New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Not forever, no.
Btc is not the future, but I think digital coins are. Right now, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple are the first steps into a new way of transferring value, but I don't think any of them are part of the final solution.
I am sure crypto will outlast fiat. Not today's crypto, but some kind of crypto or an evolvement there of.
@jar et al.
I did not doubt that there is a perspective from which crypto-currency seems to have a value.
But "many, many people 'think' this or that" carries no weight whatsoever for me. If it did then Hitler would have been right; after all, he had a majority behind himself.
For us mere mortals currencies serve a purpose which is to abstract concrete and tangible value, as in "not needing to kill my cow to give the baker a piece of meat in exchange for a bread and the baker not needing to bake and give 100000 chunks of bread to the people building his house".
Another decisive point is acceptance, which still is rather limited with crypto-currencies.
And of course, working in IT security I'm extremely hesitant to trust any crypto-currency any further that I can throw a locomotive ...
And then there is the practical aspect: during the past decades (as pretty much throughout history) "the people" have become poorer while the rich have become richer. That is the simple reality and I see no reason to assume that it's going to be different with crypto-currencies. After all your or my ability to play the crypto currency world is very limited while e.g. Elon Musk easily could finance or run a mining operation.
But hey, that's just my view and I won't disturb anyone who trusts in the "value" of 'proof by [chose your favourite BS]' backed crypto-currencies. In fact I wish you good luck (but stick to my own definition of "value").
I hear what you are saying, and I agree with all of it.
But, how does anything of what you just said not apply to fiat currency just as much (if not more) as it does to crypto currency?
Being able to pay the baker is the absolute fundamental idea behind cryptocurrency. You should be able to pay the baker directly, without interference or having to rely on a third party. Hence, that is an argument for cc, not against.
Think about it. Let say you pay your baker with a $100 bill. What gives it it's value? The paper it's printed on? The ink? Or the fact that you and the baker both think that it is worth $100?
What if the baker was foreign and refused to accept your US dollars? How much would your $100 bill be worth to him then?
ALL value is based on what people think, no matter what currency you use. Cryptocurrency is no different, it's just a bit harder for some people to wrap their head around that something they cant touch can be worth something.
Working in IT security you should know that your everyday fiat currency is in no way immune against cyberattacks. It happens everyday, all the time, for billions of dollars. There is basically no difference between logging in to your online bank to check your account and logging in to your online wallet to check on your bitcoins. Whatever kind of currency you use, security will always be an issue. Cryptocurrency might well be better suited to handle this since it is a modern, purely digital currency, while traditional fiat currencies such as dollars have had to be adopted into a digital society and has a legacy that makes it difficult to handle in a purely digital way.
With cc you have public and open ledgers and blockchains, everyone can confirm every transaction ever made.
With fiat, you simply trust that the transaction you did was successful just because your bank tells you so. You can never verify it yourself, since the banks ledgers are closed. And whatever other transactions happen in the world, you have no clue about and there is no way for you to find out.
The gaps between rich and poor has gotten wider throughout the entire human history. That has nothing to do with what kind of currency you use to measure the wealth.
A rich may have 1 million cows, 1 million dollars or 1 million bitcoins, it is not the currency used that defines whether or not he is rich.
Yes, Elon could finance a pretty impressive mining operation. But almost all cryptocurrencies have accounted for this in their design, mining gets less profitable the more coins are mined to the point where mining will no longer be profitable. Most coins are also finite, which means that one day there will be no more coins to mine. There are plenty of designs and balancing functions like this in cryptos that fiat simple never had and never will have. If they would have had it from the beginning, maybe today the rich wouldn't be so rich and the poor wouldn't be so poor.
Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. I just get the feeling that you have not fully understood what cryptocurrency is and the problems it solves.
My personal opinion is that crypto will be a part of our future, so it doesn't really matter if everyone likes it or not, they will get it eventually anyway.
And the bottom line is that people who agreed with you early on are mostly doing quite well financially. Reality dictated that crypto had value and it translated that value into real world gains for early adopters. Everyone missing out is stuck trying to explain why they missed out. Some taking the "fuck me" approach and others the "fuck you" one.
Me, I'm kicking myself for the opportunities I missed, not everyone else
I see it differentiated - I would have made profit, never paid tax on it because its so simple to hide, and went to jail.
