Cryptocurrency

[Gregg]

I am still of the firm belief that ALL cryprocurrenncy is a ponzi scheme.

Why, please someone explain to me why I am I giving the entity that ''created'' a crytocurenncy real money for what they assure me is the money of the future? "Legal Tender" is what you can use to pay taxes, and while the IRS will accept Yuan, Pesos, Euros and Pound Sterling, the won't take your Bitcoin. It is useless as actual money (that which can be exchanged for goods or services) because the value fluctuations based on speculation makes it impractical for one to accept and otherwise the only thing I see when I see the newest ''coin'' is tulips writ large.

The utter lunacy of an NFT even more so.

But another discussion for another day.

[Mr brolin]

Cryptocurrency in and of itself is not a Ponzi scheme.

It is however a massively speculative unit of currency with a value based on the faith of its owners.

It is, from a practical-technical basis, unforgeable and nonreplicable but has no inherent value and is not backed by fungible assets.

The dollar and pound are backed by "the full faith and credit" of a government, for which read the tax receipts of a government, so has inherent value, along with a track record of paying its debts and redeeming its collateral such as Treasury Gilts or T Bills, consistently and reliably.

Crypto currencies simply don't have anything other the faith of its owners to support it......UNLESS and UNTIL a government releases a crypto currency owned and managed by a government.

NFT's, whilst using the same type of blockchain technology for security as Bitcoin et-al, are more about providing an inviolate proof of the surety of ownership of an electronic asset. It acts much like a combination of sales receipts, records of sale and other provenance for a piece of art.

If someone has a right to a piece of electronic based asset such as the first SMS text message sent, they can then lock down the ownership in an NFT and much like copyright or trade mark, sell or restrict the rights to the use the asset. It is an extension of the same sort of intellectual property rights the likes of Sony/Disney etc use with films etc.

Very 30,000 foot explanation....

[Gregg]

I have a Doctorate in Economics, I get the gist of it. But its still all a speculative gamble of the next bigger sucker type.

If Melania Trump wants to sell NLPs of her porn out takes, fine, she has or can obtain a copyright for them and charge accordingly for their use. What then, is the utility of and NLT? Aside from un like a real copyright, it can't be enforced in a court of law?

[RTH10260]

Off Topic

I am still of the firm belief that ALL cryprocurrenncy is a ponzi scheme.

Why, please someone explain to me why I am I giving the entity that ''created'' a crytocurenncy real money for what they assure me is the money of the future? "Legal Tender" is what you can use to pay taxes, and while the IRS will accept Yuan, Pesos, Euros and Pound Sterling, the won't take your Bitcoin. It is useless as actual money (that which can be exchanged for goods or services) because the value fluctuations based on speculation makes it impractical for one to accept and otherwise the only thing I see when I see the newest ''coin'' is tulips writ large.

The utter lunacy of an NFT even more so.

But another discussion for another day.

Oldbow had a nice thread on cryptocurrencies

I don't agree with comparing cryptocurrencies to a ponzi scheme. The Oldbow had an article comparing "mining" of a blockchain token to the investment in physical mining of gold (or other precious metal). The main difference is that precious metals have a real physical representation, while blockchain tokens are some computed numbers supported by a computer infrastructure and relying heavily on the functioning of the internet. The security of the blockchain algorithms is what people trust rather than having a physical bar or coin of precious metal in their hands. I can think of a ponzi scheme with blockchain tokens. Like recently when some group claimed they would generate tokens of some new "currency" and would sell them at a given price. Just selling tokens is not how cryptocurrencies work, the trust level is made by allowing anyone to mine tokens, and that the blockchain is not controlled by a single closed group. As for the value of a blockchain token, why does silver, gold, platinum etc have a certain price at any given time, it's what the market assigns compared to the paper token of a government issued currency. Prices of blockchain tokens fluctuate and no one seems to be certain of the underlying motives of buyers and sellers.

As for the "real" currencies, aka government issued printed paper, they are easier to handle than barter trade items, try keeping some pig halfs in your appartment or stacking crude oil barrels in your backyard. The virtual blockchain tokens are just a modern replacement for the pieces of paper, or the traditional bank fund transfers.

