Cryptocurrency thread

[RH | 4,903]

11 hours ago, Code Monkey said:

What? No it isn't, blockchains as a decentralized ledger are an important piece of technology. Ticket sellers are using NFT tickets to sell entry to an event and also profit from secondary sales of that same ticket when that couldn't have been done in the past. Authentication of physical product is now possible against a digital token, New Balance is using the Cardano blockchain to ship validation QR codes with all of their new sneakers.

Fads can last a while.  There are plenty of cryptos that have been adopted by big companies for various reasons and are now largely ignored.  The thing about crypto is so much of it is still pure speculation.  A lot of the features that cryptos offer can more easily be offered outside of a blockchain.  There's nothing magical about a blockchain.  Sure, you can use an NFTs to sell tickets, but why?  Seriously answer that question.  Has TicketMaster ever had an issue where someone bought a ticket and, oh noes, someone cracked their DB and assigned 1,000 high-dollar ticket purchases to someone else's account?  No.  It might help you if you show up to a concert and can show a QR code on your phone--you don't need a printed ticket for that but... can't you do that too through a ticketing service?  Putting tickets on a blockchain also strips the ability to have customer service.  If the blockchain is final, any mistake is final.  If the blockchain can be reversed by a signing authority then, again, what's the point?  The data might be distributed but there are still master-key holders of the data and that's a form of centralization.

I hear the irony in that statement because when I'd talk to friends and family back around 2011 about cryptocurrency and how it will "change the future", the biggest question was always why does it have value?  There are two reasons--one people assign it value and it becomes a social contract where value is determined by how much people are willing to pay/trade for the supply.  The second is that it provides a specific utility of currency that is NOT derived from a central authority which can be manipulated by governments, where governments are always willing to manipulate their currency for their benefits, at the behest of their constituents.

Most of the derivative work built on blockchains might criteria #1, but not criteria #2.  I was sure back then that crypto would have many ups and downs, which we were seeing even in the early days.  However, there is nothing special about blockchains that solves any real world issues for most of its use-cases today.  Instead, they are taking problems with known, solid solutions and just making them "decentralized" when there really is no need  for decentralization.

Whether it's in 3 months or 3 years, I guarantee you that 99% of the tech in use today will be a tool of the past, even if wide corporate adoption picks up on it.  Crypto is kind of experiencing it's own DotCom boom of the late-90s, when people were hyping up sites like Pets.com, thinking it was a $10 billion industry all because it was the first to market on the internet.  Well, that and many other companies flopped, or fizzled to next to nothing.  Crypto is at that same point.  There is money to be made, even now, but there is also a lot of hype that is just 100% pure hype.  Corporations can buy into that hype too, which can only temporarily legitimize some of this tech but eventually speculators will dump and move on to the "next hot thing".

 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

28 minutes ago, DoctorEncore said:

Yes, I'm a huge fan of Solana. I have about 23 SOL now and am buying a little bit every week. I also use it to invest in some projects, so it has utility as well. I could see it moving to 2,000 easily.

My other big investments now are BNB and ORN. Orion network is growing like crazy right now.

It reminds me of where ETH was a year ago when I stupidly sold my 5 tokens for $300 each. I picked up just short of 50 SOL this morning so I'm hoping that I'm getting in at a good entry point. 

[Code Monkey | 2,006]

29 minutes ago, RH said:

Fads can last a while.  There are plenty of cryptos that have been adopted by big companies for various reasons and are now largely ignored.  The thing about crypto is so much of it is still pure speculation.  A lot of the features that cryptos offer can more easily be offered outside of a blockchain.  There's nothing magical about a blockchain.  Sure, you can use an NFTs to sell tickets, but why?  Seriously answer that question.  Has TicketMaster ever had an issue where someone bought a ticket and, oh noes, someone cracked their DB and assigned 1,000 high-dollar ticket purchases to someone else's account?  No.  It might help you if you show up to a concert and can show a QR code on your phone--you don't need a printed ticket for that but... can't you do that too through a ticketing service?  Putting tickets on a blockchain also strips the ability to have customer service.  If the blockchain is final, any mistake is final.  If the blockchain can be reversed by a signing authority then, again, what's the point?  The data might be distributed but there are still master-key holders of the data and that's a form of centralization.

I hear the irony in that statement because when I'd talk to friends and family back around 2011 about cryptocurrency and how it will "change the future", the biggest question was always why does it have value?  There are two reasons--one people assign it value and it becomes a social contract where value is determined by how much people are willing to pay/trade for the supply.  The second is that it provides a specific utility of currency that is NOT derived from a central authority which can be manipulated by governments, where governments are always willing to manipulate their currency for their benefits, at the behest of their constituents.

