Is anyone else starting to become a bit worried? mod note in first post

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value

A fellow sceptic.

On the one hand, he says it's a steaming pile and on the other he says it's interesting. Why spend time on it then and why clutter up this thread with your ramblings.

I'm all for hearing the counter viewpoint but not with the twisted invective that comes with it - and only if it's coming from someone that keeps an open mind. That's certainly not you.

makeorbrake wrote: »

On the one hand, he says it's a steaming pile and on the other he says it's interesting. Why spend time on it then and why clutter up this thread with your ramblings.

I'm all for hearing the counter viewpoint but not with the twisted invective that comes with it - and only if it's coming from someone that keeps an open mind. That's certainly not you.

I do keep an open mind. If there’s some major development or breakthrough then I’ll reconsider. Don’t need to do so at the moment though. Crypto has two use cases:

Buying it in the hope someone will pay you more for it - the greater fool theory.

Buying drugs, porn, illegal services on the dark web.

Oh, or you can use it in a cat cafe in Chang Mai.

WhiteMemento9 wrote: »

I wasn't really trying to be offensive. It is quite clear that you are playing some sort of circus clown in order to get a rise from people. Someone commented that it would be nice to see you not posting. I was trying to say the opposite as I find great comedy in your posts.

I am sorry if that is not the case and you are in fact about serious business of trying to save people from themselves on this forum. Hopefully some souls might listen. In that case you are doing gods work.

I’m not playing any clown role. I’m a huge sceptic of all cryptocurrencies, and think they are an extremely stupid gamble/investment. I think greed is the primary motivation of most players in this space, and they appear to have lost even basic critical analysis faculties as a result. These coins are being magicked out of thin air, and people are handing over real money for them. They aren’t used anywhere, give you no share in the ownership of the company who produced them, are useless as a store of value, and most of them were created by hucksters, conmen, and criminals. The poor fùcker sticking a few hundred or thousands into this is the one going to be left holding the bag.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

I’m not playing any clown role. I’m a huge sceptic of all cryptocurrencies, and think they are an extremely stupid gamble/investment. I think greed is the primary motivation of most players in this space, and they appear to have lost even basic critical analysis faculties as a result. These coins are being magicked out of thin air, and people are handing over real money for them. They aren’t used anywhere, give you no share in the ownership of the company who produced them, are useless as a store of value, and most of them were created by hucksters, conmen, and criminals. The poor fùcker sticking a few hundred or thousands into this is the one going to be left holding the bag.

Plenty of people though have given counter arguments to all these points numerous times and you just willfilly ignore them. No I won't be pointing them out again because it is complete waste of my time.

Winners and losers exsist in all areas of life. We don't live in some utopia where everyone is going to get rich from thin air. Some people will lose money, some people will make money. That is the nature of investing in volatile markets such as this one.

As someone has already said why don't you put your money where your mouth is and short the markets instead of pointing out the bleeding obvious here 24/7.

WhiteMemento9 wrote: »

Plenty of people though have given counter arguments to all these points numerous times and you just willfilly ignore them. No I won't be pointing them out again because it is complete waste of my time.

Winners and losers exsist in all areas of life. We don't live in some utopia where everyone is going to get rich from thin air. Some people will lose money, some people will make money. That is the nature of investing in volatile markets such as this one.

As someone has already said why don't you put your money where your mouth is and short the markets instead of pointing out the bleeding obvious here 24/7.

Where can I short all altcoins? Link please? And not bitmex or bitfinex. Dodgy as a 9 bob note even by cryptos famously low standards.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

Calm down amigo. You’re in danger of causing yourself a stress related breakdown. I didn’t bang your sister or anything, just putting across my view that blockchain as a tech, and crypto as an ‘investment’ are both steaming piles of fresh dung. There’s nothing a blockchain offers that can’t be done cheaper, faster, more securely using existing technology. Bitcoin and all the other buttcoins are just a libtard fantasy.

I can't see the point of bringing vulgarity into a crypto investment subforum thread, unless you're just a sock account trying to derail things here.

makeorbrake wrote: »

Agreed. I can't see the logic in taking such a heavy interest in something that he says is a pile of ****. Doesn't make a blind bit of sense. I mean, perhaps he's trying to do us a solid - but then those who have invested in crypto he's called morons.

I’m interested in the psychology of a bubble market. I’ve also become interested in the different movers and shakers in the space: Tether, Bitfinex, Verge, Justin Sun, Binance. I agree with the very many pundits who believe that every ICO is a scam, that regulation will hit hard this year, and that the value of most/all of them will trend quickly towards 0. I believe the emperor has no clothes, and that the entire space is one created through scams, greed, FOMO, and waves of hysteria.

I apologise for my outburst earlier (had a massive quantity of porter last night after the Liverpool game), but will not apologise for being a sceptic. I think it’s very silly to have crypto in under investments to be honest. It’s gambling. I will continue to put forward a viewpoint that is a polar opposite of the orthodoxy around here - crypto is great, anyone who doesn’t believe in it is a troll, salty nocoiner, sock puppet; everyone is going to be loaded.

makeorbrake wrote: »

It's mostly YOU that's coming out with this... regurgitating the same stuff over and over.

Its only him thats coming out with it tbh, this is a pretty cautious forum, everyone knows its a gamble. Anyway he actually used the word "libtards" as an insult, no point trying to reason with someone like that.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

I’m interested in the psychology of a bubble market. I’ve also become interested in the different movers and shakers in the space: Tether, Bitfinex, Verge, Justin Sun, Binance. I agree with the very many pundits who believe that every ICO is a scam, that regulation will hit hard this year, and that the value of most/all of them will trend quickly towards 0. I believe the emperor has no clothes, and that the entire space is one created through scams, greed, FOMO, and waves of hysteria.

