So much for Blockchain's real life use cases
So much for Blockchain's real life use cases
139 comments
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A distributed pseudonymous ledger for use by a centralised authority that will hold sensitive, personal information.
I think the paper was right.
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Spain did what
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España creó un pasaporte blockchain para ver por alguna razón, porque supongo que los tiddies ponen nerviosas a algunas personas.
Source: Sé dónde está la biblioteca.
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The did whhhhat with the trains?!
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Is it Blockchain based though?
It is a shitty porn passport, I'm Spanish, but I didn't hear that it was Blockchain based.
Why? It needs a centrar register not an uncentralized one.
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Yeah, I was just looking through some documentation on it. It says it uses a "digital wallet". Maybe people are seeing that and thinking that means it's blockchain-based? I'm not seeing anything more solid claiming there's any blockchain involved, though. (I'm not 100% certain there isn't any blockchain involved, though.)
It's BS either way. Extra super plus plus BS if it's blockchain-based. But still BS even if there's no blockchain involved.
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A blockchain does not mean decentralized. It means a public ledger where each new item validates the one(s) before it
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Do they need blockchain for it though?
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No. This won't work any better, either. Keeping anonymous porn off the internet is like trying to prevent kids from fooling around with sex by not telling them about sex.
Unless you're removing their genitals, they're GOING to figure it out. The situation only gets worse with more ignorance and more control.
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https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-builds-porn-passport-to-stop-kids-watching-smut/ I guess this? Wild stuff.
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bit of a futile endeavour tbh, if a kid with access to the Internet wants to see porn, they're going to find porn. And if they don't have access to the basic sources they'll probably find a more dodgy, unmoderated, and possibly extreme porn than if their curiosity got sated by pornhub or something
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Agreed. Even going back to sharing stuff via Whatsapp or something like that, they are going to evade control for sure. But when will society be ready to just be honest with kids about what exists and teach them how to safely explore that and give them context? I guess we'd rather have dystopian control than that
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Once verified, they'll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.
...I'm sorry, what? Is the government keeping track of how much porn I use?
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So they can raise a bronze statue to the biggest masturbator on town, of course.
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What about all the games where you can shoot people? Why is that okay for kids, but a little tit here and there will destroy their view of the world?
Didn't these things get their starts by sucking on tits? So why hide them now?
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There is this famous spanish porn actor. Nacho vidal, who says that we would have a better world is kids would play around with plastic dildos instead of plastic guns.
I don't know the playing with plastic dildos, but it is true how wild is the normalization of giving kids a replica of a human killing instrument to play with.
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well you can't have fun running around all summer squirting water at your friends from a dildo
at least, not without getting some truly vile looks from passersby
also it's just intrinsically fun to try to shoot each other with harmless little darts that let you know you've been hit but not do anything else
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Why would anyone chain their porn?
\ Cockchains are not for that. Not really for anything, but not for that too.
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Not sure why everybody needs a copy of my, I mean, somebody's porn passport.
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I used to suck dick for blockcain..still do... but I used to too
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Miss you, Mitch.
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My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.
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I wonder how many sites will bother checking for Spanish pornpasses. Seems they're just playing people and waiting for the inevitable, "Turns out the Internet isn't respecting our kids, we need to ratchet up the control. We tried to give you a good deal though, right?"
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That's the insidious part of all this - the government will set up captive portals which require you to verify yourself to get outside the federal network. It will start with porn, then it will be VPNs, and so on. This is just a very convenient excuse to establish the infrastructure and process framework which will eventually be used to kill the open internet by a million cuts.
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Most will just block themselves there like pornhub does in the states that require checking IDs in the US.
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They will not have to
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Oh no Spain has an "innovative" idea to fuck the internet!
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One of the things blockchain could do is become a digital proof of ownership, augmenting or replacing things like property deeds and car titles. We already agree that a written record of ownership of such things is legally binding (even if the writing is stored digitally), but transfer of that ownership to another person is still a very manual process. Imagine an NFT that represents ownership of your house, and when you want to sell your house, you transfer that NFT to someone else's custody - adding their ownership information to it. It would record the entire chain of ownership, and specific details about the piece of property involved.
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Without law enforcement, which is centralized anyway, your documented ownership is worthless. So if the state or a similar centralized real life organization, whiches existence people agree on, is needed to grant and enforce that ownership, blockchain is unnecessary. They can instead just store that shit in a database.
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And who would the largest nodes on that blockchain be? The banks? Who could say and do whatever they conspired since they command >50% of the computing power and/or value?
