Cryptocurrency Teaches Novices Hard Life Lessons About Investing

There will only be 21 million bitcoins and that is baked into the system minus who knows how many have been lost thrown away etc... And.... every millionaire couldn't own one if they wanted to.
Some of the haters on here never took the time to investigate why it is such a game changer in financial history. Yes market cycles apply especially to crypto, so I keep on HODLing .
 
There will only be 21 million bitcoins and that is baked into the system minus who knows how many have been lost thrown away etc... And.... every millionaire couldn't own one if they wanted to.
Some of the haters on here never took the time to investigate why it is such a game changer in financial history. Yes market cycles apply especially to crypto, so I keep on HODLing .

This “there will only be 21 million Bitcoins” argument is terrible for a variety of reasons. First of all, they forked Bitcoin once, and they will do it again if needed, so there is no actual “scarcity”. Second of all, scarcity only matters if people want something. There were limited edition Beanie Baby runs as well, which commanded a huge sum in the secondary market, until the day when people realized they were paying thousands of dollars for a stuffed animal, after which the price returned to a more appropriate $2.

Bitcoin sucks as a currency, and moving the goal post to say “it’s not a currency, it’s digital gold”, is also stupid, because I’ve yet to see anyone give me a credible argument for why lines of code labelled “Bitcoin” is somehow more valuable than lines of code named after a meme about a dog.
 
There will only be 21 million bitcoins and that is baked into the system minus who knows how many have been lost thrown away etc... And.... every millionaire couldn't own one if they wanted to.
Some of the haters on here never took the time to investigate why it is such a game changer in financial history. Yes market cycles apply especially to crypto, so I keep on HODLing .

In addition to some of the other points, I'd like to point out that there is exactly *ZERO* scarcity of bitcoins, nor will there ever be. The wretchedly bad red herring of "only 21 million!!!!!" would only matter if you had to complete transactions in whole bitcoins. As long as you can send .00000001 bitcoin to settle up with someone, they'll be subdivided to meet actual market needs for transactions. The only scarcity is in the mining power needed to support these operations, and the current trajectory on that is completely unsustainable anyway.

Also, in regards to market cycles...those are, again, a feature of investment systems and not currency. For a usable, stable currency, movement of +/- 1% is news. For bitcoin and crypto in general it's just noise. If this behaved as a normal currency, then the increased maturity and reach of currency usage would preempt wild swings in valuation. Since they continue unabated, crypto remains a wildly overvalued penny stock.
 
In addition to some of the other points, I'd like to point out that there is exactly *ZERO* scarcity of bitcoins, nor will there ever be. The wretchedly bad red herring of "only 21 million!!!!!" would only matter if you had to complete transactions in whole bitcoins. As long as you can send .00000001 bitcoin to settle up with someone, they'll be subdivided to meet actual market needs for transactions. The only scarcity is in the mining power needed to support these operations, and the current trajectory on that is completely unsustainable anyway.

Also, in regards to market cycles...those are, again, a feature of investment systems and not currency. For a usable, stable currency, movement of +/- 1% is news. For bitcoin and crypto in general it's just noise. If this behaved as a normal currency, then the increased maturity and reach of currency usage would preempt wild swings in valuation. Since they continue unabated, crypto remains a wildly overvalued penny stock.
The difficulty level to keep 8 min blocks is what drives the mining power requirements. If ASICs were shutoff, hash power reduced -> the difficulty level would drop and power required to mine would drop. If all ASICs where just shutdown then the difficulty level would drop to point where a GPU/CPU could maintain the block chain. It is very dynamic, self correcting and almost impossible to destroy.
 
Thats what you get, no sympathy here. Crypto currency is a scam, real world value to coins generated via compute time is just stupid. Blockchain is a great tech, but not for wealth generation.

Blockchain hype is a big part of why this scam was so successful. It's technobabble. I have yet to see an actual use-case where a private blockchain makes more sense than a traditional database, and we've seen all the issues with using public blockchains for currency: extreme volatility, security issues, delays and transaction fees, etc. Not to mention that when bitcoin started getting difficult to mine suddenly there were a billion different altcoins to keep the scam growing (21 million my ass). The idea that 'smart contracts' on top of this convoluted mess was going to replace public notary was absolutely stupid. None of the people pushing the meme of 'well, blockchains will eventually be useful' has a goddamn clue what they're talking about (not picking on you TonyZ, I heard/believed it too). It's not that hard to wrap your brain around if you read up about it, but people got blinded by the technobabble, greed, and optimistic hype.
 
