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The Cult of the Torment Nexus knows a scam when it sees one.
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I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I’d never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
Yeah, it’s like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
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Even the “legit” parts are only used by people to try to get richt from it. It isn’t a currency and won’t ever be.
And as an investment it is bad. At least with real investments the company actually uses the money to improve. Crypto is nothing more than a sock under your bed.
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imagine not being able to read
they literally said some is a scam
therefore they don’t consider all of it to be good, and therefore they don’t ‘simp’ for it
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It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.
I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).
If I understand that correctly.
Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.
Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.
Here are a few of the problems being solved here:
- transaction fees
- privacy
- decentralization
- independence from fiat
Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I’m mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn’t do either of the last two, it’s subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won’t get the option of Taler.
I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don’t see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that’s what I’m excited to see take off.
Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It’s not going to happen. You can’t price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are “plug and play” payment processors who can handle it now… Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they’d have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
Never happening doesn’t mean they don’t try.
Fees are predictable. Volatility is not. If you can’t make sure the money you are paid retains its value then the price you are selling something for is also volatile rather than inert.
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.
You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?
I don’t know what you’re saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the cryptocurrency value drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don’t have the money.
The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.
Vendors can immediately sell upon receipt. And prices rarely change that much in a day, usually it’s a few percent at most (within the credit card fee range), especially for the currencies targeted at actually being currencies instead of scams.
This ^
Most vendors do frequently sell or convert to stablecoins to avoid this problem, and in times of uncertainty, they often charge more to cover the eventual losses
What is the point of using them if you are expected to switch them to an actual real fiat just to keep your value?
That is not what’s stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
My portfolio disagrees.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
My Enron stock disagrees.
Your attack missed!
You can pull the Enron card when talking about investments in general; your comments do 0 damage.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
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What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
It won’t crash indeed, cause it is too useful to scam people.
Monero is the only good crypto
No, but one of the good ones
Same way fiat is.
Édit: damn, and I thought bitcoiners were obnoxious You guys take the cake with so much copium.
Oh stop it
What’s the GDP of Bitcoinistan?
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I mean, it is worse
Probably the same as North Korea, with the amount of money laundering, ransomware, propaganda and scams they do 😄
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
I’m sure that if they found a set of keys for a Bitcoin wallet, they would just throw it away.
I certainly wouldn’t keep anything in cryptocurrency. I would transfer it to something stable.
I mean if I found a wallet with a million euros worth of bitcoin, I’d sell half and keep half. If it rises significantly, sell half of the remainder. And so on.
If I found a wallet with like 5k worth of BTC on it though? Just sell it all right away, it’ll do more for me now than say 10k in 5 years which is an insane long term return tbf.
Do the shareholders not realize how much easier it is to bribe the president with crypto?
Bribery isn’t illegal, theres no need to be coy and secretive about it.
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I don’t think people who give or take bribes usually like having a permanent history of the transaction.
Which is why they take the bribe in monero
Workarounds for the shortcomings certainly make bribes possible with crypto but not exactly easier than with traditional currencies.
Big incentive to keep trump in power if your bribery of him is public record. Someone else might do something about it
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Meta: Fuck it, we ball. (commits PR to add Bitcoin)
I bet Zuck is regretting not going forward with their crypto scheme
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I didn’t really parse what your comment is saying. Are you saying that whenever you buy BTC you later sell it for half your buy average? Or are you saying like 150%?
Is it just you or are you implying that everyone loses/gains 50% from the magical BitGoblin?
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Thank you, I appreciate the clarification.
Seriously, I do not have faith in USD anymore. What’s left of my paycheck after bills all goes to BTC, and I sell what I need on demand to cover day to day costs. Been doing this since 2019 and it has paid off handsomely.
If only there were some other major currency, maybe controlled by some larger union of countries so that one country’s poor decisions can’t tank it
Greece has entered the chat
Who was the 1%?
Why not Dogecoin?
That was so funny I forgot to laugh.
yeah people don’t understand DOGE might be the best investment known to mankind
spoiler
because some people on this thread cant take a joke, \s
Just like MS’ shareholders did. Most of these big companies don’t need to at the moment given how successful they are under the current system but eventually they will.
There is no logical reason not to hold BTC on your balance sheet over short duration US treasuries. One is an appreciating asset that has been growing at 50-60% per year since inception, while the other can’t even keep up with inflation. And Trump has made it patently clear only four months in office that the US and the entire dollar system can’t be trusted anymore. Hence more and more foreign countries and entities moving their capital out of US stocks/bonds and into gold, international equities, bitcoin, etc.
