What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

[thrill]

The dumbest, most scam-prone guy I ever knew told me to buy Bitcoin in 2005. I did not, because he is the most scam-prone guy I ever met.

He's also not rich, so I don't think he bought any himself.

[Arthur Dent]

I think you may have just been underestimating him, what with his knowledge of the upcoming invention of Bitcoin in 2009.

[cardinalkarp]

I think you may have just been underestimating him, what with his knowledge of the upcoming invention of Bitcoin in 2009.

lmao

[thrill]

Guys getting old is hard enough, I don’t need you to rub it in.
If I try really hard to place the correct year (ugh f you guys) it was AFTER the guy ordered pizza with bitcoin which was 2010 but way BEFORE the rest of my normie bro friends wouldn’t shut up about it (2015).


For real though, I knew a bunch of guys who were obsessed with crypto and none of them are rich now. I kind of want to know what they did with their crypto (I think they were lying about how much crypto they had). At least one of them has to be secretly rich now.

[Arthur Dent]

I just remember it being created in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 and inflected with libertarian ideas about replacing government controlled currency which was supposedly being debased at the time by the Federal Reserve's response to the crisis.

Looking back at my posts in this thread, I said that BTC is a joke as a currency because the thing can only manage 5-7 transactions per second for the whole world. Checking now, it seems like there were peaks at ~8 in 2024 but back down to ~5 at the moment. Transaction fees have come way down to ~$1, but that's only because the thing is not used as an actual currency and just needs to support much more infrequent speculator transactions.

So, no sign and no real prospect of BTC turning into a real currency. We did have the NFT boom and the Silicon Valley Web 3.0 plans, but that seems to have busted, and I'm not really hearing any current stories of underlying utility for crypto beyond the original one: the ability to do illicit transactions for crime or international exchange avoiding fees, sanctions, etc.

Not having utility seems to have done nothing to contain it's price, which kind of fascinating. The official Mark Cuban line is that it's a kind of digital gold where it's valuable because people just trade it with each other as an agreed scarce thing, and where there are comical armored vaults with bars sitting around inside doing nothing. It reminds me of the questions I've always had about the stock market. Supposedly stock prices indicate the value of some underlying business, but the actual connection between the real business activities and traders exchanging stocks with each other at whatever price they happen to agree to is extremely weak. This shows you need basically nothing at all for extreme values to get exchanged. We're told about the market as this rational coordination system where resources are allocated based on knowledge, merit, etc, but it sure looks like the big dollars go into the useless and harmful.

It's grown so out of control and is getting integrated into finance in ways that make me think there will someday be some horrific crash that splatters over everyone not involved, but who knows.

[heyzeus]

I'm holding out hope that Bitcoin was created as a Banksy-esque art project and that baked into its code is a self-destruct command, such that on some date in the future every bitcoin in the world will just delete itself.

That would be pretty [expletive] funny. Sure, a number of nations would basically collapse (including, by the time Trump is done with us, probably the US). But what a ride it would be.

[IMADreamer]

Guys getting old is hard enough, I don’t need you to rub it in.
If I try really hard to place the correct year (ugh f you guys) it was AFTER the guy ordered pizza with bitcoin which was 2010 but way BEFORE the rest of my normie bro friends wouldn’t shut up about it (2015).


For real though, I knew a bunch of guys who were obsessed with crypto and none of them are rich now. I kind of want to know what they did with their crypto (I think they were lying about how much crypto they had). At least one of them has to be secretly rich now.

I know multiple people with a good chunk of change from crytpo. Not bros per say but I know one guy who retired off bitcoin during the last run up during the pandemic. My wife and several of her friends also have dealt a lot in crypto in a previous career if you catch my drift. Of course most of that got turned to real money because they had to live. My wife however still have 3 full BTC she's holding on to for the hell of it. Obviously not retiring off that but it's also not nothing.

I do wonder what the long term viability of it all is, but here were are nearly two decades into crypto and it's going strong.