[simo7]

> Nobody chooses to be a fool

Dogecoin is at least honest, so many other "jokes" including Bitcoin, contemporary art, some stocks etc...

If people want to play a game of musical chairs, I rather prefer this game to be called exactly what it is.

It surprises me to see so many warnings about Dogecoin and so few about Bitcoin for instance. People actually believe there's any relevant difference?

[XorNot]

Contemporary art isn't a joke, it's a money laundering scheme.

[eps]

It's a mainly tax deferral/evasion scheme, far less a laundering one.

[tim333]

And a Veblen good. Really if you want to avoid tax there are easier ways.

[arisAlexis]

They don't understand they are playing musical chairs. They think they are investing.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

The difference is Bitcoin is much more widely used for payments. It now has a second layer payment protocol, which makes transactions fast and cheap, while remaining permissionless. And yes, it is useful. I just recently contributed to an imprisoned political dissident in my country. If made through regular credit card channels, that contribution could land me in jail.

[salawat]

It can still end you up in jail once your regulating authorities catch up to the technology. It's a distributed ledger. This should translate to "queryable public datastore of your financial transactions" in your head.

Just look at how the U.S. IRS is starting to get a subpoena process off the ground with regards to identities of wallet holders from exchanges. Even though the glacier doesn't appear to move, I assure you, it most certainly does.

Never make the mistake of assuming just because something is new meaning it will always remain that way, and if your nation state is cracking down on political people non grata, they may have no compunction with figuring out who was behind those transactions with or without your help.

This is ironically why cash not in a bank vault is the king of anonymous, difficult to trace financial activity. No paper trail.

Note: Of course banks and regulators know that too, and capital markets will do anything to make sure the maximum number of people entrust their finances to an institution to a loanmaking institution. People don't realize that ease of transaction and traceability is in and of itself a populational control mechanism.

[LanternLight83]

There are privacy-focused coins, like Monero, which are developing some pretty awesome tech

[inteoryx]

For what it's worth, I do feel the same way about bitcoin. I just feel like the argument is even more clear when discussing dogecoin. I also think that once you reach this conclusion on dogecoin it is easy to think "Well dogecoin is basically bitcoin, so..."

[polishdude20]

What is your opinion about Ethereum in this case?

[inteoryx]

I'd need to know more than I do about Ethereum in order to have a solid opinion. My current impression is that Ethereum tries to provide some value or innovation in the form of distributed computation, which is good, but also that there is no useful program being run on the distributed computation layer.

I haven't looked too much into it, so maybe I'm wrong about the useful program thing, but to my knowledge smart contracts are mainly used for creating digital tokens and things like that. Maybe Ethereum could be a useful way to conduct raffles, lotteries, or sports betting.

If you know more about Ethereum could you point out any useful applications that use it?