The average person isn’t going to build a fucking blockchain node just to keep the deed to their house.
“Grandma, please you need to fill your basement with these ASICs or else script kiddies will steal your house”
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That's not how that works.
NFT is issued determining ownership to a property. Property sells, another NFT is issued, tied to the original one to maintain a chain of ownership. Issuance of a second NFT for a sale to a new owner would depend on authorization by the previous NFT holder. Lienholder information could also be stored, and linked to a mortgage NFT with payment history.
The "NF" part of that stands for "non-fungible." As in, once created, cannot be changed.
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It could. It may or may not. I agree decentralization is a good thing, but do governments agree as well? First of all, governments are very resistant to change if that doesn't play into their interests (real or percieved like this privacy violation). Using a traditional database to keep track of ownership seems cheaper (since they already do it) but most of all simpler. I'm not too familiar with the way blockchain functions so I may be wrong, but say someone wants to sell a car. In the current state of most countries you just draw up a paper or fill out a form, maybe get it notarized and pay taxes. A database seems flexible enough that if your sale didn't get logged and the buyer got pulled over and questioned, they could provide the contract and clear up any questions about ownership. Or say the ownership was stripped as part of a court order. If it was a database, then changing the records is simple, but with blockchain the court would either have to get you to transfer the ownership volountarily, force you to disclose your keys or have some mechnism of forcing a transaction from the requester account (which as I understand it seems what blockchain is here to stop abd a core part of the specification). Alternatively the government just uses blockchain instead of a database, managing all the keys, wallets and identities (as in they have everyone's keys and do all the transactions) which is the same level of centralization as a database, but with extra steps.
Ownership was (and is) a social contract, and a flexible one at that. Things get gifted volountarily, sold, taken away lawfully and inherited in a single jurisdiction by the thousands daily, and not all of these are well documented. Blockchain seems very limited in what it can do flexibility-wise which makes it unsuitable for keeping track of ownership, and that's not taking into account that either everyone would have to actively use the blockchain for their sales and be familiar with the technology (decentralized) or having all the wallet keys operated by the government (defeating any useful feature of the blockchain for citizens). Adding blockchain into the mix will just complicate the transfer process and centralize it (as in we either do all validation on the blockchain or none), and with the fact that all the transfer history is centralised in the blockchain (despite it being decentralised in storage, it's still explicitly stored and accessible) it would serve as just another venue of privacy violation and opression.
Maybe blockchain could be useful for things like, say carbon credits, or similar government-issued 'currency', but I don't see it applicable to validating general ownership on a large scale for the general population, ever. The 'digital Euro' proposal, also being blessed by the buzzword Blockchain seems very distopian to me as well. Here, with currency being used I can see how it would be applicable in the real world (instead of heavily unstandardised land deeds, sales contracts and other proofs of ownership you have strictly defined currency units), but this also seems like a gross privacy violation as the government (and maybe anyone) can see where you got your money and where you're spending it down to the cent.
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Spanish government is implementing a sort of passport for people to be able to view porn.
They want that any porn website sited in Spain would ask any visitor for credentials to enter, thus assuring it's over 18 yo.
We call it the "pajaporte".
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its 'decentralized' copium
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Still a use case
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Blockcain
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is a helluva drug
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Git is a real-life use-case
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One of the crucial differences between blockchain and Git is that Git is fully subserviant to humans and anything can be undone by humans.
If your blockchain house title is stolen by a hacker, either the courts (rightfully) aren't going to put any significance on the state of the blockchain and are going to say "yeah, you still own your house" (in which case what was the point of using blockchain in the first place rather than a SQL database or some such where mistakes and problems and fraud can be undone without cryptographically-hard obstacles in the way) or if in this hypothetical the Libertarian dystopia has progressed to cartoonish extremes, you're just SOL and lost your house, which just isn't even remotely realistic.
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Git is not a blockchain. Most importantly, it's not distributed. There's a singular git server that all git clients for that repository connect to and use as a source of truth.
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Git was built specifically to avoid the necessity to have one authoritative server.
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https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Workflows
In contrast with Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCSs), the distributed nature of Git allows you to be far more flexible in how developers collaborate on projects. In centralized systems, every developer is a node working more or less equally with a central hub. In Git, however, every developer is potentially both a node and a hub; that is, every developer can both contribute code to other repositories and maintain a public repository on which others can base their work and which they can contribute to.
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That is patently false. It was developed to help develop the Linux kernel, which famously has multiple decentralized repositories managed by different maintainers.
The fact that most companies use it in a way you describe, with only one central repository, does not mean that git is not distributed.
