this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
747 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59207 readers
3702 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't mess with crypto but why would people leave it in FTX/Coinbase? is it cheaper for trades and stuff?
because most people are using crypto incorrectly as a speculative asset where it's meant to be used as a currency. What people should be doing is buying it and then taking it and spending it. Whereas what they are doing is they are buying it, hoping that the price goes up in terms of dollars or euros or yen or whatever and selling it. Those sorts are not what I would consider real crypto people. They are just using it as some sort of stock. What real crypto people want to see is the government and central banks no longer able to fuck people out of their money through inflation, taxation, and manipulation of the money supply. The good cryptos All have a completely predictable money supply. Hard-coded into their core so you always know how much there will be at any given time.
I tried buying something using crypto on Coin base back in the day. Signed up, transferred $100 into Eth, had to wait two or three days for Coinbase to do their due diligence or whatever, and then it was down 50% by the time I could use it. (I think China banned crypto or something?) I just pulled out my credit card and bought the item directly, and never touched crypto again
The problem is that the item you were buying was priced in terms of fiat currency, such as dollars or euros. When items are priced in crypto, then they don't fluctuate, because, for example, one bitcoin will always be one bitcoin, no matter what. Whereas a dollar will not always be a dollar. A dollar in 1914 would have bought a lot more than a dollar does today. The three good monies are silver, gold, and crypto. The first two can only be manipulated by going into space and getting asteroids to get more, and the third can only be manipulated by worldwide community consensus, which is really hard to obtain.
But with a hard coded money supply, you cannot control inflation. The inflation won't be in terms of dollars, it'll be in the number of coins required to buy whatever, you know like how inflation doesn't make euros less valuable versus dollars, it makes euros less valuable versus bread
First off, let me say that I am no monetary expert. Now, with that said, once something like Bitcoin hits its 21 million cap, there will never be any more Bitcoin. So wouldnt thar be deflationary due to lost coins, etc? Now in this case it can be argued this is a bad thing because miners need fees to secure the network. If there are no more coins being released to secure the network, then fees will have to make up for it, and that could drive the cost to transact up, which would be a bad thing. Something like Monero takes another route where 0.6 new Monero will always be released, but that the inflation is asymptotically 0 because that new 0.6 Monero makes up less and less of the entire supply over time. This would allow for the replacement of lost coins as well so that one coin doesn't become infinitely valuable.
Now imagine central bank halving their value to reduce inflation. Its the same thing but you don't have any control over the money you earned spending the time you did to earn that money. If there was an alternate currency which is not controlled by any government or inflation of a single government that crypto currency.
My brother-in-law is obsessed with cryptocurrency. He keeps going on about a fiat and how it isn't a fiat, or something. I don't listen to that 90% of the things he says, so I'm not that clear.
He's also a massive anti-vaxxer.
It's like being an idiot in one area of your life predisposes you to be an idiot in another era of your life. Who knew?
Mhmm Sure thing bud