• fierysparrow89@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.

    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you’ve got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.

      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.

        But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don’t care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.

        They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.

        • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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          5 days ago

          Since the government hates Monero so much, that’s actually not as big of a problem with Monero because people want to earn it and trade it for goods and services in the real world. Also, people who use Monero are incredibly against centralized exchanges and would like to see it banned from every single centralized exchange on Earth so that decentralized exchanges would be the only place you could obtain it or through permissionless atomic swaps and peer to peer. The Monero community also mocks number go up people and calls them state plants.

      • fierysparrow89@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we’ll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.

        Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I’m afraid we’re just at the begin of its initial fallout.

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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          6 days ago

          every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes

          Yeah, sure, that’s why we’re all riding Segways.

          The reality is that quite a lot of new technologies have no significant real-life use case and vanish without a trace.

          • fierysparrow89@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            I tried to make clear that I’m talking about tech with potentially significant impact, case in point: blockchain. Are you suggesting that a quirqy twowheeler is somehow on the same level?

            Unless trolling is all you’re about, I can recommend refraining from such offhand dismissive remarks. Sarcasm has its use, but rin an anonymous online discussion it is easy to misunderstand. It does not contribute to a meaningful exchange of ideas.

        • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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          6 days ago

          I think the rise of Monero over Bitcoin is a very positive sign. Since it has privacy, the government absolutely cannot stand the fact that it exists, and therefore, institutions don’t want to touch it. This means the “number go up”, “to the moon”, and “compliance”, shmucks are all driven away in horror and you are left with the real core who want to see a better money in a digital world. If that sounds interesting, you might want to listen to “darknet Market Maximalism” a manifesto by xenu. You can listen to the audio version of it on YouTube.

          Edit: I’ll save you the trouble. Here’s the link directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogNg20rGTU