Any of you into cryptocurrencies?

[rpggal she/her]

Any of you are into cryptocurrencies? I know of one website that lists some faucets that offer free crypto.
I am really into cryptocurrencies. I think they will replace dollars and cents in the future.
I am into nfts as well, played a few nft games like alienworld, centurytrain etc.
What do you generally think is the future of cryptocurrencies?

Edited November 28, 2022 by chongjasmine

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

I have the opposite opinion on Crypto. I think that it's cool, but if we look at FTX and others, we can see that no regulation or government backing isn't always a good thing.

If the FTX collapse had happened to a real bank, people would have gotten their money back. Because of the lack of regulation, that didn't happen.

I understand why Crypto would be attractive, but I don't think that I'll invest in it.
It was a pleasure to hear your opinion!

[Chaos he/him]

No links to sketchy websites, please. These all look like the most sketchy things ever, and we will quickly remove them. It doesn't help that we get so many spambots spamming very similar sketchy things, so maybe no one here means harm, but also... oof. 

[rpggal she/her]

I used to love cryptos, but not anymore.

[Mason Wheeler]

When Bitcoin first came out, I looked at the idea, and the technology involved, and thought "this will never amount to anything more than one big scam."

Turns out I was wrong.  Over the years, it's turned into a fractal scam, with smaller scams inside the big one, and smaller scams still inside of them!

[Kasimir he/him]

I told my prof that functionally I'm the worst of both worlds: I'm a sceptic that it is really as disruptive and transformative as advocates claim it will be. I do think there are some genuinely awesome use cases: I just think that there's a lot of concomitant ideology no one is really thinking through.

Will they replace dollars and cents? Maybe, but we'd need a population that's a lot better at cybersecurity and better cyber defenses for this to work. I point you to how Internet banking (and, to be fair, just increased Internet penetration) has been a major driver of the surge in scams in Singapore. Every year, the situation gets worse, with more cases reported, and increasing amounts lost on the millions. In a world without Internet banking, that doesn't happen because as a scammer or a hacker, I can't empty your bank account as easily. (To be sure, I can certainly get you to issue cheques or send money in aluminium foil-wrapped cardboard boxes (long story, don't ask.) So there's more friction there.

Here's the thing. Crypto is this Up To Eleven because suddenly the banks can't reverse the transactions easily (remember, they often can't reverse transactions anyway in the Internet banking paradigm, but now there's actually technical barriers against it.) Maybe you could design a CBDC that would get past this element, but that would probably be a hybrid or private blockchain which is giving up one of the key commitments of crypto ideology. I fully believe a lot of people still do not fully understand private key security: I've also seen cases where people don't remotely understand what permissions they are surrendering when they interact with dodgy smart contracts in an AirDrop and CBA to ask.

Do we need a trustless society? Yes and no. There's a well-earned scepticism of authority and government institutions, which makes sense when you realise how much crypto has its roots in the cypherpunks and how that too was grounded by US surveillance scandals. But I think insisting code can replace social institutions and structures and that we henceforth won't need to think about the ideal society or even just our underlying social presumptions is wrongheaded. Trust is normative; reliance is not. In general, I think one should also be wary of any system that suggests that we replace normative incentives with market incentives: it drags us back to the notion that markets are a great way of predicting human behaviour or rationality (!!!! a major red flag!) and then we want to rebuild basic social infrastructure using technology that fundamentally depends on or has market incentives baked into it as a means of replacing social systems.

Instead of normative trust, we rely on rational self-interest, which just fails when people get both greedy and stupid.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Kasimir

[+Wax he/him]

I was really into crypto up to the bull run in 2021. I was in from 2014… now fully out of it. The underlying tech is a good theoretical idea that doesn’t work in reality. Because we’re human, our underlying greed corrupts everything. So, until AI completely takes over this planet (hopefully never), crypto will remain a ponzi scheme in my eyes.