Technology

Mid-bear-cycle. It'll be back in a year or two.

While the prospect of using it in everyday transactions seems pretty much dead, for some reason the crypto market cap in and of itself is very much alive. Plus it's interesting that crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis and people wanting more control over their assets, so if anything I would think it would be more socially relevant now than ever.

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.

the pyramid scheme of crypto is dead. Partially because there are no suckers left to buy in and partially because interest rates have gone up, meaning that money is no longer free and investments need to promise a return, which crypto can’t provide as it lacks meaningful utility.

The long and short of it is that crypto was never a good idea, a currency where no one is “in charge” Is a currency where no one is responsible, so if something goes wrong no one is to be expected to fix it.

I’m not about to say that the federal reserve is the perfect system, but it is much better than anything the crypto world has come up with. Bitcoin is deflationary and inefficient, ethereum is undemocratic and has it’s attention split, and everything else lacks a broad base.

The centralization or currency was never the problem and these alternatives are worse in just about every way.

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.

you can’t get a real discussion of crypto here because downvotes are impossible and the simps are legion

It is humming along nicely for those that use it. There could be another speculative pump filled with scams, that would be no surprise.

it should be

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

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

The A.I. "Grift Shift" is Underway

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 is dead, long live bitcoin.

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

Bitcoin is still around 30k a pop, so I wouldn't say it's dead yet. But I foresee a big crash in the months or years to come: the hype has passed, and the real uses of crypto are very few. It's also not a good investment since the expected returns are 0. Once people finally realize that, I see the price falling to 1k or even less.

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

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 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.

Most existing cryptocurrencies have no inherent value, they might make sense as a currency, but having a cell in a distributed spreadsheet assigned shouldn't be considered a growth investment and it's absurd how many treated it that way. The only way that sort of thing works is with an endless supply of greater fools, and evidently they ran out.

This is good for Bitcoin.

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.

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.

As a bitcoiner I certainly hope so.