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holding BTC long term isn’t that risky
and the ‘full faith and credit of a nation’ uhhhh the nation in question is the US. not a bad idea to consider other things to put money into
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I would like to be shot out of a cannon with poop
You can say the same about any technology advancement. The fire, wheel, black powder, electricity, radio, tv, internet, crypto, AI, etc. The problem doesn’t reside in the technology but in the people exploiting it for evil intentions.
So what’s the positive uses of crypto then? You listed many things that are immensel useful like the wheel, fire, electricity, etc. Do you think crypto fits in that category?
Just an anecdote but never the less.
A couple of years ago I got a job at an animal shelter in a country that’s not the one I live in. For this I was paid 400€/m in cash to cover my bills back home during the time. So I went to the local BTCatm and even though they charge an insane markup (15/20% iirc) it was still cheaper than the “minimum fee” charged by the bank/western union.
As useful as the electricity or fire? Probably not. But as a tool for low paid workers that go to another country and is sending money home to their families without having to pay half of it in fees it’s pretty usefull.
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- Monero will just allow other instances (including itself) to fuck you over.
- That is just ripe for crime and terrorism
- You are just trading (wasting) electricity for money at a bad rate
- Cool, so they don’t fall for one of the blockchain scam, just all the other ones
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I don’t want to say crypto in general, but Bitcoin in particular was born after the 2008 crisis, as a decentrized form of money, meaning storing value against the inflationary fiat money that the goverments can print in a centralized manner, destroying all your savings. I think any technology that empowers decentralization is positive. Same as fediverse. And in the case of bitcoin, having a decentrized money it’s a really positive tool for freedom to avoid centralizing the power in the governments. But I am curious on knowing why you say that there is no positive uses.
Why do you think freedom and decentralization is always good? I don’t think bitcoin improves lives and the majority of people view it as gambling rather than currency. Sometimes its useful to get around local regulations or to pay slightly less in fees that would normally go to a bank. Its just a different western union money transfer and yet people on here are talking about it like it represents freedom and the individual spirit or some nonsense. Its main use is to scam people out of money. Its secondary use is to facilitate purchase of illegal goods. A very small fraction of the whole is people using it as an actual currency.
I’ll put it this way, a small fraction of responsible heroin users does not make heroin as a whole a good thing.
I don’t know why you say that bitcoin is mostly used to scam people and to purchase illegal goods. I agree that maybe a small fraction of people is using it as a currency. But, in my case, most of the people I know who have bitcoin, just have it as a store of value. Maybe I am lucky and know a lot of those “responsible heroin users” who understand that there will be only 21 million bitcoins, so what makes it valuable is its scarcity, and as long as central banks keep printing money out of thin air, bitcoin demand will grow, at least among those who understand it.
It’s used as money in Vietnam and Argentina.
Original purpose of BTC is to prevent government from controlling and inflating the supply of money. You can’t make 1000 BTC from thin air and put it into circulation. There is no company or CEO that controls it, it’s code is maintained by open community and network secured by globally distributed miners and nodes. That’s regarding BTC, other cryptocurrency nah
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Guns don’t kill people, people kill people excuse.
I hate that argument because it’s already been disproven. People use guns to kill people, often in heated situations.
If everyone wasn’t wandering around with guns in their pockets all of the time then they wouldn’t be the opportunity to shoot someone. Things would massively improve if the law was simply adjusted to not allow people to carry guns in public and they’re only allowed to keep them in their house and other authorised locations such as gun rangers and designated hunting locations. The gun nuts will still be able to play with their toys, but the murder rate would drop.
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If bitcoin didn’t use 40 terawatts to mine and was more reasonable in its electricity demand then I don’t think that many people would care about it. It still wouldn’t make it useful but at least it wouldn’t be actively damaging the environment.
We might even be able to find a use for it at that point. But as it stands now the energy requirements essentially make the technology not worth it given the very minor benefits.
There are versions of cryptocurrencies that don’t use massive amounts of energy.
Pick anything launched from Ethereum onwards.
And nobody uses those, so that argument is mute.
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This is an argument for renewables, not fot shitcanning POW.
Lmao
Who even made the proposal?
I due not want my corporation holding Bitcoin, if I want exposure I’ll buy Bitcoin directly. They should be holding a bit of debt optimally.
TBH if the choices are USD or BTC then I think the latter has a better future at the moment.
I think the latter has a better future at the moment.
Crypto ‘godfather’ of Bel-Air: Probe widens into L.A. deputies’ alleged links to mogul
- Federal authorities accuse Adam Iza, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, of financial conspiracies and extortion.
- Prosecutors allege Iza used L.A. County sheriff’s deputies to carry out his criminal bidding.
- Iza has pleaded not guilty. A judge ordered him jailed despite claims that he needs medical care after a cosmetic leg-lengthening procedure.
