Reddit reviews Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

If I was the wife I would be strongly against that kind of division. Cashing out cryptocurrencies for real US dollars in your pocket can be incredibly difficult or impossible. I say "real dollars" as opposed to "numbers on some shady unregulated exchange's database", where the exchange says withdrawals are currently disabled due to a software bug but we'll totally have them working again next month. Because that kind of thing has happened multiple times in the past, with exchanges who ended up either running away with all their customers' money or losing the money in a hack and trying to cover it up. See (1) (2)

Read this guy's book, it's pretty good. He describes bitcoin exchanges as "keep[ing] your money in a sock under someone else's bed".

Far less and far less informedly than /u/dgerard, who's written a book on the topic: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.

My general sense is that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) are the best educational programme on the benefits of central banking authority ever devised.

There are some potentially useful applications of blockchain, though I strongly suspect they're not in the area of cryptocurrencies. One that I'm exploring is th idea of a publicly-disclosed, auditable, PKI key regeneration or recovery system. I'm not sure that that's quite possible, but it may be, and could prove useful.

Attack of the 50 foot blockchain by our own u/dgerard

You can find the paperback for sale here.

His blog can be found here.

David—anything you’d like to add so people can find your content?

>Whole business model of crypto is to FOMO people into buying high and selling low. There is literally nothing you can do to predict whether the price is going up or down. It is pure gambling. If you want to gamble, go to Vegas. Gambling there is regulated and you odds of winning are much better than in crypto wild west.

>The best way to deal with FOMO is to understand that you can have FOMO about anything. Does FOMO of winning a lottery keep you up at night? I think not.

Seconded. FOMO is the core of all cryptocurrency speculation (and bubbles generally), but it's not unique to it.

The good news is this means almost all of the advice for dealing with other kinds of FOMO—like seeing other people's "better" lives on social media—works just as well for crypto.

Consider these articles on dealing with FOMO, mentally replacing "Facebook" with "crypto charts", "social events" with "investment opportunities", and "exciting experiences" with "easy 10x gains":

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stronger-the-broken-places/201501/10-ways-overcome-fear-missing-out

https://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-overcome-my-fear-of-missing-out-1148725866

For some more direct advice on defeating crypto FOMO, I highly recommend reading Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain ($5 on Kindle, link is the author's referral link, not mine).

A lot of it is basically about why the underlying economics is nonsense, which you've already figured out based on your post, but chapters 4 and 8 were what killed any remaining jealousy I had over the people who actually did buy Bitcoin ten years ago.

Basically, it made me realize two important things. First, many of those hypothetical gains aren't real. They're just numbers on a screen until you actually cash out. And cashing out is significantly harder than it seems. So when someone shows me a chart saying I could have turned a few hundred US Dollars into a pile of Bitcoin worth tens of thousands of USD Tethers, I know that their numbers aren't fully reflective of what I would actually be seeing in real-world cash gains right this moment.

Second, the ease and frequency of scams, hacks, user error, and general malfeasance means that the raw numbers don't reflect the actual risk. Let's say I had a bunch of Bitcoin in 2010. Well, I probably would have had in Mt. Gox, like most people who were doing anything other than sitting on a cold wallet. And then I would have lost them when Mt. Gox got hacked and shut down. Whee.

And if not Mt. Gox? Between 2010 and 2016, a third of all exchanges had been hacked and almost half had closed. Who cares that my original "investment" nominally goes up 10x if I lose 90% of it in the meantime?

I'm pretty smart, but I'm not psychic; I would be fooling myself to think I would have cleverly avoided all the bad options and only taken the precise actions that would have let me navigate the field of scammers and hackers and successfully cash out with my entire wallet intact over the span of eight years. So what am I actually "missing out" on?

I literally wrote a book on the subject, which appears to be the only critical book. You can read the first few chapters on Amazon with "Look inside!" - chapter 1 answers "wtf is a bitcoin". (And chapters 2 and 3 tell you why Bitcoin and answers to a lot of the claims you'll see in this thread.)