Thoughts on Cryptocurrency?

arthur , 2 months ago

Nice tech surrounded by scams.

PoliticallyIncorrect , 2 months ago

I like crypto specially because I'm paid by crypto transactions and at the same time I have investments in crypto and I'm making good money 👍👍.

LWD , 2 months ago

You don't say...

onlinepersona , 2 months ago

Multiple governments want to have their own cryptocurrencies and bitcoin was recently accepted in ETFs (for investment) which is why its value it skyrocketing right now.

Stablecoins might become actually viable methods of payment or cryptocurrencies created by governments. But stuff like bitcoin, ethereum, and all the ethereum tokens, will probably never become used by a large section of the population for payments. The value just fluctuates too much.

What interests me most is the blockchain being used for voting. Wouldn't surprise me if that happened.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Duke_Nukem_1990 , 2 months ago

The initial idea and the aspect of "fuck the banks" intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.

makeasnek , 2 months ago

There's lots of people who use the dollar and other currencies I don't like. But I still use the currency. Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policies and promises for 15 years. It's money whose supply can't be diluted through inflation. You can be your own bank. That has never changed. Whatever it originally promised, it's still doing.

Umbrias , 2 months ago

Being your own bank is 99% of the problems crypto runs into. It turns out being your own bank is hard and makes most people into marks. This is of course, by design, and most of the space, the vast majority of the space, is scams.

Also bitcoin has kept its promises just as much as USD has. That's not really a useful metric.

egonallanon , 2 months ago

It's really useful for committing crimes on the Internet but as a daily cash replacement I remain unconvinced mostly do to the woeful speed of confirming transactions in most currencies I'm aware of.

halfway_neko , 2 months ago

i think it's really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don't use crypto personally, but it's important that something like it exists.

cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it's obviously not going to replace "normal" money any time soon.

i feel like it's kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you're trading lots of electricity for "not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations". obviously it has it's flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.

edit: oh yeah, i didn't mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it's private and it's an esperanto word :P)

Scolding0513 , 2 months ago

I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life

utopiah , 2 months ago

I'm for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin

But, sadly, I'm against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn't been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA's https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn't even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d'etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.

So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I've became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.

I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.

PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I'm using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that's where the value literally is today. I'd also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they'd be technically viable.

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

I think a lot of us first heard about bitcoin when Paypal shut down donations to Occupy Wall Street and later WikiLeaks.

Both of them turned to bitcoin to accept permissionless donations.

Bitcoin was just the first majorly successful coin. I think most orgs should accept Monero these days, for Privacy reasons.

Linkerbaan , 2 months ago

Amazing but transaction fees are still too high for normal daily use.

makeasnek , 2 months ago

Not with L2s like Bitcoin lightning. Your fees come in under a penny in most cases and are not tied to chain space because they are not on chain. This is 100-1000x less than credit cards, for example.

Mubelotix , 2 months ago

Lightning is the universal answer

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

Monero transaction fees are between $0.01 to $0.00

Compare that to a bank wire feez which can easily be $100

Kindness , 2 months ago

bringing back cash anonymity

Most cryptocurrencies do not have this. It is trivial to tie bitcoin to an identity. Given the nature of publicly posting the transactional records, all it takes is tying any given purchase to someone one time, to identify them and view their entire purchase history.

Monero being an exception.

makeasnek , 2 months ago

It's more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It's certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it's not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.

Kindness , 2 months ago

Trust me on this. I know what you're thinking, "Blindly trust an internet stranger? No thank you." That's good, but this time, you should listen because you care about your privacy.

It's not different enough to matter... yet.

Identifying users was still trivial as of 2 months ago, which is the last time I brushed up on implementing smart contracts. Bitcoin Lightning came out somewhere around 7 years ago. Unless something fresh and hot hit the market within the past 60 days, and has been implemented, do not, I repeat DO NOT trust your privacy to bitcoin, especially if you're doing something your governing body disapproves of.

Monero's privacy protections are still a generation ahead, but still not a big headache for the good ol' 5-Eyes. Probably not for the 14-Eyes either, but who knows what they know.

sugar_in_your_tea , 2 months ago

I assume you're talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that's not part of someone's threat model, is Bitcoin still reasonable private?

As in, if we remove state-level actors from the threat model, is Bitcoin still safe enough? I'm more interested in not getting doxxed for my choice in VPN, email service, etc if I choose to run for office, and Bitcoin is accepted by enough places to be useful enough.

Kindness , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that’s not part of someone’s threat model

I am talking about anything that might become a skeleton in your closet, when political winds change. If you:

• donate to anyone religious, vocally non-religious, political, controversial, extreme, or critical of government.
• are American and can be linked 3.5 degrees of Kevin Bacon to any Russian.
• purchase cakes from bigoted religious Christians.
• bought merchandise of controversial figures
• donated to the guy who taught his pug to Seig Heil and plan to visit Germany.
• transfer money to protesters.
• contribute to public defence funds.
• purchase "suspicious" amounts of nearly random chemicals for reasons you don't care to explain.
• purchase novels with Russian or Chinese themes and undertones.
• do anything your governing body or enforcement division disapproves of.

The likely-hood of you becoming a big enough thorne for governments is small, but they are ultimately the key holder to your privacy. That should be your threat model.

if I choose to run for office

De-anonymizing crypto users is not illegal. Posting it is illegal, but finding out what you purchased for a smear campaign? Totally fine in most western countries. Advanced persistent threats would be that future's threat model. It is not hard for large political organizations to hire teenage nosy geeks to dig up OSINT dirt. Your level of risk tolerance is your choice. If it's too much hassle, it's too much hassle.

That said, the largest governments in the world have signed a cooperative agreement to share and process data they are currently collecting, regardless of the legality of collecting it.

Purchasing privacy coin, using TOR(Yes, in caps. They don't get to set the rules on acronyms.), doing anything "out of the ordinary" will likely warrant investigation into your affairs. Once they have that data, their track record of protecting it is not so good. "The Pentagon", "ANAO", and this one doesn't even mention why the UK suddenly needs a new task force with Russian advanced persistent threats "on the horizon".

Everybody else: If you just don't want your neighbors to know you have a fetish, knock yourself out with lightning and have the package gift-wrapped.

LemmyHead , 2 months ago

Also note that lightning is an off-chain centralized approach. It loses a lot of benefits of decentralized layer 1 like bitcoin and monero. Privacy at a centralized entity is like having no privacy at all.

makeasnek , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Look up a network map of lightning, it's not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.

The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

They're called Privacy Coins for a reason. Monero is just one.

makeasnek , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don't have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).

Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the "crypto world", but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:

• Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money's value is not diluted by supply inflation.
• You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
• It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
• At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can't say the same for most other coins.
• And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other "stranded" supply. Pretty powerful stuff.

Monero's privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.

LemmyHead , 2 months ago

"Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to"

I think that's the biggest flaw in your thinking. Monero has this built-in from the start and everyone using it knows it and supports this approach. It affects how legislators can manipulate the coin because they can't, it will keep on living. It already affects the true value of the coin with all privacy included, because you can see how exchanges are unwilling to list it or are delisting it if they already did so, so there are no (or hardly any) institutions or billionaires manipulating the price because of the high risk factor of losing their money. You're forgetting that people in power nowadays are brainwashing us to accept that a wanting a fundamental right like privacy equals you're doing criminal activity or have plans to do so. There are A TON of reasons why bitcoin will never include such strong privacy features, because there are so many factors that influence this decision to make it possible, and the dominant reason you see that matters to btc holders (or any other crypto token for that matter) is NUMBER GO UP. Privacy is not a number go up reason. So it's not a tech issue, it's a people issue

rambos , 2 months ago

Its awesome if you have some, its basically all time high price these days 😉

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

Well it was until today. It just went on sale

possiblylinux127 , 2 months ago

No as it pretty much a scam

BrightCandle , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn't the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.