What if... crypto currency has been a psyop all along. Ultimately eliminating physical currency and government having full blown control of digital currency.
Oh I'm trying to suggest that like many technologies. The infancy of it is laced with people who are scamming others. Medicine had a go about with this phase as well; and to my understanding is now widely regarded as a "good move". Even if some dude use to sell cocaine mixed with alcohol and called it medicine because it made you feel better.
Equivocating cryptocurrency, block chain tech, and bitcoin is disingenuous to say none of that exists like fairies or Santa Claus. It exists just as much as PGP or AES or the deficit does. It's dumb to think any of that is going to launch you to extreme wealth or solve everyone's problems, but it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
Even if you don't agree with the politics it is a pretty interesting technology for consensus building between potentially adverse participants. Someone with experience maintaining open source repos could at least appreciate that aspect.
it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
And instead it should be hedgefunds that have that power?
There is a need for currency and someone is going to have control over the value of that currency. At least with the government you can vote the bastards out.
I don't think anything we've seen yet solves wealth inequality, but whether that becomes a property of a currency or not may change.
I agree voting is important for governance but what if citizens held that specific power by default instead of the government, and if the government wanted to use that power they would require asking for it? It's the same people doing the voting but for a specific measure instead of a representative. I didn't think we're there yet but that being a possibility seems hopeful.
It already exists without crypto tokens and it's called a referendum.
Different countries use it to different extents. The Swiss Country does a lot of it, for example.
But referendums are not always a good idea and are extremely prone to manipulation by the media and populism (see Brexit). Minorities are also underrepresented in referendums, which poses a real problem with these things.
Having an elected government with separation of power is definitely always better, than whatever DAOs are doing.
Nobody has to have control of the production of money, it is especially bad when corrupt people have the power to generate it into their pockets. I know it is hard to understand how generating money for one's self is theft from everyone with money, but it is the case, you just have to try a bit harder to wrap your head around it.
Yes, if everyone can produce as much of it as they want, then it would lose value. However, someone doesn't need to back something for it to have value. The most common currency in all of history was seashells. Nobody backed the seashells. Gold has had value for a long time and still does. Nobody backs gold. The reason these things had/have value is for a number of reasons, but possibly the most important reason is what you said, that nobody can just produce as much of if as they want. This is also a fundamental reason why Bitcoin has been steadily increasing in value, nobody can produce as much of it as they want. This is a major flaw that is inherent in fiat currencies(usd, euro, lira..), they can be produced as much as somebody(governments, counterfeiters) wants.
This is very simplistic, there are other reasons that various things are good ways to hold value. Divisibility and transportability are two big ones, both which Bitcoin excels at.
I definitely made some assumptions, I'd probably do well to read a bit more and comment a bit less. No harm just down votes let me know there's plenty more to learn
Most of bad rep is generated by insufferable hype train enthusiasts we started to call cryptobros and big tech CEOs trying to capitalize on putting this edgy technology everywhere, just like with LLMs right now. Many people who escape shit states in recent years legitly use cryptocurrencies to bring their unconvertable money abroad and that's more reliable than a suitcase of precious metal bars, lol. This tech is no Jesus or Devil, it just needs to mature and overcome the initial fascination, with most bad realizations and schemes dying off. In ten years this discourse would be very different.
It's not surprising tbh. Most millionaires like Linus or tech people in general have so much money that the problems of the financial system don't impact their lives.
Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
Continuous exponential growth is actually something our financial system was DESIGNED FOR. It it makes no sense our inflationary money makes no sense.
Crypto currency, when in its infancy, had a halfway decent concept.... now? It's a shitshow.
Crypto bros tend to argue about the main currencies, Bitcoin, etherium, etc. Meanwhile, there's about 1000 currencies that aren't talked about for every currency with any weight behind it.
The main problem with CC's is that it's all hype and confidence based. There's nothing tangible attached to it. I often equate it, for non-cryptocurrency people, to stocks trading. Often, stock is trading above what the actual value of the stock is. Most of the time in IPOs the price of the stock immediately jumps after the stock is released, then trends along some impression of how the company is doing. If there's a loss in confidence in the company the value of the stock drops, etc. It's pretty simple supply and demand beyond that. If investors have high confidence in the company to profit, demand for their stock will increase, and since supply is pretty much fixed (aside from shenanigans like stock splits and whatnot), price goes up. Same goes for the inverse, low confidence leads to low demand, price goes down.
