"Don't use it" is a bad argument in general. Gaining an option is not necessarily positive value, since other people can now attempt to coerce you into using it. I don't want there to be a straightforward irreversible way to send money to foreign cybercriminals; I want this to be impossible so that they don't attempt to extort these payments.
Similar logic explains why selling your kidney is illegal and why voting systems are designed to make it impossible to prove who you voted for.
Here's your TL;DR: if the author is right, crypto will actually hurt society. Not saying I agree with him, but it wouldn't just be a matter of adopting it or not. Nothing wrong with public discourse on the matter, would be more productive to directly refute his arguments.
Crypto has allowed citizens to circumvent oppressive and corrupt government financial abuse, as well as provided much cheaper, faster, more reliable and convenient means of transferring small - yet, life-changing - amounts of money cross-border.
An example of the latter:
A worker in one country sending half of her weekly paycheck back to her family overseas has two options presently: days of waiting (which means no food on the table for those days), uncertainty it will arrive at all (starvation, stress and pressure toward crime), and exorbitant fees taking anywhere from 15% - 50% of what she sends (shamelessly robbing the most vulnerable). By using the correct crypto alternatives, she can send the full amount, at a cost of fractions of a percent, and know with certainty if it has arrived - in seconds.
There is a reason crypto adoption is huge in poor and oppressed countries such as Venezuela, parts of Mexico etc.
There are other benefits, but this should be enough. Nothing else has been able to, nor likely could be able to have such an impact in any short space of time in these areas, and not without possessing many of precisely the same core principles shared by most crypto projects.
This doesn't mean crypto is perfect or doesn't have problems. And it doesn't mean we should ignore those problems.
But it does mean that the endlessly served-up misinformation that crypto "has no benefits", works toward harming less-fortunate people who've suffered more than anyone should have to.
Do you have any data showing how “huge” cryptocurrencies have been for facilitating legitimate international money transfers, compared to pre-existing alternatives?
The XRP Ledger, often in conjunction with local cryptocurrency exchanges, has been involved in many such projects. It's one of Ripple's main marketing points.
For others, conduct a simple search for the name of low-income, despotic, crime-ridden nations plus "cross-border" and "cryptocurrency" to find news coverage.
Finally, look at the overall crypto market capitalisation. It's in the trillions.
It's ludicrous to think that a decades-old, trillion-dollar industry has literally ZERO real-world benefit applications.
Here's an article in Mercator's Payments Journal I found in 3 seconds:
I’m not saying it’s not possible for it to be used this way. But you used the word “huge” to describe its popularity for legitimate cross border transactions, which is meaningless without data. On the other hand, if the vast majority of its use is for speculation and money laundering, then policymakers may decide to throw out the baby with the bath water.
It’s sort of like BitTorrent. Does it have legitimate use cases? Sure. Is the vast majority of its use to illegally share files? Also yes. (Note that approximately zero mainstream content providers such as Apple Music, Spotify, or Netflix use BT for delivering bits to customers.)
People should be free to spend their wealth on whatever they want, whether it's crypto, high-powered gaming computers, or abstract art.
If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
>>So, you're saying I should run my unlicensed nuclear testing facilities?
That is not a voluntary interaction. Nuclear reactors pose an uncontrolled risk to all those in their vicinity.
Yours is a hyperbolic analogy, and likely just a trope you wheel out whenever you encounter an opponent of your anti-libertarian "you only have the rights I agree you should have" ideology.
>>It's a hyperbole, but Bitcoin suffer from both of those: heavy externalities, and interfacing with black market.
I've already commented on how the externalities should be addressed.
As for the "black market" angle, there is a fundamental difference between designs for weapons of mass destruction, and targeted restrictions on their dissemination, and dragnet controls over all financial interactions, in an attempt to preempt a host of crimes.
The former targets a true threat, and takes proportionate measures to mitigate it. The latter rejects the first principles of a free and liberal society, in instituting warrantless mass-surveillance and centralized gatekeeping of practically all private economic interactions, in the name of preempting crime, and in doing so, creates a hyper-centralized power structure that is in itself a massive threat to humanity.
Life doesn’t work that way. We should try to prioritize the use of valuable and finite resources to those things we think are most valuable to society. Usually we leave that prioritization to the free market, but we also sometimes have to take corrective actions to prevent misallocations that would be harmful or destructive to society, the planet, or the human race.
Life works however we want it to work. "Life" doesn't mean "my ideology's preferred state of affairs".
>>We should try to prioritize the use of valuable and finite resources to those things we think are most valuable to society.
No, we shouldn't. People should always be free to decide for themselves how to expend their share of those finite resources. There is nothing inherently more valuable about one non-essential activity over another.
If a person wants to spend their resources running high powered gaming machines, that is not inherently more valuable than spending it mining crypto. Your subjective determination that one non-essential activity is more valuable than another is just that: a subjective opinion. It doesn't govern someone else's subjective determination.
>>There’s a whole encyclopedia of free-market failure modes that’s worth reading up on
I did not advocate an absence of government intervention. I explained how to make such intervention congruent with the values that are stated to be the intervention's motivation:
>>If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
>>Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
We form governments and associations, and have them set rules, in order to accomplish more than we can accomplish separately. This means relinquishing some individual freedom of choice and prioritizing our use of resources. If you disagree with those choices, that’s fine, and you’re free to make your disagreements known and vote accordingly, but living in a society means accepting that you can’t just do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.
What it essentially boils down to is him saying "this isn't useful for me, therefore it isn't useful for society, therefore it will hurt society because it has nonzero cost and no benefit". If I'm being too strict then we'll say he thinks the balance tips towards cost outweighing benefit.
But not everyone subscribes to this sort of extreme collectivist mindset.
You don't have to believe I derive value from it because I don't need you to believe it. It still works.
There is nothing to refute. I mostly just find it amusing that these people think we care. They're just talking to themselves.
It's a trap for people like me to even respond to this stuff, we could be out doing things instead of arguing the toss about whether sugar is tasty or not. Like yo, I like it and it works for me. I don't care whether the health service in aggregate likes me eating sugar.
Similar logic explains why selling your kidney is illegal and why voting systems are designed to make it impossible to prove who you voted for.