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I overheard the sales people at my local computer store talking about a multi GPU mining machine they just ordered for a customer ... it was over 11k. This was a few days ago ... buddy may be just a tad late to the mining craze. Just to add to this madness our electricity price is so high it was an issue in the last 2 provincial elections. The new premiere got the CEO of the provincial hydro utility to step down in an effort to adjust prices.
 
The upside to all this is maybe the next time crypto comes slithering by, there won't be as many miners go into a feeding frenzy over it and wipe out the entire GPU market for 6 months. This is twice now that crypto mining has ballooned up to ridiculous levels then crashed back down to earth. Maybe on the 3rd time there won't be so many takers.
 
The upside to all this is maybe the next time crypto comes slithering by, there won't be as many miners go into a feeding frenzy over it and wipe out the entire GPU market for 6 months. This is twice now that crypto mining has ballooned up to ridiculous levels then crashed back down to earth. Maybe on the 3rd time there won't be so many takers.
You know that's not true.

Fools and money are easily separable.
 
Sadly, this is part of the reason why crypto won’t be mooning anytime soon and this bear market will last for years.
 
The difficulty level to keep 8 min blocks is what drives the mining power requirements. If ASICs were shutoff, hash power reduced -> the difficulty level would drop and power required to mine would drop. If all ASICs where just shutdown then the difficulty level would drop to point where a GPU/CPU could maintain the block chain. It is very dynamic, self correcting and almost impossible to destroy.

Referring specifically to BTC, there is a flaw in this logic. BTC has a terribly long difficulty reset window. If the majority of the hashrate abruptly left, there wouldn't be sufficient power to move the chain forward to reach the adjustment window to drop difficulty so the remaining miners can carry on the chain.
 
Blockchain hype is a big part of why this scam was so successful. It's technobabble. I have yet to see an actual use-case where a private blockchain makes more sense than a traditional database, and we've seen all the issues with using public blockchains for currency: extreme volatility, security issues, delays and transaction fees, etc. Not to mention that when bitcoin started getting difficult to mine suddenly there were a billion different altcoins to keep the scam growing (21 million my ass). The idea that 'smart contracts' on top of this convoluted mess was going to replace public notary was absolutely stupid. None of the people pushing the meme of 'well, blockchains will eventually be useful' has a goddamn clue what they're talking about (not picking on you TonyZ, I heard/believed it too). It's not that hard to wrap your brain around if you read up about it, but people got blinded by the technobabble, greed, and optimistic hype.
Look up Kodak’s block chain implementation.

Pretty cool. Who owns the rights to this particular photo? Two different people are claiming it.

Kodak block chain shows party A hashed it as their photo first in the immutable ledger and so Party A owns the photo. Party B, pay your justly due royalties if you want to continue using the photo. This can protect artists and copyrights, once widely established. I though that was a cool use of Block Chain. It could be extrapolated to all media to protect musicians, or cinema, or recipes, or books, or whatever.
 
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The cryptocurrency bubble is not the first nor the last bubble, but I think that future economic historians will compare it to the Dutch Tulip mania with a top in 1637.

They compared it with that daily on CNBC.

Ppl didn’t listen
 
Look up Kodak’s block chain implementation.

Pretty cool. Who owns the rights to this particular photo? Two different people are claiming it.

Kodak block chain shows party A hashed it as their photo first in the immutable ledger and so Party A owns the photo. Party B, pay your justly due royalties if you want to continue using the photo. This can protect artists and copyrights, once widely established. I though that was a cool use of Block Chain. It could be extrapolated to all media to protect musicians, or cinema, or recipes, or books, or whatever.

Party b just buy some asic miners and take it over.
 
.... Just to add to this madness our electricity price is so high it was an issue in the last 2 provincial elections. The new premiere got the CEO of the provincial hydro utility to step down in an effort to adjust prices....

Prices don't need to be adjusted, just hammer the people who run buildings full of these rigs 24/7 with increases in fees, penalties and taxes.....
 
An ICO for a repeatedly delayed altcoin product from a defunct, bankrupt company trying to boost it's stock price? That sounds really promising.
That's not the point. The point is using the tech in other ways to solve problems, hopefully efficiently. There is value there.

Someone says "Crypto" and half this place turns into {S}altyforum.
 
That's not the point. The point is using the tech in other ways to solve problems, hopefully efficiently. There is value there.

Then why is it defunct? It's a technobabble solution in search of a problem.

Kodak Coin.png


Looks to me like the owners of Kodak wanted to cash in on ICO fever by inflating and dumping worthless Kodak stock. I guess there's some value there.... :rolleyes: We haven't heard a thing about Kodakcoin since.
 
