[deedree]

This feels like a Rick and Morty episode to me. They just reinvented cash money, with extra steps.

Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else.

So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Maybe it could be useful in countries where the currency is devalued like some in South-America. But then all the extra steps seem to be a big hurdle to me.

Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.

[PKop]

It's a non-sovereign store of value (potentially). It's not meant to substitute completely for fiat credit for day to day commerce or transactions, just to be used a store of value to hedge currency debasement which is coming due to so much sovereign debt. It's gold in a more transmittable form.

You spend and transact mostly in fiat, you borrow in fiat. You save some percent of your earnings in more finite stores of value (you and everyone else already do this so the concept is not controversial).

The idea is explained here: Ctrl + F "two monies"

http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...

[unmole]

> hedge currency debasement which is coming

You're honestly going to claim that an asset that is down more than 40% YTD is a hedge against inflation?

[PKop]

As long as Federal reserve keeps tightening monetary conditions, nothing will beat cash. The argument is though that they cannot continue down this path as the amount of debt in the system will result in everything breaking as a result of this tightening.

Also, you do realize this point of view "muh down YTD" is a meme comment yes? Stare at any 6month period of any chart and you can make any argument you want. Are stocks not inflation hedges generally? Yet they are down YTD too. In the period of monetary expansion from 2020 through 2021, did not BTC do just fine hedging this monetary expansion? Even in Wiemar Germany, gold did not go up in a straight line, it was extremely volatile. BTC is more volatile than almost anything else that still long term has worked to hedge expansion of liquidity. BTC moves in line with growth or contraction of liquidity better than anything else. Just look at the charts.

Additionally, my point is this is the framework. It can also be a failed experiment. But there is no scenarios where a finite asset can replace fiat currency. There is theoretical basis for same asset to replace other forms of scarce stores of value. In principle, BTC is a SoV asset, not a transaction currency or unit of account by virtue of its technical fundamentals (un-inflatable supply, expensive to transact, slow).

[unmole]

What do you actually mean by hedge?

> BTC moves in line with growth or contraction of liquidity better than anything else.

> In the period of monetary expansion from 2020 through 2021, did not BTC do just fine hedging this monetary expansion?

How is it a hedge if it moves in line with liquidity?

Why is expansion of liquidity is something one would need to hedge against?

[PKop]

Because some portion of cost of living will expand with it..housing prices, other financial assets and therefore wealth of those investing in them, and in the future, costs of commodities and other consumption items as investors drain the stored energy in these "liquidity capacitors" and the money flows into the real economy.

"mitigate the potential negative effects of" I guess..

>How is it a hedge if it moves in line with liquidity?

I don't know what you're asking? Liquidity expansion inflates assets, and BTC inflates more than almost anything, especially over a multi-year time frame.

It hedges just holding cash. It hedges the opportunity cost of not investing while invest-able assets are going up in value, and wages on a relative basis are not.

>Why is expansion of liquidity is something one would need to hedge against?

Sort of a philosophical question lol. Maybe you don't. If one wants to invest at all (why though?) this is a framework for thinking about that process.

[unmole]

A hedge is meant to control risk by taking an offsetting position. Whatever you're describing is most definitely not a hedge.

[alexb_]

>BTC inflates more than almost anything

What the everloving fuck are you talking about? Bitcoin is deflationary to the point that nearly everyone uses it as an "investment" vehicle, not to actually transfer money. Do you even know what inflation is?

[lottin]

You can't expect to make sense of a complex phenomenon without having a proper conceptual framework and terminology.

[newsclues]

So it’s like paper certificates for gold!

[PKop]

Without looking at details too much, it's seems significantly different than paper claims on a separate physical asset held by a custodian 3rd party subject to counter-party risk.

The control of the BTC is maintained with possession of the private key stored in the bearer asset cash.

Holding gold certificates does not enforce any fundamental claim or control of the actual asset the backs the paper; possession of the physical gold does. You need to trust somehow that the holder will exchange the gold for the paper in the future, as well as actually have the gold at that time.

[yoavm]

Well, here you need to trust that their app will exist next year. And perhaps also that something will happen when you cut the notes, but I'm not sure I got that part...

I don't know if it exactly like gold certificates, but it sounds pretty close to "I'll pay you with cashews" to me. It's not terrible - I bet a many people exchange goods like this every day.

[throwntoday]

Aren't like 90% of all bitcoin held by a few whales? Why would I want any part of that system it has worse distribution than fiat.

