Don't get into crypto is like: don't get into cars when you are a horse owner. I think there are some very good reasons why crypto is great:
- It provides means for decentralization
- It provides means for anti censorshop
- Everything is public via a ledger
I don't want to turn your release thread into a argument about crypto, but I cannot let this "crypto is the future" rhetoric go unchallenged
There is a big difference between horses vs cars and crypto. Cars have advantages over horses, like being able to go faster, and being able to safely transport multiple people without worrying that someone will fall off. There are practical reasons to use a car over a horse. You cannot say the same thing for crypto, or even blockchain. I have yet to see a single use of blockchain that couldn't have been done better with some other tech.
In theory, blockchain is supposed to be decentralized, but it became centralized anyway. No sane person tries to conduct transactions themselves with bitcoin. It takes way too long to process a transaction for that to be practical. Instead, they go through some intermediary that makes it easier. In order to make it easier, these intermediaries have to have full control over the crypto-wallet containing your funds. Congratulations, you just invented banking, something that already existed, except now, there are no regulations to protect ordinary people from predatory companies. What has society gained here? Nothing. Just a pointless waste of electricity.
How exactly is crypto anti-censorship? In order to circumvent the government, businesses would actually have to accept the crypto-currency as payment for goods and services, and if you haven't noticed, most don't. Once upon a time, crypto-currency was good for exactly one thing. Buying illegal things. But the place that facilitated this shut down, and crypto-currency has gone back to being functionally useless as a currency. It instead functions as an incredibly volatile stock that isn't actually worth anything. The only way to get value out of crypto now is to sell it to someone who is a bigger sucker than you. Interestingly enough, this is where NFTs come in. NFTs are a huge scam in every conceivable way. They are marketed as a way to "help artists", but their only true purpose is to trick more people into buying crypto. The fact that you can easily "mint" an NFT for something that you don't own any rights to and then sell it to someone else should be a HUGE red flag that this isn't something that will be accepted as legitimate. Then, if you go into the technical details of what is actually being bought and sold, it gets even more obvious that it has no value. What gets bought and sold is merely a URL to an image. Not the actual image. Just a URL. URLs are practically free. It costs virtually nothing to add a URL to an existing webpage. Why would you pay for this? The actual image is still hosted on some server that someone is paying for, and they could easily swap out the image with something else. Your terrible-looking ape NFT has now become <insert name of shock image here>. (I don't want to name-drop actual shock images here, this forum isn't the place for that)
The blockchain IS public, and yet, crypto-bros seem to conveniently forget this fact when they start talking about how block-chain will be used for everything, including storing private information that you absolutely wouldn't want to have public, like social security numbers. Being public also makes it ludicrously easy to "pirate" all NFTs, further cementing their uselessness.
Not only has blockchain yet to prove itself as a useful technology, the whole crypto scene is rife with scammers. Scammers have concluded that people who buy in to crypto and NFTs are easier to scam, and run rampant in spaces dedicated to NFT and crypto discussion.
For all of these reasons and more, I will never buy into crypto, and I would heavily discourage anyone else from doing so either. If you want more information, here's a 2 hour long video that goes into great detail about the problems with NFTs and crypto.
youtube.com/watch