Technology

I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen

Oh I don't know maybe it has something to do with Sam Bankman-Fried swindling $8 billion.

This is good for Bitcoin.

the pyramid scheme of crypto is dead. Partially because there are no suckers left to buy in and partially because interest rates have gone up, meaning that money is no longer free and investments need to promise a return, which crypto can’t provide as it lacks meaningful utility.

The long and short of it is that crypto was never a good idea, a currency where no one is “in charge” Is a currency where no one is responsible, so if something goes wrong no one is to be expected to fix it.

I’m not about to say that the federal reserve is the perfect system, but it is much better than anything the crypto world has come up with. Bitcoin is deflationary and inefficient, ethereum is undemocratic and has it’s attention split, and everything else lacks a broad base.

The centralization or currency was never the problem and these alternatives are worse in just about every way.

It is humming along nicely for those that use it. There could be another speculative pump filled with scams, that would be no surprise.

Not dead, just sleeping. It's a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:

Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.

And that's it. You don't have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can't solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone's database and hoping nothing happens or they're too big to fail. It's just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.

@peanuts4life@beehaw.org It's called a bear market. Every 3-4 years, it's the same thing. Patience...​:blobcatthinksmart:​

as long as there are suckers out there, crypto will live.

No, it'll never go away, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective.

it should be

I think really it just hit some kind of critical mass where people lost interest. Like streaming services: at first there was one (Netflix) and everyone wanted it, then there were a few and there was one for everyone, then there were too many and people just got sick.

Cryptography? No it's not, any more than math is dead.

Cryptocurrency? I don't know.

Nah. This happens every few years, has been since 2014. Buy a GPU before they rise up and use all of our electricity again. An new SBF will crash it sometime.

It will never die. I believe it will wax and wane over the years. Being incredibly anonymous and deregulated means it will always be a great place for the evil doers to manipulate the market and make money off of it. Because of that there will always be some people using it.

I think one of the biggest failings of cryptocurrency in general is that people view it as a replacement for cash or debit cards when in reality with how slow and expensive the transactions are it is more of a replacement for clearing houses. When you get money sent to your bank you can use it right away because the bank trusts you and provides that service but the money isn't truly there yet. You may have heard the phrase of "the check cleared" or something similar. It takes a long time for those processes to complete and crypto is faster than it.

I use crypto for its real intention, as money. I buy my groceries with crypto and pay most of my bills in crypto on a monthly basis. Crypto itself is not a problem. Its the FTX's and Mt Gox's of the world trying to graft old banking norms onto crypto that is the majority of the problem. "not your keys, not your coins." Exchanges are like gas station bathrooms, you go in, do your business, and get the heck out. You dont just hang around.

Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?”

The A.I. "Grift Shift" is Underway

Bitcoin is still around 30k a pop, so I wouldn't say it's dead yet. But I foresee a big crash in the months or years to come: the hype has passed, and the real uses of crypto are very few. It's also not a good investment since the expected returns are 0. Once people finally realize that, I see the price falling to 1k or even less.

Crypto is dead, long live bitcoin.

There are always some new people who believe they can get rich quick by investing in stocks, crypto, NFTs or something else. Why don’t we just write numbers on ping pong balls, throw them in huge transparent plastic sphere, shuffle the balls a few times, pull out a few and give some money to anyone who guessed the right numbers. Oh, wait we’ve already invented the stupidity tax centuries ago.

not really. the stupid stuff, like nfts, are dying, but the rest is still the same.

Most people are shifting towards the AI trend instead. Read a post which somewhat describes it well, people integrate the new trends into their projects to get more investor money. Nothing looks better to investors other than 'We have AI Blockchain nano technology behind our service'.

Last year, 'we have blockchain' earned lots of money. Now it's 'we have AI'. In both cases, the technology probably isn't needed, it is there just to be there.

as long as there are easily accessible networks with money on them there will be scammers to try and exploit them, this is no different than what we have seen with fiat, the biggest difference being that usually you have to use cash only to put out a shingle and be shady. Crypto allowed anyone to "look" legit and have easy access to settlement.

if anything people are learning WHY you want to at minimum control the ramps and ensure there are channels through which there can be trade using strong identity systems. next phase of crypto will look a bit more grown up as it will very likely be coming to the party as an enabler of multiple VRF style auth systems, helping break dependance on social login systems.

Most existing cryptocurrencies have no inherent value, they might make sense as a currency, but having a cell in a distributed spreadsheet assigned shouldn't be considered a growth investment and it's absurd how many treated it that way. The only way that sort of thing works is with an endless supply of greater fools, and evidently they ran out.