It's similar with so-called crypto. Confidence goes up but supply is fairly stagnant, so the price goes up. Same with the inverse.
The primary difference between the two as investments, is that stocks get repaid (depending on a few factors) if the company goes under. The stock represents a monetary value for assets owned by the company, both liquid and physical assets. Crypto, however, has no such backing. If Bitcoin goes away for some reason, all you're left with is essentially digital trash.
This is mainly true for all of the talked about cryptocurrencies. The majority of currencies are not really following the same trends. After the initial golden era of CC's, it became a breeding ground for pump and dump schemes. Since it's entirely unregulated, borderline impossible to regulate, and AFAIK, no such regulation exists to govern it, there's no law against pump and dump schemes in the CC world. So it became a huge problem. We see this a lot with NFTs. Touching on NFTs for a second: if you own an NFT, all you actually own is a receipt that is an attestation or receipt that you paid for whatever the NFT is. That's it. The content behind the NFT, whether it's artwork or whatever, isn't locked. It's actually the opposite of locked, it's publically available on the blockchain, by design. The only thing you "own" is a tag in the blockchain that says you paid for it.
Pump and dump, for those unaware, is where you artificially inflate the value of something making it seem like a really good deal so everyone buys it, raising demand and prices, then the people who generated the hype dump their investment, cashing out when the value is high, and making off with the money while the value of the investment tanks.
This is very very frequently the case with NFTs. Since it's unregulated and entirely confidence based, the creators of NFTs will say whatever they have to (aka lie), to increase the confidence in the NFT, then sell it, and let the value freefall afterwards. They've even gone to the point of buying their own NFTs with dummy accounts for top dollar to have records on the blockchain that people can look up, which say it was sold for x amount in whatever cryptocurrency, to inspire others to think they're getting a bargain when they get it for some fraction of that initial transaction. The perpetrators then sell and disappear.
Several other crypto scams like this have also happened, mostly with NFTs but also with lesser known currencies. One that I heard of, required some token to exist to perform any transactions on the blockchain. When the perpetrators were done, they deleted the token, effectively locking the currency to never be traded again. Therefore those with the now digital trash of that crypto/NFC, couldn't sell to anyone else and they were stuck with the digital garbage data that used to represent their investment.
"Big" currencies, especially older currencies, are fairly stable in terms of confidence, but they're still volatile, and backed by nothing more than confidence. Any "new" CCs are a gamble to see whether they're legit at all, or just a pump and dump. The number of currencies that start high, then drop to nil and never recover, is significant.
Here's a controversial one, Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, isn't an idiot. He pump and dumped Dogecoin, by tweeting about it to bolster it, then divesting when it surged from his influence. I think this was pretty obvious, but I think a lot of people missed it. IIRC, he did it twice. I'm speculating, since I don't know which blockchain wallet is his, so I can't verify, but, he likely picked up a crapton of Doge then did his tweet, dumped when it went high, waited for it to drop again, picked up a crapload more, tweeted again, and finally dumped at another high to earn even more. Since then, doge has not been doing superb. He inspired volatility in the currency and profited from the crypto bros getting excited about it.
The evidence is there and when you look past the confidence game, and look at the numbers, it tells a story that most people don't want to see.
Crypto currency, when in its infancy, had a halfway decent concept
The premise of Crypto as currency was "Lets make a currency that has a soft cap on gross volume, so nobody can ever print any more of it and its value will only rise over time."
Even halfway and in its infancy, it wasn't a decent concept because
It presumes continued increasing cash investment (which repeated crypto crashes illustrate isn't true)
It refuses to acknowledge the potential for Shitcoins
Here’s a controversial one, Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, isn’t an idiot.
He's a carnival barker with a penchant for talking billionaires out of their wallets. That takes a certain kind of cunning, but its also heavily predicated on circumstance and opportunity. Had Elon Musk been born on the other side of the South African color line, he wouldn't be a billionaire right now because Peter Thiel wouldn't have had anything to do with him. Neither would the US military or the Wall Street banks or the East Asian automotive industry.
