I bought $250 in ether out of curiosity. A basketball player had some weird kind of auction and I placed a bid. Doing so required that my ether be converted to some kind of other, evidently more usable form of ether. I lost the auction. This other form of ether costs $80 to convert it back to ether. Oh, and while I've waited for transaction costs to fall, the value of that ether has fallen 40+%.
I don't really care about the money but it absolutely convinced me that this crap is entirely useless and that even the above board "applications" are scams. Happy to hear why I'm wrong.
Okay, but the basketball player is Andre Drummond. The OpenSea project, which is the source of the "wrapped ETH" or "wETH" that I now hold, is partners with andreesen horowitz. If the scam were truly akin to a Nigerian Prince, the problem would be an inability to identify the participants. But as a lawyer who frequently deals with white-collar fraud, I do not have a claim because it's not a true scam, it's just comically inefficient. No one stole money from me. They just caused me to convert it into a less usable form.
Yes. I held $250 in ETH in one of these many wallet apps (but it was one from one of the primary, above board companies), to place an auction bid it needed to be converted to wETH. When I lost, I got refunded wETH. My understanding is that to convert it back into ETH (or USD) would cost roughly half of the value of the wETH.
I appreciate the more balanced reply. I don't like being called an idiot! Granted, I called it a "scam" myself, but I really meant that the whole zeitgeist that crypto currently has lawful and sensible use cases seems fabricated. The transaction costs are outlandish and the benefit to using this stuff for legal transactions is near zero.
It is important to differentiate Bitcoin from those cryptos that came later. Your point is spot on. Bitcoin should be viewed as Crypto 1.0, Ether as Crypto 2.0. There are also new blockchains, my favorite is Cardano the token for which is ADA. This is a third generation blockchain project that has real world changing goals, IF SUCCESSFUL. And it's fully possible that all these blockchains will blow up at some point, but my gut tells me that something revolutionary is afoot.
I'm an old guy. I'll be 71 this year. I don't expect I'll see the impact that future generations of blockchain will have, if any. I decided a few years ago to "invest" a very small amount in three different blockchains, one of which is Cardano. None of which is Bitcoin. I went in knowing this is money that is 100% at risk.
Yogi Bearra famously said "Predicting is difficult, especially about the future." Trying to predict our technological future is even more so. Well see.
That's fair criticism. I reckon it's the tortoise and hare story. I just like the long-term goals. In the end, any "investment" and I use the word loosely, is a big gamble. The other two I own are Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP). Any crypto purchase is rolling dice.
Exactly, it has always been thus with technology. The new obviates the old; not sure that will happen with blockchain but that's been the pattern for the last couple of hundred years.
Here's an interesting tidbit I read this morning. Some miners are having trouble paying their electric bills.
As mining creates less and less bitcoin as the software approaches the 21 million token limit the income from new coins goes down. The miners therefore are dependent on fees all the more. As bitcoin becomes more and more useless as a transactional device that too will decline. So, where does this eventually lead?? Not anywhere good. But then I could be FOS.
I bought $250 in ether out of curiosity. A basketball player had some weird kind of auction and I placed a bid. Doing so required that my ether be converted to some kind of other, evidently more usable form of ether. I lost the auction. This other form of ether costs $80 to convert it back to ether. Oh, and while I've waited for transaction costs to fall, the value of that ether has fallen 40+%.
I don't really care about the money but it absolutely convinced me that this crap is entirely useless and that even the above board "applications" are scams. Happy to hear why I'm wrong.
Okay, but the basketball player is Andre Drummond. The OpenSea project, which is the source of the "wrapped ETH" or "wETH" that I now hold, is partners with andreesen horowitz. If the scam were truly akin to a Nigerian Prince, the problem would be an inability to identify the participants. But as a lawyer who frequently deals with white-collar fraud, I do not have a claim because it's not a true scam, it's just comically inefficient. No one stole money from me. They just caused me to convert it into a less usable form.
Yes. I held $250 in ETH in one of these many wallet apps (but it was one from one of the primary, above board companies), to place an auction bid it needed to be converted to wETH. When I lost, I got refunded wETH. My understanding is that to convert it back into ETH (or USD) would cost roughly half of the value of the wETH.
I appreciate the more balanced reply. I don't like being called an idiot! Granted, I called it a "scam" myself, but I really meant that the whole zeitgeist that crypto currently has lawful and sensible use cases seems fabricated. The transaction costs are outlandish and the benefit to using this stuff for legal transactions is near zero.
It is important to differentiate Bitcoin from those cryptos that came later. Your point is spot on. Bitcoin should be viewed as Crypto 1.0, Ether as Crypto 2.0. There are also new blockchains, my favorite is Cardano the token for which is ADA. This is a third generation blockchain project that has real world changing goals, IF SUCCESSFUL. And it's fully possible that all these blockchains will blow up at some point, but my gut tells me that something revolutionary is afoot.
I'm an old guy. I'll be 71 this year. I don't expect I'll see the impact that future generations of blockchain will have, if any. I decided a few years ago to "invest" a very small amount in three different blockchains, one of which is Cardano. None of which is Bitcoin. I went in knowing this is money that is 100% at risk.
Yogi Bearra famously said "Predicting is difficult, especially about the future." Trying to predict our technological future is even more so. Well see.
That's fair criticism. I reckon it's the tortoise and hare story. I just like the long-term goals. In the end, any "investment" and I use the word loosely, is a big gamble. The other two I own are Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP). Any crypto purchase is rolling dice.
Exactly, it has always been thus with technology. The new obviates the old; not sure that will happen with blockchain but that's been the pattern for the last couple of hundred years.
Here's an interesting tidbit I read this morning. Some miners are having trouble paying their electric bills.
As mining creates less and less bitcoin as the software approaches the 21 million token limit the income from new coins goes down. The miners therefore are dependent on fees all the more. As bitcoin becomes more and more useless as a transactional device that too will decline. So, where does this eventually lead?? Not anywhere good. But then I could be FOS.