you carry), so you could hedge against him getting/staying rich by getting a little creative with long-dated DOOM stuff.
Depends on how annoying he is I guess ;)
It's true that some people just FOMO into anything going up. But those types will end up losing all their "gains" in due time anyways.
that's what luck is - they didn't recognize the value, but speculated on the potential value when it originally was valueless.
It could've crashed and burned, and it was luck that it didn't.
It's like seeing a lotto ticket, and claiming that you recognized the value of it (after the ticket has been shown to be a winning one).
No, it’s nothing at all like that. The value of crypto was obvious very very early on. It was never going to crash and burn. Sure a black swan event could have wiped it out and still may. But based on what’s knowable, the value has been obvious since day 1 of bitcoin.
You're speaking about a subset of crypto traders that go right back to fiat.
You can transact at any store that accepts credit cards with a crypto credit card.
There are countless uses for blockchains now from DeFi, gaming, social networks, NFTs, entertainment streaming, DAO’s and decentralized governance, and on and on the list goes.
I recommend you catch up to 2022 crypto if you don’t already know that.
On the others: the crux of my argument was adoption and usage, with the implication that cryptocurrency was better for the usecase than traditional methods. Of course you can shoehorn a blockchain or “the chain” into any usecase, just like I can use C to write a frontend service, but it doesn’t make sense because C isn’t the best or even a good tool for the job. I can buy bananas and put them on the blockchain, doesn’t mean there is any reason to do so aside from pumping up any cryptocurrency holdings I might have, perhaps BananaCoin or BananaICO or Gorilla NFTs, which I just invented right now.
In the end your pithy comments aren’t going to convince me to start shoehorning blockchain into my day to day transactions — as much as I might long for a decentralized currency — and my fact-based analyses aren’t going to convince someone who has a financial or psychological interest in bitcoins or cryptocurrency or NFTs to abandon them. I suggest we just agree to disagree.
If they'd just outlaw proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, I'd shut up and you can continue gambling your proof-of-stake digital chuck-e-cheese tokens to your heart's content.
But you're wasting more power than Argentina to do it. So yes, I hate this garbage and want it to fail.
We could argue that Facebook and YouTube are only providing entertainment value. They don't do anything especially novel or provide critical infrastructure.
Rockets that deliver payloads into space are INCREDIBLY bad for the environment. But it provides critical services and infrastructure for now and the future.
Bitcoin provides a novel, decentralised, secure, electronic digital currency. It's being used for that purpose currently.
The FUD is unreal. We accept that certain use cases can persist and use tonnes of energy, but others we think is a crime against humanity.
Use of energy should not be a measure of shame on its own. What use case is it providing now and in the future for that energy usage?
The future will require a lot more energy for things we don't even know about yet. We need to ensure reliable renewable energy will provide for us now and in the future. We should not shut down new technologies just because it uses a lot of energy. When energy is cheap and clean and plentiful, we shouldn't worry about using it.
Nuclear Fusion reactor technology currently uses much more energy than it provides in output. But when that technology is viable it will help us to produce reliable and clean energy. Should we outlaw nuclear fusion because it uses shitloads of energy for no benefit (currently)?
Any engineer worthy of the title should be appalled by this inept and abusive design.
Bitcoin monetary policy is dead simple and sound. USD not so much.
I can’t think of any advantage to usd unless you consider having physical money an advantage (eg paper bills and coins)
[1] Except maybe Buddhists and the elderly.