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I agree it's not a blockchain, (although it has chain properties) but it is kinda decentralized. By convention projects almost exclusively have a single remote, and by convention that single remote is treated as an ultimate source-of-truth... But you can absolutely have the same repo with multiple remotes defined, and one could establish different schemes to determine which branches on which remotes represent what in terms of "truth".
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The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that's why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can't lose trillions of dollars annually.
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A banking system running on Blockchain
Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:
- would use as much electricity as an entire country
- payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
- would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money's gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
- would have no way to stop money laundering
- would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they'd just lose their life savings permanently
- would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
- the list goes on
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Relative point to point
- which Blockchain are we talking here? How does it compare to the current banking infrastructure?
- again, which one? How does it compare to the current pricing?
- escrow is a thing, someone can build up a PayPal equivalent on top of a Blockchain, the list goes on
- the current system doesn't do great here, some Blockchains makes it way more traceable, in fact
- skill issue, but also solvable with a PayPal equivalent
- not a fact, what does this even mean?
- does it?
You could say the Linux kernel is an astronomically terrible idea because it doesn't do anything...but it is just the platform, the good comes from what people build on top of it that add all these quality of life features you miss
Buy ydy
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Just to elaborate here. You are describing one implementation of a blockchain that provides a cryptocurrency. Blockchain is literally just another form of a database. It’s just that it can contain traits that would allow the database to be shared and distributed unlike typical databases. Currently there are some companies that are utilizing blockchain for their inventory systems. They aren’t using any more energy than they would with a typical system. They are just doing it to keep an unchanging record of past transactions which helps with fraud and loss prevention.
P.S. Money laundering using a system that is publicly distributed and has every transaction involving usd paired with an ID, social security number and enough pictures of your face to make a 3D model is genuinely idiotic.
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You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that's not it's only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.
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payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
Not necessarily. You could have a federated system, where only big players like banks participate in larger blockchain, like banks already do with forex and wire transfers and pay ridiculous fees to clearing agencies, and clear out local transfers locally, possibly inside their own smaller and much faster blockchain.
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Bitcoin only consumes the energy people put in it. It literaly would adjust to only consume 20W if that's what was available. But that also means it can absord an infinite amount of excess energy if necessary
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make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility
yall 100% did that to yourselves
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Y'all?
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How are they going to implement it, I guess by linking your identity to your porn-blockchain key.
I guess there's no better way to track your habits.
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Ah yes, let's just make everyone's financial transactions public record. That couldn't possibly be an insanely dangerous thing to do.
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Hmm I don't think that's necessarily what OP is proposing. There are cryptos where transactions are anonymous.
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Bad research based on subjective opinion? I dont see how anyone would see blockchain in itself as useless. It provides a verification method without the use of a centralized system. Are all peer-to-peer systems useless now? Its not to be used as a tool for everything. It will not fix everything. I'd be more interested in research of what happens when reactionary practices are used. Such as using blockchain just because it's the hot new trend without thoroughly thinking about the consequences of such actions. blockchain = bad / blockchain = good is not good enough, each implementation needs to be studied independently and answers derived from that. Replace blockchain with AI and it's the same.
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It’s a way of verification and trust in a system where no one trusts any central authority, but does trust an algorithm. That seems too specific to ever actually be useful. People will end up relying on services or instructions that make the system digestible and usable for them, but as long as they still rely on those giving the instructions, the same problem arises.
And when an example case is brought up, it’s always one central authority that is pushing the idea - and could achieve the same more easily and without power waste using a central server.
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I mean, if one party pushes for use of blockchain, you'd just need to trust that specific system (algorithm, network..) and not explicitly the party pushing for it.
I also wouldn't call it power 'waste' since it does useful work - confirmation. It may be more inefficient compared to a centralized authority though. There are other ways of doing confirmations than proof-of-work as well, though each have their own drawbacks - just like a centralized system does,
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I dont see how anyone would see blockchain in itself as useless.
it's chewing through tremendous amounts of power and water to improve....? what?
I have yet to see the upside.
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HA! you think the pentagon is in control? You think the people responsible for this debacle are actually following orders? These are all absconders and expats who are doing all this garbage. Pentagon is seemingly powerless to stop them.
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This posted to the main section, not as a reply.
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You can downvote this because you're mad that blockchain exists, for those who don't know the actual real life use case: Bitcoin has been around for 15 years, it is a blockchain. It has a real life use case.
