Is investing in Crypto just a get rich quick scheme?

[tsuki]

@Lyubov These are valid points. Here are my thoughts about it:

25 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

1) Inaccessibility - It's accepted almost nowhere. You can't use bitcoin to buy groceries or really anything. I'm going to speak like an absolutist in this post so be prepared. Don't tell me how some food truck in the Bay area accepts it. It isn't remotely an avenue for expenditures in any practical sense. On top of that the entire process of buying bitcoin is unusual and unfeasible for the conventional usage of a currency.

I think that this is the biggest reason for volatility. I agree that this is a big issue with crypto and this is why I said few posts back that the technology that will allow for widespread adoption is probably 20 years from now. The biggest obstacle is scalability, slow confirmation times, as well as difficulty of use. All of these points are solvable given enough time.

25 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

2) ZERO intrinsic value - It only has value because people think they can buy it and others will later as well at a higher price thus making some money off of it. It is backed by literally nothing. Again, don't even try to compare this to a fiat currency backed by society and entire governments. Such a low quality false equivalency. I'm not going to even bother explaining why here. This leads to my 3rd point

While this is true for the big daddy BTC, not much so in the case of ETH. Ethereum is a decentralized computing platform where you run your software. It has an internal market because you pay in ETH for execution of smart contracts that give interesting technological opportunities for developers. its biggest advantage is that software that runs on etherum blockchain is trustless. There is no centralized authority that can cheat and control the outcome of events. This is why I think that ETH is much more valuable than BTC, not because of its value as money itself (the first point, inaccessibility), but because of how you can use it. I like the analogy someone posted here that if BTC is looked at as gold, ETH is like oil.

25 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

On top of that these cryptocurrency companies don't have remotely any sort of foundation of trust from the public.

What companies, exactly? Most cryptocurrencies are open source. You mean crypto exchanges?

25 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

You know how much earnings for other cryptocurrencies is based off stolen money for their initial offerings? A fuck ton. Bitcoin literally only became a thing originally because people needed an anonymous way to pay for drugs online. 

There are cryptocurrency services that trace transactions and rate the money on each BTC address by whether it came from drug dealing, hacks, and other illegal activities. These coins are basically gone from the general circulation because no exchange will accept them for trading. 

Privacy in most cryptocurrencies is held by obfuscating the relationship between a wallet and a specific person. But the transaction graph is publicly available and it is relatively easy to trace each coin from generation to its current address of ownership. There are of course some cryptos that are even more obfuscated, like the ones based on mimblewimble protocol, but they are not nearly as widespread as the BTC-like ones.

Edited January 15, 2021 by tsuki

[Leo Gura]

The biggest threat to BitCoin is some other, newer, better crypto coin -- which could render BitCoin worthless.

There is no guarantee at all that the world will settle on BitCoin as the crypto standard of choice. And that is what you're gambling on when you "invest" in BitCoin.

The devil is all in the details.

[tsuki]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The biggest threat to BitCoin is some other, newer, better crypto coin -- which could render BitCoin worthless.

This is true, but I don't think it's much of a threat for now.

This is not going to happen overnight. There is a plethora of altcoins that try to solve specific problems that bother BTC by changing the parameters within the BTC protocol. For example, Dash is an altcoin that tries to solve responsiveness problem by speeding up the block creation rate. The problem is that each variation of parameter introduces a downside. This is why most altcoins running on the BTC protocol are roughly equivalent in terms of value even if they rate differently. BTC is much higher with respect to USD than DASH, but they are basically the same technology.

Then, we have different protocols such as BTC and ETH and we can already see that it's not like people switched overnight to ETH when it was introduced. Hell, even ETH is being improved upon by the likes of Solana, and Solana is practically worthless atm. There is a long period of adoption between the technology is introduced and it is trusted by the users, especially when money is at stake. So the transition should be visible miles ahead if such were to happen. Not to mention that BTC is being updated too, so it's not like they are blind to this possibility. For example, ETH is transitioning to ETH2, which will introduce major protocol changes that are backward-compatible only to some extent. But it was designed so that ETH1 will be recognized in ETH2 blockchain.

The game is not to have an absolute store of value, but to appraise the value of upcoming technology correctly. Also, it should be noted that the problem of implementation of digital money may have a stable solution that cannot be improved upon. ETH is mostly different from BTC in that it is a computing platform, but it is not a better currency in of itself. It actually lacks some of the features of BTC that make AML issues more involved.

[Leo Gura]

16 minutes ago, tsuki said:

So the transition should be visible miles ahead if such were to happen.

Once it's visible to you, it will be visible to everybody, and the price of BitCoin will crash immediately.

Digital currency is such a brand new thing that likely none of the current technologies will be the final form of it. They all have terrible downsides. I foresee a new future coin that solves all the tech problems and downsides. It must be fast, private, stable, secure, un-fuck-with-able, usable as easily as a debit card, etc.

