[camgunz]

Cryptocurrencies do have a couple of extra utilities:

- they can be pumped and dumped without state oversight

- with the use of a tumbler, you can launder money pretty effectively (in fact we should stop calling them tumblers and start calling them money launderers, that's exactly what they are)

It's pretty obvious that this is bad for society. In addition, the transactions are extremely slow and wildly expensive--even without factoring in externalities like carbon burn. The price is extremely volatile. It's highly unavailable (ex: good luck getting your money if Coinbase goes down). The governing structures don't inspire confidence (look at ETH's PoW -> PoS, or BTC's block size debate).

Things don't have value simply because people decide they have value. This is a weird kind of tautology or circular reasoning based on a deep misunderstanding of markets. It's clearer to say that people price things based on a perception of value. Crypto seems like it does--a lot of people go around saying so--but unless you're a comic book villain, it doesn't.

However, things like gold or oil do! You can make electrical contacts out of gold. You can refine oil into fuel. Commodities have physical utility. BTC doesn't.

State-backed currencies also do! You can get pretty much anything for USD. You can get a great pint for GBP. This is because the states and entities producing those goods price them in currencies they can get other goods for, reliably. You can't reliably use BTC to get other goods, and you can't reliably say your BTC will hold the same value even minute to minute. Further, it's very likely your transaction fees will be more than the purchases you make.

[inter_netuser]

Sounds so great, what can I get for my rapidly depreciating Turkish Lira nobody wants to take?

BTC seems a lot more accessible than the great and amazing US or EU banks, who have nearly failed and had to be bailed out barely a decade ago. Doesn't inspire confidence, tbh.

[camgunz]

I think it'd be more productive if you engaged with the substance of what I wrote, rather than engaging in whataboutism with USD/Euro/etc. I'll try and do that here with what you wrote.

> What can I get for my rapidly depreciating Turkish Lira nobody wants to take?

A couple of things about this:

- You can get Dollars/Euros/GBP/RMB.

- Crypto cannot solve the "so you're born in an oppressive or poorly-run state" problem. You've gotta trade the currency you have for crypto, and if that currency isn't good, crypto doesn't help you at all.

- There's really no examples of crypto helping people in oppressive or poorly-run states (Venezuela still has horrendous problems, for example).

- The transaction fees are bad enough in USD, but valued in (say) Bolivars they're prohibitive.

- In particular, Bitcoin is super bad for the planet, and people in oppressive or poorly run states are disproportionately susceptible to ecological disasters and climate change.

> BTC seems a lot more accessible than the great and amazing US or EU banks, who have nearly failed and had to be bailed out barely a decade ago. Doesn't inspire confidence, tbh.

I think you don't mean "accessible", but rather you're saying because banks need bailouts that fiat currency is unworkable? My counterpoint here is mostly what I wrote in my previous post; fiat is superior to crypto in every way, unless you're a criminal.

Furthermore, cryptocurrency systems are vulnerable to a whole class of problems central banking isn't, i.e. someone lost the keys, Sybil attacks, developers making changes that destroy your stake/economy.

There is no recourse for this. Are heads of state supposed to join a Discord channel or w/e and lobby crypto devs?

[inter_netuser]

Sadly, you are absolutely uninformed.

1. no, you cant get FX. capital controls.

2. USDC stablecoin actually has explicit sanction exemptions from US Govt to help people in Venezuela. They aren't easy to get at all, but I guess according to USDC does absolutely nothing in Venezuela, so it must've been a waste of effort.

3. transaction fees are measured in milli-cents on Lightning Network. They are also instant. Still Bitcoin, with the same security budget.

4. Why is using renewables super bad for the planet? Either renewables can power the planet and our industries - or they just don't work. Make up your mind.

If you think proof of work is waste and you need to lobby devs - you have literally everything upside down. very unfortunately it's a common situation on this board.

a. Proof of Work exists to remove any subjectivity from consensus. Longest valid chain with most work, period. Subjectivity = politics, and everything that comes with it.

b. devs do not have anywhere as much control as you think, and the ecosystem can trivially eject malicious devs. happened a number of times.

The entire point of Bitcoin is that it is objective and transparent.

As for "criminal" - people commit on average 3 felonies per day: https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/

Everyone is a criminal.