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It is true that crypto has been really hard on new investors. People who invested after November 2017 and didn't get out before 2018 made a really stupid mistake.
Every rational person understands that once something goes 20x profit (shit, some coins went 5000x profit), people get out. No one is stupid to hold forever.

I invested about €3000 into mining hardware, 13 GTX 1060 and the stuff needed to run them. Plus electricity about €150/month (my electricity is expensive) for about 14 months.
But it has paid off.
I'm still mining even though I am barely turning profit after the electricity cost. I get more tokens now than before, and I am pretty confident that the market will bounce back so I'm holding my tokens. Crypto is not going away.
 
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Neither do you, despite your condescending attitude. Nobody can see the future, so stop being a smug ass.

No one can tell the future, but some of us have better trading/investing/speculating judgement than others. Just because you can't tell your ass from your head doesn't mean others haven't made a lot of money in crypto (and will continue to do so).
 
No one can tell the future, but some of us have better trading/investing/speculating judgement than others. Just because you can't tell your ass from your head doesn't mean others haven't made a lot of money in crypto (and will continue to do so).
You mean people like this?
140408170959-bernie-madoff-image-horizontal-large-gallery.jpg
 
The cryptocurrency bubble is not the first nor the last bubble, but I think that future economic historians will compare it to the Dutch Tulip mania with a top in 1637.

Whoa! Tulips? Yeah, I see what you mean! EVERYONE likes tulips! I'm in. Big.
 
No one can tell the future, but some of us have better trading/investing/speculating judgement than others. Just because you can't tell your ass from your head doesn't mean others haven't made a lot of money in crypto (and will continue to do so).
I'm actually a bit bullish on the overall concept of blockchain and even crypto. I'm really bullish on the logistical applications of it. I've had enough of the fakes.

However, at this point all the crypto is not an investment vehicle, it's speculation. Also, I have not problem with speculation or speculators; interestingly enough, they serve a valid function in helping determine the real price of anything. I know lots of people say speculation like it's a bad word, but I'm not. I mean it in the most technical of ways.

It is a problem though when unknowledgeable, that is ignorant, "investors" get into a speculative market. It undermines the technically valid aspects of speculation and generally results in wise speculators taking the money of the unwise; it's a hard life lesson for them, but I fear one that goes unlearned in general.

I expect crypto to eventually graduate to a partial investment/speculation/functional market like the commodities or currency markets. Each of those has a suite of vehicles depending on what your desired method of making/loosing money is. I guess options markets are similar enough as well; i.e. you can speculate there, but you can also hedge investments to manage risk portfolios.

The only caution I will toss your way is, pride is a common folly that has blinded many a speculator and caused their ruin. I wish you luck.
 
Referring specifically to BTC, there is a flaw in this logic. BTC has a terribly long difficulty reset window. If the majority of the hashrate abruptly left, there wouldn't be sufficient power to move the chain forward to reach the adjustment window to drop difficulty so the remaining miners can carry on the chain.
Even that could be addressed if the case. Yes, better correcting mechanisms such as what RVN is going to which evaluates each block has been developed. If the nodes have been severed and worked independently over time and then reconnected, the blockchain would also correct itself weeding out any bad transactions.
 
Blockchain hype is a big part of why this scam was so successful. It's technobabble. I have yet to see an actual use-case where a private blockchain makes more sense than a traditional database, and we've seen all the issues with using public blockchains for currency: extreme volatility, security issues, delays and transaction fees, etc. Not to mention that when bitcoin started getting difficult to mine suddenly there were a billion different altcoins to keep the scam growing (21 million my ass). The idea that 'smart contracts' on top of this convoluted mess was going to replace public notary was absolutely stupid. None of the people pushing the meme of 'well, blockchains will eventually be useful' has a goddamn clue what they're talking about (not picking on you TonyZ, I heard/believed it too). It's not that hard to wrap your brain around if you read up about it, but people got blinded by the technobabble, greed, and optimistic hype.
Largest bank in the USA uses a derivative of Ethereum, blockchain:

https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/blockchain

Go check it out. Blockchain maybe bigger in the long run than the internet in how it changes societies.
 
Even that could be addressed if the case. Yes, better correcting mechanisms such as what RVN is going to which evaluates each block has been developed. If the nodes have been severed and worked independently over time and then reconnected, the blockchain would also correct itself weeding out any bad transactions.

...yeah, because getting consensus for a hard fork has been real easy to do on BTC.
 
Largest bank in the USA uses a derivative of Ethereum, blockchain:

https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/blockchain

Go check it out. Blockchain maybe bigger in the long run than the internet in how it changes societies.

