[throwaway_kufu]

Not disagreeing but from Bitcoin, ethereum to DogeCoin they are all tied to the whims of non trust worthy persons.

What if satoshi (unlikely but maybe the Fed itself) decides to liquidate its position of at least 1M Bitcoin. Ethereum foundation forks ethereum again to roll back transactions. Or Doge is uncontrollably minted (I don’t think it has a supply cap) or Elon decides to stop pumping it and decides to dump it.

Everything else in between is just a bunch of discord/telegram armies pumping for their own interests. I just that’s great so long as you have the social credit to be on the inside.

[ViVr]

Your post seems to have an undertone of nervousness about the exchange rate of USD/cryptocurrency which is understandable in the middle of this bull market. In my opinion bitcoin is a revolution disguised as a get-rich-quick scheme. A whale liquidating lots of BTC sounds like a sweet bargain to me. BTC has a capped supply so they will run out of steam at some point.

Due to game theory mechanics most network participants have an incentive to play by the rules and agree on rules that are as fair as possible. A hard fork has to be embraced by the majority of the users to be accepted. It's not just the miners or the whales who decide the rules.

Of course there are countless of cryptocurrencies in use right now of which most are doomed to fail (maybe even all but one are doomed to fail).

[throwaway_kufu]

It’s not USD/BTC. That’s not longer the dynamic, if BTC is dumped it’s value falls in relation to all other coins/tokens/fiat.

> A whale liquidating lots of BTC sounds like a sweet bargain to me.

This is my point, it’s all me, me, me. What about the people that lose everything. And what about when it’s no longer a situation of “only invest what you can afford to lose” rather that’s the currency you get paid in and it’s regularly subjected to pump and dump schemes. That’s not a system of currency, much less a democratization of money.

The entire defi system is currently set up for people to literally act as vultures and skim money from liquidity pools staked by others. NFTs are effectively money laundering schemes mixed with guerrilla marketing consisting of fake collectors, self purchases/self dealing, and more pump and dump scams.

Imagine some senior citizen just trying to pay rent, buy groceries and pay for meds fiddling with the most user friendly centralized wallets much less managing their own private key and setting gas. They fact is there are whales and they are sophisticated persons/organizations (if not live neural nets/bots trading on their behalf with unlimited capital and liquidity seeking to scrap profits by manipulating the prices) they certainly aren’t the unbanked which is another bs marketing scheme of the technology.

[seibelj]

I don’t think you can predict the future of crypto based on the current state-of-the-art. Using bulletin boards in the 80s internet was a difficult experience only for the technically savvy. I would give it more time for non-technical people to start using crypto.

[Applejinx]

Unless these non-technical people collectively work out that they are the chum for the consumption of the neural nets, whales etc. previously mentioned.

At some point it has to become obvious that there is no new opportunity for the non-technical, relatively powerless person. They are the food for the already powerful in this situation, as things currently stand. I know people in exactly this situation: older musicians and sound engineers on a discussion forum who clearly aren't up to speed on the mechanics of how all this works. The only redeeming factor I can see is that they're into POS instead of POW crypto, but they seem to have little idea of how fees and things work, and they're elderly musicians who're on the whole already not wealthy, and crypto is gonna take the last thousand dollars from some of these guys and leave 'em destitute.

When you talk about putting these sorts of things into the reach of the non-technically savvy, it seems we are generally NOT also talking about not predating upon them savagely. Instead we get Facebook and the like: we get mechanisms to consume those people, that being the point. Not great.

[throwaway19000]

>This is my point, it’s all me, me, me. What about the people that lose everything.

I think that's a very important point. Contrast cryptocurrencies to free software. The free software activists intended to give every user more power, to let anyone modify and share the software they use.

But crypto is different. Instead of empowering everybody, it replaces one concentration of power (old money and fed) with another (new money and whales). So naturally, the arguments in favor are increasingly of the type "this will be good for me": support crypto so that you, too, can carve out your part. Or don't and "have fun being poor" (i.e. left out of the concentration of power).

If crypto were about empowering everybody, it would consider pump-and-dumps in particular and preferential attachment in general to be bugs, not features. But it doesn't, not as long as number go up.

[joe_momma]

The fact people are jumping through the hoops and hoopla now show that it's possible. Could you imagine if we still used dial up to access the Internet, some people actually do so tech being difficult is a given for first generation offerings.

[bpodgursky]

Is there any evidence that Musk actually owns Doge? I think he's said something like, it's fun as a meme but has too much central ownership for him to actually buy it.

(wouldn't be shocked if he holds BTC though, since he got Tesla to buy in there)

[throwaway_kufu]

Whether or not he owns it, he is single handedly responsible for pumping it.

Look at how he pumped it leading up to 4/20/21 (DogeDay) and then Twitter bots and scammers pumped it on Twitter getting “DogeDay” trending by multiple times and all the uneducated “investors”, if you can even call them that, bought in at the height thinking it would pop to $1 on 4/20/21 DogeDay with Elon’s continued support and instead it got dumped losing 50%.