If you want a deeper dive, check out the TrueAnon episode series Zort a three-parts-and-counting plunge into the seedy underbelly of Cryptocoin scams, extortion, leg-lengthening surgery, LASD rampant corruption, and age-gap discourse.
Oh no! Lmao. You’ve really only demonstrated that you don’t understand what Bitcoin is, that you think Iza owns and operates it.
Don’t need to be the owner to grift.
And grifting is specific to any one form of currency because…?
BTC is still less stable. It will need to stop being a pump and dump cycle target before it could claim a true future.
With a Market Cap of 2 Trillion it’s pretty difficult to impact the purchase price as an individual or group. Even a small nation would struggle with it.
You’d think that but as Bitcoin becomes tied to more and more those things become part of what holds up Bitcoin.
Bird flu won’t affect Bitcoin valuation but could affect most fiat currency, but that’s only because of the system now. If Bitcoin became more prominent wouldn’t it be bound to thing more?
So you’re saying there is a group out there pumping and dumping hundreds of billions equivalence to USD?
I think you should learn more about the stock market. It’s literally a lie point blank and totally manipulated aggressively by actors who aren’t even THAT big.
Okay but we were talking about BTC pump and dumps and to perform that on the massive scale which dwarfs any stock ticker below the top 5 by hundreds of billions of dollars while somehow completely illuding people who watch the blockchain like hawks for big movers…
It’s just not feasible. You would have to be much richer than the official richest man on earth and have almost all of your assets liquid and then on top of that you would need millions of wallets acting asynchronously. And why would you even bother? If you’re that rich you could just not hide it.
Yes. That bitcoin dogshit fell and rose with the covid fall and rise of stocks. You think bitcoin is some profound new form of currency, but it’s really just another avenue for wall street to steal from main street.
Coming soon: Meta announces they are buying bitcoin anyways, because fuck them plebs.
most of the shareholders aren’t ‘plebs’
I suppose compared to our lord zucc they might be
yeah honestly though a man with 200 billion is vastly more wealthy than someone with 100 million
It’s difficult to comprehend just how much more wealthy a billionaire is. If you spent $10 every ten minutes, it would take you about 70 days to go through $1 million. To reach a billion would take 190 years.
The difference between a million and a billion is approximately a billion
Why would they in the first place? It would be like a newspaper buying gold. If investors want to buy bitcoin they can just do that.
Because holding USD is a liability these days.
Is it?
Seems like petrodollars have been riding high for decades.
Since you’ve missed the news, the USA has been overtaken by a fascist christian white supremacist party who gut social programs, cut science funding, literally completely disbanded the department of education, increased the defficit, and enacted large Tariffs on every other nation.
the USA has been overtaken by a fascist christian white supremacist party
For the third time (assuming you don’t count Congressional cycles) in twenty years. I’ve spent a solid 13 of the last 25 years living under a Christian Fascist presidency. Why am I supposed to assume that will devalue the dollar this time around?
You’re either pretending this administration isn’t worse than any previous example or you are woefully naïve.
!remindme in one year
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But now they’re essentially just a bitcoin proxy, they even changed the logo to have a bitcoin on it.
Now that there’s lots of ETFs and stuff, why buy Microstrategy and not just bitcoin?
If you own a share of meta then you own a share of meta and meta owns a mix of assets ranging from physical to various liquidity, whether its USD or BTC there isn’t any difference in this regard.
Their value-add is that they financialize their bitcoin holdings to grow their bitcoin-backed shares faster than the bitcoin itself. Higher risk than just holding bitcoin or ETFs that just hold bitcoin, but something like 30-40% better returns.
In good times. We’re yet to see how they do in a bitcoin winter.
What does “financialize their bitcoin holdings” mean? Do you mean they use leverage (i.e. debt) to buy bitcoin than they could otherwise? That’s nothing new and is a common ETF strategy (see BITX). And yeah, it also means the bad times hit much harder.
They issue “convertible notes”, which this coindesk article explains far better than I could because I am not a finance head and honestly do not fully understand them.
Yep, that’s leverage. They sold notes which can be converted to shares of microstrategy. So while they don’t have to issue more shares right now (which would dilute shareholders and lower the value of individual shares), they will have to in the future given the conditions on the convertible notes. If they have to convert those notes into shares while the price of bitcoin is dropping, it’s a double whammy because the value of their holdings (which their value is entirely based on) drops AND they’re diluting individual shares by having to issue more shares. This wards off investors which will tank the price even more.
Apparently GameStop are considering it too.
is gamestop even relevant anymore
Gamestop already did last week
I’m out of date then.
Yeah but GameStop’s entire existence depends on crypto meme hype, while Meta’s depends on extracting our data as efficiently as possible
