So much for “trustless transactions” eh?

Please stop DCA’ing. Put your money into a standard ETF if you want to see a solid return. You will not get rich doing what you’re doing.

Yeah, but then you just get another job which there isn’t a lot of competition for because the number of people who know this stuff is small and no one wants to learn it because everyone is getting carpet bombed with negative propaganda.

That doesn’t sound very appealing.

My perspective is a bit different though, I think, because I was an early Bitcoin investor so, for me, unemployment is just a vacation

It’s funny how many people claim that. Which is probably significantly more than those who actually did see huge returns. I hope you cashed out already, because a lot of those early adopters who think they’re rich will eventually find out they aren’t.

I’m also curious how much you think you have which makes you financially independent? These days, people coming into large amounts of money is more likely to cause them to squander it than play it safe.

There’s also no job security in crypto. I’ve never seen another industry where on Monday, they’re saying everything is fine, and on Wednesday they declare bankruptcy.

No.

Period.

While stuff like Chainalysis are more white hat crypto types, it’s still not a growth industry no matter what people say.

There are tons of stories of HR people who will immediately reject people who previously worked in the crypto industry.

Also, in 10 years there won’t be any reasonably sized industry. Most people working in crypto are relatively transient in their jobs.

Very interesting how evasive people are when you’re asking such a basic question. Especially as it pertains to how much people have cashed out.

It makes you wonder how easily people really can cash out and how much liquidity there is in the market when everybody kinda implies they have a ton of crypto, but nobody will really say how much.

Personally I think most people don’t have hardly any, or they bought in and are negative and don’t want to think about it.

In a general sense, you don’t cash out. That’s not the way the market is designed. Money goes in. Exchanges steal it. Money doesn’t come back out.

No problem. Just call Metamask customer service. They’ll happily fix things for you.

Oh wait… you’re your own bank. Never mind.

Yes but if the promise of permanence doesn’t offset that cost then there is a fundamental problem somewhere: blockchain is supposed to be permanent, no?

There’s no guarantee blockchain will be permanent. In fact, because it’s so expensive and inefficient to maintain the blockchain, it’s highly likely it will not be permanent. There are 30,000 blockchains that are already dead because they were not economically viable to maintain.

And right now, both BTC and ETH are not economically viable to maintain. The only way they remain online is because a tremendous amount of resources are being dedicated to marketing their adoption – resources that aren’t getting paid back, resources that only see a return if you can continue to recruit more people to buy in higher. But after 15 years, blockchain still hasn’t proven to be uniquely good at anything in particular. So it’s not looking like it will be around much longer.

Look at all the crypto exchanges that have collapsed. These are not isolated incidents, despite everybody wanting to claim they are. The sad reality is there is no way to operate an ethical, legal exchange because the market doesn’t really create any substantive value. The only value being injected into the market is from dark markets and fraud. While that seems like it might be a limitless resource, it’s not really, and various authorities are clamping down on the fraud.

But it is a more general issue around pricing all storage. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting is a general solution - so when you zoom out and abstract away the single examples, it remains the only sustainable direction to keep fees low and let the blockchain survive forever without intervention.

I have no idea what you mean by “automatic transaction rebroadcasting.” This just seems like another meaningless buzzword.

We have existing systems that are part of solid business models that are self sustaining that can ensure their servers and databases are online and operational in perpetuity. Crypto/Blockchain doesn’t do that. It’s not self-sustaining right now and there’s no sign it ever will.

I get that you guys are sitting on top of tokens you hope will go up in value – so you want to believe I’m wrong. Your “faith” in crypto is not backed up by real world evidence.

It poses an interesting question: What happens if everyone starts using Ethereum as a data archive service?

It’s incredibly inefficient as a data archive. It’s also incredibly expensive. Why would you spend $5000 to store some data on blockchain that would cost $0.01 using other methods? And there is no guarantee of the permanence of blockchain. At some point, the size of blockchain will become so large, it will be a liability hosting such decentralized databases.

That “consensus” is not at all democratic. It’s an illusion. In the crypto world “consensus” translates to, “Whoever has the most resources has the most influence.” Which is ironic given that crypto seems to aspire to elevate itself above powerful special interests, but ironically, does nothing of the sort. In fact it merely trades one set of powerful special interests, with an even smaller, less accountable set of powerful special interests.

We are 15 years into blockchain technology now, and still, there’s not a single thing it does better than existing non-blockchain tech. The functionality of Ethererum’s “smart contracts” makes a 10-year-old Wordpress site look like advanced alien technology.

It’s time to admit this was a fun experiement, that yielded nothing of value to society. I know everybody hopes to get rich, but that’s just not going to happen. It’s mathematically impossible for even a notable percentage of holders. It’s a shame so many people have to lose so much, to learn, and some of them will refuse to admit the reality of the situation and repeat their same mistakes over and over.

Everybody loses their money except a few early adopters who managed to cash out, like all other Ponzi schemes.