[capableweb]

I'm curious about those numbers for both cases myself, but I know that only one of them you can actually get the numbers from (although only the number of coins in wallets, not coins belonging to users, as a user can have many wallets), the other one is completely in the dark as no one can really say who has what.

Since we can't know the numbers for fiat, we can at least try to understand it for Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, sources seem to point towards the number being closer to ~2% of wallets hold ~70% of all Bitcoin.

If this is a better/worse distribution than fiat, we will never know.

[fartcannon]

I think thats generally believed to be hot wallets for exchanges, but if it is true, it's about the same as the stock market so you're probably already engaging in something like that: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

Bitcoin is a nice mirror to look into. We need to eliminate money, go full star trek post scarcity utopia.

[rchaud]

> We need to eliminate money, go full star trek post scarcity utopia.

Electricity is scarce, and unholy amounts of it are needed to create this post-money utopia.

[spicybright]

If not infinite unless we really re-think how personal freedoms should work.

[yunohn]

> I think thats generally believed to be hot wallets for exchanges

Could you source that claim? I find it absurd that you think such studies haven’t considered crypto exchange wallets in their analysis…

[fartcannon]

You don't need a study, you can see the biggest wallets on sites like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

It's all public knowledge.

[jazzyjackson]

and all the gold is locked up at ft knox, I still want some for myself (:

[johnnymorgan]

I used dash to buy food for people in Venezuela during the height of the Maduro conflict (still ongoing really but this is while it kicked off) when all other methods had failed.

It was farmer that turned his farm into direct sales, used an Uber like service to deliver and used DASH as point of sale and store of value...is what I did illegal??

There are a ton of uses cases out there where blockchain tech can provide a faster better solution, not every single case but it's there.

Even the 'criminal' side is nothing compared to the USD and how it's used. That same argue applies even stronger to fiat currencies.

A bankless note isn't a new idea, ops solution is novel and well thought out and there are markets that it solves pain points.

[Termitiono]

I'm still questioning the real benefit compared to the downsides of it.

Ordering food online vs. Terrawatts of energy wasted, Asics hardware and GPU prices and the created co2 of all of that.

Mmhhh difficult very difficult

[johnnymorgan]

What, wow easy in the strawman now do the same for the energy required for the US dollar.

Lol, compare and contrast apples to apples first and you'll see the cost in energy is negligible.

Also what do when POS drops and ruins your current strawman argument.

There was zero other way to pay for it, people were literally walking over to Columbia to get money they could use.

Anyway I can see your a bad faith actor, GLHF!

[herbst]

I am not sure the alternative (traditional banking) is so co2 neutral. As far as I know they all have plenty of huge buildings with hundreds of people wasting their time & resources working for them.

Don't get me wrong I am sure bitcoin is worse in terms of power usage, but not every crypto is automatically worse than what we have right now.

[Termitiono]

You can see it as an idiotic PoW for all those people working in those banks.

It's easy to make it renewable with benefits to us. The solar panel on a bank building is giving energy to people.

And I'm not saying that the current banking system is perfect (it actually optimizes itself quite well) but it has much more features while Bitcoin/crypto doesn't have real solutions for huge issues.

Fraud, scams, money laundry, investment tools, sepa, bank account recovery, global market regulations, sanctions Support etc.

And it does all of that with billions and billions of assets.

While Bitcoin consumes energy.

In an utopian society we don't need banks and no PoW crypto but that's not what is critical now.

Besides aluminum smelter, due to high energy costs there are other critical industry affected as well: paper making and glass making. Bottles for example.

[capableweb]

> Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else.

You seem to have nailed the use case well. This is exactly why'd someone use something like this.

I'm not saying it's a good idea (nor a bad one), just that those things are "features" in the eyes of the cryptocurrency users and proponents, not bugs.

[jstummbillig]

I don't know. The people I know that said "I really want my currency to have an unchecked exchange rate, that would do a lot for me" is 0. I also don't feel that's an honest representation of why anyone has gotten into btc (although I am sure some claim that's why they did it)

[canjobear]

Replace the statement with “I don’t want my currency’s value to be controlled by a central authority” and you’ll get >0 people.

[doliveira]

There's no such thing as a power vacuum...

[yunohn]

So… they’d rather it be controlled by rampant speculation and pumping-dumping?

[rchaud]

Libertarian maxis seem to think that negative externalities won't affect them personally.

In lieu of an elected government and sane central bank, monetary policy will be controlled by a cartel of your locality's most powerful gangs and paramilitaries.