I wrote a post on here about the scam and said it would get bought back up on the dump and go to new all time highs as the uneducated investors that got scammed sold due to fear and not only did that happen it happened on Musk’s tweets of doing SNL and skits of the DogeFather. It honestly is like a predictable a moral neural net that’s single purpose profit on self created pump and dumps that it is capable of creating with unlimited liquidity.

When I made my post it got the inevitable comments of “so what, it’s no different than X, and the way it’s always been”. Maybe but its always poor people targeted and ultimately hurt, it’s immoral and should be fucking criminal. Especially if he is pumping it just for shits and giggles.

[nmfisher]

While I would support regulation to stop stupid people from losing their money, I also have zero sympathy for anyone who loses their money on something like doge.

Anyone who buys into a get-rich-quick scheme is a greedy fool, rich or poor.

[throwaway_kufu]

If you don’t believe in protections of uneducated investors that do lose money on Doge who exactly deserves protections. These are the very same people that would invest in a stock based on a tip, they’d never be able to perform due diligence, and that’s exactly why they would trust Elon, because that’s what uneducated investors that need protections do.

[simondotau]

It's impractical to demand laws to protect people from all incarnations of their own stupidity or credulity.

Specifically, it's not Musk's fault that it seems a large numbers of stupid and credulous people are choosing to have their "investment" strategy influenced by the tweets of a well known Twitter jokester. If Musk tweeted that paper shredders actually convert $100 bills into gold, should he be liable for any losses incurred by anyone stupid enough to think he was being serious?

[throwaway_kufu]

There is a major difference between laws to protect people from all incarnations of their stupidity from pump and dump schemes directed at unregulated investment vehicles.

It’s the same individual who has already faced legal repercussions with the SEC for his Tweets related to publicly traded stock. Let’s not forget Martha Stewart didn’t actually go to jail for insider trading, but she did go to jail for publicly stating she would be found innocent of the insider trading and they ended up nabbing her for those comments which amounted to securities fraud because they boosted her stock price.

It’s not like he doesn’t know his tweets are primarily influencing young, uneducated investors, and as they say in tech...that’s a feature not a bug. And for what it’s worth your comment is consistent with the opinions of scammers who never accept responsibility, to them it’s always the victims that deserved to be scammed for what ever reason.

[Applejinx]

What else are laws for?

[bpodgursky]

Wait, seriously?

The main (and to some people, only) point of laws is to protect people _from other people_, not from _themselves_.

[throwaway_kufu]

Victims, whether or not they are educated, or even if they are stupid as they have been called, are still victims. You are exercising crazy mental gymnastics to victim blame, it’s exactly what people do when a girl is rapped and they say she should have dressed to provocatively.

It’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard...to not protect someone because they should have been smarter than to act upon a desire selfish desire to make money, well no shit that’s why fraud and cons work, because almost everyone acts on the desire to make money. It’s why people have jobs and work, that doesn’t give employers a green light to defraud employees.

Should all those old people who fall for scams down to the Nigerian price email scams not be protected because they are stupid and acted selfishly?

Let’s say a casino rigged a deck of cards or rigged a slot machine and falsely advertised the odds of winning to the public, would victims not be entitled to protection because they are stupid and acted in a greedy way to get rich?

Why shouldn’t the victims of Elon, all the Twitter bots , and those behind them, that are pumping and dumping Doge be protect besides calling them stupid and greedy? What is it is shown millions of the victims are actually just kids that idolize musk? Are they still just stupid and greedy and thus deserve to be scammed?

[briefcomment]

Fortunately, there’s a competitive crypto landscape. If none of these are actually decentralized, people will move to different currencies. Sure it will be turbulent, but we’ll probably get to something effectively decentralized eventually.

[lottin]

Why would people move to decentralized currencies? They are clearly moving from decentralized currencies to centralized exchanges.

[briefcomment]

There's definitely a market for a currency that avoids monetary policy. I think exchanges are an intermediary until P2P becomes the norm. That's why I'm bullish on BCH. They make P2P cheap and fast, while retaining most of the other signature aspects of BTC.

[netheril96]

> Doge is uncontrollably minted (I don’t think it has a supply cap)

It doesn't have a hard cap, but it does have a cap on inflation: 5 billion every year (current reserve is about 128 billion). The inflation rate is less than 5% and going down every year, much lower than most fiat currencies. (Not related to why it shoots so high these days).

[tromp]

All cryptocurrencies control their supply. That doesn't mean a supply cap. It can be as simple as emitting only 1 coin per second. That makes it very different from fiat, with its unpredictable supply.

[dragonelite]

If the satoshi wallet holder would liquidate its position, he/she would do it like Micro Strategy and Tesla, no body really notice it over time. Given bitcoins open ledger and the wallet address its quiet easy to anticipate that traffic. You already have chain analyses tools.

[null0pointer]

The issue with that is the instant those coins move to a new address people will notice and probably panic.