Haha, well I think the solution to that one is obvious, and it's surely not to avoid profit
Even I pay my taxes, enough to make me question why I bother making money. And I think Joseph Stack was a patriot.
I don't care about the jail time either, but here they take what you owe + 100%, so you have nothing left when you get out.
In other news I seem to have bought some ethereum classic while drunk. I bought it at $44.
Trying to keep my investment strategies very diverse. Both short and long term. Have a set amount invested in crypto and regular stocks, routinely trading the short term investments as they give the returns I wanted. This ETC really blindsided me on gains.
You are right, fiat money is a very sad story and actually a perversion - but btw. also the result of the "trading" view.
True - with one 'but': There is also authority involved.
The problem is not that I don't understand crypto-currency.
Uhm, no. I happened to do some work for fin. companies and even for a national bank but that was limited to tasks I encountered pretty much in any other business too (modulo the fact that the fin. sector tends to take security more seriously). Based on what I saw and on the attitude and common practices I'd say that "normal" money is considerably less vulnerable than crypto-currencies.
Probably that is true but then one must know that those user interaction interfaces are "periphery" for banks. The security level there is regrettably low and usually just good enough to meet certain standards (which are regrettably low too).
Not really, because traditional currency (and banking) has more than just IT to achieve security.
I think, it's a double-edged sword with fin & IT. It certainly has advantages but it also has very significant disadvantages to due being all and completely about and based on IT. And btw. I do not see the data points for the assertion that crypto-currency is more secure. Actually I rarely saw worse sh_t than with crypto-currencies. Their "security" is largely driven by what (pardon me, clueless) users perceive as "secure".
What I've seen a lot is "proof of [insert favorite nonsense]" - but what I#d like to see is formal proof of their model and their code.
Well, cows don't miraculously vanish or change ...
I'll largely stay away from that because I don't have the necessary expertise in finance stuff, but I see quite a few things that won't hold up to scrutiny.
... or says it solves ...
Probably that's the plan, yes. But do not underestimate people's creativity when one touches their livelihood in ways they don't like.
And btw good luck with crypto-currency in case an EMP kills all electronics in a large region ...
And what problem does cryptocurrency solve? All the use cases of crypto so far can be done without using a blockchain. Talk about transparency and preventing inflation all you like, but those are all moot points. Currency has value because people believe in it, and this trust comes from widespread use. Do the rich people/governments want transparency? Probably not. Do they want to prevent the printing of more money whenever they like? No.
Crypto is here to stay, but it will likely never be used in our everyday lives (i.e. when you go out and shop). The current trend is tech companies and governments rolling out e-payment services and potentially collaborating with other countries for easy cross-border payments. Governments want all your data, but they don't want to be transparent. There's just no room for crypto as a currency. Crypto makes everything transparent, so governments would never adopt it. Crypto enables people to be anonymous too easily, so they wouldn't want widespread use of it too. Just look at china. They made a digital currency where they can print money whenever they want and no blockchain. That's the ideal kind of technology which align with governments' interests, not cryptocurrency.
What do people do with cryptocurrency anyway? It's mostly seen as a means of investing or a good to be sold for fiat currency. (Or to buy/sell illegal stuff)
I'm old enough to remember when online banking and electronic cards came around, and man, people sounded exactly like you.
"It will never be used for everyday payments, its for cross-border payments, it's only for moving money between banks, what do you do with it?".
Today everybody pays with visa, venmo or paypal.
The thing is that it does not matter what rich people or governments wants. The whole idea behind cc is that it does not need rich people or governments, it works anyway.
And if the government wants to print money, it still can. But it can only print it's own money.
Lets say for arguments sake that 1USD = 1 BTC. If the US government then prints a new dollar, they can buy 1 bitcoin with it. It just how it works today, if the US prints dollars, they can buy euro's. It's just a currency.
However, as anyone with even basic understanding of finance has already figured out, if the US keeps printing dollars and buying bitcoins, people will eventually catch on and be reluctant to sell their bitcoin for 1 dollar. Why should they sell their hard earned bitcoins to the US that simply prints new money when they want? Thus, the value of the dollar compared to bitcoin will drop. But this is nothing unique to bitcoin or crypto, this is how it works today, with whatever currency you choose to use.
