I think there was a potential future where cryptocurrency could've actually been useful, but it was ruined by scammers, rug pullers, and of course, speculators.
I'll still hold a little bit of Monero, since it holds the most potential for being a real currency in my opinion. But otherwise, I fully agree with the sentiment.
It's always only going to be useful for things like buying drugs, cases where you want to skirt regulation or you really want privacy. Which is fine. It can have it's niche. Pretending it was ever going to be more than that was a mistake.
When the Wild West was around Medicine was used as a scam too. Snake Oil salesmen aren't very nice people. But that doesn't mean medicine is a bad idea ya know?
I agree that there are a lot of snake oil sellers in the cryptographic currencies realm. But that world is basically the digital wild west at the moment to me. I too am waiting to see what happens.
That's definitely true. I've always liked the concept, but never bought into this hype around the speculation, which really gives it a bad name.
That's why I think Monero is really the way forward to a good cryptocurrency. It's price is fairly stable and makes more sense than Bitcoin in many ways. I'd use it more if there were more vendors using it. The most I've done with it is buy a Mullvad subscription.
I hear what you’re saying. But USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
I’ve been deep in decentralized finance for years as an investor and fulltime software dev. I get the whole “hur hur Bitcoin is dum” but you’re really missing the forest focusing on a tree.
USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
No, it is a speculative investment. If it were a currency it would be something people were using to buy things, accepting for selling things, using to pay taxes and fines, using to invest in something else, etc.
It's not a currency, it's at best some kind of intermediate thing used to buy even more speculative "investments".
Didn’t you repeat what I said? It’s a token on decentralized ledgers that represents a currency. Like a number in the database at your bank. No different than that.
You deposit your currency at a bank, it’s a number in a database. You earn interest on your investment.
Are you saying that is a different concept than usdc deposited into a lending market on a decentralized ledger and earning interest?
Also, usdc is accepted places. In fact Stripe is adding it as a payment method very soon. Would that make it a currency, or does it have to reach some level of acceptance? What about PayPal balance? Currency?
Except that my bank stores dollars, not memecoins.
USDC is not a memecoin. Are you aware of what USDC is? A token issued by a US company, Circle, with strict transparency and regulatory compliance. It’s no different than a number in your banks database, except it’s in your custody, like cash.
Yes, because "USDC" isn't a currency.
Is your bank’s database a currency?
Look, I get the popularity of shitting on crypto but I’m happy to teach you about the industry if you’re interested. Memecoins, ponzis, shills, shitcoins, etc is the loud obnoxious side of our industry and has no bearing on the real economics and financial system being developed.
It’s no different than a number in your banks database, except it’s in your custody, like cash.
And it's not a real currency, it's a memecoin.
Is your bank’s database a currency?
No, my bank's database is a database, it refers to a currency that is real because it is accepted for paying taxes, fines, etc.
but I’m happy to teach you about the industry if you’re interested
There's nothing you could teach that would be valuable to learn. You seem to be in on the grift, looking for another person to get in on the pyramid scheme. Good luck with that, but I'm not interested.
USDC is a memecoin? It’s $1, on a decentralized ledger. Backed by $1 in the legacy banking system. I can move 1 USDC to $1 in the legacy system nearly instantly by redemption at Circle. No different than a legacy to legacy bank wire.
I’m not grifting - I’m attempting to make you aware that there are decentralized markets denominated in US dollars. What I’m explaining is not a pyramid scheme - I’m just informing you that there is a very widely used token on decentralized ledgers which represents exactly $1.
TerraUSD was an algorithmic stable, not backed by any real USD. No one with a brain expected that mechanic to work. That was a ponzi, but an interesting experiment.
The problem is that snake oil stuff was (mostly) solved not because snake oil salesmen decided to be nice and close up shop, but because regulations and laws were put in place to protect people from them.
Likewise, we've seen crypto get hit with pretty much every issue that has ever afflicted fiat over the entire history of money. The only reason we've seen anyone get punished for it is because governments still have some jurisdiction over crypto traded by their citizens. People will say "but smart contracts!", but the only proven way to be safe with those is to verify the code is both bug-free and not malicious, and that's a lot to ask of someone trying to buy dog food. A lot of exploits have been executed on contracts that were marked safe by audit companies.
I think the idea as a concept is interesting, as I don't exactly trust the government or banks either, but I trust random black box companies and individuals a lot less.
Like I said. It's the wild west in that sphere right now. No rules no nothing. But I also think that even the wild west was tamed over time. Meaning I'm not sure if it will stay so unregulated forever.
Right, but the wild west was tamed by increasing regulation, which is precisely what crypto fans want to avoid. The truth is, though, most people won't trust crypto without some kind of centralized authority guaranteeing that their money is safe, whether that be a government or a private entity. This pretty quickly materialized with the NFT craze, which saw the vast majority of NFTs were created on the same two sites, with only the biggest names having their own domains and redundant storage for their images.
That may be true. To me, however, not all regulation are ethically or morally sound. I hear people in countries with corrupt governments can use these new fangled monies to avoid the regulations/sanctions put on their countries.
The example that comes to my mind was some guy in Turkey buying medicine. I guess Turkey isn't allowed to trade many countries because they government is corrupt? And this person was unable to get the medicine they needed in Turkey. Only way was to in port I guess? So they converted their local turkish currency to something the medicine maker would accept.
I can't really verify such claims but seemed like an alright "breaking of the rules".
To me, the difference there is that the jokes about snake oil and homeopathy, healing crystals, or essential oils are roughly the same - e.g. "what do you call X that works and has been peer reviewed? Medicine."
So far, there has been no equivalent positive usage in the crypto sphere. Medicine, though often administered to different levels, is a good idea in itself.
Actually, for most uses of crypto it's attempting to muddle in and "add" value to a previous known-good thing. Is the comparison here that crypto is snake oil currency, snake oil databases, or snake oil contracts? In every case, to me, crypto is the snake oil salesman trying to sell you the brighter tomorrow - without adding anything positive, and often getting the heck out of dodge (or folding a company and moving on to, e.g. LLMs) before delivering on promises.
Now a days we peer review medicine. As I mentioned, in the "wild west". There's no peer reviewing. The metaphor of the wild west was also pointing out the infancy of a technology. Another example could be how the "self driving cars" aren't actually that self driving. However I suspect that over time even those cars will actually become peer reviewed, functional and what not.
The example that I saw that I liked the best was video games. Just because someone sells bad video games. Doesn't mean all video games are a scam. Ya, know?
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.
Oddly enough lots of people do mess with V-Bucks for FortNite, Riotpoints for League of Legends, and/or CoD points for Call of Duty. Damn you chucky cheese money in my video games!
Right, his talk about how he's not very good at computers is pretty funny. I don't understand the crypto hate on Lemmy. Although I guess I don't understand a lot of why things are hated here. I guess crypto is too close to capitalism maybe? Freedom is frowned upon here.
Tangible items can have utility in the real world, where cryptocurrencies can never be anything more than numbers on a display.
Gold can be used in electronics, and I get that people are mad that currencies are just something we all mutually agree have value, but generally speaking powerful governments back those up. Cryptocurrency is backed up by people promising it’s totally gonna be a real currency any second now. Please ignore that crypto can wildly fluctuate in value which generally a horrible thing for a currency to do.
The only two countries that accept bitcoin as a legal tender are noted powerhouses El Salvador and the Central African Republic… not exactly world leaders.
Yeah, El Salvador, people from there told me quite recently that it's not at all what the government propaganda is trying to sell. Nobody uses Bitcoin and it is only accepted by a few state institutions. As for Venezuela, we had Petros for a while, now the shitcoin has been completely phased out and discontinued since nobody but a few oligarch used it to launder money.
No, no major government has completely adopted cryptocurrency as legal tender. El Salvador became the first country in the world to do so in September 2021, but there have been significant challenges :
Volatility: Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are known for their price swings, making them less than ideal for everyday purchases.
Consumer protection: Concerns exist about the risks faced by Salvadoran consumers, especially those unfamiliar with the complexities of cryptocurrency.
Business adoption: Businesses have been slow to embrace Bitcoin due to technical hurdles and a lack of customer demand.
Cryptocurrencies are still considered too volatile and risky by most governments for everyday transactions.
And crypto is more stable than some governments' real currency. It's been a life saver for some people.
It's also a lot faster for transactions than normal banking when sending money to people in other countries.
