[_81ih]

I really don't get what the argument is here? NK and others also use Tor, Signal (Protocol), and more. Are they all bad? And why always use the most extreme examples like NK and China?

If US citizens could empathize with people not only from NK, but also from places like Turkey, where the value of our currency has been demolished under the current authoritarian government (and, IMO, they aren't far away from putting limits on buying USD), I think we would have healthier discussions. Now, I can — and am — moving out of the country, but not everyone can. Thinking otherwise is privileged and ignorant thinking.

Of course ETH is not flawless, and if I were in a middle-class family in the US, I would love to have these deep philosophical discussions about if Ethereum is really really decentralized, but the fact remains that cryptocurrencies DO solve real problems, and they DO help more people than they hurt, just like any technology. If this weren't the case, humans would have stoped innovating a long time ago.

[thelamest]

You can only be sure in hindsight which solution is comparatively or net good. Not all hard work done by smart and nice people turns out to be worthwhile. There are always trade-offs and cryptoassets bring them too. You have good reasons to be worried about centralization, but concerns that this technology empowers crime and totalitarianism, just in a different way, are valid too.

[nine_k]

All technical solutions are trade-offs.

See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly.

Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a steam engine from 1800: large, dirty and inefficient as it is, it already solves real problems.

Now, moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a huge step, like moving from firewood boiler to a turbine. Maybe not a complete perfection yet, but a huge jump in efficiency.

[hnthrow1010]

>it already solves real problems.

That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the energy usage. All of the other fatal flaws still remain: The inability to do anything about fraud, the disastrous security of smart contracts, the ponzi-like economics, the inherent unfairness of mining/staking, the practical lack of decentralization and vulnerability to 67% attacks, the lack of any kind of legal structure around anything whatsoever, and not to mention that the technology is actively enabling new kinds of crimes like ransomware and evading sanctions on a grand scale...

It's patently obvious that the "tradeoff" for most people is that you get to gamble on the price of a highly speculative asset in exchange for enabling massive amounts of crime. I don't like that tradeoff. As a society, we can collectively decide not to make it.

[nine_k]

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds.

My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof-of-work electricity-guzzling proof-of-work BTC network, because two transatlantic flights are even worse.

You'll call this a marginal problem. I'll say that marginal problems are still real, and need solutions.

[hnthrow1010]

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

[nine_k]

I specifically used Russia as an example, because transferrimg nearly any fiat currency between it and the West is now blocked, due to the sanctions.

If Swift transfers worked, they could be a preferred alternative.

[jayd16]

"Bad tool is used by bad guys so don't support it" doesn't imply "any tool used by bad guys is bad." It's perfectly valid to think that different tech has different value based on specific pros and cons.

[yellowapple]

Right, but this presupposes that the particular tool in question is a "bad tool", and the basis of that presupposition elsewhere in this thread is very strongly implied to be "tool is used by bad guys therefore it's bad unless I specifically benefit from it".

[ShamelessC]

Eh, that wasn’t my read. More that it seems to be exclusively used by bad people.

The lack of people manually verifying the _nature_ of a transaction and not just that someone claimed a transaction occurred means everything you’re doing is, well, pointless. It is (highly optimistically) a libertarian political movement that is deeply misinformed about how free markets and trust actually work.

Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this. If you were to send your money to anyone claiming to be a NK citizen, you still have to personally verify entire transaction occurs, or you’ll get grifted. It’s useless. You’re being grifted. You’re making it worse by continuing to defend it and at some point you’re culpable for not admitting this despite it coming up on literally every hacker news post about cryptocurrency.

[yellowapple]

> More that it seems to be exclusively used by bad people.

So I'm a bad person, then? Are the migrant workers sending money back to their families bad people? Are the refugees using it to bring their life savings with them bad people? Are the people currently subject to those bad regimes and unable to escape bad people?

At best, the belief that "it seems to be exclusively used by bad people" is blatantly ignorant of reality. At worst, it's saying the quiet part out loud: that as far as the legacy financial system (and the supporters thereof) is concerned, these people are just as "bad" (read: worth shunning from the benefits of said system), with the only difference being that said system is able to exploit them and their labor while it pretends they don't exist.

> Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this.

Because there's no problem to be solved in the first place. There are many issues with cryptocurrency, but "wah nation-states can't arbitrarily censor transactions wah" ain't one of 'em.

[ShamelessC]

Can you prove any of those things is actually happening with the sort of regularity you’re implying? Preferably without linking to coinbase articles?

[yellowapple]

https://restofworld.org/2021/crypto-remittances/

https://coinflip.tech/blog/how-cryptocurrency-is-aiding-ukra...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2020/10/19/dissident...

Your turn: prove your assertion that cryptocurrencies "seem" to be used exclusively by bad people.