←back to thread

I wasted years of my life in crypto

(twitter.com)
681 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(48): >>46181550 #>>46181552 #>>46181565 #>>46181570 #>>46181587 #>>46181592 #>>46181595 #>>46181598 #>>46181626 #>>46181627 #>>46181644 #>>46181650 #>>46181665 #>>46181684 #>>46181692 #>>46181705 #>>46181710 #>>46181747 #>>46181851 #>>46182086 #>>46182181 #>>46183207 #>>46183326 #>>46184155 #>>46188845 #>>46188916 #>>46189281 #>>46189390 #>>46189635 #>>46189752 #>>46190184 #>>46190277 #>>46190352 #>>46190438 #>>46190551 #>>46190980 #>>46192357 #>>46192629 #>>46192718 #>>46192829 #>>46193037 #>>46193082 #>>46193531 #>>46193609 #>>46194845 #>>46194934 #>>46195115 #>>46203155 #
fsh ◴[07 Dec 25 13:55 UTC] No.46181710[source]▶
It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
replies(8): >>46183912 #>>46188004 #>>46189527 #>>46189658 #>>46189805 #>>46190291 #>>46191411 #>>46194081 #
1. oersted ◴[08 Dec 25 12:18 UTC] No.46191411[source]▶
I believe the “trustless” part is not having to trust a central authority that makes the transaction possible, not about not having to trust the person you are transacting with.

With crypto you don’t need to trust the authority that holds your digital money, the authority that executes the transaction, or the authority that manages the issuance of currency and other factors that may affect its value (interest rates, fixed exchange rates…).

That being said, I agree that in practice this is a rather niche problem to solve, and among the people with this problem, there are far more bad faith ones that good faith ones.

And it is never completely trustless anyway, for most crypto you need to trust a single dodgy implementation, the issuance policy of the founders hoarding the vast majority of the tokens, and whatever backdoors they have put in place for disaster recovery or other purposes. And then there are all the surrounding systems that make crypto actually practical to use, like exchanges, that are absolutely not trustless.

It’s absurd how the top exchanges keep their customers crypto in big joint accounts that the exchange controls and transactions mostly just happen in their closed database outside the blockchain, canceling out most advantages of crypto anyway.