He pump and dumped Dogecoin, by tweeting about it to bolster it
The Dogecoin pump worked entirely because of the soft cap on the original Bitcoin. It wasn't an Elon invention (Elon repeatedly failed to recreate Dogecoin magic with Shibecoin and Muskcoin and a few other shitcoins of note). Dogecoin surged as a precursor to the Stablecoin market, because you didn't need to wait half an hour for the transaction to clear. Once you had Doge, you could trade it as a proxy for BTC.
And this functionally became the "Central Bank printing unlimited money" solution to the problem BTC created when they objected to a central bank printing unlimited money.
The joke about crypto is that its an object lesson in why things like the gold standard and fixed currency rates don't work. All the natural inventions within the crypto market parallel what western financiers were doing a century ago, just with dumb cutesy nicknames and more graft.
everyone uses money, but "faith in the market" leads to people buying and selling or hoarding stocks, which in turn affects actual stock prices, which affects company worth, which leads to people being hired/fired, money invested or divested from companies and industries, leading to more and more effects.
all based off "hype and confidence". Real companies and people are affected by feelings.
It's fiat currency, the value of which is determined by faith in the market and stock prices.
You think your money has worth because it's backed by something real? No. It has worth because people think it does.
Edit: if everything about the USA stayed the same, but people stopped believing the USD was worth anything and started using Euros instead, the dolar would be worth nothing. It's all based off feels.
All very true but missing one point. Most (all?) current "regular currency" is fiat (let it be done) with no backing except tax payments and government spending. Sure, that's not nothing but it's also not so much something.
Crypto, as fiat currency, has the value people ascribe to it. If it can be traded for goods and/or services, it has value. What value? Only time will tell.
There's a whole discussion that can be had here about the merits of most fiat currencies. My viewpoint is that the currency is essentially a "stock" note for the country. The same way stocks are a representation of the value a business has. The value of that note goes up and down (relative to other countries) as they prosper or falter financially across their entire economy.
The fact that most currency is compared to the US dollar doesn't and shouldn't imply that USD is stable, instead, when they falter, all other currencies gain value, and when USD prospers, all others fall by an appropriate amount.
There's still some sort of backing on it, something to weigh the confidence in that currency against. It's easier to draw that comparison between stocks because it doesn't take as much creative thought to work out how the numbers change compared to a single fiat currency. However, I would argue that the same principles apply.
From there we could get into the weeds with fiat currencies and national debts and whatnot; the whole global banking industry, but we get pretty far from the main topic of cryptocurrencies pretty significantly, and into the realm of whether money exists and what the concept of money actually is. That discussion would circle back to cryptocurrencies eventually in the fact that they are currencies, the many of the same ways, and in the end we wouldn't really prove anything.
Though, I'd like to point out that this is by far one of the best comments I've seen in reply to my post so far. Not that others lack merit or any reasonable discussion points, or that they are somehow not worthy of further discussion. There is a lot to say about the idea, and I don't think anything I've said thus far is inherently false, nor do I think any of the replies don't have merit, they do; but by far, this is the best discussion point so far. I commend you for your time and effort in furthering the discussion.
Meanwhile, there’s about 1000 currencies that aren’t talked about for every currency with any weight behind it.
Who cares? It's an open source tech. If people want to gamble on random shitcoins, that's not the fault of the technology.
There are probably 10000 worthless video games for every few that are good. That doesn't mean video games are terrible.
Also there are scams. But there are scams with the dollar too in fact many many more. People need to be aware and defend themselves.
It's almost impossible for me to feel any sympathy for people who bought NFTs. Really that's the fault of the buyer not the underlying tech.
Sure crypto is kinda terrible but you need to consider the alternative: state paper. It suffers all the same deficiencies but even worse. Literally destroying the planet.
To my understanding, the older cryptographic currencies are the energy consumers. Newer models have avoided the massive energy consumption. A.k.a Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake.
