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.
Good point, I always wondered if there is a way the technology will evolve and somehow find a niche that's unexpected. But you're right, 16 years is a long time to be meandering.
It's such a first-world thing to not understand all the good that crypto has done. There are countless lives that have been financially saved by having a safe place to hold wealth while their countries' fiat collapsed. It's just a short matter of time until many first world folks understand this as well.
Yeah, probably, don't worry about it, it's all a bit complex so probably all just the same thing, who knows. No way to tell really. You'll be fine without digging too deep into this stuff, it's difficult to understand.
Yes, because infrastructure, subsidies, education and social spending still need to happen and not paying your taxes will erode those things long before they stop a genocide. If you don't care about getting in trouble with your government, there are more effective things that can be done.
Paying taxes is one thing, and of course it is necessary. Extra value is extracted by printing more and more money. USD used to be backed by gold, but they took that away. In addition to corrupt governments extracting value by printing more and more currency, counterfeitters also do the same. Bitcoin fixes both of these issues. There is absolutely no reason why Bitcoin and taxes can't coexist.
Furthermore, with bitcoin we can electronically transfer exactly how much value we want to without having to trust every single vendor with our credit/debit card numbers. Have you ever had to cancel a card because of fraudulent spends? Well, millions of Americans do every year and this also doesn't happen with Bitcoin. You send exactly how much you want to, you don't hand indefinite access to your funds to every single vendor to sell your information or steal from you whenever they want. In the last 2 weeks I've had over $400 stolen from my debit card because of this idiotic system.
Traditionally clever Argentinians have used USD to escape the collapsing currency, but over the last couple of years, there has been a massive shift to doing this with Bitcoin and some stablecoins. Personally, I would just go for Bitcoin, but I do understand that there is less variance with stablecoins, so they may be a bit more practical for some people. Here is an article that goes into this.
For all the reasons that crypto is a scam, every "value" stock - stock which does not now, and never has any intention of ever paying dividends - is also a scam.
I didnt say that, money is real because its backed by a source be it government or otherwise. Having a currency has a rather obvious use case, having a liquid form of exchange to represent wealth is useful and eases things. Hell it doesnt even have to be paper or metal, it could be bullets, bottlecaps, seashells, or be rocks.
Money is real in exactly the same way that zero-dividend shares are real, or that cryptocurrency is real.
The difference is that the government can freely adjust the value of money, and anyone can create shares. Cryptocurrency can only be generated per the conditions of an algorithm.
Yes but also no, what im trying to say is that currency is in and of itself real. Real currencies are backed by something be it metals, food, water, military, or the entire fucking economy of a region or nation. Cryptocurrency is only backed by hopes dreams and energy wasting mathematical formulas, also I can use a 20 dollar bill practically anywhere in exchange for goods I cant use a crypto wallet or some shit in many places.
It is real because the people who use it believe it is real. Same goes for zero-dividend stocks, crypto, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Beanie Babies, etc. The difference between currency and any ofbthese others is only in the number of people involved.
You can point to government regulations for money. You can point to SEC regulations for stocks and other securities. I can point to algorithmic scarcity for crypto. And I am sure there are standards that various collector communities deem important. But, the fundamental concept value for any of these others is that the people using it believe it has value.
Common trade goods within a barter arent necessarily a currency. Bronze wasnt a currency during the bronze age, mostly because currency wasnt invented yet. Every item you listed isnt a currency they are valuable trade goods at best, currency needs a general degree of universal acceptance, I couldnt go into say a grocery store and pay for my food with yugioh cards, beanie babies, or zero dividend stocks the same applies to crypto.
To use these goods in a trade one must generally convert them into a useful trade form say USD. Just cause they are valuable doesnt mean anyone will use them as a currency, sure you may get the occasional place that does but yet again near universal acceptance is an important factor.
On a similar note Russian Rubles arent a currency outside of Russia since they are worth less than monopoly money. Similarly the currency of Joshua Abraham Norton could be considered a pseudo currency in parts of San Francisco during his lifetime, mind you it was because Norton was funny and kind of a meme celebrity but hey it was accepted.
Your comments about Emperor Norton and the Ruble demonstrate my point. The value of these currencies is entirely in the minds of the people using them. None of the items I mentioned have any significant intrinsic value. Their value is to the community that uses the .
I was not suggesting that any of these items was a currency, merely that they derive their value in the same way that currency does.
