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I like these federated services being kinda "rough around the edges"
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Crypto and NFTs are money-laundering scams with a lot of technobabble thrown in to hide the truth from normies. I knew it was a scam when one of my friends, who is a smart guy but not a tech guy, bought into BTC because he thought it was clearly the future. I think he made money on his first BTC, and I’m pretty sure he lost on his second and third BTC, and I feel terrible for him because it was with some of his retirement. He’s going to have to work a trade job for years longer than if he’d just put that same money in an index fund, because he got sucked in by the allure of crypto.
I’m not huge on governmental regulation of people’s decisions with their money, but I have a personal rule. If you can’t explain it in a sentence to the average 10 year old or they understand it and it sounds like it should be illegal to said ten year old, it’s not a good idea. It’s easy to explain how a basic investment in a company that makes physical goods can be profitable. Try to explain NFTs to a fifth grader without using words like “profit from nothing” and see what they think.
If the stock market is already artificially high for a few reasons, crypto and NFTs were/are even a step higher in artificial pricing and being a tool for rich people to get richer and hide their money from the few governments powerful enough to dare tax them.
I think the original Bitcoin proposition had some merit in introducing a new concept and a new type of trustless economy. However probelms in scaling the PoW mechanism and transaction fees make it infeasible for daily use.
99.9% of the other stuff? Never understood why people see value in NFTs. Especially given that they mostly link to image files on someones web server that would point to a 404 page if taken offline.
My main complaint with crypto is not the underlying idea of a digital currency, is that people used it as a straight investment like it was a normal stock, they traded it like it was a different currency without understanding currency trading fundamentals, or they used it as a hedge against the USD/Pound/Euro collapsing as though that would gain without taking down the complete grid which is how crypto transactions get tracked against the public ledger. Yes, P2P crypto rejections are possible, but in a collapse scenario they’re effectively useless, even more so than gold and silver, and I’m a big believer that the only true precious metals in a grid down scenario are lead, steel, and brass in the forms of tools and weapons to defend communities.
Gold has value as a transaction medium in some scenarios, but they depend on being able to accurately assay the quality and weight, neither of which lend themselves to quick transactions in small purchases. It’s also super heavy, and since the mined coins are a full or half ounce, in a collapse scenario they’re too valuable for little things, which means massively overpaying and therefore spending the hedge at an accelerated rate.