You can refill those printer cartridges yourself with a 50/50 mix of used motor oil and coffee grounds. They work just like OEM.
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And to think all this time Iâve been living across the street from a Starbucks and right down the street from one of those shyster $5.00 oil change places.
Mr Epeen 
FWIW a close family member downloaded to her phone one of those cyrpto wallets, linked it to her checking account, xferred some $$ and bought a basket of cryptos in one afternoon.
I think youâre confusing teaching about blockchain (wasnât that used to be called âlinked-listsâ back in Comp Sci 101 class?) and encryption cyphers with what the concept of a crypto currency is and how to operate a wallet.
Thatâs like saying to buy/sell stocks you need to learn about SEC rules, Reg T, DTC, settlement procedures, etc. just to open an online broker account, fund it, and make a trade.
Thatâs exactly what I said.
The claim was that explaining the underlying details of crypto is easier than explaining the underlying details of government-backed fiat currencies. How to open a wallet and start using =/= underlying concepts of blockchain and crypto. Just like how to open a brokerage and start putting money into it =/= the underlying concepts of stocks and bonds.
My nephew came to me about 8 years ago and asked me to help him find some people who would lend him some money to invest in Bitcoin. I told him that when he could explain to me exactly how Bitcoin works and what made it a sound investment, I would.
That put an end to that, although of course now he blames me for his not currently being Bitrich.
To be fair though, one of my other contacts came to me and asked me what I thought about him trying to trade in currency since it looked like there was âeasy moneyâ to be made in currency fluctuations. I told him that when he could explain to me how a central bank uses monetary policy, discount rates, reserve ratios, etc. to control money supply, then it would be time to start.
Itâs been almost 3 years. I havenât heard from him since.
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You make an asset that starts out cheap. You collect a huge amount for yourself, then you spread the word so some more people can get in near the top. Then those people recruit more people to go farther down. Eventually, once you get all the suckers to buy into it, you stop making more, and you sell your asset off for a mega-fortune. When the value eventually crashes to zero, there will be nobody that people can send to prison for fraud, because it was all out in the open the whole time.
That is how Bitcoin works.
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FWIW a guy I know bought some Bitcon waaaaay back in the day (bought, not mined).
He sold them this year and bought his first house. 
(ps- I still think itâs a tulip/Ponzi scheme)
No, not in the slightest.
How? Why would they take non-crypto currency for crypto if crypto is better, and how would you pay for it without a bank account?
Lower fees for merchants and customers because there is no middleman. Government canât just seize your money (ask the greek, they each got up to 10% of their money on their banks confiscated). Donât need a bank account just a smartphone. Does not inflate away like the dollar
Because that is their business. You can also mine it with your computer, then you pay energy to get Bitcoin (although you need special hardware this days to be efficient enough) or you can just find someone in your town that sells it to you, no bank account required.
I think this is my last response to you. I feel like you purposefully try to not understand it because you are for some reason opposed to it. Thatâs just sad, but it is eventually your own problem. It will not go away and is essentially like hating on the internet without understanding it.
Are you familiar with how Bitcoin works? Because itâs actually rather simple. There are two technical things you have to explain, which is hash functions and public/private key cryptography. Both can be explained in simple terms that a layman understands them. From there itâs just super simple.
There is a reason why the whitepaper is only 9 pages. And I still think that school kids could easy learn this even with the technical details and even write their own wallet.
Would you like me to pretend that Iâm a boomer or a mobile-gaming, eye-rolling, iPhone-using teenager, and we can go through that process together?
Ok, I get it, you think people are too dumb for it. But that still means it would be even harder for them to learn how the current system works, because it is way more complicated and convoluted.
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The beautiful thing about the current system is that people donât need to know how it works; they just need to have faith that it will.
But itâs hard to have faith in something like bitcoin when you can wake up one day and find out youâre going to lose the mortgage because the exchange whose basket you put all your eggs into got hacked, or because Elon Musk appeared on a 2-minute SNL comedy sketch and said four words that made your crypto lose fifty percent of its value overnight.
Well yes, the volatility is an issue, but it will go down with time. Gold was once very volatile and had similar phases of exponential growth in value.
The point is to not use an exchange. That is probably the first thing you learn in crypto: not your keys, not your coins.
I know, people think banks are saver, because when they implode because of their insane gambling they just get bailed out by tax money. Itâs completely insane that we take that for granted and act as if this (where some rich dudes gamble with everyones money but zero risk) is somehow superior to a system where companies that make mistakes go bust and people learn how to NO put their eggs into one basked and account for that possibility.
No, thatâs not how things work actually. Banks are regulated, and in the US for example, we have provisions like the Glass-Steagall and Serbanes-Oxley acts to specifically make sure that this doesnât happen. Which is why, in fact, banks rarely go out of business, and the cost to taxpayers is relatively low.
Meanwhile, crypto markets have no such protections or regulations in place, and the âvolatilityâ youâre talking about isnât even the same kind that securities markets experience and can quantify, because a bunch of Slavs walking into a cold-storage locker with loaded Kalashnikovs and a bear isnât the kind of reasonable non-systemic risk the textbooks I read in Econ 101 talked about.
No, you just are literally evading the issues that make your answers paradoxically untrue.
If you are going to continue to be disingenuous about this, then you probably should stop replying.
But it happened anyway. We somehow have a bunch of companies that can take the money of people, engage in extremely risky trades, if they win they make billions, if they lose they risk nothing because the tax payer has their backs. This is absolute â â â â â â â â , but itâs exactly what we have today.
They are regulated, but they should be more regulated in my opinion, and people who in crypto as in the legacy financial world should face criminal charges instead of simple fines that cover a percentage of what they made with their plot, if they engage in criminal activities.
But why should there be protection by the state? With crypto everyone can custody their assets on their own and if you decide to give it to a company/bank then you should be aware of the risks and that company should face the full consequences of the law if they gamble with that money. But under no circumstances should the state have to save the company.
Iâm sorry you feel that way. I answered everything honestly without trying to be disingenuous or trying to hide anything at all. Iâm not sure why you are so hostile when it comes to this topic. It seems you just canât even allow for the possibility that this crypto stuff has something positive to it.
But anyway, I donât think there is much to be won by discussing this further with you
I want to understand why you feel its some boon for people who arent rich.
You dont seem to want or be able to explain this.
That in itself shows theres something shady about all of this stuff.