Breaking news! Criminals (but not only) use crypto, and people get scammed. This happens as well with fiat, so that must surely mean fiat is a scam!

Flawless logic, really. You people impress me with your thinking.

if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.

in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design. it's a scam because the only people who have that control are the wealthy.

If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.

the purpose of a Fiat currency is economic supremacy that is backed by the governing body and the economy that uses it.

tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?

I usually do, but in general they're dead for lack of demand

Crypto is not a scam, it's just plain stupid.

The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.

It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else. Can you imagine doing billions of transactions per day this way? It is extremely inefficient and yes, this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.

It's in a way comparable to a cpu doing 6+7 in a single CPU cycle whilst AI needs to burn down a forest to answer the same question

Crypto is stupid.

I get what its trying to replace and i agree that the current system sucks as well for a long list of reasons, but crypto is NOT the solution. A fundamentally different system must be designed to be able to solve the issues that crypto is trying to solve

None of that is "by design" its just the result of an unstable system. Crypto sucks for a long list of different reasons.

it is by design for a lot of them.

The instability?

You're giving it too much credit, especially the altcoins that didn't look beyond "existing". I know, I made one like 7 years ago or so and I ain't proud of it.

The instability of the worth of these crypto coins is just inherent to the instability of it, and actually not that different from currency fluctuations. You don't think the entire world works with US dollars, no?

It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else.

wat?

wallets don't process any transactions other than yours. and even then, wallets do the easy work.

Your existence is a scam.

Don't even bother. You'll never get through to these drones.

I might be mistaken, but isn’t using a mixer considered money laundering in the US?

Wtf are you talking about

You don’t understand how crypto works it seems

It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else

That’s misleading. Your wallet scans blocks for transactions that goes to your wallet, but this is super fast for many cryptocurrencies. Wallets usually sync in seconds.

this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.

No. The main reason is block size and block emission period. Also, you’re completely forgetting the fact that non Proof Of Work cryptocurrencies exist, and have close to 0 electricity cost

The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.

If they do they’re pretty much a fucking genius for their age

USA also claimed they owned all BTC that went through dark net markets. I don’t care what they think about X or Y thing

But yea that would be considered ML in many countries because you’re hiding the links and making it seem like normal money, which it should be imo

I'm a developer but have utterly no experience with torrent architecture, or for that matter anything outside of standard web services and the kinds of things companies do. But I've been wondering if BitTorrent technology would be usable for federating content for things such as Lemmy. After reading that somebody was begging for money to offset the $5k/month they were spending to run an instance (I mean, that shows true dedicaton but holy crap dude), it seems like a distributed architecture would make a lot more sense than somebody having to foot the bill for a big-ass server. I just personally wouldn't know where to begin on a project like that, but maybe if somebody with the right combo of skills and experience gave it some thought...

You won't convince anyone one here that crypto isn't a scam. These people are set in their ways.

if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.

This is untrue for pretty much everything, even fiat. Everything is a market. A good example of this: stocks.

in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design.

Now this is just false. You’re just inventing fake facts here. You clearly know nothing of the history of crypto.

If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.

Uhh no? 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC. Its value compared to other assets will change though. And in that case it would have less value indeed. You’re just allergic to high variations and high risks assets. Stocks is exactly the same. Some assets vary more than others. Let me assure you the value of BTC will never do a +/-10x in a day

tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?

Emission (POW, POS…) (or total stock), demand and offer and perceived value, just like everything on earth?

And stubbornly entitled

Their uncle must’ve been rug pulled when buying a shitcoin or something and now they believe crypto is nothing but a scam

But yea there’s nothing to do. If you can’t educate them then let them stay in their ignorance if they like it. I just don’t feel that letting them spread their misinformation is a good thing

2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.

I essentially got ridiculed.

And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.

If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.

Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.

Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.

The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.

To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.

Crypto doesn't have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can't be printed at will by the government.

Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto's value is driven more by speculative "investors" than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.

Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn't any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.

Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can't give up their ability to print money. It's far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.

The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating