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by mirimir 2506 days ago
Cool, yes. But "predicting" isn't how I see it.

We wanted anonymous, private and untraceable digital cash. Many people worked on it. There were several ~centralized electronic currencies, and they all got taken down, sooner or later. Because of FinCEN "know your customer" requirements. E-gold lasted until 2009. Liberty Reserve lasted until 2013, and the founder went to jail. Pecunix still sort of exists in a weird stunted way.

So anyway, Bitcoin was developed as a non-centralized electronic currency. Which would be far harder to take down.
1 comments
Nursie 2506 days ago
E-Gold and Liberty Reserve were, like BTC is now, rife with scams, Ponzis and other fraud.

It's not really a surprise that the Quadriga CX founders have history in those arenas.

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mirimir 2506 days ago
Last I checked, dollars are "rife with scams, Ponzis and other fraud". Bernie Madoff, for example.
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Nursie 2506 days ago
Not in the same way, not as their primary use or as such a large proportion of their use.

This is a really disingenuous argument.

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mirimir 2505 days ago
Mostly, for me, it's "so what?".

It's entirely predictable that any system that's truly private, anonymous and untraceable will be abused. That's simply because some people are wont to abuse others.

But that doesn't require that we eliminate privacy and anonymity, and make everything traceable. Personally, that would be intolerable. And unless people became hugely more tolerant, it would tend to enforce conformity, and inhibit dissent.

Also, perhaps ironically, "scams, Ponzis and other fraud" are reliable indicators that systems are truly private, anonymous and untraceable. Canaries, one might say.

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Nursie 2505 days ago
>But that doesn't require that we eliminate privacy and anonymity

But it seriously limits any sort of appeal it may have to regular folk who don't really care about that anonymity.

In the case of Liberty Reserve and e-gold, just their mention becomes a huge red flag for any legitimate activity. Cryptocurrency is basically there too, particularly as it's a worse system in pretty much every other way.

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mirimir 2505 days ago
Well, Liberty Reserve allowed me to pay anonymously for VPN services and servers. And now, Bitcoin does. That's all that matters to me.
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