| > Whataboutism does not strengthen your own position. Granted, but what you may fail to see is that Cryptocurrency is reactionary to the blatant corruption that has been normalized, the very same beahviour that the poster decries is plaguing Cryptocurrenices without providing much of an argument. When in reality, currencies like Bitcoin continue to follow the Network's protocol that it derives its value from and has not detracted from it, despite the continuous polemics and external threats and attacks. Sucks in what way exactly? Because this is always a point of contention for most of its detractors. They aggregate all Cryptocurrencies into a single group, which is absurd. Telling me how easy it is to lose a private key, thus your ability to move your funds, may be a valid point to your argument as functional (read: entirely fool-proof) key storage is still why I think its not ready for global mainstream use, in my opinion; but telling me about how a celebrity influencer Marketed alt/ICO didn't 1000x overnight as projected and instead crashed and burned as the creators absconded with the money that you read a blurb on techcrunch's twitter account is not. Because from where I'm standing: I continue to have access to a low cost, friction-less token on an immutable ledger operating on the World's most secure Network on my phone, that I can use anywhere with wifi, and I can pay anyone who currently accepts Bitcoin and it operates 24/7 without anyone's permission. And I can program it to do various things on top of that should I need it to, with built in trustless systems; and is also one that I can use to divide my unit of currency to 8 decimal points and still be able to operate on said network(s). All of which incentivizes not only fair commerce and a real usecase for triple bottom line accounting, as it spurs on renewable energy as its main source as it continues to grow but also allows for previously marginalized/undocumented people into an economic system to be on boarded; unlike the exclusionary, war and fossil fueled driven fiat based system that is used to props up the Institutions I think we all know have outlived their purpose. |
You can't really use them as currencies. They're too unstable. Cryptocurrency transactions are taxable events in the US. That alone is too much of hassle to make them worthwhile.
They're usually backed by nothing, which makes them a purely speculative risk asset. The most stable coins are backed, ironically, by fiat. Sometimes with fractional reserve. I've looked into crypto backed by precious metals, but liquidity is awful.
So they're useless as currencies, they're useless as a hedge, the only use for cryptocurrency is to speculate on cryptocurrency.
> Because from where I'm standing: I continue to have access to a low cost, friction-less token on an immutable ledger operating on the World's most secure Network on my phone, that I can use anywhere with wifi, and I can pay anyone who currently accepts Bitcoin and it operates 24/7 without anyone's permission.
Yes, that's the gimmick. I get it.
> And I can program it to do various things on top of that should I need it to, with built in trustless systems
All your "trustless" system can do is shift around entries on digital ledgers. That's not that useful. Most systems require some degree of real world trust and accountability.
For example, how does cryptocurrency deal with fraud and theft? Quite poorly, if you ask me.
> All of which incentivizes not only fair commerce and a real usecase for triple bottom line accounting, as it spurs on renewable energy as its main source as it continues to grow but also allows for previously marginalized/undocumented people into an economic system to be on boarded
I don't see any evidence that it actually does that. Sounds more like wishful thinking.