An enlightening and high quality video on how money and the banking system work, why they are corrupted and what is the solution.

  • makeasnek
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    3 days ago

    Bitcoin is one of the most successful open source projects to have ever been created, and it gets downvoted to hell anywhere it gets brought up. 15 years of growth in network size, usage, and capability. Surviving attacks and attempted bans from nation-states. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack, reliably transferring money across the globe to anybody with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in seconds to minutes for pennies to dollars in fees. 100% open source and decentralized, uncorruptible, open to whoever wants to use it, the way currency should be. It’s got a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP and is already more reliable and widely accepted than most national currencies. Nobody can make it print money it isn’t meant to print or move money it isn’t supposed to move.

    • exu@feditown.com
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      2 days ago

      Theoretically cryptocurrencies are interesting, but Bitcoin just isn’t usable.

      Bitcoin and many other currencies have way too many and large fluctuations in value for daily use.
      Bitcoin specifically is not practical for transactions in general due to cost and block size limits. Yes, lightning exists, but maybe your technology is shit if it needs a second overlay network to function.
      Instead of fixing those issues, most other coins are just pump and dump schemes for a quick buck.
      Only very few coins try to do something different and fix some of these issues.

      • makeasnek
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        2 days ago

        Instead of fixing those issues, most other coins are just pump and dump schemes for a quick buck.

        Oh agree totally on this one.

        Bitcoin and many other currencies have way too many and large fluctuations in value for daily use.

        If you are using it to send money from point A to point B, you can cash it out at the same price you put it in at, so fluctuation doesn’t matter much. You’re probably saving on bank fees and exchange risk enhanced by slow international settlement. Exchange risk is always a thing with any currency. It’s gotten more stable over time and I imagine that trend will continue. Other currencies are also unstable, how has the purchasing power of the USD held up over the last 5 years? That’s not to mention the billions of people not fortunate enough to live in a currency environment which is dominated by the dollar. Ask any Argentenian or Turkish person how stable their currency is compared to Bitcoin. Best case scenario, your dollar slowly loses value over time due to supply inflation. Whether or not you find it useful, more and more people find it useful every year, the transaction volume has increased reliably for 15 years. Nobody’s making them use it. On the contrary, there are often hurdles educational, regulatory, and technological to using it, but they still do. Maybe on year 16 though people will finally realize it’s useless and stop using it.

        Bitcoin specifically is not practical for transactions in general due to cost and block size limits. Yes, lightning exists, but maybe your technology is shit if it needs a second overlay network to function.

        Maybe TCP/IP is shit if we need other protocols build on top of it like SMTP. Maybe ethernet is shit if we have to design a whole nother protocol (TCP) just to make sure packets actually arive in the proper order. No. This is a weak argument. Fedwire, the system for settlement between US banks, has a equivalent transaction speed to Bitcoin’s base layer. Banks don’t seem to have any problem with that speed. And ten minutes is pretty dang fast to send a million dollar transaction across the globe (on main chain) or under a second (on lightning). Meanwhile, the US dollar doesn’t have a built-in transfer mechanism, and the mechanisms available can be quite frustrating or expensive to work with, ask anybody whose ever had to send an international bank wire or deal with the frequent buyer return fraud on platforms like eBay. I’d sell an iPhone to somebody in (insert fraud prone country here) no problem in BTC. With PayPal? No effing way,

    • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      I absolutely shit on crypto forever until actually reading into it. Alas, new things are too scary for conservatives most people to consider. I’m glad I grew up, being able to recognise Bitcoin as a genuine effort at creating a good thing instead of a fad.