Bitcoin and Digital Currencies

I can't tell you how many times I've contemplated getting into the crypto market just to make a quick buck and get out. I have no ethical qualms about earning money from exploiting crypto bros. I even considered starting a shitcoin or NFT side-project just so I could rug-pull it and make a few hundred thousand dollars.

Again, the ethics don't bother me. Crypto bros are the least ethically challenging people to steal from. In the end, it wasn't worth the personal risk. You are stealing from people, after all, and those people tend to get angry.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2024 at 9:52:55 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Given how volatile that market is, and the sheer amount of mismanagement going around, it feels more like a bad gamble, honestly.

Wake me up at your own risk.

Kinda, yeah. One of the ways people get lured in is by stories of quick, massive returns, but that's the experience only for a subset of participants. After all, for every winner there has to be a loser. For everyone who gets in early and makes a killing, there's someone else left holding the bag.

That's not even talking about how crypto enables criminal activity — and not the tame kind, either. I don't want to be connected to that.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2024 at 10:06:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The real money in crypto, like with any gold rush, is to be the one fleecing the miners hoping to get rich. Meaning start your own crypto exchange and fake being a financial genius like SBF. Just don't get caught when it inevitably goes wrong like SBF.

Edited by M84 on Jan 3rd 2024 at 11:33:52 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised

The best time to make money off cryptobros was... a few years ago, I guess? Pretty much all the people who made bank were early adopters who have already cashed out by now.

Now that I think about it, it really is like gambling in a way - because you need to know how and when to get out and avoid overcommitting.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jan 3rd 2024 at 5:30:30 PM

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

Rugpulls are not smart at the moment either, because making an NFT collection costs money and a lot of the more recent attempts have just crashed and burned and left the minter with several thousand dollars in costs and no profit. Mostly because the NFTbros are AIbros now.

Not Three Laws compliant.

And of course the ones who really make money in gambling are the ones running the games.

Disgusted, but not surprised

Yes, the best time to get in was a couple of years ago. There's no money in NFTs any more, and the crazy enthusiasm for coin offerings seems to have faded as well. At least the Twitter/X spam from them has died down.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

My younger brother claims to be in some private Discord group by rich people who trade crypto and hints.

I have a hard time seeing that as anything other than a scam.

They claim there's a coin called Hytopia, which is a crypto attached to some stupid Minecraft ripoff called Hytopia, and that it'll be used in the player-made economy. A big argument of his is that a Minecraft server which allowed trading of NFTs had like 100k users at its peak before Minecraft shut it down, therefore proving there's a demand for crypto in that community, therefore Hytopia will catch on.

I'm very skeptical of that being proof that there's much demand for it now, and that this was anything more than a temporary burst of interest from cryptobros who flocked to that server.

Either way, I put in $1k into Hytopia for the hell of it fully expecting to flush that money down the skibidi. Admittedly, it nearly doubled since then (a few months) but I'm still skeptical. I don't think this dumb little Hytopia game will catch on in any important way.

I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!

The vast majority of those "private Discord groups" exist to lure in marks for pump-and-dump schemes. There is zero utility for projects like the one he describes.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That's exactly what I think. He said he put $10k into Hytopia. (He's rich.) 🤦‍♂️ Like I said, I think that money's gonna vanish. But there's no point in telling him, because he refuses to admit he's wrong about anything that's important to him.

Last time he tried to get me to buy a crypto, he kept saying, "Just think about the fundamentals." That crypto crashed.

I kept telling him Hytopia was gonna flop, and he was saying that it would succeed because this or that reason.

Fun fact, the official website for the game attached to that crypto claims the game will launch in 2023.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Jan 3rd 2024 at 7:02:47 AM

I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!

That's the fundamental: Crypto always ends up crashing and burning.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I think this might be a good idea for you to watch, if you haven't already, Bonsai. It's an in depth video about the culture of crypto and NF Ts and it's really good.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 4th 2024 at 7:51:57 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

I watched that awhile ago. It's going, but it's worth mentioning it's a basically a full length documentary.