[tsuki]

25 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Once it's visible to you, it will be visible to everybody, and the price of BitCoin will crash immediately.

Not when most crypto investors base their predictions upon news digest headlines .
If you understand the technology on the protocol, or implementation level, then you are miles ahead of the crowd. Not to mention that most people don't even understand the differences between coins too well. If you want to make big money off technology, you have to invest time into understanding it. Most investors don't. This is how salespeople steal their money, they pitch crypto/stocks/etc as risk free investment, and there is no such thing. This can easily turn into full time job if you wanted to.

25 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Digital currency is such a brand new thing that likely none of the current technologies will be the final form of it.

I definitely agree. I can see how the current technology is problematic. This is not even specific to crypto, I can see how fiat money is problematic and someone came up with the idea how to upgrade it . In the relative world, there are no absolute solutions.

25 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I foresee a new future coin that solves all the tech problems and downsides. It must be fast, private, stable, secure, un-fuck-with-able, etc.

With technology, the "what" is not as much of an issue as "how". With crypto, it is pretty fucking difficult to understand mathematics behind this that solve the issues we're facing right now. This is one of the downsides of it.

For example if someone solved the scalability problem reliably, then it would be the crypto of the future, regardless of its current market price. Not to mention the cryptography doomsday that will come when quantum computers are ready to use.

Edited January 15, 2021 by tsuki

[LfcCharlie4]

@Leo Gura l agree with this, except BTC won’t just crash, as most people involved in Crypto already know this, and know BTC isn’t a one size fits all solution. 
 

It will just be what backs digital currency, as I keep saying the Gold.  

[mmKay]

Imo crypto is in the dark ages. I was buying some nootroopics online and they discount you money if you pay with crypto. 

I had 0 clue about it, so I spent like 4 hours learning basic information just for me not being able to purchase, fees and payment complications, sketchy sites, irl documentation, etc. 

Im not the smartest tech guy buy i dont see a boomer learning to manage this. So maybe in the future it will be polished up. 

[Leo Gura]

9 minutes ago, mmKay said:

I had 0 clue about it, so I spent like 4 hours learning basic information just for me not being able to purchase, fees and payment complications, sketchy sites, irl documentation, etc. 

Im not the smartest tech guy buy i dont see a boomer learning to manage this. So maybe in the future it will be polished up.

BitCoin is like what the internet was back in 1994.

You kids these days don't even know what the internet used to be like. Why, back in my day, we had to wait a minute just to get a porn jpeg to load.

[RoerAmit]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

BitCoin is like what the internet was back in 1994.

 

It's "Bit"c"oin" ahahahaahh stop write with "C" AHAHAHAHAHAHA

My ego couldn't hold it anymore.

And yeah Leo I like your visionary worldview about things.

For sure in a decade we will have 100 times better coin.

[RoerAmit]

3 minutes ago, neutralempty said:

??..

I mean he just wrote it wrong.. 

It's "Bitcoin"

[GroovyGuru]

4 hours ago, tsuki said:

 

Privacy in most cryptocurrencies is held by obfuscating the relationship between a wallet and a specific person. But the transaction graph is publicly available and it is relatively easy to trace each coin from generation to its current address of ownership.

I don’t understand. Which is it? I thought ownership was supposed to be anonymous. This is the headline I woke up to this morning

[Lyubov]

4 hours ago, tsuki said:

@Lyubov These are valid points. Here are my thoughts about it:

I think that this is the biggest reason for volatility. I agree that this is a big issue with crypto and this is why I said few posts back that the technology that will allow for widespread adoption is probably 20 years from now. The biggest obstacle is scalability, slow confirmation times, as well as difficulty of use. All of these points are solvable given enough time.

While this is true for the big daddy BTC, not much so in the case of ETH. Ethereum is a decentralized computing platform where you run your software. It has an internal market because you pay in ETH for execution of smart contracts that give interesting technological opportunities for developers. its biggest advantage is that software that runs on etherum blockchain is trustless. There is no centralized authority that can cheat and control the outcome of events. This is why I think that ETH is much more valuable than BTC, not because of its value as money itself (the first point, inaccessibility), but because of how you can use it. I like the analogy someone posted here that if BTC is looked at as gold, ETH is like oil.

What companies, exactly? Most cryptocurrencies are open source. You mean crypto exchanges?

There are cryptocurrency services that trace transactions and rate the money on each BTC address by whether it came from drug dealing, hacks, and other illegal activities. These coins are basically gone from the general circulation because no exchange will accept them for trading. 

Privacy in most cryptocurrencies is held by obfuscating the relationship between a wallet and a specific person. But the transaction graph is publicly available and it is relatively easy to trace each coin from generation to its current address of ownership. There are of course some cryptos that are even more obfuscated, like the ones based on mimblewimble protocol, but they are not nearly as widespread as the BTC-like ones.

Some interesting thoughts you bring to the conversation. 