Crypto, however, has no such backing. If Bitcoin goes away for some reason, all you’re left with is essentially digital trash
It's crypto's weakness and it's power is that it's not and cannot be regulated. It acts as a protection against malicious regulations. Of course, it does bear numerous risks and should be approached with extreme caution. But I can literally remember the seed phrase and go through dozen of checkpoints and criminal neighborhoods without any risk of losing any of it, even if they rob me completely naked. It is safe as long as I'm alive and of sound mind, and probably wouldn't really care anymore if I'm not. As far as I know, there's nothing else in the world that could offer such a security level.
The content behind the NFT, whether it’s artwork or whatever, isn’t locked. It’s actually the opposite of locked, it’s publically available on the blockchain, by design
There's not even a guarantee that the content stays up. The receipt just points to some content on some server. Or to ipfs, but ipfs isn't magic, if there isn't anyone on there hosting said content then it is gone. Same problem, but a lot less probable, is that if all nodes on the blockchain go offline, then the NFT itself, along with all currency, is gone.
Pump and dump, for those unaware, is where you artificially inflate the value of something making it seem like a really good deal so everyone buys it, raising demand and prices, then the people who generated the hype dump their investment, cashing out when the value is high, and making off with the money while the value of the investment tanks
Ideally, in a perfect world without hype and idiots, this would be a guaranteed losing scheme. Because to "dump", you'd have to have someone who is ready to buy. If people don't buy, then the perpetrators would have no option but to take the hit themselves. I heard this was the case when somebody managed to short logan paul's shitcoin immediately after the pump. There should be less hype and more of that, and more frequently.
Buying groceries. Personally, I guess I don't need an anonymous cryptocurrency, but why wouldn't you have an anonymous cryptocurrency? That would be the equivalent of letting everybody in the world see your bank account and your withdrawals and deposits. And who would do that? That and while people would like you to believe otherwise, you still have a right to privacy.
In the case of groceries, use cash? I understand the overall privacy issue, and I don’t fall into the “I have nothing to hide so why should I care” category, but I struggle to find a real world example of where an anonymous digital currency would be required outside of illegal purchases. There are certainly “illegal” purchases that shouldn’t be illegal, depending on your area. Birth control will be a big one.
The problem is that cash suffers from the same thing that digital money does being inflation by the government, whichever government you happen to live under. Ask people in Argentina or Venezuela how good cash is. The answer is it's not. The government cannot be allowed to print money because they will abuse that power and hurt everybody.
Inflation occurs when governments print money and so with these cryptocurrencies, at least the good ones, the amount that is printed is known in advance and will never exceed certain boundaries. So even though the greedy people may wish to print more for themselves, they cannot do it because the system will not let them. And right now the system is perfectly happy to let them and fuck everybody else.
The big difference, though, is that if a crypto exchange says that there's more crypto than exists, they have to make good on that promise. Or they, you know, go bankrupt because they don't actually have the money they say they have. Where would they government? That's not the case. There are only 21 million Bitcoin available. If a crypto exchange tries to make it sound like there are more than that, then people will pull their money off of that exchange and then exchange will go bankrupt because they can't produce the money.Also, real crypto people don't rely on centralized exchanges anyway. They either trade peer to peer or use decentralized exchanges that can't be manipulated like that.
I read somewhere that someone was using anonymous currencies to buy life saving medicine from "non traditional" markets because they were much much cheaper. Let me see if I find the article
In most countries it's illegal to purchase or sell non-OTC medicine without a doctors note (buyer) and license (seller). Even if government doesn't care, I'm sure that big pharma would like to keep their profit margins.
Another use I can think of is paying for a domain and registering it with fake info. Registrars require pretty sensitive information, and apparently can check if it is real by comparing it to the info tied to a card used to pay, which crypto eliminates.
Wish there were more XMR-accepting registrars though.
Love it for donations. Monero specifically is also super fast: open wallet, scan QR, enter amount, hit send. Easily done in 30s or less.
It's also good for VPNs, because now the VPN provider needs to figure out who owns the IP, rather then looking up the clear name in the payment info. Doesn't make you anonymous, but reduces risk of data brokers buying your personal info.
I used Monero to pay for my domain and VPS while under sanctions and thus failed by the mainstream payment system. And in daily life I use pretty much only cash.
