Technology

I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen

Oh I don't know maybe it has something to do with Sam Bankman-Fried swindling $8 billion.

No. Bitcoin is the future of money. It really is the best form of money humanity has invented so far. People just need to stop trading shit coins.

Not dead, just sleeping. It's a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:

Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.

And that's it. You don't have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can't solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone's database and hoping nothing happens or they're too big to fail. It's just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.

Crypto scams burnt up all their market, i.e. pretty much everyone who was going to get into the crypto bubble, did. You can tell because crypto went mainstream, buying stadiums and advertising through Matt Damon.

So when the bubble burst that time, there's no one left to start a new bubble with.

Crypto is dead, long live bitcoin.

Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?”

The A.I. "Grift Shift" is Underway

I use crypto for its real intention, as money. I buy my groceries with crypto and pay most of my bills in crypto on a monthly basis. Crypto itself is not a problem. Its the FTX's and Mt Gox's of the world trying to graft old banking norms onto crypto that is the majority of the problem. "not your keys, not your coins." Exchanges are like gas station bathrooms, you go in, do your business, and get the heck out. You dont just hang around.

Cryptography? No it's not, any more than math is dead.

Cryptocurrency? I don't know.

@[email protected] It's called a bear market. Every 3-4 years, it's the same thing. Patience...​:blobcatthinksmart:​

It's definitely not dead. Market cycles come and go. It's just a matter of time until the next round.

No, it'll never go away, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective.

It will never die. I believe it will wax and wane over the years. Being incredibly anonymous and deregulated means it will always be a great place for the evil doers to manipulate the market and make money off of it. Because of that there will always be some people using it.

I think one of the biggest failings of cryptocurrency in general is that people view it as a replacement for cash or debit cards when in reality with how slow and expensive the transactions are it is more of a replacement for clearing houses. When you get money sent to your bank you can use it right away because the bank trusts you and provides that service but the money isn't truly there yet. You may have heard the phrase of "the check cleared" or something similar. It takes a long time for those processes to complete and crypto is faster than it.

I think really it just hit some kind of critical mass where people lost interest. Like streaming services: at first there was one (Netflix) and everyone wanted it, then there were a few and there was one for everyone, then there were too many and people just got sick.

In the US each time crypto is traded it needs to be reported.

I got free crypto from Coinbase. Then sent it to a wallet, then sold it. So each transaction needed to be reported. It’s too troublesome to be worth it.

Also, if I buy crypto, they have a week hold before I can move it. My idea was to buy crypto in country A and sell it in country B to quickly transfer money between the two countries I live in. Also it would help me beat the bank fees.

But the 7 day hold kinda defeats the purpose of quickly transferring money.

This is good for Bitcoin.

as long as there are easily accessible networks with money on them there will be scammers to try and exploit them, this is no different than what we have seen with fiat, the biggest difference being that usually you have to use cash only to put out a shingle and be shady. Crypto allowed anyone to "look" legit and have easy access to settlement.

if anything people are learning WHY you want to at minimum control the ramps and ensure there are channels through which there can be trade using strong identity systems. next phase of crypto will look a bit more grown up as it will very likely be coming to the party as an enabler of multiple VRF style auth systems, helping break dependance on social login systems.

Most people are shifting towards the AI trend instead. Read a post which somewhat describes it well, people integrate the new trends into their projects to get more investor money. Nothing looks better to investors other than 'We have AI Blockchain nano technology behind our service'.

Last year, 'we have blockchain' earned lots of money. Now it's 'we have AI'. In both cases, the technology probably isn't needed, it is there just to be there.

as long as there are suckers out there, crypto will live.