It's still in the early days... like email in the late 80s / early 90s. It should get better, but there's so much crap and scams out there right now. It's still very much the wild west. It's like Wall Street on acid.
EDIT: people downvote but don't say what was wrong. Awesome.
Well you're talking about a technology that can obsolete VISA and MasterCard and their predatory transaction fees!. There's a lot of money riding on cryptographic currencies taking off or not.
You could very well make the argument that ultimately crypto is backed by energy, which is something we all agree has value. Without energy, you can't go to work, heat or cool your house or anything like that. If you believe that electricity is fundamental for society, then by extension, crypto is backed by the most fundamental force that there is even bigger than a government.
Sure you can. There's absolutely nothing stopping somebody from putting a private key on a piece of paper and loading money onto it and spending it physically as long as the private key has not been exposed. Kind of like those Amazon scratch-off gift cards. And just to prove my point, take a look at this.
Depends on who the 7-11 cashier is. If they are really smart, they would gladly take your crypto and pay for your items with their fiat. You are not going to get big places using it first. You are going to get little places using it first. The Amazon's and 7-11's and Walmart's of the world will come later. And trust me, they will come. There's a natural tipping point apparently, where when 5% of the world population uses something, the other 95% generally soon follow, because it's more useful. Crypto has already hit that 5% mark.
Isn't there a person that famously said something to the effect of energy is neither created nor destroyed, only modified? I want to say it was like Isaac Newton or something. Some big name anyway. So you're not destroying the energy. You're changing the energy into heat, which during the winter can heat your home as a subsidy to your furnace, and you are turning it into a digital representation that you can take and spend anywhere in the world.
I get you're desperately trying to sound smart, but in this context, "energy" meant electricity. Because that's what it takes to produce cryptocurrency. Not the general definition in the realm of physics study. And electricity can most certainly be created and destroyed.
When you buy gold, you have the gold. It's backed by the thing you have.
When you buy cryptocurrency, you don't have the electricity that was spent in fabricating those numbers. You don't get sent a battery in the post. You have nothing.
You're not understanding. Real money isn't only numbers on a screen. It can be physical or not, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's universally backed and usable.
Crypto isn't. It's just numbers on a screen without the backing of government, business, or most people.
Which is why Monero's proof of work algorithm ends up being better than Bitcoin. Because for a data center with tons of computers, it makes more financial sense to do something else with the machines rather than mine. But for a home user, it makes tons of sense to mine and get the heat to subsidize their electricity bill during the winter.
I've recently been hearing a lot about mining, consuming energy that either would not exist otherwise, or would be wasted. For example, places in Africa can build like a hydroelectric power station, but don't have the money to run lines far enough for all the energy from the power station to be used, so they give most of it to a crypto mine and let the residents use the rest. If the residents ever need more power, then the crypto mine can shut down temporarily or slack off on their usage in order to provide the residents with more power.
You know what else they could do? Store it... in batteries... which are reliable for long term storage... and aren't nearly as volatile... and use it on stuff that generates more value per watt consumed...
For example, batteries can be used to power homes and businesses, which can help to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and improve air quality e.g. improving quality of life which generates a shit load of value. Batteries can also be used to provide backup power in case of a blackout, which can be essential for critical infrastructure such as hospitals and data centers. I just don't see how most crypto currency can compete in this space... maybe something highly power efficient? But even then the value is extremely volatile.
Also consider that many peoples (me) would like to move from the older cryptocurrencies that needs lots of power to run (proof of work) and try to advocate for newer proof of stake models.
To my understanding proof of stake models have dramatically lower power requirements.
Yes, but they are also quite a bit easier to take over and destroy because governments can just print their fiat and buy up a large amount of that currency and then kill the network.
Translation: actual currencies can be used to purchase energy, but cryptocurrency cannot.
What you're saying is precisely like saying "I know a guy that trades turnips for money. Therefore turnips are a great currency that you can buy anything with."
I don't know of any laws specifically against them accepting it, but I think it's probably demand-based because only about one-fourth to one-fifth of US citizens use crypto currently. I think that number will grow over the years.
So no laws them. And 25% of the US using crypto. That's surprising. Got any proof of that? That seems remarkably high. You could even say unbelievably high.
