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I wasted years of my life in crypto

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681 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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spicyusername ◴[07 Dec 25 13:28 UTC] No.46181533[source]▶
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

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dpedu ◴[07 Dec 25 13:51 UTC] No.46181684[source]▶
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
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1. dale_glass ◴[08 Dec 25 12:18 UTC] No.46191403[source]▶
Early on bitcoin was thought to be pseudoanonymous. Like sure, it's all public, but what's public is "bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh", not "John Smith, age 43, living in Florida".

Then two things happened: people figured out that it's actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: "donate here: (hash)".

And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we've got real names connected to those random looking numbers.