A very recent development of the blockchain technology is that of sharing ownership of some object, physical or virtual. Trust again is based in the organization that controls object. The legal framework to properly handle all situations has not yet been developed.

[keith]

How do crypto currencies get stolen?

What happens when you forget or lose your wallet password?

[RTH10260]

How do crypto currencies get stolen?

What happens when you forget or lose your wallet password?

How they get stolen: someone hacks into your personal online storage, and accesses your electronic wallet. Mostly cause you don't recognize that you are opening an email with hacking payload. Sometimes cause you access a website that manages to sneak nastyware past your anti-virus software.

When you "lose" your wallet - it's electronic, you ought to have made all those backups to some really safe place, like external harddrive and stored an extra copy offsite in case of deluge.

You forget the password? Bad luck for you - the stuff is gone forever, an electronic skeleton in your closet. That's why you ought to have it written to paper and stored in a save place, but also use one of the trusted password manager apps with safe storage (though you need the minimal brains to remember the password for the password manager).

[much ado]

How do crypto currencies get stolen?

What happens when you forget or lose your wallet password?

How they get stolen: someone hacks into your personal online storage, and accesses your electronic wallet. Mostly cause you don't recognize that you are opening an email with hacking payload. Sometimes cause you access a website that manages to sneak nastyware past your anti-virus software.

When you "lose" your wallet - it's electronic, you ought to have made all those backups to some really safe place, like external harddrive and stored an extra copy offsite in case of deluge.

You forget the password? Bad luck for you - the stuff is gone forever, an electronic skeleton in your closet. That's why you ought to have it written to paper and stored in a save place, but also use one of the trusted password manager apps with safe storage (though you need the minimal brains to remember the password for the password manager).

This kind of thing happens...

Man seeks to excavate landfill that allegedly has half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hard-drive ... -landfill/

[Gregg]

When Mt Gox or the next big exchange goes ***poof***.


The second bigget coin was started as a joke and I think owesd its incredible market cap to a tweet or two from Elon Musk.

So you go get a whitepaper, you issue a coin, hype it, and when it gets high enough you dump your own coins in the market, make big bank, the price collapses and everyone else gets left holding the bag.


Tell me that CAN'T happen, go ahead.

[Sam the Centipede]

Go on Gregg! Leverage your Doctorate in Economics into a Professorship of Evil Economics!

Write up how Fogbozium sail be the virtual currency of the liberal future, so evangelicals, trumpists, cruzophiles and others need to invest (a much classier word than buy!) to get rich, own the libs, and rnsure a dominionist destiny.

There's the strategy: you pump, they trump, we dump.

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that's right – everything!

[RTH10260]

When Mt Gox or the next big exchange goes ***poof***.


The second bigget coin was started as a joke and I think owesd its incredible market cap to a tweet or two from Elon Musk.

So you go get a whitepaper, you issue a coin, hype it, and when it gets high enough you dump your own coins in the market, make big bank, the price collapses and everyone else gets left holding the bag.


Tell me that CAN'T happen, go ahead.

Remind me of Leeman Brothers and the collapse of the regular banking system in 2008. Also too where blockchain exchanges are a trust issue, something about eggs and baskets and spilling comes to mind. Maybe not keep all your bitcoins in a single wallet in one exchange. The cryptocurrencies do incur the same flaws of any conventional form of exchange markets. Without the minor annoyance of a SEC investigation...

[bill_g]

The hype over cryptocurrency reminds me of the wild telecom market in the 90's. The internet was new. Telco deregulation was new. And the Bulls were ready to storm every opportunity to be the first to market. They truely lost their minds, but we made a bundle on their bones after Y2K right up through Obama. We purchased and knit together hundreds of individual purchases of dark fiber in the dirt that were never commissioned. We turned them into real assets with real value, and we did well on the sales.

That's real money.

[MN-Skeptic]

I heard a financial analyst give a speech about investing. She talked about young people getting excited about cryptocurrencies and so, with no other investments, they were putting their savings into cryptocurrencies. However, when she asked a couple of the young people "What are cryptocurrencies?" they couldn't answer that question. Her advice: "Don't invest in something you do not understand." Wise words.

[jcolvin2]

When Mt Gox or the next big exchange goes ***poof***.