People generally don’t trade currencies as commodities or treat them as investments. When the same people promising crypto is totally a currency actually start treating it like a stable currency to exchange for goods and services and not an investment or commodity to be traded, I might revisit it. For now, the evangelists refuse to walk the walk.
I said generally. Your parents who get paid in local currency for their job are not trading in foreign currencies. The fact that rich people can find ways to squeeze more money out of just about anything isn’t a win for cryptocurrencies.
The main test is to give cryptocurrency to my grandparents and they should be able to figure that out and do their grocery shopping. I pity the people having to explain how to use cryptocurrency to my grandparents at the cash register.
Not really. "Take your card out of your wallet, and instead of putting it in the machine and typing your pin, you just tap it against the screen"
Vs "well, ok. I set up a wallet for you. No it's not a real wallet, it's on your computer. Anyway, your wallet has this huge long code that you can't remember, so keep it safe, because if you lose it you lose all your money, ok? Right, well before you buy anything, you'll need to register with an exchange, there are a number of exchanges, like XYZ, so sign up with one of those, then — wait what do you mean you don't know how? Just give them your email and whatever else they need.... you don't know your email address? Christ on a bike. Ok we'll sort that out soon — anyway, back to the exchange... go onto their site and trade your cryptocurrency (the weird money in your wallet... no not your real wallet, grandad, your computer wallet), now you need to wait a while for the transaction to happen and you to receive your money. Now you can go to the shop and pay by card. Amazing, isn't it? And it'll only get better when everywhere accepts [coin], I'm sure that'll happen any day now!"
You have obviously have not heard of forex and the vast quantity of money that flows through it on a daily basis if you think currencies are not traded as commodities, nor have you heard of places like Argentina or Turkey apparently if you don't know currencies are treated as investments.
There are many many scams in cryptoworld but there is no need to throw out the baby with the bath water as it were. Crypto can and is being used as valid alternative to fractional reserve issued currency; the thriving and resilient darknet proves it so.
I appreciate and applaud anything that can even attempt to separate state and money. That will imho be the best thing for humanity since the separation of state and religion.
I have no like of transaction fees but... you know they exist in the cryptocurrency world right? And that they're generally higher? Those transactions take work and aren't done out of charity.
If crypto had pivoted to freedom and prioritized mass-adoption, it would have been great. Instead, almost everyone who invested got more people to buy in, dumped it, and got their payday. So yes, very much like capitalism.
Really, the only crypto that comes anywhere near :
If crypto had pivoted to freedom and prioritized mass-adoption
Is Monero. Unfortunately, it falls short when it comes to mass-adoption. Still, it's just as volatile as any other crapto-currency, so using it as an investment vehicle is a bad idea. It seems almost like crapto-currency is fundamentally incompatible with stock market style investments.
I agree with you. I think people are using it wrong. It's a currency for a reason. It's meant to buy and sell goods and services. I should be able to buy a house with it. I should be able to buy a car with it. I should be able to go to the doctor and pay the doctor with it or buy some eggs from the farmer's market with it. But instead, people want to treat it like a stock market thing. And that's not what it was designed to be. It was designed to be an ultimate check on the government's authority to steal from their citizens through inflation. And anybody who tells you different is either a damn liar or has an agenda.
It was designed to be an ultimate check on the government's authority to steal from their citizens through inflation. And anybody who tells you different is either a damn liar or has an agenda.
Unfortunately that's just not how most crypto currency is designed. Really, most crypto currency are essentially an extremely volatile private bank with a user-federated money printer.
Most are just an obfuscation of global inflation and yet still highly influenced by governments.
Allowing governments to track the transactions makes crypto basically just a crappy version of credit cards.
I completely agree. Most cryptocurrency is a stupid mess and I would never ever get involved in it. That word most is the keyword, though. That implies that there are some that are actually valuable for their own sake. And I believe that to be Monero, which is why I personally use it. Monero does not allow the government to see your finances at any time and so they absolutely hate it and try to demonize it at every chance they get.
Completely agree. By obfuscating the blockchain transactions, monero is essentially digital cash (at least when it comes to monero-to-monero transactions); what craptocurrency is supposed to be. That's why governments hate it so much, it's hard to tax transactions they can't see and it's hard to regulate something you can't control or track. That's why governments opted to ban it outright.