That doesn't mean that any of the crypto coins out there are worth a damn in the long run. That a bank uses something derived from Ethereum doesn't make Ethereum more valuable since you don't have to license the technology. So if the banks develop something based on blockchain technology that becomes huge and useful, it doesn't mean that some coin will be worth anything or have any use. The opposite is more likely, in fact.
 
IMHO, there are lots of problems with existing cryptos for any commercial use, to start there is no method to dispute transactions. Once the transfer is done it's done. Same goes for people getting robbed of their cryptos. I would think any major financial institution that develops or uses any blockchain tech is going to have some internal method that gives them full control for handling disputes / fraud / etc, vs using some existing crypto that has no methods for handling that. At that point if they have full control over it its not really decentralized anyway.

All the speculation in existing cryptos also works against it being legitimized for use as a common currency since it's not even stable, someone doesn't want to go to the bank, buy 20 usd of crypto, then find out its only worth 15 when they go to spend it.... you don't go to a store and pay for food with stock based on what its value is at the time of the transaction lol, the whole idea is kind of comical.

Also, with cryptos existing forms I would think the investment in developing something like that would also probably not provide any useful return vs how everything is currently setup. Financial institutions want to be the single source of truth for all financial data vs having some decentralized crypto software running everywhere.
 
Look at all the historical hindsight investor pros. Bravo.

Ir's simply called "late to the party."
 
That doesn't mean that any of the crypto coins out there are worth a damn in the long run. That a bank uses something derived from Ethereum doesn't make Ethereum more valuable since you don't have to license the technology. So if the banks develop something based on blockchain technology that becomes huge and useful, it doesn't mean that some coin will be worth anything or have any use. The opposite is more likely, in fact.
Yep, would agree, most as in 98% of them will fail. Those 2% or what ever it will be may change the world. At least mix things up.

Bank is using block chain because it is better than anything else they had. Read their white paper.
 
Largest bank in the USA uses a derivative of Ethereum, blockchain:

https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/blockchain

Go check it out. Blockchain maybe bigger in the long run than the internet in how it changes societies.

No, thats incorrect. They don't use it, they claim to be 'exploring' it. They did one tech demo. Walmart said the same thing about using blockchains as part of their cold-chain management system. It was BS, it never went anywhere. There's no evidence that Quorum is actually useful for anything outside of tech demos. JP Morgan was talking about spinning it off last I read. The head of their blockchain program even said this:

We haven’t really seen a lot of really large scale things go into production yet. There are few cases where Blockchain can really shine.

Notice that now that crypto fever has subsided these stories have dried up. If blockchains are so revolutionary why is there not a single one in actual use by the private sector?

Stop falling for technobabble and hype.
 
I decided to have a go at getting in Cryptocurrency.

I sat down one afternoon and just looked into buying some.

After an hour of -

"What?" "Who?" "Why?" "What's their deal?" "This is sketchy!" "Why do I need to install that?" "Why do they need to know that?" "What's their pedigree?" "Who is in charge of all this?" and many many more...

Suspicious ol' me just gave up and walked away.

At least I didn't lose anything other than my patience and time. Other folks I talked to said "Oh you struggled? I found it so easy!" The thing is these are all the kind of folks that would respond to a phishing email or some guy from India on the phone from 'Microsoft'. Lambs to the slaughter.

It's a total crock...
 
Bought a few litecoins with money I had. they are worth about a quarter of what i bought them for.
Knew the risk and went anyway, cause why the fuck not
Taking out a loan to do this shit is madness

I nearly bought into Bitcoin at 3k...should have done that...sold at over 10k then and wash my hands of it :)
 
No, thats incorrect. They don't use it, they claim to be 'exploring' it. They did one tech demo. Walmart said the same thing about using blockchains as part of their cold-chain management system. It was BS, it never went anywhere. There's no evidence that Quorum is actually useful for anything outside of tech demos. JP Morgan was talking about spinning it off last I read. The head of their blockchain program even said this:



Notice that now that crypto fever has subsided these stories have dried up. If blockchains are so revolutionary why is there not a single one in actual use by the private sector?

Stop falling for technobabble and hype.

Exactly, lots of people exploring it, and no killer apps or use for it found. With how large of a tech division lots of these big companies have, they 'explore' all kinds of new tech that never materializes into anything. Every once in a while something does come along, but if bitcoin was it we would already see more active commercial uses of it, instead of a gigantic market purely based on speculation.

NFC / Samsung pay / Apple pay is way more useful to the common non-techie than bitcoin. As a currency I think bitcoin is pretty useless, if I want to send some money online to friends or family... paypal, venmo, chasepay... all based on the almighty dollar are all way better options than bitcoin.
 
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