The second biggest coin was started as a joke and I think owes its incredible market cap to a tweet or two from Elon Musk.

So you go get a whitepaper, you issue a coin, hype it, and when it gets high enough you dump your own coins in the market, make big bank, the price collapses and everyone else gets left holding the bag.


Tell me that CAN'T happen, go ahead.

Remind me of Leeman Brothers and the collapse of the regular banking system in 2008. Also too where blockchain exchanges are a trust issue, something about eggs and baskets and spilling comes to mind. Maybe not keep all your bitcoins in a single wallet in one exchange. The cryptocurrencies do incur the same flaws of any conventional form of exchange markets. Without the minor annoyance of a SEC investigation...

I am not sure that the true cost of Bitcoin becoming a widely held currency/investment over the long term has been fully explored. The decentralized trust structure for proving ownership and verifying transactions requires thousands of computers to be constantly verifying and agreeing on the blockchain. Like the initial mining, the verifying process requires a lot of electricity. I saw figures a few months ago that claimed that Bitcoin used more electricity than Washington State. (IIRC Telsa initially proposed accepting BTC as payment for cars, but backed off because the high electrical use was antithetical to their Green message.) At some point, the enthusiasts will no longer be willing to bear the costs (perhaps because mining is no longer generating a sufficient income). At that point, the verification costs will either be passed on in the way of transaction fees, or the numbers of computers performing the verification will prove to be insufficient to prevent some clever math fraud.

[Phoenix520]

It seems like a really long con, to me. It’s complicated, which means many will say they understand how it works when they don’t. Pretty much everything happens out of sight. Trust factor indeed.

And, as you point out, the electricity usage is all out of balance and the possibility of invisible fraud seems huge. Nope, thanks.

[Gregg]

Okay, this is going to be my last post on crypto in this thread, because thread hijacking is one of my favorite things, but within reason.

So, crypto has no viable use as a payment medium for anyone but fools and criminals. No business can accept payment that might be worth 20% less than what they accepted if for, overnight, based solely on a tweet from a fashionable deranged mind. Selling a $100,000 car and the payment being worth only $75,000 by the time it is in the bank isn't a model anyone can live with.

Which leaves us to the only defacto real utility of crypto ''investments". Speculation, and at that speculation in something that is subject to a dozen different non-market ways it can collapse altogether, or any number of frauds or outright theft.

I use blockchain technology every day, you can hand me any single part from a car we manufactured on the last 10 years and I can source every single part in that car all the way back, in some cases to the batch information of the alloy of metal in a part. Developing and deploying that technology took many years and tens of millions of dollars, but the motorcar company cannot sell the fact that we do it.

No one has to this day explained to me how keeping incredibly OCD statistics about a digital dollar bill's birth and circulation history in and of itself adds value. Especially since the digital dollar bill in question otherwise serves no purpose other than to be passed on to the next bigger fool

I could go on for quite a while, I do find it interesting, but this isn't the place and I'd suggest we might move this elsewhere.

[keith]

So, crypto has no viable use as a payment medium for anyone but fools and criminals. No business can accept payment that might be worth 20% less than what they accepted if for, overnight, based solely on a tweet from a fashionable deranged mind. Selling a $100,000 car and the payment being worth only $75,000 by the time it is in the bank isn't a model anyone can live with.

That is absolutely 1000% the fact. Pure and simple.

[Suranis]

There seemed to be some interest in Ze cryptos, so I decided to make a Topic. Have at it

[RTH10260]

Okay, this is going to be my last post on crypto in this thread, because thread hijacking is one of my favorite things, but within reason.

So, crypto has no viable use as a payment medium for anyone but fools and criminals. No business can accept payment that might be worth 20% less than what they accepted if for, overnight, based solely on a tweet from a fashionable deranged mind. Selling a $100,000 car and the payment being worth only $75,000 by the time it is in the bank isn't a model anyone can live with.

When businesses think of using cryptocurrencies for transactions then they have to handle them in the same manner as they handle any other standard currency. Cryptocurrencies may be less predictable and more volatile. But think how Turkeys currency dropped i value cause of a stupid primeminister who thinks he knows more than economists. Or how a few years back we Swiss had a problem when our central bank over night stopped keeping a fixed exchange rate versus the Euro - we lost like 25% when it dropped. Or think of cryptocurrency as a different form of barter trade, how many pork bellies do I need to give you in exchange of a unit out of your production. How do I make the pork belly into $, how to I make a Bitcoin into a $.