Most of the derivative work built on blockchains might criteria #1, but not criteria #2.  I was sure back then that crypto would have many ups and downs, which we were seeing even in the early days.  However, there is nothing special about blockchains that solves any real world issues for most of its use-cases today.  Instead, they are taking problems with known, solid solutions and just making them "decentralized" when there really is no need  for decentralization.

Whether it's in 3 months or 3 years, I guarantee you that 99% of the tech in use today will be a tool of the past, even if wide corporate adoption picks up on it.  Crypto is kind of experiencing it's own DotCom boom of the late-90s, when people were hyping up sites like Pets.com, thinking it was a $10 billion industry all because it was the first to market on the internet.  Well, that and many other companies flopped, or fizzled to next to nothing.  Crypto is at that same point.  There is money to be made, even now, but there is also a lot of hype that is just 100% pure hype.  Corporations can buy into that hype too, which can only temporarily legitimize some of this tech but eventually speculators will dump and move on to the "next hot thing".

 

I don't know why you're thinking this, can you tell me one situation where you can get all of these benefits without the blockchain?

• decentralization
• automation
• near instant transactions
• low transaction fees
• instant payment validation

I don't know why you don't see the value in decentralization, what if there's a massive power outage that brings down the data centres? What if Amazon goes off line (again)? Having nodes continuously validating a ledger of transactions is incredibly valuable, much more valuable than trusting my bank to do it.

Complete automation, the blockchain runs smart contracts which allow things to happen autonomously based on predetermined conditions. There's no referee to determine a winner, it's automatic.

How long does it take for you to do a wire transfer to another country? Now how long does that take on the blockchain? It's much shorter.

How much does it cost for you to send $10,000 to India? How much does that cost on the blockchain? There's a reason countries like El Salvador and Brazil have adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, it will boost the economy by removing these extra fees.

Payments are instantly validated instead of having someone manually checking them.

[Gloves | 11,776]

4 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Hopefully you did since it looks like everything took a dive overnight.

3 hours ago, RH said:

As someone who paid off a house by crypto trading, take your profits and be happy with a 300% gain. Trust me, even if it does double or triples again, better to make money than to wait to long.

 

I ended up cashing out literally at the top of the spike, so pretty happy about that. Remember guys, profits are driven solely by gut instinct!

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

10 minutes ago, Gloves said:

 

I ended up cashing out literally at the top of the spike, so pretty happy about that. Remember guys, profits are driven solely by gut instinct!

So basically you cashed out just in time to buy the dip? 

[RH | 4,903]

35 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

I don't know why you're thinking this, can you tell me one situation where you can get all of these benefits without the blockchain?

• decentralization
• automation
• near instant transactions
• low transaction fees
• instant payment validation

I don't know why you don't see the value in decentralization, what if there's a massive power outage that brings down the data centres? What if Amazon goes off line (again)? Having nodes continuously validating a ledger of transactions is incredibly valuable, much more valuable than trusting my bank to do it.

Complete automation, the blockchain runs smart contracts which allow things to happen autonomously based on predetermined conditions. There's no referee to determine a winner, it's automatic.

How long does it take for you to do a wire transfer to another country? Now how long does that take on the blockchain? It's much shorter.

How much does it cost for you to send $10,000 to India? How much does that cost on the blockchain? There's a reason countries like El Salvador and Brazil have adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, it will boost the economy by removing these extra fees.

Payments are instantly validated instead of having someone manually checking them.

There's a lot to unpack here but I'll try to summarize my response.  First off, I'm not entirely writing off the use of a blockchain.  It can be useful and it does solve problems.  Part of the innovation I knew crypto would need was change where transfers could be much faster.  This was especially needed for there ever to be real world use-cases where you could use a crypto for a payment without the need for an intermediate third party.  If you need a third party to instantly validate a transaction, you don't really have "decentralization" because you have to trust that authority.  This is one of the many reasons why I jumped head first into crypto, but didn't get much into Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is an excellent experiment of concept, I'm thankful for it, but it was just that's all it was to me--a proof of concept.

Much of what you enumerated are good uses for currency, and currency alone.  Smart contracts can too have some valuable uses but again, 90-95% of those cases are not needed and they just add bloat to chains and tools that are not solvable by other means.  Blockchains come with their own consequences, and regarding data outages and such, those are not that big of a deal in our modern world where very few companies can now easily generated distributed systems where if one server farm goes down, there are other still alive that can fix the issue.  And outages that affect entire corporations are rare.  the flip-side with crypto is, if a network is divided or local outages prevent connectivity to the network, you are completely disconnected form the network.  There is also the negative of having to maintain passwords and passphrase.  In the early days, most of the adopters had very harsh attitudes towards those who lost funds due to hacked accounts or weak pass-phrases.  Early, the idea was that we were a very technical crowd and if you didn't have proper safe guards in place, that was your own problem.  Buy crypto is mainstream now, and though there are some solutions that can mitigate the loss of funds under certain cases, they either fail by being a minor headache to manage (multi-sig management, for instance) to be practically useful on the day-to-day use, or they use a third party which, again, removes and important pillar of the value of crypto.