Okay now I get what youre saying, but I will say that the Russian Ruble is backed by the Russian state which is far from doing healthy. The backing of these items is based often times on peoples opinions, but say USD is still backed by the government and more specifically the military and economy as well. Just cause its esoteric doesnt mean its not real. The backing maters not the form it takes.
There are plenty of places I can take you where your $20 bill isn't worth the paper it's printed on. There is nothing particularly special about a dollar bill that makes it fundamentally different from any other intangible object.
Again, the only difference is the size of the community that shares the belief. The dollar has a much larger user base than crypto. Crypto has a much larger user base than the Albanian Lek.
The owner of a privately held company receives those profits. The owner of a value stock does not: the company profits do not transfer to the stockholder. The shares of the company do not entitle the holder to any part of the business. The "value" of those shares are only that other people want them as well.
Without the possibility of dividends to convey the profits to the shareholders, the profitability of the company is entirely irrelevant. The only "value" of a value stock is its desirability to other people.
A value stock means it's undervalued compared to its fundamentals or "cheap". It has nothing to do whether or not the company pays dividends.
The difference to garbage like crypto-tokens is that there actually are fundamentals - a profitable company you're buying a share of and for a cheap price. Of course there's risk involved but you are likely to profit from this.
Much more likely anyway than any crypto-token gamble because there's no value underneath, only wasted energy; and yes, also with PoS or whatever - it's all inefficient compared to a conventional database behind the firewall of a trustworthy organization. Your trustlessness rethoric is the actual lie behind this huge scam.
a profitable company you're buying a share of and for a cheap price.
A company in which the owner receives nothing from the business operation is not a "profitable" company. Where the shareholders do not receive dividends, and have zero expectation of ever receiving dividends, the business operations of the company are divorced from the value of the share. From the perspective of the shareholder, there are no profits to consider.
The actual "fundamentals" of such a share is nothing more than the faith that someone else will want to buy that share for more in the future, and the only reason that second person has to buy it in the future is the belief that a third person will buy it later.
That is exactly the same "fundamentals" as crypto; the same "fundamentals" as a ponzi scheme.
This is pointless. You don't even seem to know what profit and value are exactly, much less how the letter is increased.
But ok, gamble away your money for worthless crap if you believe it's the same as owning non-distributing value stock (lol). I'm not an altruistic economics teacher trying to stop you hurting yourself.
But ok, gamble away your money for worthless crap if you believe it's the same as owning non-distributing value stock (lol).
I can point to any number of companies whose stock has proven to be worthless crap. It is the same type of gamble for both. Neither have any value arising from business operation. The value of a cryptocoin and the value of a zero-dividend share arise solely and entirely from investor faith.
But what about all the real valuable assets these companies would have these days? Like the multitude of 5 year old PCs, 1990s era Hermann-Miller office furniture, the buildings and land they lease... /s
Except, you know, the stock being tied to ownership in a company that sells real goods or services. Definitely problems with how stocks are traded, but they’re quite different from crypto.
Except, you know, the stock being tied to ownership in a company that sells real goods or services.
That's the scam: without dividends, or at least the reasonable prospect of dividends, it is not tied to the company in any tangible way. Shareholders benefit only from speculation by other investors, and not from actual business operations.
Almost. If you own a share of a company, you own a share of something fungible, namely literal company property or IP. Even if the company went bankrupt, you own a sliver of their real product (real estate, computers, patented processes). So while you may be speculating on the wealth associated with the company, it is not a scam in the sense that it isn’t a non fungible entity. The sole value of crypto currency is in its speculative value, it is not tied in theory or in practice to something of perceptibly equal realized value. A dividend is just giving you return on profit made from realized assets (aforementioned real estate or other company property or processes), but the stock itself is intrinsically tied to the literal ownership of those profit generating assets.
Everything you just said is only true for stocks that pay dividends now, or may pay dividends in the future.
It is not true for companies with zero intention of ever paying dividends.
Even if the company went bankrupt, you own a sliver of their real product
Historically, when that happens, the creditors walk away with the assets. The shareholders get nothing.
but the stock itself is intrinsically tied to the literal ownership of those profit generating assets.
That's the scam. It's not. In practice, the sole value of a zero-dividend stock is the speculative value.
it is not tied in theory or in practice to something of perceptibly equal realized value.
Electricity has value. Crypto value is intrinsically tied to mining costs. Even if you have access to a free source of power like your own solar panels, you have to weigh the cost effectiveness of mining against the revenue from using your panels to backfeed the grid, selling power back to the power companies.