There's a reason the example quoted is always Star Trek and not Somalia.

[capableweb]

The one I know who actually want to use Bitcoin et al and/or work in the space (not outside "investors" who just want to earn as much money as soon as possible), don't consider the exchange rate important at all and couldn't care less about it, as Bitcoin is not for exchanging it to USD/EUR/whatever.

[ivalm]

But presumably they care if bitcoin is still exchangeable to something (maybe goods and services?). The exchange rate to currencies determines the exchange rate to everything else. If they don’t care about exchanging bitcoin for currencies or goods or services then what is the purpose of BTC? Both currency and store of value use cases depend on exchangability.

[arubania2]

There is a concept called Bitcoin maximalism that means, in my understanding, that the whole world would switch to BTC so that the exchange rates to other currencies wouldn’t matter anymore.

It’s easy to get paid in BTC if you land a crypto job, but it’s the groceries part that I can’t really imagine yet.

[fleddr]

That's not an accurate description of BTC maximalism.

Usually a BTC maximalist means that within the context of crypto, they are BTC only and aggressively and passionately reject every other crypto token. This is what you call call a common maximalist stance.

Out of that group, a small minority is a believer in "hyperbitcoinization". This is an event where BTC becomes the dominant asset class, at the expense of gold, bonds, etc, with a market cap prediction for BTC ranging from 10-100T.

Even people with that (unlikely) hope, do not claim any currency replacement, only an asset shift.

[cecilpl2]

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trilemma.asp

So given the trilemma then, it sounds like Bitcoin maximalism means fixed exchange rates (since all countries use BTC), and free flow of capital (since that's the BTC ideal), which means no country can set independent monetary policy.

So you essentially have the Eurozone problems but across the entire world. Seems like many countries would try to avoid picking that side of the trilemma.

[ivalm]

But even maximalists care to be able to use bitcoin to buy goods and services (eg be able to spend it). Since other currencies are also capable of being exchanged for good and services then the exchange rate to other currencies determines how much goods btc can buy (or there will be an arbitrage opportunity).

[yunohn]

But even in a purely BTC universe, wouldn’t the relative value of goods/services stay the same? You’d still need more BTC, the same way you need more fiat today.

[rchaud]

One of the few avenues for entertainment remaining on social media are watching BTC maxis and ETH bagholders argue that the other is completely useless.

[metalliqaz]

"for the crypto enthusiasts, the problem with the legacy financial markets wasn't that they were manipulated, it's that they weren't in on it." (reproduced here from memory)

[sunshinerag]

“For the fiat incumbents, the problem with crypto markets is it pulls capital away from their entrenched fiat scams”

[rchaud]

Brian Armstrong didn't buy his $133m compound with BTC, it was from the filthy, debased USD that he exchanged his Coinbase shares for.

Everyone's a fiat incumbent in the long run.

[rglover]

> Only, without the oversight of a central bank

Yes, that's a good thing.

> Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.

Currency that can't be manipulated or devalued by the state or central banks. In other words: eliminates the potential for exactly what's taking place worldwide right now.

[erulabs]

With inflation at the rate it's at, I can't help but laugh at "crypto is so volatile!" That argument made sense in the endless bull markets - but these days? What's not volatile? I-Bonds?

The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.

[rglover]

It certainly could have been if our government didn't:

1. Unpeg it from a gold standard.

2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon.

The power and greed were too intoxicating.

[vkou]

Yes, because tying deflation and inflation to the rate of 'how quickly do we mine gold' is a brilliant way to run an economy.

Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation.

Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope.

> 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon.

Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.

[not2b]

This was exactly the history of the American economy in the 19th century. Rapid episodes of deflation would regularly bankrupt farmers, who couldn't sell their crops for enough to repay their loans.

[rglover]

> Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.

Until it backfires and creates the potential for a nuclear war.

[vkou]

Nobody's going to start a nuclear war over sanctions.

[gunshai]

I'm not really sure why people opine about not using the gold standard.

Especially crypo-enthusiasts or even libertarians (I consider my self tangent to both these groups).

Gold is terrible for the following reasons.

* Supply is unknown so your market cap value is volatile to any sudden prospected windfall. This one is ESPECIALLY bad if you are a central government. Why would a central bank want to be beholden (with respect to purchasing power) to some random gold find that devalues the currency unexpectedly? (see wiki article about Mansa Musa who just went around destroying local economies because he just literally threw his gold around.)

* Gold is not very divisible, in that there are real costs to trying to divide the mint.