I can send money, with my android phone, from my couch, in my underwear, to anybody else on planet earth who also has a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. The transaction is not only sent, but actually settles, in under a second with Bitcoin lightning. And I pay pennies in fees. No going to the bank, no bank holidays, no paying wire fees or making sure their bank can talk to my bank. It's just simple and instant and it works. It doesn't matter if they are a dissident or if their country doesn't allow women to own bank accounts, the transaction goes through anyways. In many countries, their app can also instantly convert that BTC into the currency of their choice and deposit it to their bank account. That's assuming they have access to stable banking infrastructure, which billions of people do not.
Bitcoin has delivered on its promise of being a currency with a capped supply (21 million coins) and transaction system consistently for 15 years without a single hack, without a single hour of downtime, without a single hiccup. It just works.
You can argue that Bitcoin isn't better than
<insert local currency and transmission system>
. You can argue that there are "better" solutions. But it has a clear use case. I use it on a daily basis and it has a fifteen year trend of continued growth whether you are looking at total market cap (bigger than Sweden's GDP), number of nodes, number of transactions, whatever.Most everything negative you've heard about Bitcoin is either hyperbolic or about other crypto. FTX wasn't Bitcoin. Crypto coins collapsing or people being rugged? Not Bitcoin. For more information, FAQs, and myth-busting, check out http://bitcoin.rocks
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Not even sure why I'm bothering replying to this bot, but guess misinformation should not be left alone
- It's not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It's not even clear how many confirmations are enough.
- It's only instant if you use the lightning network. Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin. If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?
- fees are huge and will only increase in the future.
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I'm not a bot, I'm just an idiot.
It’s not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It’s not even clear how many confirmations are enough.
You're thinking of main chain (which takes 10 minutes for the next block), though I would take a zero-conf transaction in any situation that isn't moving more money than a day's labor. A single confirmation means it made it into the next block which should be plenty for 99% of situations. If you're selling your house, maybe a wait a 2-3 blocks to be sure. Lightning is instant and uses main chain for security but does settlement/transaction data off-chain.
Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin.
It's not, you don't need a bank to use it. Banks don't settle instantly, banks have chargebacks, banks required six forms of ID, banks can't reach some places, banks may discriminate. Lightning is Bitcoin. You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning, and when you close your channel, you get the appropriate amount of BTC back. You can run a lightning node on a phone, a "routing" node on a raspberry pi, it's just as decentralized and trustless as the main chain is. You can open a channel directly w the person you're transacting with or you can forward the transaction through other channels/nodes, all trustlessly, all instantly, all automatically. Nobody ever has custody of the funds aside from you and your intended recipient. There's no central custodian (like a bank) you have to trust.
If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?
Main chain and lightning have different use cases. Use main chain for long-term storage of funds or large transactions. Use lightning for everyday spending. Main chain secures lightning transactions. Main chain is layer one, lightning is layer two, it's possible there will be more layers, just like SMTP is built on TCP which is built on Ethernet or whatever.
fees are huge and will only increase in the future.
Main chain fees are around $1.50 for the next block, which is still cheaper than a bank wire or other equivalent payment methods in many situations. You're right though, they are expected to increase as adoption increases, but lightning has scaled that available blockspace several orders of magnitude. Lightning fees are <1% in almost all instances and aren't expected to increase since they are not tied directly to main chain fees and no mining is required. A lightning transaction uses about as much CPU power as sending an e-mail. A single main chain transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have billions of transactions inside a lightning channel.
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The last time I had to send 30 Euro to someone, I had to pay 5 Euro for gas fees. It used to be even worse. Your statements are bullshit, we all know what the usual use cases are (other than speculation)
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5 Euros seems like a pretty standard fee for a Bitcoin transfer, which is insanely cheap for large transfers. Your 30 Euro transaction is more suitable for the lightning network, which handles off-chain transactions for much lower fees. The person you were responding to was specifically talking about the lightning network.
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Crypto coins collapsing or people being rugged? Not Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has collapsed like three times in the last like 7 years dawg.
But it has a clear use case.
Sure, I suppose, if you count things like "destroying the environment" and "lining Nvidia's pockets" as "use cases".
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Bitcoin has collapsed like three times in the last like 7 years dawg.
If you bought 1 BTC 15 years ago, you still have 1 BTC. It has not collapsed. The price relative to USD has collapsed a few times, but the average trend is growth. Bitcoin does not guarantee any price relative to any other currency, because it can't, all it can guarantee is a stable supply of currency. The USD, in that time period, has lost >20% of its purchasing power as well, so the USD also "crashed".
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it would be nice if the price of bitcoin was stable enough that when I sent $100 to somebody it wouldn't be a gamble whether what they actually received was double or half that
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