Because crypto is tied to something of utilitarian value, and zero-dividend stocks are tied only to the whims of investors, the stocks are actually a significantly greater scam than the crypto.
Federal investigators believe the fraud in the investment management division and advisory division may have begun in the 1970s. However, Madoff himself stated his fraudulent activities began in the 1990s. Madoff's fraudulent activities are believed to have accelerated after the 2001 change from fractional share trades to decimals on the NYSE, which cut significantly into his legitimate profits as a market-maker.
Alerted by his sons, federal authorities arrested Madoff on December 11, 2008.
Holy shit, the crypto bros are really triggered by this, out in full force in the comments. If the only argument you can bring for crypto is that you make/made money on it, that sounds a lot like a Ponzi scheme
Fully agree. I think there exist both good and scammy-bubble types of blockchain and crypto. Crypto can be a scam, memecoin rugpull, ponzi scheme, ..etc, but it can also be the peer-2-peer decentrilized self-custody borderless international currency of people away from governments manipulation, inflation, banks and middlemen, which is something that has its own advantages and negatives as we've seen it with criminals, tax evation and money laundering, but also used by people fleeing war zones after their banking come down and escaping trumbling government fiats. However, it also needs regulations and the protections of world governments to work but also claims to want governments and regulations off.
To clarify my position honestly, I think blockchain programming is here to stay but today 99% of it including BTC could be the scammy bubble type and does not represent or have most of the therotical advantages of the bitcoin's original white paper which I listed above.
It is a Ponzi scheme. Very clearly one. How that garbage is legal, I will never know. I could have gotten into crypto from the ground floor eons ago and made tons of money but I didn't because I knew it was illegal and figured the whole thing was going to collapse as soon as governments found out about it. Imagine my shock when most legitimized the damn thing. Still wouldn't bother even if I could go back and do it again knowing the brain dead, money-greedy idiots are going to legalize a literal Ponzi scheme because I have values and morals.
Yeah, it's relatively easy to make good money in crypto if you understand investing. There are a lot of things that are illegal in regulated securities markets that are not yet illegal with crypto.
I intentionally don't invest in crypto, because it doesn't produce anything. Any money you make is just taken from another investor, usually because they don't know what they're doing. When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers. Something is created and rarely are people cheated.
The people investing in crypto are intentionally cheating uninformed investors in a way that is not possible in regulated securities markets.
intentionally don't invest in crypto, because it doesn't produce anything. Any money you make is just taken from another investor, usually because they don't know what they're doing. When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers. Something is created and rarely are people cheated.
When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers.
You mean, executives with "fiduciary responsibility" take extremely irresponsible actions to "maximize shareholder profits" and gut the company that produces those products such that the product is minimally viable, borderline shit, and might even kill the end user (Boeing, Tesla, GE, etc etc). Oh and jobs and the economy are on the line too, so that's great.
All of that is way more productive than crypto because something actually gets produced. Crypto is literally only gambling and scams, plus it's bad for the Earth. And I have nothing against gambling, it's the fact that vulnerable people lose tons of money thinking it's an investment.
See, the real crypto people are not in it for the number go up. They are in it for the technology and the human freedom that it can bring. So we don't like those people either.
I mean, hell, I would like you to participate too. But I understand that may not be your thing. And that's okay. I don't want you to participate for some number go up mad gains stock casino thing. I want you to participate because I seriously believe that Monero can help move human freedom forward by eventually replacing government money.
Good luck bribing someone with something that requires an electronics and communications infrastructure if things get that bad. I'd keep chickens if that was your worry.
While the ones that do exist still exist, and that's not to say that somebody couldn't create other things that were similar. Just as long as the private key is not peeled away, then you know it's actually got the value it says. And you don't need the internet to verify that.
Okay, so let's say the country's economy has collapsed. People are fleeing for the border. I go up to a border guard with one of those and hand it to him... do you really think he's going to believe that has value?
Really depends on the country. If you are fleeing somewhere like the United States, there's about a one in four chance that it would be recognized. If you're fleeing some other place that has had currency issues in the past, then it's probably quite a bit higher.
I'm not sure what you think that proves about whether or not a border guard would accept a metal coin that the briber claims has a value in Bitcoin. The guard could have $100 million in a Bitcoin wallet and still say, "this is some kind of bullshit trick." Why wouldn't someone try to trick a border guard like that if they were desperate.
So basically, you'd have to hope this border guard would either be one of the very small number of people (hardly a quarter of Americans) who would look at a metal coin with a Bitcoin symbol on it and decide it has value to them.
Well, there aren't many of those around. So if it's recognized, then the person would know to look for a QR code on it. And if it has not been destroyed by peeling the hologram off, then they will know it's good. Seems like bribing a border guard with chickens would be kind of difficult. Just for the noise they would make and the space they would take up. You might be able to pass them an ounce of gold or something. That might be a possibility.
Hey, 1/5 to 1/4 arent terrible odds. Even if they haven't used it, there's a damn good chance they've heard of it. If they've heard of it, then they know it has value.
Again, your '1/5 to 1/4' is based on people who understand what Bitcoin is, not based on people who would see that coin and think it has value. Stop being dishonest.
You show me evidence that these metal coins, which, again, are no longer available for purchase, are something even most people who own Bitcoin know about and think has value.
Also, I'm guessing more than 1/4 of the people who are food insecure because society has collapsed know the value of a chicken.
That 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 is the amount of people who have actively used crypto in some form. Everybody almost has heard about it and knows it has value, even if it's to give it to somebody else.
The metal coin has a private key embedded underneath a hologram. The private key has never touched the internet. And so if you throw it away, that value is lost forever. So the metal coin in and of itself does have value. As long as you can physically see that the hologram has not been peeled away and the private key exposed, which would be a dead giveaway, that it has been swept and is no longer of any value.
And you think you have a one in four chance of a border guard realizing that?
Because, again, if society is collapsing, food will be insecure, and far more than one in four people know you can eat a chicken. In fact, I would say four in four people know you can eat a chicken.
Well, if the average intelligence level I see around me... They might not know a chicken is edible. LOL. However, only more serious note. It doesn't seem like it all goes down at once. I mean, people in Venezuela have issues for sure, but they just take their money as soon as they get it and put it into something else that will retain their value. So we won't go from an ordered stable society to Mad Max where everybody's stealing chickens from preppers in one day. It would take years to get there.
Ah, so this is a societal collapse where you have to bribe a border guard to get out of the country but where food is secure. I see. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works in Venezuela, so can you give an actual example of such a situation?
Admittedly, I have very little actual information on their situation, and it's more just hearsay. So if you've met them, then you would have more information than I do.
How many people got in early, made some money, lost it all getting scammed or just making bad choices, and will spend the rest of their lives chasing that dragon? How many drunks are at some bar right now talking about how much money they could have made if they had waited to sell, or how much their nft portfolio is gonna be worth when the market rebounds?
I actually had the same thing happen to me because I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and dismissed it as crazy and that the governments would never let it exist. And then several years later heard about it again in a news article and was like, wait, the government hasn't shut that down yet and started doing some reading and really understood
Alright, as a crypto entrepreneur myself, I'll bite and try to break down exactly what the appeal of crypto is. But b4 I do I would appreciate some updoots since I have a new account. Anyway, crypto, it's a way to do transactions anonymously. You know how when your wife frequently accesses your bank account to meticulously track every offbrand sex toy you get on temu (at least mine does, filing a divorce at the time of writing, just trying to keep custody of the kids even though they hate me) so you can feel the sensation of plastic child labor alone in your bedroom? But yeah I don't really use crypto that much personally, too many scams.
Cryptocurrencies in general are not anonymous. There might be exceptions, but all I've seen is pseudonymity. And an eternal backlog of every transaction ever, i.e., if your identity gets revealed for a single transaction, it will get you revealed for every transaction you ever did.
No, it can't. It's built into the protocol and enforced. On other currencies such as Zcash, you can turn off privacy if you wish. But on Monero, it's not possible to opt out at all. You either have privacy or you don't use it at all.
I mean not to mention the ridiculous amount of electricity it uses, and heat generated. but hey it's low priority even though every year lately is the hottest in record.
For clarification. To my understanding, the older cryptographic currencies use an immense amount of power (Proof of Work). But newer models have solved that issue by switching to a Proof of Stake model instead.
You are correct, but that doesn't mean they all use the same model. Apparently in the USA, it's as much electricity as the entire state of Utah. Also apparently Texas is a big home for it:
BTC is not private. XMR is actively being used mainly on the darknet because of its superior privacy guarantees. BTC is mostly sold and bought just like investments.
