Originally published at: Rough day for Crypto prices | Boing Boing
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A bunch of imaginary money became somewhat more imaginary than it had been before. How ironic.
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im glad i didnt buy in in any real way, i put 50 bucks in doge when it was real low but i did so not intending to see a return. Personally i dont believe crypto as a currency is a sound idea. The blockchain is good but coupling a currency to it has only caused speculation and pollution, it’s such a waste
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Let me know when they go to zero, otherwise IDGAF
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Here’s a funny ha ha, sort of. I have a senile uncle that dropped [his life savings] $80K into crypto [via some scammer], after a family intervention regarding his finances, power of attorney for his finances, the crypto account was found & cashed out at $200K. We moved him out’a his flop-house digs to a real assisted care facility. It’s the only upside story I know of personally, many downside stories are to be had. Don’t play with your money, when it’s gone, it’s gone big time.
P.S. The scammer was his care takers son, now doing time in the pokey.
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Yeah, the polkadot and DFINITY stuff is interesting, since they actually (claim/aspire to) do something useful without burning through any more electricity than a regular application, but we’ll see if any of it amounts to anything. Not holding my breath.
Bitcoin and even Ethereum seem more like selling Da Vinci drawings of flying machines rather than building planes.
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Having seen first-hand what sudden, undeserved crypto wealth does to a person and what they then do to others, I have little sympathy
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yikes, that sounds awful.
when my mother-in-law died in 2008 my wife and her brother cashed out an annuity she had purchased some years before in order to settle the estate. or at least they thought they had cashed it out. it turned out that they cashed out the dollar amount but ended up leaving $0.78 in the annuity. a year later my wife got the first of a series of annual statements describing the growth of the annuity. the last statement we got in january showed a current balance of $3.29. behold the power of compound interest.
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For reference: Ethereum reached $3,700 for the first time last Saturday - it lost 5 days of value.
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Exactly. A synonym for “playing with your money” is “gambling”. Putting one’s life savings on a highly risky bet is not a good idea, to put it mildly. And spreading that money out on a bunch of different table games in a single casino is not “diversification”.
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“Gambling” implies a set of stated rules and hard probabilities, and there are TONS of regulations making sure that gambling institutions follow those rules. Everybody knows how roullette works, the rules of your particular blackjack table are usually on the table itself, etc.
Putting money in crypto is pure Ponzi. And unbelievably environmentally desctructive on top of it.
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The same rules ensure that the casino always ends up winning at the end of the day.
And a lot of people apparently know the rules so well that they have a “surefire system” for winning.
Gambling is just a core aspect of a Ponzi scheme. Whether you’re looking at a casino, the lottery, Bernie Madoff, or Bitcoin, the promise underlying the bet is the same: you too can get rich quick without working or doing your homework. No-one should be risking their life savings on that proposition, and anyone who claims otherwise is as crooked as the predator who scammed @Papasan’s uncle.
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I hope the crash continues. I just want to be able to buy a good video card for my computer for a decent price.
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Too bad they couldn’t wait until 3008.
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Well, one, at least: (Doyne Farmer, a physicist turned quant (quelle surprise) also did this, around 1980. His website has a photo of the computer he built, but oddly doesn’t mention the prior work by Shannon and Thorpe)4
But, hey, Beanie Babies are up! The Market giveth and The Market taketh away.
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I really liked the math/ideas behind the blockchain ideas and I did buy/mine some bitcoin when it was brand new. Spent most of it on a vps lease for a few years and did make a few 1000 $ profits on the whole thing. I hoped that it would become a viable alternative for international payment because I really dislike paypal and the like. But the energy consumption an the speculation scared me away.
I don’t really regret it, but the few $1000 I earned from it would have been nearly a million $ today had I not sold them back then 
I don’t agree that it’s ‘imaginary’ money, though. At least not more imaginary than all other money. People calling bitcoin ‘imaginary’ don’t know how all money works. All money is always worth what people believe it is. It’s not like the paper in dollar bills has more intrinsic value.
There are huge problems with cryptocurrencies. The energy consumption being the main thing. But being imaginary is not really one of the problems.
I still hope someone thinks of a better way to prove the passing of time than the ‘proof of work’ that most current crypto currencies use, because the idea of the blockchain is an interesting one. Not so much for money (or shudder 'NFT’s) but it could be useful in lots of other situations where the order of stuff matters. But the energy problem must be solved first, because the current power usage is ridiculous. I think I read that there are some promising ideas in this space, but I haven’t really looked into it in the last years, because having bitcoins was very bad for my mental health.
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uh, but spreading that money among a bunch of different Nyan Cat NFTs is still sound investment strategy, no?
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The sensitivity of the “belief” of the worth of bitcoin to the utterings of one individual sets it apart from, say the US dollar, though. The mysterious origin of bitcoin is a concern as well. Was it generated by a hostile power to undermine other currency? What of the million bitcoin held by the creators? As I understand it (which is not well 
) very little of that has been “cashed in”. Who sits on that kind of wealth? Are we one quantum computer away from collapse of bitcoin? (IBM has said they’ll have a quantum computer of sufficient capability within ten years)
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I mean, all money is imaginary, really…
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