alt Hacker NewsThe original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.
Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.
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To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.
It was inevitable and trivial to predict, which people did, and the cryptbros laughed at them coz that's how old people think.
We put so much law and limitations about anything money purely because at times when we did not, stuff went wrong.
The whole idea of currency without any laws and limitations around it means any and every problem that those law were supposed (some do it better, some worse, some make actual problem worse, not trying to pretend they are perfect here) to help with will happen, easily, with the "new money".
The fact that on top of all the old problems the crypto invented a whole set of new problems is just a little turd cherry on top of a manure cake.
Okay, that was harsh, manure have some actual positive use
The existence of fraud, toxicity and misinformation around bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean that bitcoin itself is broken. It's a very poorly understood technology, centering around money that once spent cannot be reversed. It's natural that MANY people would come along and attempt to exploit that gap. Over time though the bag of tricks will start to wear a bit thin, and people will learn what to look for.
Many people in the bitcoin community have been and are still calling out wallets that rely on 3rd party trust, decentralized exchanges that are build on a house of cards, alternative coins that are created purely for the purpose of pump and dump etc.
Meanwhile the core technology progresses and deals with functioning at larger scales, with lower entry and exit friction, improved safety guarantees.
> The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean
- hiring personal security
- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets "linked", the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...
- think about what mitigations you have in place against "rubber hose attacks"
- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don't get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don't boast about your richness
- ...
> its nothing more than a high risk stock
Nothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn't innovative?
With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD's purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.
It was started as an alternative to fiat casino capitalism. It became an absurdist parody of fiat casino capitalism.
This. The moment dex’s started allowing speculation is when it all when bottoms up.
When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.