Also the phrasing of this implies some "nothing-to-hide" mentality. Would I be in danger if I paid for my stuff with a KYC method? Not really, I connect to my VPS and request my domain daily from home, their existence is not secret. Do I benefit from the transaction being anonymous? Still yes, the less data you trust the third parties with, the better. Same as to why I encrypt my chats even though they are mundane. Just because they are nobody's business.
In most civilized countries the law is "innocent until proven guilty" - and if I (and the vast majority of people) are innocent, why the fuck is tracking a thing?
Isn't Nano the one where they distributed the coins by CAPTCHA, but there was a central party that verified all these CAPTCHAs? They could just have given themselves 51% of the coins for free.
Initial distribution was through a captcha-protected crypto ‘faucet’. The faucet is still up. Did the developers keep a large part of the coins themselves? I’ve never heard that.
Interestingly, for a currency to actually be useful, there needs to be a demand for it, something that you can only pay for in that currency. For real currencies that is normally taxes. England only accepts taxes paid in pounds, so there's a demand for pounds from every person who has to pay taxes in England. For crypto, extortion is basically the only source of demand.
Sure, occasionally there are places that accept both real currencies and crypto currencies, but for legit businesses almost none of the revenue comes from the crypto side. But, for ransomware, etc. the hackers only accept crypto. That means there's a demand for crypto, which means that it has some value.
See, you are the reason that most everybody here hates cryptocurrency. Number go up is not the reason to be in the technology. The reason to be in the technology is for human freedom and privacy and liberty. I may be mischaracterizing you, and if I am, I'm sorry. But that's how this comment comes off.
And these my friends, are the only people who use crypto currencies: people who want to get rich from it
It isn't being used to buy anything useful, it isn't designed to make the world a better place.
It is only designed and used to increase profits.
And the only way these make profit is by converting everyone they can using any method they can. Lies, manipulation, scams. All just so they can increase the number and cash out on other peoples money.
I guess we should all get rid of our bitcoin that's worth hundreds of times more than when we bought it, because an operating system kernel developer doesn't like it.
Linus is awesome but he's not a god, his opinion of things outside the Linux kernel is just the opinion of a guy. Stop worshipping him, he doesn't even like it.
You're free to shit on cryptocurrency all you like, but it has many use-cases where traditional banks and payment systems fall short.
Without cryptocurrencies like Monero we wouldn't have anonymous VPN services like Mullvad, and we would have a global web being forced to follow US laws despite being based elsewhere.
For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking. The alternative is master card and other cards that you can't get in many parts of the world, and there is no guarantee that those cards also won't start enforcing restrictions. For those places, cryptocurrency is easiest, cheapest and fastest.
Also, a ponzi scheme is something where you pay investors with newer investors' money. This is not how cryptocurrency works. People pay a tiny amount per transaction to stakers or miners that keep the network going. Anything else is purely a result of the giant surge of new investors, and once we hit a period of stability, mining and staking will be virtually the only way to "earn" money from cryptocurrency and that is completely fair seeing as you're paid to keep the network going.
Ethereum Layer 2 is cheaper than credit card transactions, by the way.
And the biggest vehicle for scams is google and Amazon gift cards.
Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
Let's not forget that crypto also enable wide deployment of ransomwares (which was not possible due to the lack of untraceable online payment at scale), while less and less ecommerce platform allow crypto payment. If this trend continues, eventually no one would use crypto except for speculation and paying off ransom.
The internet enabled that. Are we going to get rid of the internet?
Also, crypto is for peer-to-peer transactions. E-commerce platforms were never the target anyway. And if you really need to pay with crypto on these, you still have crypto-linked debit cards, and these platforms won't know the difference.
The internet has far more beneficial uses than malicious uses. We currently can't say the same with cryptocurrency due to its diminishing utility.
E-commerce platforms were never the target anyway
What's the use of money if not for paying stuff? In the early days, a lot more shops (online and offline) accept crypto payments. These days it's mostly vpn companies that accept them.
Paying people. And as I said, you can link crypto to a debit card to pay on these shitty platforms if you want (platforms that are bad for local business to begin with).