BTC is solely a mode of investment, it offers no real benefits over fiat except decentralization. At least XMR is as or even more anonymous than cash, whereas Bitcoin has zero utility.
Yes. I suppose it would also have a sort of utility if it was mass adopted and therefore practically spendable for the average person, but I would argue that there is no inherent utility to Bitcoin.
So you are saying more than the population of the United States as money launderers because somewhere between 400 and 550 million people use cryptocurrency. I kind of doubt they are all money launderers.
I can't find it at the moment, but I saw a report for 2023 or 2024 that something like 0.4% of all crypto transactions are illicit activity. So that would mean roughly 1.9 million people use it for such activity, which is a far cry from 400 million.
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.
I think crypto does have its place in anonymous transfers and stuff like that but the current form of crypto isnt that. First of all it would need to be something stable and crypto is everything but stable.
All currencies fluctuate against each other, but in most cases the currencies all fluctuate downwards in value within very close proximity to each other. You only see cracks start to appear when one currency becomes much weaker than the other ones. Look at the Japanese yen in the most recent days for an example. The big difference is that with the major cryptocurrencies the supply is either capped or very seriously constrained so it actually goes up in value while every other fiat currency in the world goes down in value over time.
The focus of what Torvalds said is the concept of tech singularity. TL;DR "nice fiction, it doesn't make sense in a reality of finite resources". I'll move past that since most of the discussion is around cryptocurrencies.
Now, copypasting what he says about cryptocurrencies:
For the record, I also don't believe in crypto currencies (except as a great vehicle for scams - they have certainly worked very well for the "spread the word to find the next sucker holding the bag" model of Ponzi schemes). Nor do I believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny.
For those who understood this excerpt as "Tarvalds thinks that cryptocurrencies dant ezizt lol lmao": do everyone a favour and go back to Reddit with your blatant lack of reading comprehension. When he says that he doesn't believe in them, he's saying that he does not see them as a viable alternative to traditional currency. (He does not say why, at least not in that message.)
And for those eager to babble "ackshyually ponzi schemes work different lol lmao": you're bloody missing the point. He's highlighting that a large part of the value associated with cryptocurrencies is speculation, not its actual usage. Even cryptocurrency enthusiasts acknowledge this.
I apologise to the others - who don't fit either category of trashy people I mentioned above - for the tone. Read the comments in this very thread and you'll likely notice why of the tone.
Yeah, that headline is very misleading. Crypto(graphy) is essential for the digital world to exist whereas the other stuff is a pyramid & money laundering scheme.
So the equivalent of the population of the United States plus 40% are money-londerers. Because somewhere between five and seven percent of the world's population uses cryptocurrency and that's 400 million to 550 million people.
Increasing demographics might initially be attributed to a rise in the number of accounts and improvements in identification. In 2021, however, crypto adoption continued as companies like Tesla and Mastercard announced their interest in cryptocurrency. Consumers in Africa, Asia, and South America were most likely to be an owner of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in 2022.
That's functionally the nut of it. People in countries that lack a traditional western banking sector but enjoy internet access can piggyback on the network of banks with crypto-interfaces. This is more a consequence of the unregulated wing of the financial sector than an raw utility of cryptocurrency itself.
If WellsFargo won't ratify me as a client, but Coinbase will, I'm stuck dealing in bitcoin simply because I can't get a credit card denominated in USD.
They meant that choosing one possible definition and saying it’s what the word means is stupid. Words mean pretty much what everyone agrees they mean. Look at all the words that have basically flipped definitions since their inception. Just because the modern derivative of a word means something literally everyone understands but is slightly different than what it used to mean doesn’t mean the oldest answer is the correct one. Unwad your jock.
Never heard it commonly used as a short form for "cryptography". But did hear it commonly used for "Cryptocurrency". Why not let the morons have it? Do you have a scam running that relies on "Crypto" being short for "Cryptography"?
Using "cool" brevs is the mark of the amateur anyway, if someone said "crypto" to me when he meant cryptography, I'd forever judge them as a silly person.
Before 2010 it was almost exclusively used to refer to cryptography, outside of some even more niche fields (parts of biology, political sciences, etc)
I run /r/crypto on reddit, for cryptography, and the spam is horrendous and the flood of idiots is never ending
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.
Lets see, cryptocurrencies involve tech bros, fin bros and lots of money. I am not surprised it is on its way to become the most disgusting money making scheme in the world.
u.today
Oldest