I think the most relevant point is that because Crypto is ultimately built on the belief that it will be more valuable in the future, it encourages a sort of toxic positivity within crypto communities because anyone who doesn't think the value will always increase in the future actually undermines the value of the crypto/NFT.

While this is technically true of most financial assets, there's usually some sort of real thing backing the asset, which isn't usually the case with crypto.

Crypto also has the wrinkle of becoming entirely useless if the exchanges fall apart. If I have a dollar, I can go to a store and use it for a dollar's worth of stuff. If I have one bitcoin and I can't access any exchanges, it's basically worthless in real world terms.

Not Three Laws compliant.

It is exceptionally funny when bitheads (or coinbros or whatever they're called) go on about how when national economies collapse they'll still have their BTC and ETH and whatnot. This is absurd. Their "money" relies on the Internet and a massive array of mining/blockchain verification data centers. If the world falls apart, do they really think that'll still operate?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Lol, that was actually one of his silly arguments. That something was backing up the crypto. Just like how he encouraged me to buy gold because gold can be used to make electronics, therefore it has value, and its value will go up when the dollar crashes.

(And yes, like all wacko conspiracy theorists, he's also a massive bigot who threw many of his social skills away to replace them with his agenda. Before anyone wonders.)

As for that documentary, it looks like it's somehow blocked here at work despite YouTube itself not being blocked. But if it's "Line Goes Up," I've seen it before, and I think it's awesome.

My view was, if money falls apart, what will those crypto even be worth? And how many people even have crypto and see value in it? Same with gold.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Jan 4th 2024 at 9:35:52 AM

I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!

I would say that if the situation becomes so bad that money is useless that you are back to physical goods exchange anyway.

Edited by Risa123 on Jan 4th 2024 at 3:44:33 PM

Pretty much. Nobody is going to barter a USB drive full of bitcoin for bread or meat.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

In a total colapse, the gold hoarders might actually have some leverage.

But I'd go the way of Metro 2033. Bullets worth more as a currency.

And still, I also find extremely amusing how the cryptobros act like fiat money as being fake money and worthless, while crypto is the real deal because it isn't centralized and "community" run. As if you don't have actual backing for fiat currency like the soft and hard power of a country and its whole economic output and population to back it up. While crypto is built on hype and being run by a bunch of hedge fund scammers.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Generally speaking, currencies do not have value as itself. They only have value because people recognize them as such. That is the point of currency, and it's main advantage over goods exchange.

That's right (lo)libertarians who are often in to crypto for you really. State is bad, private good regardless of whatever it makes sense or not. Now to be "fair" it does make sense if you are so rich and privileged that you do not need the state to help you. The flaw is there by design because the state act limits them in their activities.

I think it's not inconceivable that some sort of crypto could have value after society has stitched itself back together. The period of time where we go back to bartering would likely last for months or a couple years at most.

However physical goods would still be a far more effective and consistent method to transport value through the other side of a societal collapse. Heck, plain old cash might even have crypto beat since it will probably retain value from cultural inertia as long as the collapse didn't involve hyperinflation.

I ask again: who's going to be running the computer networks needed to validate transactions on the blockchain in this post-apocalyptic hellscape?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Crypto is heavy enough in terms of computer processing time that if the internet totally collapses, it's not inconceivable that it won't be possible to do anything with crypto and that whoever designs the successor system may well design it in a way that crypto doesn't work, depending on what actually happened.

There's also the possibility, in that scenario, that whatever wrecked the internet was connected to crypto or the blockchain in some way, in which case no one would want to design anything that can comprehend crypto without significant extra work.

Not Three Laws compliant.

My line if thinking is that "apocalyptic hellscape" is actually a very unlikely scenario even among the scenarios where our current infrastructure and institutions fall apart.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that my view indicates that cash would be a safer investment in many societal collapse scenarios, so I'm not exactly taking the crypto enthusiasts side here. I'm just saying that it's not outright impossible for crypto to retain value after society had stitched itself back together, which it almost certainly would in some fashion.