Still, the whole "being used as a stock market" is a problem for monero too. To a lesser degree than other cryptos, monero still was heavily impacted by the crypto bubble-pop. Monero has a lot of technical merit, unfortunately it's being soiled by the failure of competing cryptos.
You don't get into Monero for mad gains, which is what people don't seem to get. They are in cryptocurrency for number go up, and I absolutely despise them for it. Monero is growing in adoption, even with the government adversity towards it. It is still growing. In fact, a decentralized exchange called Haveno just launched last Tuesday which will make it completely impossible to ever actually kill Monero's Fiat 2 Monero Exchange
Haveno is the base software where Haveno-reto is the live network based on it. Currently they have to fork it and put keys directly into the source code to be able to change networks, although that should be fixed in a future update.
I would like to introduce you to my friend Monero. It actually gets used as a currency and has people who believe in human freedom using it, which is why the government's hate it so much and purposely try to get it delisted from as many exchanges as they possibly can because they do not want normals like us to have it.
I have a long day of paying rent, then buying groceries, coffee, and fast food tomorrow. If you can detail how I will accomplish that with Monero, I am on your side. And keep in mind, "expensive, inconvenient currency-switching" may work for me, but it won't work for most people. Be realistic.
I have personally been purchasing my groceries every month with Monero for a year and a half now since January of 2023. I also actively search out companies that take Monero and purposely buy from them whenever possible.
the idea of crypto on its not bad on its own, its just there are a lot of bad actors agressively trying to prop up the value of some arbitrary crypto without actually selling a good or service in order to make a quick buck.
at least teams like the one behind Axie Infinity offered a product/service. Most don't, which is the problem.
if your marketing essentially has to relate to other people buying into buying it, then theres a big problem.
Which is primarily the reason that I will only use Monero. It actually offers something that other cryptocurrencies do not. And that's privacy. If you need to see which crypto to buy or use, look at the government's efforts. The government has Wall Street accepting Bitcoin and put in people's retirement accounts. Why? Because they can control it. Where with Monero, they're trying to purposely get it delisted from every single exchange they can possibly get away with. Why would they be so willing for you to have Bitcoin? But not willing at all for you to have Monero? Simple. Because with Bitcoin, they can see everything you spend at all times and see your balance at all times. Where with Monero, they can't control it and they know it. Monero is what Bitcoin people thought they bought.
Exactly. These people seem to have no idea what they're talking about and or flip flop on issues. As an example, they flocked to open source software. The minute a billionaire bought the company they previously used, because in open source software, they finally see that no billionaire can buy it and control it like they can a closed source system. But yet, oh no, we can't have open source money. That doesn't make any sense.
The minute a billionaire bought the company they previously used, because in open source software, they finally see that no billionaire can buy it and control it like they can a closed source system.
I’m genuinely struggling to understand what this sentence means. Is it badly worded or am I just brainfarting?
Oh, sorry. I was using voice dictation to type that and it put a period in the wrong place. That is not the beginning of a nuisance. I was intending to say that they flock to open source software the minute that a billionaire buys the thing they were using because they realize that a billionaire can't buy open source software.
I think “open source money” is a great idea and I’m sure many here do too, but as others pointed out in the replies, cryptocurrency has a lot of issues at the moment for that to be viable.
Also, a lot of the hate probably comes from all the people shilling for it and the whole “get rich with this!!!” narrative around it.
Yeah, I'm not in it for those get rich quick reasons and I despise people who are. I am in it for the tech and the potential to increase human freedom around the world.
Because it went from being a novel decentralized payment method, into a speculative asset, and finally a Wall Street commodity.
Yes, I know there are projects where that core ethos is still relatively intact, but those aren't what come to mind whenever people publicly discusses "crypto".
I hate it in part because its adherents seem intent to relearn all the mistakes of the free banking era and constantly evangelize long-debunked economic theories. It’s like the goldbuggism of libertarian cranks of yore.
Also, for Bitcoin specifically, the extra demand for electricity raises rates for nearby residents. It’s essentially a transfer of wealth from ratepayers. A lot of them are in Texas and if you think Texas has “excess capacity,” then explain why they literally pay bitcoin miners an absurd amount not to mine when there’s a cold snap or heat wave.