So anyway, I could go on.  Again, to be clear, I'm not saying cryptocurrency is useless.  It is and it's still a radical idea I think could change the world if developers and users stay focused on the real, core principles that make it worthwhile.  I also thing there are also a few features where integrated into a decentralized blockchain makes sense.  I also think there are some use-cases where fudging the line of full-decentralization can add a LOT of benefit.  However, I stand by the belief that 95% of what is being engineered on top of this tech is not solving any real, useful problems and is using hype and excitement built into crypto and the masses to create speculative bubbles.  These bubbles will burst, but I doubt it will kill crypto entirely.  People will have their "what were we thinking!" moments and the ecosystem will begin to rebuild and solidify a more useful purpose.

[Code Monkey | 2,006]

5 minutes ago, RH said:

There's a lot to unpack here but I'll try to summarize my response.  First off, I'm not entirely writing off the use of a blockchain.  It can be useful and it does solve problems.  Part of the innovation I knew crypto would need was change where transfers could be much faster.  This was especially needed for there ever to be real world use-cases where you could use a crypto for a payment without the need for an intermediate third party.  If you need a third party to instantly validate a transaction, you don't really have "decentralization" because you have to trust that authority.  This is one of the many reasons why I jumped head first into crypto, but didn't get much into Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is an excellent experiment of concept, I'm thankful for it, but it was just that's all it was to me--a proof of concept.

Much of what you enumerated are good uses for currency, and currency alone.  Smart contracts can too have some valuable uses but again, 90-95% of those cases are not needed and they just add bloat to chains and tools that are not solvable by other means.  Blockchains come with their own consequences, and regarding data outages and such, those are not that big of a deal in our modern world where very few companies can now easily generated distributed systems where if one server farm goes down, there are other still alive that can fix the issue.  And outages that affect entire corporations are rare.  the flip-side with crypto is, if a network is divided or local outages prevent connectivity to the network, you are completely disconnected form the network.  There is also the negative of having to maintain passwords and passphrase.  In the early days, most of the adopters had very harsh attitudes towards those who lost funds due to hacked accounts or weak pass-phrases.  Early, the idea was that we were a very technical crowd and if you didn't have proper safe guards in place, that was your own problem.  Buy crypto is mainstream now, and though there are some solutions that can mitigate the loss of funds under certain cases, they either fail by being a minor headache to manage (multi-sig management, for instance) to be practically useful on the day-to-day use, or they use a third party which, again, removes and important pillar of the value of crypto.

So anyway, I could go on.  Again, to be clear, I'm not saying cryptocurrency is useless.  It is and it's still a radical idea I think could change the world if developers and users stay focused on the real, core principles that make it worthwhile.  I also thing there are also a few features where integrated into a decentralized blockchain makes sense.  I also think there are some use-cases where fudging the line of full-decentralization can add a LOT of benefit.  However, I stand by the belief that 95% of what is being engineered on top of this tech is not solving any real, useful problems and is using hype and excitement built into crypto and the masses to create speculative bubbles.  These bubbles will burst, but I doubt it will kill crypto entirely.  People will have their "what were we thinking!" moments and the ecosystem will begin to rebuild and solidify a more useful purpose.

You're bouncing all over the place here, you first mentioned blockchain was useless and now you're saying most of the technology using blockchain is useless. That's 2 separate arguments, I'd agree most of the garbage that uses blockchains is useless but that's not what my initial argument was. I'm arguing against the fact that the benefits blockchain can provide are useless, I don't agree with that. I think it has real world uses that cannot be replicated without block chains and it provides a benefit which isn't being fully utilized.

[RH | 4,903]

4 hours ago, RH said:

There's a lot to unpack here but I'll try to summarize my response.  First off, I'm not entirely writing off the use of a blockchain.  It can be useful and it does solve problems. 

 

4 hours ago, Code Monkey said:

You're bouncing all over the place here, you first mentioned blockchain was useless and now you're saying most of the technology using blockchain is useless. That's 2 separate arguments, I'd agree most of the garbage that uses blockchains is useless but that's not what my initial argument was. I'm arguing against the fact that the benefits blockchain can provide are useless, I don't agree with that. I think it has real world uses that cannot be replicated without block chains and it provides a benefit which isn't being fully utilized.

 

I think you misunderstood me.  I definitely didn't say the blockchain was useless.  But in case in all of my words I screwed up and it wasn't clear, I'll give this TL;DR.