It's a free unfettered Wild West market where anyone can buy in and potentially make 10x or even 100x.

Forget the whole crypto thing - that alone is a massive pull.

I am very skeptical about crypto myself, but the money made from it is very real. I would recommend reading the original Bitcoin thread here, going way back years. Interesting to see the same comments how it was a bubble, a scam, etc, when BTC was worth fractions of what it's worth today. Personally I remember people telling me buy at $20 and myself replying that it was nonsense. Am still not keen on BTC itself, but it's hard to argue with those gains over the years.

Autochange wrote: »

Comments have now been closed for this thread.

:pac:
There's a limit to the amount of brick walls you can slap your head against. It was the same for the vaping sub-forum years ago - uneducated folks on a moral crusade against an evil they couldn't pinpoint... but "muh chemicals!"
I prefer to let data tell the story, others believe in whichever US lobbyist can affect the most change with their money. YMMV.

Woke Hogan wrote: »

Hasn't blockchain been around for almost a decade? At what point does a technology leave the alpha or beta stage after ten years?

Bitcoin has been around for almost a decade. Very much a test case that's had to weather many storms just to get to it's current stage and it's still nowhere near infallible. Ethereum is the first that's capable of relatively complex programmable utilities on-chain and much of the reason behind last year's boom.
A technology that implicitly requires the tightest implementation of security yet known for any financial instrument - who knows when it advances or at what speed?

Blockchain detractors seem to think it should work the opposite way, scale it quickly and let it be broken if needs be, possibly due to not having read a single thing about it or a side-effect of knowing very little about software development? Maybe? Probably maybe definitely?
For a group of people worried about people's money flowing into the space ye don't seem to give a toss about the security of said money once it's entered. Vulnerabilities exist and slow down development in all other areas. This isn't like standard software development (which still takes many years to progress) where bugs can be ironed out later with relatively low risk to users.
As you may have seen over the past few days, many badly-written ERC20 contracts have a bug allowing new tokens to be created - this obviously devalues those currencies as trillions upon trillions of new tokens exist.
What could have stopped those bugs...? Some kind of an audit perhaps, maybe it should be called a "Security Audit" and bad code wouldn't be published. Just some off-the-wall blue sky thinking there. Now imagine that at the protocol layers where each line of code is being combed over in order to circumvent the design. This has to be secure.

Anyway. Which other things would have fallen by the wayside in the past with this logic of "Not finished or ready for mass adoption now, therefore never worth anything."?

GNU. Development started in 1984. Not the dominant OS for the majority, it must be a failure.

Linux by extension. Started in 1991. Same. Obviously a total failure with no use cases.

Handheld tablets. Newton released in 1993. Ten years later we realised tablets were a waste of time. Oh, wait... Until they weren't, a full 17 years after the Newton... hundreds of millions got sold! Imagine the embarrassment those people will feel knowing that the thing they bought for whatever purpose is actually useless to them.

Mobile phones. 1973 for first working prototype. A full ten years after that we had the first commercially available mobiles. Another 15 years after that came mass adoption. Evidently mobile phones had reached their ultimate form, never to be improved upon or advanced in any...

Smartphones. Goddamn you smartphones! You've ruined our perfect mobile phone. All we wanted was to ring people and play Snake, now we have these modern games and AR and VR and emulation and apps that can integrate into productivity suites - next you'll be telling us we'll meet our future lovers via this "smart" pho... Oh

The internet. Email. Actually, modern communication in any form. HD anything. Batteries. Tech advances slowly but surely... Detractors seem to suffer from memory loss. Large leaps have been made from 2008 to now. Large leaps were made from 1998 to 2008. And so on, and so on, and so on...

What's wrong with ye that ye think this one particular area of tech - which rightly has security as it's most important base to build upon - will cease advancing?

"Yaw, well, you see... It hasn't changed MY world yet, therefore it never will, roysh?"

Cool, keep thinking that. Back-end services are currently being piloted and will be transitioning over the coming years as scaling problems get solved.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value

A fellow sceptic.

Eh, I approached cryptos with the same scepticism in 2011. Had a small bit of Bitcoin from 2013 onwards as a gamble but remained sceptical and lost interest as development was oh so laboriously slow. If only I'd kept more of an eye on alts in the following months I would have spotted the ETH announcement. And probably would have retired by now. Oh well!
Once I became aware of Ethereum (2016?) and a utility beyond fiat-destruction became apparent it changed my view entirely. On one side I think it's sad you can't be bothered reading beyond the surface of pump'n'dumps, on the other I'm delighted because people who're sceptical based on wilful ignorance deserve no reward.

Whelo79 wrote: »

Well said. But I don't know why people continue to take the time to respond to two specific posters. They continually return with the same tripe over and over again despite having this type of information put to them several times.

Because hopefully new entrants will notice that those posters keep ignoring points placed against them and then they can make their own judgements. Maybe I place too much hope in human judgement but I refuse to believe that most people want to be ignorant and deluded. I've done this cynicism-deflection in many other forums about many other subjects over a great period of time.
I think maintaining a positive sentiment about a clearly positive philosophy helps adoption whatever the case.
There's one guy around here involved in crypto-speculation at the sidelines who was one of the most ignorant towards one of my other main preoccupations on the internet, yet I haven't seen him post stupid shít since mountains of data started being published. Maybe JohnnyFlush and his ilk will succumb to reality in the same way?

Or maybe they keep screaming "ponzi" while they dream of their properties doubling in value so they can take advantage of the next generation? Who knows?