Trolling aside, I’ve talked a little bit about cryptocoins before, so full disclaimer: I have no money in coins. I’ve just been watching this unfold since about 2010 because it’s fascinating and sometimes goofy shit.
At this point I am still undecided about my opinions on a lot of things about crytocurrency itself, pro or con. What I do know is that this technology is not going to go away. It’s already being actively used and deployed as a currency, a payment layer and a commodity.
I hear a lot of people saying “this will never happen” but it’s already happening right now.
I know more than one person with functioning debit cards that spend one or more coins directly from online wallets.
Another thing that’s driving crypto adoption is the legal cannabis industry, because FDIC backed banks refuse to let cannabis industry members open bank accounts or make deposits to store cash.
Well, so far the cannabis industry has been pumping a lot of cash into cryptocoins and often turning large profits on their gross and net profits entirely on accident. Like, even some employees are choosing to get paid in crypto instead of cash, and it’s not all bitcoin, either – and they’re paying taxes on it and any crypto gains because they kind of have to because they work in the legal cannabis industry.
And, well, despite the volatility and weirdness and hassles and even the more recent high fees, if there’s one thing that’s been right (so far) about bitcoin’s self-made claims is that it is itself deflationary, not inflationary. The people I know who were being paid in crypto weren’t unhappy about it at all.
So for better or worse this technology has already changed the world, it is currently changing the world and it will be changing the world even more in the near future.
To ignore this or remain unaware of it or to dismiss all things cryptocurrency entirely would be like, say, ignoring Napster, Paypal, Bittorrent and a number of other things that people have recently ignored and even laughed at.
There’s also a lot of incorrect information, perceptions and/or FUD in this thread beyond statements of opinions, and some of them are coming from smart and normally readily trustworthy places.
There’s no way I can attempt to correct all of them and I certainly don’t have the expert knowledge or energy for it. What I can do is ask you to do your own homework, and to not necessarily take anything anyone says at face value or as correct, whether here or elsewhere.
One I would like to briefly correct is power consumption: Not all distributed blockchain networks or currencies consume as much power to function as Bitcoin/segwit does right now.
There’s a few that require extremely low power to operate that function just fine in a snippet of browser code or a small phone app. AFAIR Zcash is one example of low energy use, as is Ripple and Monero.
Ethereum is working towards it by switching to proof of stake instead of proof of work.
But, yeah, bitcoin’s power consumption is ridiculous. Apparently the bitcoin network now uses more electricity than Norway. I’m not sure if that’s BTC/Segwit itself or both BTC and BCH together.
Anyway, right now there’s a lot of weird shit going on.
I mean, a lot more than usual.
So, one of the weird things that’s going on is the continued battle between what is currently being called Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which is the results of the hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain late last year.* (Huge side note about forks below.)
nyway, contrary to a lot of predictions, BTC didn’t exactly bull run to the moon, and BCH didn’t plummet to zero. Because of friction due to high fees and network congestion on the BTC chain, people are moving back to BCH as well as to Ethereum and newer networks with less friction, fees and lag.
So on top of this, recently the Blockstream company did this kind of wild thing where they declared Bitcoin/segwit dead due to speculator capture, high fees and a lack of functionality as a payment layer, and therefore they’re no longer going to support or develop their block explorer technology for Bitcoin, and they’re switching those efforts to Bitcoin Cash. Except they’re just going to start calling Bitcoin Cash plain old Bitcoin.
Also, the @bitcoin twitter account recently became active again and has been promoting Bitcoin Cash as the real Bitcoin, leading to a huge crash in commodity salt futures and prices. So much salt.
Oh, and about 2-3 months ago all of the investment scams and spam I was getting switched from real estate and forex autotrading to Bitcoin.
They don’t seem to be that aware of ICOs or alternative coins yet, but there’s a hell of a sign it’s a huge bubble waiting to pop, if you needed another one.
And, well, everyone I know who was involved with mining, speculating or trading Bitcoin got out of bitcoin either last year or months ago, or they’re just sitting on small amounts of diversified coins that they don’t care about losing, because they didn’t really put any or much USD in to begin with. The huge, obvious elephant in the room is Tether, which is going to make MtGox look like a kid losing their allowance if/when it collapses.
I was actually betting on paper that BTC would have crashed harder than it did the other week and go back to prices as low as 8-9k USD. The timing was right, but there was a lot more support than I thought, and then futures started being offered and things got a little crazy.
But there’s a lot of people who have put a lot in, and we’re definitely in “stockbrokers getting tips from shoeshines” territory. When this bubble pops, at this point it is actually going to cause some problems. The total market capacity is large enough now to cause some weird ripples, but in this case it’s going to mostly be a lot of little people that get hurt by it that bought into it as a lottery ticket. I have heard way too many stories about (mostly young) dudes that have put their entire meager life savings of 5-10k into coin portfolios and then bought entirely in to the cultish mindset of “hodling” aka just holding on to coins at all costs, which, duh, props up the market for the whales and sharks.
And it’s these people along with regular folks who are following them that are going to get burned, hard.
I don’t think it’s going to be like the entire stock markets tanking during the Great Depression, it’s more like a whole lot of people invested in a really complicated pyramid scheme that doesn’t sell anything at all, and a lot of that “stored value” is just going to evaporate and get sponged up by the online wallets and exchanges, just like they’re doing now.
Like a mini Great Depression just for little people, like you could get a whole class and demographic of regular folks investing in volatile penny stocks almost entirely independently of the existing stock markets.
So yeah, bubbles and tulips. But some of these tulips have weird roots that actually do things, and not all of them are simply tulips.
Some are hardy, efficient and drought tolerant cacti.
Others have the potential to become entire ecosystems and gardens. (I’m actually really into the concept of the Kodak ICO as a way to prove copyright and ownership for photography, and even sell photo li.