Especially Turks, Venezuelans and Nigerians seeking to escape their broken systems and banks. Must be some savvy criminals - recording their crimes on a globally replicated open ledger, visible to the entire world.

[camgunz]

> 1. no, you cant get FX. capital controls.

I can't find where this is true. There are some restrictions about denominating some contracts, etc. in FX, but nothing about investing in foreign currencies. And it looks like many Turks are in fact doing this [1].

On the other hand, after a non-zero level of crypto hype [2], a lot of Turks invested in crypto only to fall prey to some bonkers scams [3]. I know the typical rejoinder is "there are fiat scams too", but particularly in failing/failed states, the regulatory infrastructure is completely incapable of policing this stuff, making it all the more likely. The fact is it's easier to run these scams using crypto than fiat, because of the lack of international banking controls and KYC.

> 2. USDC stablecoin actually has explicit sanction exemptions from US Govt to help people in Venezuela. They aren't easy to get at all, but I guess according to USDC does absolutely nothing in Venezuela, so it must've been a waste of effort.

The argument crypto advocates make is that if you're in an failing/failed state, you can just switch to BTC. This clearly hasn't happened. The US is using a blockchain and VPNs to get aid to Venezuelans. That's (super) cool, but it's not at all what crypto advocates were talking about. It's also worth saying Venezuela is still in dire straits, despite all this. So while it's not a wasted effort, it certainly isn't a cure-all (again, what crypto advocates have argued).

> 3. transaction fees are measured in milli-cents on Lightning Network. They are also instant. Still Bitcoin, with the same security budget.

Lightning has all kinds of problems, and is probably unworkable:

- It currently only holds $70m, despite being available for years.

- It doesn't solve the problem of very small transactions across multiple parties (think gas stations, retail, vending machines, tolls, monthly subscriptions, etc. etc. etc.)

- It's fundamentally a desync from the blockchain, with all the potential for fraud that implies.

- The protocol requires constant internet connectivity; if you disconnect you risk losing your funds in the desynced transaction (again, bad for developing nations)

> 4. Why is using renewables super bad for the planet.

Crypto advocates seem to have a lot of assumptions about the use of renewable energy for mining, but the best study that wasn't conducted by people heavily invested (literally and figuratively) in crypto shows a pretty mixed bag, and indicates that a lot of the reason for the use of renewables is that it can't be used for anything else (e.g. it's too far away and transmission costs are too high) [4]. In the Xinjiang region in China, for example, it's all coal.

There's also a lot of externalities when it comes to mining. Hydropower has a significant environmental impact. ASICs evolve and the old ones become e-waste.

> Either renewables can power the planet and our industries - or they just don't work. Make up your mind.

They can power the planet and our industries, as long as we're wise about their use. Using them for crypto mining is an unwise use, akin to leaving the A/C on and all your windows open.

> Proof of Work exists to remove any subjectivity from consensus. Longest valid chain with most work, period. Subjectivity = politics, and everything that comes with it.

You can't seriously say crypto governance is free of politics. Look at the block size debate, or all the weirdness around ETH2.

> devs do not have anywhere as much control as you think, and the ecosystem can trivially eject malicious devs. happened a number of times.

ETH devs keep pushing ETH2 into the future, putting off the gains of people who bought into PoS and shoring up the positions of people who invested in big PoW mining rigs. That's politics, with devs at the heart of it. I can't think of a bigger issue in ETH, now or ever.

> Everyone is a criminal.

First of all the book that "article" references is pretty cranky. That said, it's true that it's very easy to incidentally commit crimes. However, there's plainly a difference between incidental criminal acts, and trafficking drugs or people. Don't equivocate between these two things.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-15/turks-are...

[2]: https://www.coindesk.com/turkey-doesnt-regulate-crypto-its-t...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/5/5/for-the-ruined-tu...

[4]: https://cdn.crowdfundinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/...

[inter_netuser]

1. Turkey had all sorts of controls in the past, and they will return. There are soft curbs in place right now. Yes, people subvert them, just like they __criminally__ circumvented controls in the past. [to your point about being a criminal, holding dollars in many countries is a crime, and many are committing that heinous crime as we speak]

a. https://www.duvarenglish.com/turkey-could-resurrect-past-def...

