How bad boy
Full Member
Crypto bros would tell you the same is true of FIAT money. Which is kinda true, stuff is only ever worth what people think it is worth. If everyone buys into that concept then yep, it's worth something, even if objectively that appears to be nonsense.When you think about how absurd the production of the bitcoin is, it really is mind-diddling. Using electricity to open an electronic puzzle box that contains computer code which is inherently valueless.
There's an island in Micronesia where massive stones are currency.
The tiny island with human-sized money
The Micronesian island of Yap has a famously unusual currency: hundreds of giant discs of rocks scattered all over the island, many of them too heavy to move.
www.bbc.com
This is literally this village's bank:
Money is very, very weird stuff and it gets weirder the more you think about it.
I stand by my earlier assessment of this
IMO, crypto is the biggest pyramid scheme in history.
It's just very very different to those that came before. The fact that it underpins a huge amount of the criminal economy means I'm pretty certain it will never be killed off.
I heavily dislike cryptocurrency for a number of reasons:
1. It wastes a vast amount of power. Bitcoin alone burns more energy than Argentina
2. It's great for crime, shit for everything else. You want to launder money, go buy crypto currency, can move it across borders and wash it very quickly and effectively. Transaction costs are stupidly expensive for normal transactions, but incredibly cheap for money laundering.
3. The currencies (except for stable currencies which are another bag of cats) are useless as a means of exchange, especially as it's highly volatile relative to the real economy. Having 50% value changes on the up and down in a year is a useless currency.
4. People claim it's secure. It very fucking much isn't. The core blockchain might be secure, but 95% of people aren't using that. They're using wallets set up by techbros who are classic examples of the Dunning Kruger effect. There's wallets compromised every single week.
5. People claim it's decentralised. See point #4. For most, they centralise around the wallets.
6. I really need to reiterate how fucking stupid crypto mining is. It's idiotic, "waste enough power and you might get a reward". Fucking hell.
7. Bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions a second. Visa does approximately 1,700 transactions a second and can peak to a hell of a lot more
8. You can replicate a blockchain with an append only timeseries database. You can do a million small writes to an AWS Timestream time series DB for 50 US cents.
it needs to die, for the sake of society, but I think the organised crime and gullible fools will keep it going for the foreseeable future.
Think bitcoin value spikes are going to be an ongoing thing, because fundamentally it's not going away and every once in a while, there'll be a bit of a rush, loads of folk pile in, those who bought before the rush sell out, value collapses again, rinse repeat.