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Thoughts on Cryptocurrency?

I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Personally, I'm not against it, but I'm not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don't think it will be viable for at least another decade.

makeasnek , (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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 ,

"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

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

It's a nice technology that should exist as an alternative to personally identifyable and government-ID-connected transactions. It's not perfect in any way though

utopiah ,

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.

frogmint , (edited )

BTC, ETH, and XMR are the only ones that matter. Some stable coins (USDC, GUSD) are okay, too.

BTC (Bitcoin) is good because it's the most widespread. If a vendor accepts crypto, odds are they accept BTC. However, the blockchain is easily traceable.

ETH (Ethereum) is good because its blockchain is far more versatile, so it can be used for other things than just crypto payments. However, it's less widely used for payments than BTC and is also easily traceable.

XMR (Monero) is excellent. It's extremely difficult to track an individual user. Your transactions are private. There are some possible attack vectors for the future, but they'd require that you be an actual target to be worthwhile. Someone that's going to track you is going to find a different way than XMR to do it. XMR isn't as widely used as the others, though, and it's also not on as many crypto exchanges. Kraken has it.

However, crypto as an investment is not a good idea. Spend your crypto.

banghida ,

Ethereum is unregistered security token.

egonallanon ,

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.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

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.

rambos ,

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

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Well it was until today. It just went on sale

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

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

makeasnek ,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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 ,
@Mubelotix@jlai.lu avatar

Lightning is the universal answer

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Monero transaction fees are between $0.01 to $0.00

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

onlinepersona ,

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

BrightCandle , (edited )

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.

PoliticallyIncorrect ,

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 ,

You don't say...

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