Scams: Permissionless systems can be trivially used by anyone, and yes there will be bad actors.

How do you have a permissionless system that only allows good guys? The best I've heard so far is collaborative deanonymization, but it is very much work in progress.

Governance: Proof of Work is an attempt to minimize governance. Proof of Stake is governance by plutocracy, but with emojis. I agree if an alternative to PoW can be found - it should be improved, but PoS is a regression to the status quo, not an improvement.

Ethereum itself is nothing but a quasi-corporation with all the politics that entails, it even has founders, foundation, ,trademarks, conferences, venture arm.

The best thing Satoshi has done is disappearing. It is for this reason I find Ethereum objectionable, the politics. Even a stupid exchanged-sponsored chain like BSC is more legitimate in that context, at least they do not pretend to be decentralized and have no control over the chain. Cringy as it sounds, Binance is more honest than Ethereum sometimes, lol.

I think Bitcoin community remains cognizant of devs being nothing but potentially another failure point and an attack vector, should they become compromised. This is why everyone is so big on running their own nodes, and only making thoughtful consensus changes.

Block size wars (they weren't debates) were really just a battle over who gets to control the protocol, and thankfully status quo prevailed.

I remain optimistic on Bitcoin's future for that reason - it could withstand a coordinated attack driven by quite intelligent people with large budgets. Today, it likely can only be attacked by a nation state, and not just in 51% sense, but also social attacks on miners, devs, and so on.

Lighting network: I'm not sure I understand your criticisms. It is exactly designed for smaller payments, which is why 70 million float isn't that big of a deal. Bitrefill does a good amount of LN volume, and I think it's use will pick up with exchanges coming on board. Bitcoin as a daily transaction currency is simply too nascent, still in the speculative growth stage. LN transactions are not decoupled from Bitcoin, and are in fact un-published properly formatted Bitcoin transactions. The security model is different, but I'd say it's certainly acceptable for payments up to 50-100k USD if not higher. Much work left to be done, but it is working.

Most of actual Lightning currency usage is in the third world. If USDC is cool - you must agree LN is doing good works too.

As for the common saying "fix the money, fix the world", I believe Bitcoin is far too early here, this may take decades or maybe even hundreds of years. I certainly do not expect it in my lifetime, but maybe my grandchildren will have additional freedoms. Just like we today take freedom of speech and association for granted, many of our grandparents did not. In fact, I believe people today gotten so soft and weak that our vigilance is slipping and we are slowly rolling back right into neofeudalism.

The point is to separate state power and money.Just like we separated state and religion, and it was great, I believe separating money will be just as beneficial.After all, money isn't just speech, it is also a religion of sorts.

I don't see this as an innovation in finance, get rich scheme, opportunity to make a quick buck, inflation hedge, good investment, etc.

I see it as a transformational quantum leap humanity can make, something on the scale of the printing press. That is the reason why I support it. It is one of the most important public goods one can be working on today.

It can fail, which would mean we are not yet ready for that stage in development and Bitcoin was before its time.

We must indeed become multi-planetary species if we are to survive and travel to other stars. Do you see interstellar species trade by using money issued by some banking cartel? shiny rocks of the Au79 element?

Money is information. Bitcoin is a very solid attempt at that.

[camgunz]

(First, I love this post; very excited to dig in)

--FX controls--

Yeah, so I argue all the time that lumping in places like the US/UK/France/Germany with places like Turkey or Venezuela doesn't make sense because of the differences, and that governments can just use the violence monopoly to coerce people to do whatever. In other words I argue that the "crypto fixes monetary policy mismanagement" argument is pretty ignorant. But on the other hand, my argument is also ignorant because:

- US/UK/France/Germany mismanage monetary policy tremendously: recessions kill people, there's deep income inequality directly linked to monetary policy, etc.

- Crypto does actually insulate against inflation (I mean, kind of anyway), and the scam of the day doesn't make that any less true.

- People do use crypto for useful things--USDC in Venezuela as you point out is useful, and to the people it's useful for, it's definitely not nothing.

--Scams--

I'll admit scams aren't as bad now. But on the other hand I think a lot of that is because Western governance and money got involved and people went to jail.