I could go on about fraud and money laundering but I think being dumb as shit and raising electricity bills is plenty reason to hate it.
I dislike crypto for the grift but also that people had repackaged it as a form of DRM in NFT's, it became commercialisation in the extreme promoting materialism.
Also Cryptos relation to libertarianism makes it very off putting.
If you were not living in a powerful first world country, you would like it a hell of a lot more. It is such a luxury to not have to constantly be worried about your currency collapsing. In places like Turkiye, crypto is massively popular because their currency is constantly devaluing. There are many countries like this that many Americans and Europeans seem to forget even exist.
It probably won't be too long until even the spoiled nations will want to be able to hold value somewhere that isn't free falling as well. The US is now paying more to service their debt than they are to the military. Not everyone can afford to hold their wealth in real estate and successful businesses.
Please get fucked on assuming where i live and inturn my life style.
If capitalism died we wouldn't have first world countries feeding on third world countries. Crypto won't help with this issue, you will still have american companies drilling oil out of third world countries paying workers fuck all, sweat shops will still need to be somewhere too and the capitalist would prefer it away from they're first world country. If anything crypto will only shield the exploiters but at least the libertarian can be happy whilst getting fucked by daddy bazos.
Read my comment again, you entirely missed the point. This has nothing to do with anything you pointed out. I guarantee you don't live In a poor country because there isn't a chance that you would have no idea how much they are benefiting from bitcoin. I'm sorry you're so offended, but you were your ignorance so prominently that it isn't hard to see at all. I'm also in the 1st world, but I desire to understand the whole picture enough to be able to tell. Use your anger over something you know nothing about as a guide of where to educate yourself.
I saw the point you where trying to make, diminishing my knowledge in the matter due to your presumption of my privileges.
Then railroading off with how its good as poor countries are forced to invest in these schemes.
Do you know much of rune scape gold farming? Gold farming in rune scape was very profitable. Westerners would pay slave wages to poor countries to play and farm in run scape working 60 hours, this was eventually broken up which also didn't lead to a good outcome as a large community lost the financial structure they depended, essentially chewing up and spitting out the disadvantaged.
Similar instances have popped up since crypto where again it has created a work force built on shaky ground which doesn't just exploit but creates a dependency on something liable to fail.
So again no crypto will not fix third world problems as it allows for massive exploitation.
Oh my. Hold your horses buddy. Nobody is forcing poor people to buy bitcoin. People are just faced with a choice, they can hold their value in fiat currencies that corrupt governments are printing like crazy, or they hold their value in a decentralized currency that nobody has control over and nobody can print on a whim. Just because you feel like you missed out on a good investment and so you are bitter towards an entire growing industry doesn't matter at all to people who are using it to escape corruption.
It really isn't nearly as complex or evil as you think it is. It really is just a way for people who have repeatedly been screwed over by corrupt politicians to escape corruption. It's just a matter of time until more and more people around you realize the same, and eventually you will join in, albeit a bit late due to your ignorant bitterness. You do yourself no favors by being against something simply because you don't take the time to understand it.
like nobody is forcing the poor to drink dirty water or go without food..
Just because you feel like you missed out on a good investment and so you are bitter
you make a lot of assumptions. next you'll be calling me a basement dweller.
capitalism isn't evil, guns aren't evil, physical currencies aren't evil, they are instead an easily manipulated vehicle that intern can be used for evil. crypto has proven itself with the sheer amount of scams to be easily manipulated.
i don't see crypto as complex, i have followed it since 2013 and have a good understanding of encryption and decentralized systems as well as economics.
the main reason i don't like or see use for crypto is that i am a socialist, crypto goes against core socialist economic values. it also pollutes as the oil cost is high, it promotes commercialization, its abusive to human psychology with fomo, it feeds into libertarianism.
Poor people all over the world are less poor because they have used bitcoin to escape predatory devaluing fiat currencies. Go check out much of Africa, much of South America, Turkey, Georgia, and Southeast Asia. There are literally people eating better food and drinking cleaner water thanks to the fact that they can maintain their hard-earned value with bitcoin.