* Gold comes with high storage/security costs (especially if it is your currency back).

* Gold isn't really that transferable, the stuff is a pain in the ass to actually move around.

Gold has two things going for it.

1. It has manufacturing uses that provide real world value

2. Through out time people have a perception that it should have value. This perception spans across cultures and geography.

[rglover]

There's no opining about it. It was the best solution at the time and removing it eliminated the last remaining dam preventing absolute corruption of our money by the state.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[agentultra]

The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system was really bad. It got so bad that Nixon had to temporarily suspend exchange of notes for gold. It eventually dragged all currencies into a death-spiral. You can read all about it in the history books. Why should it be repeated?

The Austrian school of economics radically simplifies economic theory to an absurd degree (I assume that's what you're signalling you follow given your statements). It treats empirical evidence as heresy. The only driving force behind all of their conspiracy theories and racist/anti-semitic dog-whistling is a belief that governments are evil and all inflation is bad. It's really reductive and anti-intellectual.

Inflation isn't inherently bad and not all inflation is the same.

In terms of geopolitics the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system has had many benefits. Much of the world eventually recovered by the mid-80s by the economic crises of the late-60s. Also in the history books.

War and debt are bedfellows. Everyone knows this. Also well known are the economic consequences of creating such debt by going to war. It turns out mostly authoritarian psychopaths will go to war or make crypto-currencies official currencies despite the economic consequences and impacts it would have on their citizens.

[rglover]

> War and debt are bedfellows.

Because fiat enables them to be as much. If you can print money, you don't need public consent to go blow people out of the water, nor to justify obscene spending on the military. Every war the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam has been a banker war, not a state war.

What's reductive and anti-intellectual is deluding people into believing that giving the government (or even worse, "economists" or central bankers) authority over their wealth is, somehow, going to multiply or protect it when we have ample examples to the contrary.

To your point, governments historically are evil and inflation is bad (it's arguably an inherent property of government as you're giving absolute power to the unproductive class). The idea that it's not (MMT) is the rationalization of a failed economic strategy that's put everyone's well-being in the crosshairs.

The idea that any of that is untrue is a result of unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination (or, in certain cases, someone who has directly benefited from the scheme). Any way you shake it, to think that what's happening isn't the result of malfeasance is denial, wholesale.

Mayer Rothschild codified the potential for this way of thinking with his Economic Inductance theory:

> Currency, or deposit loan accounts, has the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (interests). When applied gradually, the public adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up, depending on their resilience capacity.

Flip on the television if you need insight into what people do when they "crack up."

[agentultra]

It sounds to me like you believe in conspiracy theories about finance and banking and the threatening powers that control them. I suppose you also take Ezra Pound's later obscenities about global finance and the reasons for war to heart. And therein lies the problem with the goldbug: the path to fascism.

All inflation is bad is a highly reductive argument. It is much more complicated than that and most economic models indicate that a certain amount of inflation is a good thing for overall growth. This is why, in the US, the Federal Reserve targets 2% inflation. There are a lot of positive effects to inflation and trying to control it so that it grows moderately is a good thing. There are decades of research as to why this is the case even though I suspect it won't sway you I suggest you try reading it if you are seriously interested in educating yourself about what you're talking about.

Do I believe the current economic conditions are the result of a scheme among elite bankers? No. A conspiracy involving more than two people is not sustainable and not a conspiracy. Financial regulation is managed in most Western countries by democratic representation. In the US they created the Federal Reserve system. If you want to see what they get up to they publish their board meeting notes, research, reports, results of votes, etc. It's open information.

If Americans have a problem with the system they're free to vote for representation that will introduce laws that will change the way the Federal Reserve is run... although in my experience very few people even know what the Fed does or that they have a website.

I don't need the thought experiments of a long-dead banker who didn't live to see the formation of the Federal Reserve. The quote you're citing is antiquated. Banks today don't make money on deposits like they did in this Rothschild's day and people aren't worried about runs on a bank's reserves anymore.

Although if they're invested in crypto via Tether or any other stable coin they ought to be.

[banannaise]

Yeah, instead it's manipulated by an entirely different set of equally nefarious actors! We did it, everyone!

[rglover]

You don't understand how Bitcoin works, and that's okay, but you need to do your homework before you make foolish comments like this.

Bitcoin's supply is regulated via a timed algorithm, meaning, it doles out an increasingly diminished amount of Bitcoin on a pre-timed cycle that will end in ~2140. In order to get that Bitcoin, "miners" need to perform work (via calculation of a nonce which as an auto-adjusting difficulty of computation—the "proof of work") that can't be faked or manipulated.

