this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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More than 107 BTC are now provably burned from the supply until someone invents a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. The post Someone just burned $8 million of bitcoin appeared first on Protos.

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[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Bitcoin is only as valuable as the next idiot is willing to pay.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's true for literally everything

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago

Bitcoin only has that value.

Everything else has actual value without the obvious drawback of wasting massive amounts of electricity to make a number that means nothing.

If bitcoin had real value it wouldn’t need a bunch of sad dudes to defend it online. No other type of investment needs that to stay relevant and valuable.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Bitcoin is not mandated by any government and yet has managed to rise to a value of over $70k. Your response is to be insulting. Sure thing buddy. Plus your statement can literally apply to anything. Houses are only as valuable as the next idiot is willing to pay.

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

People need a home. Nobody needs a bitcoin.

Only someone that owns crypto supports crypto. I’d like to meet someone that thinks it’s valuable when they have nothing to gain from it.

Everyone knows corn is valuable. Cars are valuable. Food is valuable.

Crypto is speculative gambling for gambling addicts.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago

People do need a place to live but the price of a home is not tethered to that. How much has housing increased over the past few years? Is this the same percentage of new people looking for housing?

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If governments keep tracking more and more of what you do, or if they push us fully cashless so they can block transactions they don't like, a whole lot of people are gonna start learning about Bitcoin's value proposition. You only fail to see the value in it because it fails to provide value to you specifically.

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Bitcoin isn't that good at avoiding tracking. Cashless digital payment systems that offer privacy guarantees are possible (e.g. GNU Taler), but anyone who tries to accomplish that with blockchain is doomed to failure before they start. For the same reason why you can't cure illness with snake oil.

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago

Not necessarily. If you transact directly on chain and ever transact with a point that ties your identity to your wallet address, sure, you're very easily tracked. If you put your coins on the lightning network, it uses a method similar to onion routing to pass the money through many nodes in the network in a way that guarantees that the money only sends if everyone cooperates so it can't be stolen in transit, and no transaction is written to the blockchain. Nobody who helped transfer the money knows where it finally landed, nobody publishes anything to the blockchain. Not really any way to trace a lightning transaction short of finding evidence of the invoice at both ends, but you already know who your end points are in that case.

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bitcoin is great for people that buy cp and narcotics online. Not any better than real money for normal people that don’t buy illegal stuff.

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It already has at least one in that it isn't inflationary and so you don't lose any of your money's value over time as a foundational rule, and sort of another tangentially in that nobody can tamper with the money supply, so states can't debase the currency. There's still infrastructure issues in preparing for wider use, but I think people will eventually realize it has more value than none. It may still not be for everyone, but I think it will find its niche in the world.

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nobody can tamper with the supply?

How many crypto scams happen daily? How many people that have lifetime bans from securities are now in the crypto space?

Crypto is wildly volatile. Very few people have made money from it. Those few made massive amounts but the rest of the crypto bros believe it their head that they’re next. It’s so obvious that it’s almost sad.

Investing in the S&P 500 is safer and more reliable than any crypto or individual stock. No need to check it daily like a crackhead waiting for their next dopamine hit.

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nobody can tamper with the supply?

Nobody in the history of bitcoin had ever tampered with the money supply for it. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are immune to it, but not all. When I say that, I mean you can't create or destroy coins. You cannot impact the total supply of available money. Well, you can technically burn coins by sending them to uncontrolled addresses, but that doesn't destroy them, just leaves them in a very public box nobody has the key to.

How many crypto scams happen daily? How many people that have lifetime bans from securities are now in the crypto space?

But having a secure money supply does not prevent scammers, correct. It's extremely unfortunate and not something I condone, but it doesn't take away from what I said about the money supply.

Crypto is wildly volatile. Very few people have made money from it. Those few made massive amounts but the rest of the crypto bros believe it their head that they’re next. It’s so obvious that it’s almost sad.

Last I looked, everyone who held bitcoin for more than I think 3-4 years had turned a profit, and that's been true at almost every point in bitcoin's history. The overall crypto scene is rife with scam coins and people who think their near clone of bitcoin will replace it despite no real features to distinguish it.