There is no diminishing utility for crypto. It has already been integrated to a point where you just don't realize you can use it.
Even online crime often settles with gift cards though because it's too much of a hassle to explain to the Average Joe how to setup an account and buy and transfer crypto-tokens.
Scams are not much affected by cryptocurrency existence, but ransomware existence specifically relies on crypto for scaling reason. They infect millions of computers, the ransoms are being handled automatically because it's way too much to be handled manually with gift cards.
There isn’t a coin out there that can process 1/10 of the number of transactions that Visa does in an hour.
Ethereum had a sharding update done recently, which boosted the maximum TPSs by 1000 times.
Arbitrum claims to be capable of 40,000tps now. That's 2/3 of visa.
Combine all blockchains and they all surpass all credit cards combined.
Also, credit cards charge 1.5% - 3.5% processing fees. Ethereum L2 charge less than 0.01$, making them much cheaper than credit card transactions. https://l2fees.info/
Anonymous vpns would still exist, as block chain existed prior to crypto
No they wouldn't. They'd be vpns directly linked to your credit card. You're more anonymous without a VPN at that point.
You’re right, it’s not a ponzi scheme, it’s the “bigger idiot” scam.
It is a currency. It has inflation. Anything with value can become a "bigger idiot" scam. Google stocks are a "bigger idiot" scam except you also help them destroy the internet when you invest.
“Combine all blockchains and they’d surpass credit cards”
I honestly can’t believe that’s a real argument you’re making, that’s just ridiculous. Especially given the number of rug pull scams there are with coins.
They aren’t currencies, they’re investment vehicles backed by nothing.
Block chain transactions aren’t as anonymous as you think, people can be easily revealed by looking at the wallet’s history and asking the last person you bought from “where the item was shipped to”
…. Public ledger and all…
Ethereum can now process 1000 x 10 transactions. Visa currently does what, 80000 per second? Yeah it’s not quite 1/10th but….
How long until arbitrum reveals the rug pull?
I’m sure it will be any day now.
Crypto is a solution to a problem nobody has. Need anonymous transactions? Here’s some cash. Need international anonymous transactions? Yeah, those are probably better being tracked anyways. And I say that as a privacy advocate. Yes, privacy matters, no international transaction privacy doesn’t.
Ya know what most “anonymous” international transactions are? Scams.
Let’s break this down to a single argument though….
Crypto is the answer to a problem nobody has. Smart contracts? For what exactly?
Anonymous international transactions? What’s the need?
As a society we’ve decided that some types of transactions are illegal. Yes, sometimes governments make things illegal that they shouldn’t, and authoritarians around the world make all sorts of things illegal that they shouldn’t… but for your necessities, they’ll all be available locally. And under an authoritarian enough regime, they can just inspect your mail anyways.
Society requires trust, and that’s going to happen locally no matter what coin you use. It’s great that I can have a zero trust model for sending money, but it’s useless, because ultimately you still need to trust the person receiving it to do the exchange.
I honestly can’t believe that’s a real argument you’re making, that’s just ridiculous. Especially given the number of rug pull scams there are with coins.
Yes there are hundreds of thousands of shitcoins and rugpulls, I'm not justifying their existence, but Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Nano, Monero, Litecoin. These chains alone can surpass credit card max TPS. There is no argument comparing one single blockchain to one single credit card service, because the reality is it is spread out throughout all of them. You don't need more transactions per second when you can allocate these transactions to different blockchains depending on what is fastest, cheapest, safest or most private at the time.
They aren’t currencies, they’re investment vehicles backed by nothing.
They're currencies, not investment vehicles, and some of them are directly backed by government bonds and cash (like USDC).
Block chain transactions aren’t as anonymous as you think, people can be easily revealed by looking at the wallet’s history and asking the last person you bought from “where the item was shipped to”…. Public ledger and all…
That is first of all completely untrue with for example Monero where the coins are fungible and virtually untrackable. Second of all, they're completely anonymous as long as you don't provide KYC to one of your wallets or withdraw money to a bank account that belongs to you. The biggest bitcoin holder to this day is completely unknown.
Ethereum can now process 1000 x 10 transactions. Visa currently does what, 80000 per second? Yeah it’s not quite 1/10th but….