The beauty of that is that, unlike a central bank, no one can go and change a variable in a database to say "omg we have more money now!"

[danShumway]

Looking at how Bitcoin's price has fluctuated over the years, it should be pretty obvious by now that manipulating, inflating, and devaluing a currency doesn't only happen through releasing new notes. Bitcoin isn't immune from manipulation just because the supply is pre-decided.

[rglover]

Bitcoin's price has fluctuated because of the same market dynamics that play out everywhere.

Most people are panicky and hair-triggered, very few are patient. Especially with a new technology that has the potential to make outsized returns early on, of course, you're going to get a lot of gamblers entering and exiting the market.

This is why you see dips when headlines like "China bans mining!" or "Crypto is doomed, look at Luna!" are printed. It conflates things and uses people's ignorance against them (not unlike traditional financial markets/instruments).

[danShumway]

Correct, and all of that stuff is subject to manipulation, often by powerful actors behind the scenes or by grifters playing off of people's insecurities, fear of missing out, etc...

Controlling the supply of a coin does not mean the coin's actual value can't be manipulated by dedicated actors, and in the case of cryptocurrency, the "mystique" of the tech behind it, the ease of creating new systems on top of it that are complicated for ordinary users to understand, and the general fear people have of missing out on a speculative investment (as well as the general fear they have that they might be in a speculative bubble) make coins like Bitcoin particularly vulnerable to specific kinds of social manipulation, scams, and phishing, all of which end up affecting the price of the coin.

The fed can't release new Bitcoins, sure, but in exchange, now random celebrities on Twitter can cause sell-offs and spikes in value; random Discord groups can pump coins so they can sell off and make a profit before they crash. You haven't gotten rid of currency manipulation, you've just changed who's doing it.

[fleddr]

You need to be more accurate in your language.

Bitcoin's supply cannot be manipulated, unlike fiat. The currency pair BTC/USD is very much manipulated, as is pretty much any asset paired to USD.

These are two different concepts.

[danShumway]

The effect of those concepts are the same, and pretty much no end user cares about the difference.

And it's worse than just that the currency pair BTC/USD is manipulable. USD prices have a loose mapping to actual value, the relationship between BTC/USD isn't just arbitrary numbers. It's not just that the exchange rate between BTC and USD is changing, independent of the USD the actual market value represented by a Bitcoin is changing.

In other words, you do not need to manipulate the supply of a currency in order to manipulate the amount of purchasing power or value that each "unit" of that currency represents.

Bitcoin proponents often try to bring up supply manipulation like it's some kind of unique category, but it's really not. Currency manipulation does not require control of the supply.

[garbanz0]

Bitcoin's price relative to the dollar fluctuates, but it can't be inflated.

[danShumway]

The purchasing power of a Bitcoin changes. That's the only thing an end-user cares about.

Do you think that people care about inflation because there are more dollars in existence? No, they care because they can't make the same level of purchases with the dollars they're holding.

Bitcoin's price relative to the dollar indicates what you can buy with it; when that price changes it's no comfort to people that technically the same number of coins exist. They care about what the coin is worth, and Bitcoin's worth can be manipulated regardless of what its supply is.

[vkou]

Tether exists, and turning the magical Tether printing press on and off is how BTC is manipulated.

[rglover]

If Tether collapses, you can certainly expect a panic in all cryptocurrency markets, but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin.

Only 6.02% of their reserves are held in "digital tokens," the rest are held in traditional assets and cash: https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports (scroll down to "Reserves Breakdown").

[danShumway]

- "you can certainly expect a panic in all cryptocurrency markets"

- "but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin."

How do square these two parts of the sentence? The ability to cause a panic in the Bitcoin space on command by crashing another cryptocurrency sounds a lot like manipulation to me.

[vkou]

> but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin.

Imagine I am the director of Tether.

I print $1 billion in Tether out of thin air.

I then buy bitcoin with it on a UST/BTC exchange.

Bitcoin price goes up.

[beders]

You replaced trust in a bank with trust in this centralized service.

Where's the merit?

[rglover]

In this particular instance, yes. With this specific use case, there isn't. But adoption of Bitcoin in general is a net positive (I think of something like these notes being a gateway drug to self-custody).

[beders]

Adoption of Bitcoin is a net positive on the CO2 being added to the atmosphere for sure.