Bitcoin solves this problem, since the amount of coins are finite. There is a limit as to how many bitcoins you can mine. One day, every bitcoin will have been mined, and then there is no more bitcoins to mine. And even before that, the mining algorithm is designed so that it gets harder and harder to mine a coin. This means that it's not possible to make a profit from mining bitcoins if you mine it to fast.
And "widespread use" is just a foolish argument.
Do you think the first dollar had widespread use? At some point in time, PayPal had only one user. In the beginning, only one person in the world had the venmo app. Not so long ago, shops did not accept visa or mastercard. None of them had widespread use, but today they are accepted pretty much everywhere.
Widespread use comes with acceptance, and it does not happen overnight. Just look at this thread, there is massive resistance against cryptocurrency. There is always resistance against new things. Just as @jsg said: "...do not underestimate people's creativity when one touches their livelihood in ways they don't like". He is so exactly on point he doesn't even realize it. Bitcoin is new and scary, people do not understand it, it threatens the livelihood of big banks and fintech. Of course people put up a fight.
There will be massive resistance, but people have been using the "widespread use" argument since bitcoin started in 2009, nobody knew what it was and a bitcoin was worth nothing, and they still use it today when a single bitcoin is worth ~$60k, everybody has heard of it and cryptocurrency is making it's way into banking and fintech and the biggest companies in the world are starting to accept it. It doesn't really hold up as a valid argument, does it?
Even PayPal, whose sole reason for existing will be completely wiped out if people started using bitcoin, is accepting bitcoin. If there is something experience has taught me for sure it is that when a market leader starts integrating something new that competes with their own solution, then a change is coming.
I missed out on BTC when it was about $40/BTC because I wanted to wait for it to 'go down a bit' before diving in. Over the next several months I watched it climb higher and higher to over $1,000 for the first time. I felt like I missed that boat. Today it's over $50,000. In short: That's insane.
DOGE seems too memey for me. Too many of these crpytocurrencies require too much info to even buy. I'm not comfortable going through the rigorous verification process for random exchanges and then having to meet the minimum deposit amount (often times hundreds of dollars or more) just to buy some digital currency. As a provider, I accept crypto, and it stays crypto. And unless I can buy some direct from friends / peers I trust to avoid the exchanges, I don't really mess with it. It seems like such a hassle unless you have money to drop, because a couple hundo here and there doesn't move much and don't mind the idea of stringent KYC laws requiring uploading a ton of personal info, face and ID scans to random, unknown companies with unknown track records of security.
With that said, I am heavy on the Theta train. It's a fast grower and I feel like it actually has some potential and I like the idea of decentralized video delivery network. If the big players like Netflix, Hulu, Disney or even smaller (but 'large') players like sports networks / streaming, etc get on board in an effort to lower their bandwidth costs while increasing the reliability of their content streams then we'll see it go to the moon too.
It's a myth. A large enough EMP kills us all anyway, and lower level is protectable. There is a reason why the Bank of Israel owns a bunker structure in the Negev, i am sure other large/gov banks have similar.
Now private equipment... yea, will fry, but that will cause you way other problems than the financial system collapsing - Your power grid will fail, your water will fail and anarchy breaks out.
I can only speak for myself, but it's been years since I last handled cash.
I pay everything with my phone using NFC. On the very rare occasion that I stumble across a shop that does not have NFC, I use my Visa. My Visa is of course contactless, but it still has the magnetic stripe on the back for legacy. Cant remember when I last used it, it's probably around 10 years ago.
Between private persons I use Swish. It's like a Swedish Venmo, you can send money to anyone using just their phonenumber.
A large enough EMP would seriously buttfuck my ability to pay for something.
So keeping cash around just in case there is a major EMP might sound like a good idea, but I'm not convinced it is.
What guarantee do you have that your cash is worth something after a major EMP? Again, I only speak for myself, but if someone offered me cash in a post-EMP scenario, I would not take it. Give me food, heat or water, because that is whats gonna have value after the EMP. Your bills would be worth exactly the paper they are printed on, since you can use paper as kindling to light fires.
I think these are two entirely different topics. Things like visa, venmo or paypal provide means of payment. We are talking about currency here. Historically currency has always been backed by governments and for good reason. I can only consider cryptocurrency as commodities and not currency. Cryptocurrency are not good means to store value and currently it is too difficult to transact in cryptocurrency.
