Let's talk about cryptocurrency

[Sci_Girl]

I have been curious of the concept. Being that our world will go nowhere but delving into more and more online living the concept of online money I think is a great investment opportunity. That being said people are fucking retarded so I also see nothing but a pure scam right now. Putting real money into currently 'fake money'? No thanks. One day it will boom into a very popular mechanic of wealth, but for right now it's hard to say how one should invest in it. Maybe the only thing that will take off is bitcoin simply because it is most well known. Or maybe there is a crypto lying in wait like the Facebook that came after MySpace and took over the World.

[I_royalty_I]

I have been curious of the concept. Being that our world will go nowhere but delving into more and more online living the concept of online money I think is a great investment opportunity. That being said people are fucking retarded so I also see nothing but a pure scam right now. Putting real money into currently 'fake money'? No thanks. One day it will boom into a very popular mechanic of wealth, but for right now it's hard to say how one should invest in it. Maybe the only thing that will take off is bitcoin simply because it is most well known. Or maybe there is a crypto lying in wait like the Facebook that came after MySpace and took over the World.

There are already a number of projects that are out there, working, and providing a service and value to the world. I look at bitcoin as a store of value. I’d say about 2% of my portfolio is currently invested in bitcoin. I’m buying about $100 every week until I get to my goal of 1 full bitcoin just to sit on forever. There are already countries out there that don’t really use paper money and operate based on electronic payments. These countries can’t interact with other countries via that method because its localized. If they were to use a crypto payment, it could be worldwide. That’s a very simple example though.

There are already a number of coins out there that I’d argue are better than bitcoin. Bitcoin was just the first, the most well known and the most valuable right now. I don’t think it is necessarily the way forward forever though.

[Mardan]

I've got 5 figures, almost if the market would stop taking a dip. I'm curious why you don't think it's useful.
I don't think having things public and open to scrutiny is necessarily a bad thing in most cases though. There is definitely a benefit, utility wise, to be able to send payments instantly to literally anybody in the world. Take just clraik for example. Paypal works, but it takes quite a hefty fee in most cases. Some countries don't have paypal and for others the exchange fees eat up even more. The higher amounts you send, the more it costs. I could send literally any amount of ETH quickly and pretty cheap in comparison. No extra parties need to be involved. There are a number of other use cases that I think could make the internet as we know it even more efficient once the world catches up to the technology. Most of the stuff being built right now isn't anything that I can see being put to use for a few more years. The speed at which technology changes, though, could make things very interesting.
It also varies, HEAVILY, depending on which projects you are looking at. There are a bunch of them that are complete shit and provide nothing more than making the creators rich.

Every use-case for the coins ends up being done better by projects that aren't overencumbered by a blockchain though.
The "instant payments" you speak of can only happen in chains with a ridiculously small userbase, and as soon as it grows a bit you get the bottlenecks we experience every time the market takes a dive, with transactions taking days to clear unless you overpay for it.
The only big chain solutions found so far have been things like Lightning which, again, makes the blockchain completely useless, since it just turns the whole system into a centralized banking hub, but worse.
Not only that, but the processing power needed to keep a blockchain going is enormous, for little to no return. You're spending GWh of energy to send a simple signal to the system, something that would be done instantly and for no cost in a closed banking service.

The only buzzword people seem to care about with crypto is "decentralization", and yet every project that has come forward so far that has managed to be even remotely functional only accomplished that by sacrificing it in favor of a more centralized system.

[I_royalty_I]

Every use-case for the coins ends up being done better by projects that aren't overencumbered by a blockchain though.
The "instant payments" you speak of can only happen in chains with a ridiculously small userbase, and as soon as it grows a bit you get the bottlenecks we experience every time the market takes a dive, with transactions taking days to clear unless you overpay for it.
The only big chain solutions found so far have been things like Lightning which, again, makes the blockchain completely useless, since it just turns the whole system into a centralized banking hub, but worse.
Not only that, but the processing power needed to keep a blockchain going is enormous, for little to no return. You're spending GWh of energy to send a simple signal to the system, something that would be done instantly and for no cost in a closed banking service.

The only buzzword people seem to care about with crypto is "decentralization", and yet every project that has come forward so far that has managed to be even remotely functional only accomplished that by sacrificing it in favor of a more centralized system.

I primarily use ETH to move things around and haven't really had any problems there. The convenience of being able to move money anywhere, at anytime, to anybody, in any amount for a very nominal fee is pretty awesome imo. You aren't relying on the big centralized banks in order to conduct your business. Decentralization is definitely the buzz word because that is THE idea that started crypto to begin with. All these other projects, dapps, etc are just an add on. The true essence of crypto has and always will be decentralization. There are certain projects that have a ton of centralization, but I personally don't invest in them because that's not what I want out of crypto.

Right now the big closed banking environments can 100% move more transactions than crypto can but they have a significant leg up right now. The gap will start closing once the technology evolves. It will take time, won't be happening over night. I haven't pulled any of my money out of crypto, only been putting more in during these big dips. In a few years, I think we will start to see more. It's already been in the news much more than in the past, more retailers are accepting crypto payments. Toss in some regulation and big names accepting crypto, and I think we will see tremendous growth. I'm just trying to get more people involved while the price point to join is reasonable. You can pick up 1ETH for 80 some odd dollars right now. Grab some of that and sit on it for awhile!