[rchaud]

It does feel like a Twilight Zone episode.

In 2011, you could buy coffee and pizza w/ BTC (at non-conformist boutique shops but still). Now, not even those stores would accept it as a method of payment, and you'd be stupid to spend it on goods and services anyway, because BTC's value is wrapped up in the idea that it's a 'digital asset' instead of a currency.

[sumy23]

Cryptocurrencies are programmable money. Can you program traditional fiat currencies? No. Being able to program money should get hackers excited.

[polygamous_bat]

Except when someone who can program better than you can pick that money right out of your pocket (or so called "smart" contracts.)

I identify as a hacker, and I don't think all things should be programmable. Votes should not be programmable or hackable. I'm almost certain that at certain point money shouldn't be either, given how rife the abuse can be.

[Jasper_]

What does it mean to "program money" in ways that aren't just moving money around with APIs, which is what we can do already with the existing system?

[sumy23]

Isn't moving money around with APIs just moving money around by sending messages, which is what we can do already by sending a check in the mail?

How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of market cap is dedicated to providing: bank accounts, transfer services, security brokerage, options trading, credit default swaps, and other derivatives. You can easily implement the entire functionality of the entire global banking system on the blockchain. Rather than require hundreds of thousands of specialized bankers, you can do it with miners running nodes in the block chain. This is a huge efficiency improvement and allows for a more democratized system. You can think this is cool, or stupid, or dangerous, or all three. But if you aren't interested in the tech, why bother commenting on it?

[rchaud]

Ah yes, programmable money. The Do Kwon special.

[nathias]

Money needs to be reinvented since politics has hijacked it and used it as a tool to deliver policy (at the expense of money's functions). I think it's evil to harvest the wallets of poor people for scraps, pile it together and give it to the richest, which is effectively what inflation is.

[nsv]

> like some in South America

Or Turkey, who's inflation is around 70% right now.

[rvz]

> So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware.

Given that E2EE encrypted messaging apps such as Signal give criminals, extremists and scammers a hiding place such that the messages are totally unreadable by anyone else, does that mean we should tell Google and Amazon to ban Signal off of their servers because they are enabling such a communication service that benefits these criminals, extremists and scammers?

Also how does one 'hide' their transactions on a transparent ledger for everyone to see and trace even if they do use it for ransomware or illegal stuff? Is that why regulators haven't banned those cryptocurrencies yet and instead have targeted privacy-coins in new regulations requiring exchanges to de-list them? [0]

Seems like Stripe [1], Moneygram [2], Checkout.com [3] etc still seem to see that some of them have a use case. Perhaps that explains why they also waited for regulations before proceeding to use them [0].

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IP...

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram...

[3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin

[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[rootusrootus]

I'd be interested to see the ratio of criminal/legitimate activity on Signal as compared to criminal/legitimate BTC transactions.

[helloworld11]

>So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware.

This just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority.

Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum?

Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people.

How fucking tedious to see a so-called hacker site shit so much and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike.

[ipaddr]

I was reading an email exchange from Atari employees in 1984. There was one comment.. computers are not useful for anything but playing games. It's all marketing fluff.

Here we are 40 years later communicating with computers. I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.

[unmole]

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

[mrguyorama]

They laughed at Columbus and they were right! Columbus said "I think the earth is like half the size everyone else says it is and I'm going to sail around it" and everyone with reputable mathematicians said "Nope"

If America didn't exist, and Columbus was relying on his plan, they all would have starved to death roughly where the East Coast is

[unmole]

I don't like the Columbus reference either. I was merely quoting Carl Sagan.

[jacquesm]

> I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.

That reminds me of a line from a track by Apollo 440:

"Mick Jagger came up to me and I said 'I've seen the future' and he goes 'Yeah, if there is one...'".

[rootusrootus]

> I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.

Hindsight is 20/20, so of course someone will still make that mistake 40 years down the road. We can barely predict with any meaningful accuracy what will happen next year. The idea that we can predict 40 years out is the very height of hubris.

[UncleMeat]

It is certainly possible. But there are a few important thoughts here.

1. That people have been wildly wrong about various technologies before is not evidence that a given specific technology will succeed.

2. Many critics don't doubt the technical capabilities but instead worry about the social harm of systems developed using cryptocurrencies.

[nathias]

No need to speculate, I'm wondering it right now.

[sbarbarian]

rick and morty is on-point, also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54

[calvinmorrison]

I guess, you can easily confirm if it's counterfit