Yes, it's the biggest and best performing scam ever performed in history. US profited a lot after WW2 because of their fiat currency and removing their backing of gold at some point. As for printing money, it is a cause for concern, and it is a topic that has been discussed so much since the first quantitative easing. We all know currency has value only if people believe it to have value. What gives USD its value? In my opinion most of its value comes from the US' sovereignty. The rest of it would be their assets and whatnot, but these are much less important than their sovereignty.
The market cap of BTC is 1 trillion now. The amount of USD in existence is somewhere in the low 10+ trillions. Is the proof of work and fomo really worth the 1 trillion market cap of BTC? Is the proof of work truly worth a tenth of the long history of USA and the assets that truly exist in US? You would say BTC is worth what people think it's worth. That's true, yes, but as with all currencies, commodities and whatever else is on the free market, everything will eventually be priced in in the long run. Surely you agree with me that useless cryptocurrencies like doge are bound to crash in the future? Cryptocurrency is nothing more than highly volatile commodities which people consider as investment opportunities.
Yeah, but it is much easier for a government to just digitalize currency as-is and not adopt blockchain technology that would be it. They keep all the current benefits of fiat currency and more. With such a simple alternative solution that everyone would easily accept, I just can't imagine cryptocurrency successfully being used in everyday lives.
Did this thread get weird?
[X] Yes
[ ] No
Believe it or not - me too. I pay with my iPhone mostly (with a Mastercard backed by an EU bank account in Apple Pay, I am also indifferent how it works as my bank will refund fraudulent use anyway.
... and all one's crypto-coins are gone and anyway not usable.
As are the cash registers and the credit card processors.
Yes, indeed. But at least here in Europe quite many still tick in cash.
Btw, for me the point isn't to go against crypto-currencies but just against (de jure or de facto) forcing people to rely on and use it.
I don't see that as a reasonable goal. Feels more like we're forcing governments to accept that we're so tired of their shit that we prefer to increasingly ditch their currency. The more popular it is, the more damage they'll do to themselves by continuing to try to kill it. Bringing it in the fold and applying the same rules that made people adopt it won't be accepted well either. Governments are only as strong as the governed, they occasionally give concessions to pacify us. Things like this are how we influence those concessions, in the most pessimistic perspective I can drum up.
If anyone is going to get burnt or get a good money is me(most likely). Have around 18,000 coins.
At that scale of an EMB cash won't help you anymore. I know i would go loot immediately.
Well, I see your point, but I think it needs to have some sort of equal investment to hold true. I can buy popsicles for 20 cents and sell them for $1 on a hot day. I can't buy $50K of popsicles and sell them for $250K. I can probably sell 200 popsicles before they melt or lose demand. In this case, I'd rather sell the $50K investment for $60K. However, if investment is equal, yes, everyone would rather be able to sell $50K worth of popsicles instead of a $50K car or something. But I agree with you, ignoring opportunity and time needed for return, I'd rather own $50K in 30cent shares than $50K in $50k a share.
Cash registers can have manual operation. They were all originally non-electronic and just mechanical. I imagine there should be a manual way to open/close the drawer on an electronic cash register without power.
Umm, is cryptocurrency considered paying without using a third party and a blockchain?
1) No transactions are done between JUST two people, requires a third to provide the "proof", no?
2) A payment processing fee that is paid by one person that doesn't go to buyer or seller, which goes to a third party for processing/proving the payment.
I think the only "without interference or having to rely on a third party" is cash, as that literally can be a deal done between two people, without a third party (if you don't consider the treasury to be the third party), and no third party processing fee.
Also, IMO, I think "cc" is owned by "credit cards" and doesn't help calling crypto currency "cc" as well.
i've had a 100% gain from etc in 2 days lol
I sold over 200K dogecoins in 2014 for like $60, kill me now
Then a big dump on Sunday
Not around here. Their scanners are all powered, they can't input a sale without power. Hardly anyone does manual sales anymore and that old equipment was recycled before I graduated high school. If they can't scan a barcode, the 2 teenagers still employed to actually run human-run registers are going home. Everyone is data driven now, they want to know exactly how many tampons were sold to people of color between 4pm and 5pm on lane 3 or they're closing the store.
Maybe a couple of the more rural gas stations are still doing things by hand, but a snickers bar and some fishing bait ain't gonna do much post-EMP.
lol at my last job you couldn't even take cash without the internet