Nobody said capitalism is bad. Nobody said guns are bad, I have no idea why you would feel the need to conflate issues. I get that you can read headlines, but dig a bit deeper, and you will actually be able to argue from thought-out stances. The crypto oil thing was a scare tactic that got thoroughly disproven many years ago. Mining is rapidly ushering in the transition to renewable energy sources. It is also preventing waste of energy that would just dissipate.
The information is out there. It's just up to yourself to put in the work to educate yourself. I don't mean run around trying to find anything that will agree with your original hunches or whatever to try to guard your ego. I mean, look at it with fresh eyes and be willing to expand your view after critically analyzing the situation without bias. It is actually a good thing to be capable of arguing from both sides so that you are able to honestly weigh the situation. Right now you are just spewing old headlines that you once saw and not even attempting to make a coherent argument.
It will only help you to educate yourself. It's not nearly as daunting as it seems. The next step is to quit trying to defend a stance that you don't understand and to spend some time researching and asking questions. If you had understood what bitcoin was in 2013, then you would be in a much different situation than you are in right now.
Speaking about guns, capitalism and currency were to give examples, and thus context. And if you can show me evidence that crypto has improved so many live in impoverished counties, maybe a crypto GDP study I would love to see it.
I speak of gas prices as I had mined bitcoin and monero and know for a fact that my GPU was 100%, my electricity bill went up. and the crypto miner I repaired PC components for would have a repaste job every few months.
A great way to really understand just how much Bitcoin and maybe some stablecoins are impacting the lives of people in poorer nations is to just go and talk to people. Spend a few weeks in Tbilisi or similar places and just walk around and talk to average people. Bitcoin is so popular amongst the average people there that many random little shops are even selling socks or Tshirts with the Bitcoin icon on them. So many lives have been saved, and the people there genuinely love Bitcoin.
There is a huge difference between crypto and Bitcoin. There are many shitcoins that try to pretend to be the next Bitcoin or whatever, but literally 99.9% of them are absolute garbage. Luckily, they are drying up and blowing away. For people who this stuff really matters for, they are able and willing to look deep enough to see the benefits of Bitcoin and are much less likely to fall into the BS traps of CyberCoin or whatever.
It is often the uneducated outsider that hasn't lived the horrendous harm of horrible government currencies that are so vehemently opposed to Bitcoin. It just screams privilege, like when some spoiled trust fund kid gets mad at homeless people because they won't just go home. When people are struggling to not drown and they find a life raft, they simply don't care if people in yachts tell them it looks tacky.
If you genuinely want to give this a fair shake, then Google things like "bitcoin encourages renewable energy after:2023" or "Bitcoin adoption in poor countries after:2022". Get recent information and be open to having your mind changed. Bitcoin threatens the imbalance of power, and this is why there is a push to get people in powerful countries to not think deeply about how much it is helping the less fortunate right now. It's just a matter of time though. Knowledge naturally spreads.
Why does the headline say "Crypto" but then snippet says "cryptocurrencies"? Do people not realize these are not the same thing? The inventor of Linux does believe in crypto, that's why it's in Linux!
Algorithm??? I can understand not coming up with "Artificial Intelligence", but if "Al" is "algorithm", then that means they think its A L, with the L lowercase. So, that means they aren't pronouncing it "aye eye" or "aye el" they're pronouncing it "Al". Like the first name Al.
Which just makes me think of a reboot of Married with Children. Except it's just Peggy surrounded by cyborgs made to look and sound like the original characters.
So now Peggy wants sex, and she says "OOOOHHHHH AAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!"
Followed by a robot drinking a beer, and sticking his hands down his pants. Somehow even artificial Al looks defeated.
It's the most annoying thing of these enthusiasts: they glorify cryptocurrencies and blockchain while glossing over the massively important and actually useful cryptography discipline in the background.
"Crypto" has become a widely used abbreviation for "cryptocurrency," even though "crypto" itself refers to the general field of cryptography and its encryption techniques. This informal usage reflects how cryptocurrencies have become the most recognizable application of cryptography for most people.
Yes, because people were trained to look for the lock icon, though pretty much every site has it now, whether it’s something that necessitates security vs just privacy benefits. Maybe looking for the lock is outdated, idk, but it was emphasized a lot a few years ago.
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.
I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency "crypto", because "crypto" is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
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.
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.
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.
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