Visa does 60k TPS, arbitrum can do 40k TPS. But also, 10000 is indeed more than 1/10 of 80000.
How long until arbitrum reveals the rug pull?
I’m sure it will be any day now.
You get back to me when that happens. If you look at the tokenomics of ARB you should be able to tell how big of an impact that would have.
Crypto is a solution to a problem nobody has. Need anonymous transactions? Here’s some cash. Need international anonymous transactions? Yeah, those are probably better being tracked anyways. And I say that as a privacy advocate. Yes, privacy matters, no international transaction privacy doesn
Need anonymous transactions? Sure let's send 10k by letter and see how well that goes. It would take several weeks before it arrives if the mailman didn't suddenly lose track of it. International transactions are very expensive and get arbitrarily blocked. "Solution to a problem no one has"... I literally cannot pay my student loans because my Japanese bank blocks credit card transactions to the one system the Swedish student loan agency uses for credit card payment, and sending money by bank transfer costs up to 10% of the wired money. Do you think I want to spend over 4,000$ on fees just to pay my student loans? It cost me 0.01$ to send all of that through Ethereum layer 2 in less than a minute to a family member so they instead could make the credit card payment. You think no one has any problems with traditional banking and payment because your privileged ass never had any issues. In China people couldn't withdraw any money from their banks during the evergreen ponzi. Crypto was available at that time.
Ya know what most “anonymous” international transactions are? Scams.
Most of them are trades, next are off-shore transactions, third are donations. Scammers use Amazon gift cards, not cryptocurrency, because old gullible people have no idea how cryptocurrency works.
Let’s break this down to a single argument though….
Crypto is the answer to a problem nobody has. Smart contracts? For what exactly?
Anonymous international transactions? What’s the need?
As a society we’ve decided that some types of transactions are illegal. Yes, sometimes governments make things illegal that they shouldn’t, and authoritarians around the world make all sorts of things illegal that they shouldn’t… but for your necessities, they’ll all be available locally. And under an authoritarian enough regime, they can just inspect your mail anyways.
Society requires trust, and that’s going to happen locally no matter what coin you use. It’s great that I can have a zero trust model for sending money, but it’s useless, because ultimately you still need to trust the person receiving it to do the exchange.
The problems:
Banks refusing to let people withdraw their money (China, 2022),
Visa blocking art platforms from all credit card payment until adult content is cleared from the platform (deviantart, pixiv, 2024)
International bank transfers being buttfuckingly expensive (everyone, anytime)
Credit card companies and banks selling your transaction history to advertising companies (US, 2024)
Banks arbitrarily blocking credit card transactions (even very important ones such as student loan payments) because their targets aren't domestic.
Credit card services charging 1.5% - 3.5% fees per transaction despite the actual cost being virtually none.
VPN services keeping your credit card information, essentially linking all your activity to you specifically instead of anyone using your IP.
Having to register an account, give your name and address, credit card info and phone number to be able to donate to your favorite content creator, then have your data be leaked among millions of other people's data in a giant data breach.
Why don't you give me a good few solutions to these problems? Cryptocurrency solves all of them at once.
But none of them are REAL problems. They all have slow and albeit painful solutions, but they do work.
“Want to send 10k anonymously”
Who the fuck wants to send $10,000 to someone in a zero trust scenario?
Why are you sending 10K to someone without a legal paper trail?
The banks in China stopped giving people money because they couldn’t. You’re talking about a bank run, and these are societal issues that will still need to be dealt with. You think in a bank run, people will accept your monero?
You’re just going to be able to survive all societal ills will your buttcoin?
Most of these problems have already been solved and were short lived.
A central ledger is how we process transactions as a source of truth. The only reason the largest bitcoin holder isn’t revealed is because they’ve never spent a thing. The second they buy themselves anything, their shipping address is revealed.
You’re going to what….. buy property with bitcoin so that it’s anonymous despite your name ending up on the land registry?
Yes, when “money” falls, and the societal collapse happens, everyone’s going to trade in bitcoin.
Let’s bring it all together….
What are you buying with 10G where you need secrecy from everyone and are comfortable sending the cash in a zero trust environment?