I want to clarify that I am not talking about the potential of crypto currency in the future or any sort of decentralized variants. I'm talking about BTC specifically and the current state of where this technology currently is. 

I have never heard of ETH. I'm still not entirely sure what is backing it though that gives it legitimate value. I also went to the wiki page to learn more about it and in the first section they say there was $50 million worth of it stolen or something? Stuff like this will make it very hard to earn over the public' trust in using these types of currencies. 

Yes, I meant crypto exchanging platforms.

I am hesitant to believe how effective these crypto trackers are at screening for coins used on the black market or how effective they are or what work arounds there are. I need to read up on this more. Darknet drug markets only continue to grow and BTC is still their preferred method of payment so it doesn't compare to a securities and exchange commission or the secret service looking into counterfeit money.

Edited January 15, 2021 by Lyubov

[tsuki]

@GroovyGuru The most personal information that the blockchain holds is the address of your coins. Roughly speaking, address is generated from the public key that can be used to validate whether you can move these coins to another address. You, as a person, hold the private key and it is never registered on the blockchain. Everybody that have your private key, can move your coins.

The blockchain itself, is a sequence of transactions, each either moving the coins from one address to another address, or awarding you coins for creating blocks (mining). There is no way to tell who owns coins on a specific address, unless the private key has been found on their computer, or they disclosed the information themselves.

So, by observing the movement of the coins through the blockchain, you can know whether coins are "dirty" by knowing that they passed through specific addresses that are known to hold money for illegitimate purposes. For example, if SilkRoad wallets are known, then all coins that come out of that place are considered fraudulent. Another example would be busting drug cartel hard drives and finding private keys with massive amounts of BTC. Looking back at the transaction history in the blockchain, you can reason about addresses that took part in the transactions.

This is not so simple in general, because rating services offer percentage of safety, so there is some leeway in interpretation, but it is possible to know whether coins are safe.

There are even more obfuscated blockchains out there, mimblewimble protocol being the basis of them. The mathematics are more involved, but thanks to this implementation, it is not even possible to decipher the transaction graph, or even how much coins were transfered. The only thing that is possible to validate is whether coins were not created out of thin air. The only legitimate way of creating coins is by mining.

Edited January 15, 2021 by tsuki

[tsuki]

34 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

I have never heard of ETH. I'm still not entirely sure what is backing it though that gives it legitimate value. I also went to the wiki page to learn more about it and in the first section they say there was $50 million worth of it stolen or something? Stuff like this will make it very hard to earn over the public' trust in using these types of currencies. 

@tsuki Ethereum is unique in that instead of simply transferring money between accounts, you can also deploy code that users can interact with. This code can, for example, send money held by the contract. This gives the potential to create contracts between parties, some of which give rise to an analog of digital companies that sell their shares for ethereum. The hack you are talking about regarded such a company. The code that was deployed on the Ethereum blockchain was faulty and a hacker used its vulnerability to steal some of the money that was deposited by shareholders. it is important to note that this was not a bug of the Ethereum itself, but rather in third-party software that Ethereum was running.

Since it happened in early days of Ethereum and it concerned a lot of users, it was decided (by the community) that the blockchain will be manually rolled back to the state from before the hack. There were controversies around this topic and this actually created two versions of ethereum, one where the hack didn't happen, and the other, where the hacker has his money. The latter is called Ethereum Classic (ETC) and is understandably much less valuable than ETH itself. 

The controversies regarded the interpretation of how deployment of smart contracts should be considered. In ETC, smart contracts are basically considered law. The code defines a deal and if you can't see loopholes in it, then it's your fault and it is legal to use the loopholes by everybody. This is considered a "feature" of trustlessness of ETC. By deciding to fork and revert the state of the blockchain, ETH decided that it is the intent of the contract that matters. There are however, no safety features to revert smart contract actions in ETH. A rollback like this would be extremely unlikely nowadays.

Edited January 15, 2021 by tsuki

[Leo Gura]

There is no privacy with BitCoin any more. That myth was busted years ago. Feds will track you down if they want.

[integral]

The tulip bubble, price of a tulip went as high as the price of a mansion. 

A little insane seeing as flowers die... 

Edited January 15, 2021 by integral

[Lyubov]

7 hours ago, integral said:

The tulip bubble, price of a tulip went as high as the price of a mansion. 

A little insane seeing as flowers die... 

this is literally what bitcoin is

 

Edited January 16, 2021 by Lyubov

[GroovyGuru]

@Lyubov @integral fascinating videos.  Definitely something to consider and ponder

Edited January 16, 2021 by GroovyGuru

[Lyubov]

ETH shout out at the end 

Edited January 16, 2021 by Lyubov

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Lyubov said:

this is literally what bitcoin is

No, BitCoin has way more merit and value than stupid tulips.

BitCoin can serve as a global digital gold reserve. That's a pretty big deal.

Of course it can still be over-hyped, but it does have merit. We just don't know what it's ultimate value will settle at and which crypto coin will come out on top.