There are a few, minimal cases where a decentralized blockchain has value.  Most of the uses today are without purpose and only have value due to hype.  They are poor solutions to problems that already have solid, viable alternatives.

Edited November 26, 2021 by RH

[Gloves | 11,776]

I'm gonna try this "diversification" thing. 

I'm buying up varying amount of cryptos which are sitting in a dip right now, with more money going to those in a greater percentage dip. 

It's all a learning experience for me and so far I'm happy with the returns, but my approach so far has been a stressful one (all my eggs in one basket, basically). 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

12 minutes ago, Gloves said:

It's all a learning experience for me and so far I'm happy with the returns, but my approach so far has been a stressful one (all my eggs in one basket, basically). 

This you too? 

[Gloves | 11,776]

10 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

This you too? 

Where'd you get that photo of me?

[Gloves | 11,776]

Also, aside - I've gained 25 BAT so far (~$45 worth) by switching to the Brave browser. It has many benefits which I enjoy over using Chrome aside from that, but I found that kinda cool. I'm just browsing like normal (with the built-in ad-block).

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

1 minute ago, Gloves said:

Where'd you get that photo of me?

You are looking rough buddy. You should've stuck with the Canadian Jesus thing. 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

@DoctorEncore Have you checked into Loopring at all? I've been hearing a lot about that lately.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

6 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

@DoctorEncore Have you checked into Loopring at all? I've been hearing a lot about that lately.

I briefly looked into it after Jone mentioned it, but I didn't see anything particularly excited and I haven't done a deep dive. I asked one of my more crypto savvy buddies, but he didn't know anything either. If you hear anything interesting about it, definitely let us know.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Just now, DoctorEncore said:

I briefly looked into it after Jone mentioned it, but I didn't see anything particularly excited and I haven't done a deep dive. I asked one of my more crypto savvy buddies, but he didn't know anything either. If you hear anything interesting about it, definitely let us know.

I've seen the name pop up and outside of the random jump that it had recently, I didn't see anything especially interesting either.

[Code Monkey | 2,006]

On 10/31/2021 at 3:55 PM, Code Monkey said:

 

Is anyone here taking my advice?

 

[Gloves | 11,776]

4 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

Is anyone here taking my advice?

 

That's not available on the platform I use, and I'm hesitant to move away from my safe little bubble. 

Also I stopped trusting you after you suggested ADA. 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Just now, Gloves said:

Also I stopped trusting you after you suggested ADA. 

I thought @DoctorEncore was into that too, but it seems like the only crypto that actually loses value.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

1 hour ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I thought @DoctorEncore was into that too, but it seems like the only crypto that actually loses value.

I bought ADA at around $1 and sold it at $1.70 and $2. It's a great project, but it is really struggling to gain adoption. Smart contract rollout has been weak and the supply is way too high. I don't see it becoming particularly valuable until they start burning tokens and a few big projects take off.

So I'm bullish long term, but probably won't buy back in unless it hits $1 or less.

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,012]

@Code Monkeywith the killer recommendation of STORJ. it's up like 150% this month. Up like 50% for the week. It's a bipolar coin that spikes and crashes regularly but it consistently bucks the trends of the market. FIL has held strong throughout this downtrend too.

My only regret was not putting 5x more into it

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,012]

4 hours ago, Gloves said:

That's not available on the platform I use, and I'm hesitant to move away from my safe little bubble. 

Also I stopped trusting you after you suggested ADA. 

Do you have Exodus in Canada? It's a wallet  so you can just throw your BTC or w.e on there and then exchange that to the coins they have available. STORJ is on there along with I think almost 200 coins. 

The only issue is that when coins moon they usually limit exchange on them. But then again I feel more secure using a wallet than an exchange.

[Code Monkey | 2,006]

7 hours ago, Gloves said:

Also I stopped trusting you after you suggested ADA. 

That was a long term suggestion. It'll be worth it in 10 years.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

22 hours ago, DoctorEncore said:

Yes, I'm a huge fan of Solana. I have about 23 SOL now and am buying a little bit every week. I also use it to invest in some projects, so it has utility as well. I could see it moving to 2,000 easily.

I'm up around $500 already since it looks like I caught the bottom yesterday.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

On 11/25/2021 at 11:01 PM, DoctorEncore said:

Did any of you follow my advice and get in on Starlaunch? I bought at $3.50 and sold for $11.50 within a week. It's actually sitting at around $16 now, but I can't complain about an easy 300%.

I actually wanted to keep it and use it to stake and buy IDOs, but they wouldn't offer KYC for US citizens and I couldn't turn down such nice profits. If it does drop again, I'll buy a bunch so I can at least use it to mine Hydrazine.

STARS over $20 now. Doh!