Investing in the S&P 500 is safer and more reliable than any crypto or individual stock. No need to check it daily like a crackhead waiting for their next dopamine hit.

Like I said, on a long enough time line, bitcoin has almost ALWAYS turned a profit, and at many points, it outperformed S&P. But if you wanna get into the broader crypto market, don't do that, it's rife with scams.

[–] rafoix@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago

“A long enough timeline”

Dude crypto isn’t even 20 years old and didn’t hit the mainstream until the last 19 years.

You don’t even know why crypto goes up or down other than hype. There’s no balance sheet. No profits. No product. Nothing. Just a bunch of gambling addicts waiting to defend it because they know their just only keep value as long as long as it has positive press. How is it not just a pyramid scheme?

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's why I use it to buy groceries, as any currency can do.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago

My local grocery store only accepts one currency out of the hundreds (?) that currently exist.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So you claim bitcoin is a failure because it hasn’t already supplanted state mandated currencies? Bitcoin went online in 2009. Still so early on.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Yes, it has failed in its original claimed purpose, that's undeniable. Over the same time period even fucking Amazon gift cards have grown to be a better form of currency, even for anonymous crime, my personal former use case.

That's just a system failure no matter how much you like the idea of "what if money, but even easier to track, control, and steal once the feds woke up"

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago

No, it hasn’t failed its original purpose. Bitcoin is the first currency of the modern era that the state hasn’t been able to destroy. That is an amazing achievement.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago

Bitcoin is easier to track, the ledger is public, but it isn’t easier to control or steal.

[–] Juice@midwest.social 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are different kinds of value. Houses indeed have more use value than a bitcoin which only has exchange value and whose use is entirely in exchange. NFTs and smart contracts were a failed attempt at adding use value to crypto.

The numerical money value of commodities and real property is historically dependent, whereas the use value of a house is vital and inflexible.

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No, bitcoin can be sent to anyone anywhere in the world in about 10 minutes. So despite your claims bitcoin isn’t worthless. Housing value is inflexible? That doesn’t make any sense in the slightest. We can certainly live in a house but it’s purchase price is untethered from that fact.

[–] Juice@midwest.social 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Your response is very funny.

So is this how you think ideas are defended, by lying about what I said in order to make your arguments sound better? Maybe you don't understand written English, idk. Or maybe you think that things that are sold are never used. You have a closet full of clothes you try to sell on eBay, but you are a nudist and never wear them. You rent an apartment but sleep in the dumpster. You buy books but refuse to open them. Explains a lot actually. Very consistent and logical argument, Nudie Kanudie, illiterate dumpster person.

I am not the other poster, I didn't say bitcoin was worthless, I said it only has exchange value, and its only use value was for exchange. This does not contradict you at all, nor does it say it is worthless. However being specific in this way keeps us from being dishonest, and talk about value in a way other than an abstract number decided by 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓶𝓪𝓻𝓴𝓮𝓽𝓹𝓵𝓪𝓬𝓮.

Wrt housing, its USE value is inflexible. Only so many people can safely occupy a house and a house's use is in being occupied. There are many other uses for a house too, and price may reflect this. A larger house cost more materials and labor and may have a higher theoretical exchange value. The exchange value can fluctuate like btc, but if the exchange value goes up more people can't live in it. That's what inflexible use value means, but this is also linked to demand.

Everyone needs a place to live, so demand expands or contracts with population, which doesn't change enough year on year to dramatically effect need/demand, therefore it is inflexible, a constant determined by other factors and can be accounted for and planned.

However exchange value is flexible, and not based on need but on supply. So in order to increase the value of existing housing, supply must be restricted in compare to demand. So you either have to have less houses than there are places to live, or make the houses that exist less affordable. Since there is currently a near global housing supply crisis, driven by these market forces, anyone who has stepped outside their dumpster for the last 10 years is aware of these dynamics.

Value is not only a number. There is a kind of value, exchange value, that is a number, but using the stuff we buy is a different kind of value, use value. But because you can't think in these terms, you aren't able to relate to complex ideas like "people live in houses".

[–] musicalphysics@discuss.online 0 points 1 week ago

You start with insults so I’m not going to read whatever is you wrote after that.

[–] urandom@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

But there are enough of them, which makes the value quite high. That’s just reality