You can't just dismiss all those problems as not real. What are you talking about? Those are as real as any other problem, and affect lot of people. They affect me and are more important to me than what for example any quickpay service solves. And mass surveillance is one of the biggest problems of our time. Dismissing it as a non-issue is unhinged.
And stop trying to paint verything as criminal. It doesn't matter what you need to send 10k anonymously for. You could be obtaining your salary and don't want others to know how much it is or how much you've accumulated (except for when you report it yourself, ie taxes). you could be a whistleblower or reporter, or just care about privacy. One should never have to provide a reason to want privacy ever.
People would accept Monero during a bankrun. In fact, the biggest winners in the China bankrun (besides the corporations) were people who were illegally holding cryptocurrency in China.
In physical purchases, yes, your name will end up on whatever contract, but "it was paid with Monero" is the only information that will be available. Not what else you've been buying or who you got it from. And I already gave an example of where your name doesn't get linked whatsoever. Mullvad VPN.
Any online service has no reason to require your personal information. Cloud storage, subscription fees, software licenses, etc. Not everything is physical packages to your door, and there are also peer to peer crypto-cash exchanges. You can absolutely buy anything anonymously even if you are a bitcoin holder.
Yes, when “money” falls, and the societal collapse happens, everyone’s going to trade in bitcoin.
I never said anything about societal collapse. You're reiterating r/buttcoin arguments against things I'm not saying.
You don't need to give a reason to want privacy. If you immediately think "that's just suspicious criminal behavior" then you're essentially using "protect the children by banning encryption in messaging applications." As argument.
You’re over simplifying my statements to try and support what’s going to be a failed investment.
Crypto allows you to send 10k internationally with zero trust. That’s insanity.
You can’t give one reasonable use case for it.
“You might want your salary to be a secret, until you have to report it for taxes.”
Sooooo, secret from whom?
Because your neighbour and the cops can’t see your salary already. The problem doesn’t exist, unless your goal is tax fraud. But you quickly backed out of that argument because you saw the corner you were painting yourself into.
I totally agree that privacy is, and should remain an inalienable right, and you shouldn’t need a reason for information to be private.
Money isn’t information in itself. Who you give it to CAN be, but cash still solves that problem, so the problem doesn’t exist….. Until you’re trying to use cash remotely, but there are no reasonable use cases for needing anonymity in international money transfers. In fact there’s a ton of safety in having banks involved. It’s not 100% secure, but nothing ever is. As opposed to throwing your monero into the wind and hoping the other person ships your illicit items.
For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking.
Only because the social pressure after the metoo charade. Visa itself was more than happy to allow these transaction before it. And once all this stigma on adult content will pass, Visa will be more than happy to allow these transactions again. They are money to them.
That's not happening soon. The stigma is only getting worse in the US and non-us services are paying the price. Look at pixiv who had to IP ban American users.
It'll be a bad day when crypto really crashes. A lot of guys in my generation have most of their savings in crypto. When they lose that money they are going to create a very big political problem for the rest of us.
It’s gambling. Why anyone would be foolish enough to invest their life savings into it is no less stupid than the trump stans dumping their savings into trump bux or that trump credit card hat was apparently going fill up with cash when trump was reinstated.
It’s all a scam that has some likelihood of coming true if all of the right occurrences line up, no matter how unlikely. Except with crypto it’s like picking a random slot machine and somehow investing everything you have on one spin. Whereas the trump stuff is like betting on roulette, but one guy is spinning the wheel and he may just put the ball down on one of the random things and make a few people rich. Or maybe it’s more like throwing all your money into the casino toilet and flushing it because you’re too drunk to realize it’s not a slot machine.
I only know one 40 year old who started dumping everything into crypto (DCA, hasn't contributed to 401k or IRA in 15 years), but he even took lower pay to work on devops in crypto.
Getting digital cable in my bedroom as a kid was both a blessing and a curse, and I listened to Michio Kaku a lot. Didn’t understand half of it, but hey, it was cool.
Keep in mind, this was when I was a kid and thought all adults were good people and didn’t understand that Kaku and Tyson were dickheads or that Discovery Science was junk food borderline scifi.
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