Now let's go and munch a bacon sammich while the pulled pork roasts...

[RTH10260]

now we just need to wait for the Rooster to depopulate T and move the valuable stuff to here

[keith]

[
How do I make the pork belly into $, how to I make a Bitcoin into a $.

Now let's go and munch a bacon sammich while the pulled pork roasts...

Sell the pork belly to Hormel so they can turn it into spam.

Whaddya do with bitcoin?

[RTH10260]

[
How do I make the pork belly into $, how to I make a Bitcoin into a $.

Now let's go and munch a bacon sammich while the pulled pork roasts...

Sell the pork belly to Hormel so they can turn it into spam.

Whaddya do with bitcoin?

cannot even melt them down for scrap metal

[Gregg]

placeholder post

Gregg wrote: ↑Sat Dec 25, 2021 1:45 pm
I am still of the firm belief that ALL cryprocurrenncy is a ponzi scheme.

Why, please someone explain to me why I am I giving the entity that ''created'' a crytocurenncy real money for what they assure me is the money of the future? "Legal Tender" is what you can use to pay taxes, and while the IRS will accept Yuan, Pesos, Euros and Pound Sterling, the won't take your Bitcoin. It is useless as actual money (that which can be exchanged for goods or services) because the value fluctuations based on speculation makes it impractical for one to accept and otherwise the only thing I see when I see the newest ''coin'' is tulips writ large.

The utter lunacy of an NFT even more so.

But another discussion for another day.

When Mt Gox or the next big exchange goes ***poof***.

The second bigget coin was started as a joke and I think owesd its incredible market cap to a tweet or two from Elon Musk.

So you go get a whitepaper, you issue a coin, hype it, and when it gets high enough you dump your own coins in the market, make big bank, the price collapses and everyone else gets left holding the bag.


Tell me that CAN'T happen, go ahead.

Okay, this is going to be my last post on crypto in this thread, because thread hijacking is one of my favorite things, but within reason.

So, crypto has no viable use as a payment medium for anyone but fools and criminals. No business can accept payment that might be worth 20% less than what they accepted if for, overnight, based solely on a tweet from a fashionable deranged mind. Selling a $100,000 car and the payment being worth only $75,000 by the time it is in the bank isn't a model anyone can live with.

Which leaves us to the only defacto real utility of crypto ''investments". Speculation, and at that speculation in something that is subject to a dozen different non-market ways it can collapse altogether, or any number of frauds or outright theft.

I use blockchain technology every day, you can hand me any single part from a car we manufactured on the last 10 years and I can source every single part in that car all the way back, in some cases to the batch information of the alloy of metal in a part. Developing and deploying that technology took many years and tens of millions of dollars, but the motorcar company cannot sell the fact that we do it.

No one has to this day explained to me how keeping incredibly OCD statistics about a digital dollar bill's birth and circulation history in and of itself adds value. Especially since the digital dollar bill in question otherwise serves no purpose other than to be passed on to the next bigger fool

I could go on for quite a while, I do find it interesting, but this isn't the place and I'd suggest we might move this elsewhere.

|How we got here, join in

[neeneko]

Heh. My favorite latest crypto scam : Self help guru buys a dozen dead brands and starts a new coin using the Radio Shack name, and lists all his other empty companies as 'look at all these household names we are partnered with!'. His white paper is pretty much all inspirational quotes from books he claims to have read but apparently just 'skims'.

[Ben-Prime]

[
How do I make the pork belly into $, how to I make a Bitcoin into a $.

Now let's go and munch a bacon sammich while the pulled pork roasts...

Sell the pork belly to Hormel so they can turn it into spam.

Whaddya do with bitcoin?

cannot even melt them down for scrap metal

But the servers you will use to mine them generate lots of heat! That's a commodity, right?

[jcolvin2]

But the servers you will use to mine them generate lots of heat! That's a commodity, right?

I know someone who bought a mining rig and only ran it in the winter when it would serve the added function of heating his home.