Wasn’t fooled by crypto in the first place.
Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto
Submitted 9 months ago by Hirom@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/opinion/crypto-2024-election.html
Comments
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
jarfil@beehaw.org 9 months ago
…or were you?
Depending on whether some of it becomes, or not, a reasonably popular means of value exchange in the future, “being fooled” will mean having bought some when it was cheap, or not. 😉
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Most people who got fooled once will get fooled twice. Thats just what fools do.
FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org 9 months ago
This is 100% why it’s good to have a small chunk of your portfolio in crypto. It’s hit all-time-highs four times in the last ten years.
It’s hard to argue that it won’t again after that, but I wouldn’t put any more than 10% of your investment capital into it.
freedomsailor@programming.dev 9 months ago
Statistically, yes. But they’re not fooled by crypto, but by other people, or just by their own not understood feelings.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Yes, crypto people keep getting fooled by record breaking prices. So sad.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 9 months ago
The prices don’t mean anything if no one is paying it, which if someone is at said ‘record breaking’ levels, means there is at least 1 fool out of the 2 involved.
It’s still just a pyramid scheme in the end, because if I’m trading ammo or a sandwich or pigs or something, at the end of the day if no one wants to buy them from me I can still use them myself.
With crypto, there will by definition be someone holding a valueless and unusable item at some point. Whether or not the opportunity to make money in the time before that happens outweighs being involved in a pyramid scheme, is what everyone has to ask themselves (and be judged depending on their answer).
You can argue about whether all money is the same, but there have been hundreds of crypto coins that have failed since the last fiat currency died.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Don’t be fooled by the 20000th round of “crypto is dead” articles.
Hirom@beehaw.org 9 months ago
What does it mean for bitcoin to double in value?
Has bitcon’s utility or usefulness doubled?
Or has bitcoin behaved as a highly volatile speculative asset?
sonori@beehaw.org 9 months ago
It means that despite being fifteen years old, it still takes more electricity for a single bitcoin transaction than to drive an electric SUV from Florida to California, cost per single transaction has still spiked over 50 USD twice in the last six months, and it remains too prone to wild inflation and deflation for any serious business to actually price anything in.
In other words, it has the same inherent value it always has, none at all.
realitista@lemm.ee 9 months ago
It’s a great platform for being able to transfer money that would otherwise be under sanctions and for storing criminal profits. And that’s probably what it will always be for.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 9 months ago
It’s a bit too traceable for that though.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 9 months ago
They wrote in the article that it rose. That was part of what they wrote about.
I don’t see your point.
limerod@reddthat.com 9 months ago
I never understood the crypto hype. There was even an article by protonmail detailing its history and all. Yet, I remain oblivious.
freedomsailor@programming.dev 9 months ago
Do you know anything about financial markets? It’s there for you to make money out from it. Study and you’ll understand everything you could do with it. Also, on crypto, the hype respects a cycle.
limerod@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Do you know anything about financial markets?
I’m at a beginner level in Investments and stock market.
Study and you’ll understand everything you could do with it.
I’m already learning about Investments and stock market. Maybe, once I finish that I could consider this. But, I don’t see much value in crypto so won’t bother.
Perhaps, if my perception changes in the future I could reconsider. Just not in the near future.
Ilandar@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it’s just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.
Hirom@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Bitcoin is not practical for small purshases, because transaction takes several minutes, and had a 50USD per-transaction fee.
On a more ethical level, it’s also quite bad because of the insane energy cost of bitcoin transactions.
oktux@beehaw.org 9 months ago
$50 per transaction fee is on the exceptionally high end.
The average fee for the last 24 hours was $0.81 per transaction according to mempool.space/mining
I agree with your other points.
azalty@jlai.lu 9 months ago
I mean, I know I do it, but yea, not a lot of people do. Most see it as investing or gambling
Sadly we’re not really well represented, which leads to a lot of people calling all cryptos a “scam” which is just blatantly false.
Monero!
pre@fedia.io 9 months ago
Is there anything more bullish than a big media organisation warning their readers not to buy? Top signal is when the NYT says it's great and everyone should buy in. Seems there's a way to go yet.
Hirom@beehaw.org 9 months ago
This is an opinion piece… It’s clearly marked has been an opinion. Even though it has solid arguments, it’s not an actual news article nor a editorial from the NYT itself.
It’s not a fringe opinion so I don’t think the NYT should ban this kind of opinion from being published on their paper.
Everyone is free to agree or disagree with it. To buy, sell, or hold.
kbal@fedia.io 9 months ago
Calling those that don't depend on proof-of-work "more energy efficient" is underselling it to the point of being dishonest. The difference is not that they're more efficient in any conventional way. It's that they don't have the amazing bitcoin feature of relying for their operation on the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you've wasted enormous amounts of energy.
All the way through the cryptocurrency crash that the average reader of headlines thought must've put an end to it by now, the bitcoin network has kept on burning up absurd amounts of power.
sxan@midwest.social 9 months ago
C’mon, that’s being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, “your C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it.”
It was a poor design decision, but it wasn’t a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.
chameleon@fedia.io 9 months ago
It's absolutely not the case that nobody was thinking about computer power use. The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point and even had an EU-US agreement, and that was sitting alongside the EU's own energy program. Getting an 80Plus-certified power supply was already common advice to anyone custom-building a PC which was by far the primary group of users doing Bitcoin mining before it had any kind of mainstream attention. And the original Bitcoin PDF includes the phrase "In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.", despite not going in-depth (it doesn't go in-depth on anything).
The late 00s weren't the late 90s where the most common OS in use did not support CPU idle without third party tooling hacking it in.
ericjmorey@beehaw.org 9 months ago
It didn’t take long before people saw that energy was a major factor in cost of operations of the network.
One that is fiercely defended by people who invested into the implementation. So it may not have started with it being anticipated, but not it is and people are actively choosing to perpetuate this use of energy.
kbal@fedia.io 9 months ago
If I were looking to assign blame, I'd start with the coal and gas operators who are digging up fossil fuels that would otherwise remain in the ground just to fuel their bitcoin mining rigs, those who peddle specious arguments claiming that it somehow isn't a problem, those who turned the whole thing into a machine for separating the gullible from their money, and those who've built the shaky, buggy, mostly proprietary, convoluted, half-finished, untrustworthy, horrible mess that is the software ecosystem surrounding the whole cryptocurrency sphere. Perhaps none of that could have been foreseen by whoever designed bitcoin. On them we can instead put the blame for the failure to make it anywhere near sufficiently scalable, and the ridiculous choice of mechanism for the bitcoin monetary policy which serves to make it function only as a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme and not a durable currency. Regardless of who's to blame, it's got to go.
Perhaps there's already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype, but if so it's currently hidden under such an enormous pile of shitcoins that it's impossible to identify. At least the internal combustion engine was good at doing the thing it was supposed to do.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
This whole article is dishonest nonsense. The Brookings Institute is a joke.
freedomsailor@programming.dev 9 months ago
What asset would you consider a good value reserve?
kbal@fedia.io 9 months ago
A small plot of land with good soil and a steady supply of fresh water, a good education, and a sturdy pair of boots.
ericjmorey@beehaw.org 9 months ago
VT for long term Money Market Funds for short term
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Ammo. It keeps appreciating, too.