--Being Permissionless--

The way I think of this is based on social contract theory, i.e. I strongly believe that permissionless systems evolve into systems of coercion, because people will amass power and use it against each other. Maybe that's getting a 51%, mining, controlling exchanges, controlling the use of or purchase of crypto, etc. To kind of skip to the end here, I don't believe the libertarian ideal of individual, free actors can ever exist, because the benefits of teaming up and coercing are so dominating.

So I'm "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" on this. If we're faced with roving bands of street crypto gangs, we should just make a bigger gang and establish some rules. That's basically a government or a bank, and then like, maybe we'll feel like we wasted a lot of time. Unclear.

--Governance and politics--

The definition of politics is "the process by which more than one person makes decisions". They're pretty inescapable. And so is governance, FWIW. That said, to your point, I think you can do a lot to dilute it. You get into kind of a "choose your tyranny" situation in these cases though like, do you choose:

- Tyranny of the majority vs. the minority (collective action vs. individual rights)

- Tyranny of the state vs. the mob (central vs. diffuse authority)

I don't know exactly where Bitcoin lands on this, tbh. On the one hand you could say it's diffuse authority because of PoW, or because of the consensus algorithm, or the "no middleman" stuff. On the other, you can say that because devs control the protocol, it's super centralized. Suffice it to say it's complicated.

--Other coins--

The refrain I often hear is "Bitcoin is just a protocol, anyone's free to start their own separate network", but that hasn't been successful. It suggests that what's important is not necessarily the protocol, but the network effects of so many people using the network. Like, there are better coins out there (Monero, Zcash, probably ETH) and coins using the exact same protocol you could buy into for way less than Bitcoin. These all test the hypothesis that the protocol matters more than the market cap or user count. But the test came back, and the results are that network effects and market cap pretty much explain everything. More than anything, this makes me pessimistic about cryptocurrencies. I think it's beyond clear Bitcoin is a speculation casino, altcoins are for hipsters, we've built an abominable bubble, and we've burned an insane amount of carbon to do it.

--Lightning--

Well, I guess I'm absolutist about financial transactions. I really can't imagine building a(nother) financial network that has unfixable risks of fraud built in. One of the promises I most hoped blockchain tech delivered on was fixing fraud. But you really can't, Sybil is in tension with latency and availability (either 100% of the nodes agree something happened or there's room to take over enough nodes to commit fraud--sure at 99% it's very very hard, but that's not the same as impossible, but also that might be fine), and you have computational complexity problems besides, i.e. why would anyone volunteer to process transactions for free, which also costs them electricity or w/e.

More concretely, I just can't seem to set a limit in my head of what would be an acceptable amount of money to lose to Lightning fraud. Too low, like $5, and you drastically limit its utility. Too high, like $50, and you essentially can't use it in poor parts of Africa for example, where people aren't gonna risk a month's income on your dodgy protocol. Well, maybe they well as long as you don't tell them it's dodgy.

--Fix the money, fix the world--

I have never heard this, and I absolutely love it. But it actually made me think that maybe what really irks me about cryptocurrency is that it accepts the premise of capitalism. I actually think money is the problem. Like, when you think about the lengths people are going to to mine BTC, which is a system deliberately set up to get people to process transactions, it feels exactly like capitalism run amok. None of this is good, right, like no one thinks the state of BTC mining or the tenuousness of ETH PoS (don't get me started) is really what success looks like.

I just don't see how cryptocurrency fixes our social ills, and at the end of it, I can't help but think of it purely as a distraction from income inequality. I'm not super interested in fixing the banking/currency/investment system. I think people should get food, clothes, child care, shelter, health care, transportation, and education for free. Anything past that is a bonus, and I don't care what currency it's denominated in.

I think the cryptocurrency community named the villain right: investment bankers. But like, now the two communities are inseparable, and some of the most lauded people in the crypto community are essentially investment bankers, just in a handful of crypto commodities. Are average people getting rich from Bitcoin more than the already wealthy? It certainly doesn't seem like it to me.

So I think we need a little bit of a reset. There's clearly a lot of energy around this stuff, whether it's the crypto community, OWS, progressive Democrats, whatever. I think if we got our shit together and worked for big, structural change, we could really do something--in our lifetimes. But from where I sit, crypto ain't it.