Funny enough despite my burning hatred of everything cryptocurrency Snowden has been my go-to counter-argument whenever someone brings up the wonderful "solution" that cryptocurrencies promise to be to zero-trust environments:
"Are you Edward Snowden or in a societal position comparable to that of Edward Snowden? No? Then society probably isn't quite dysfunctional enough for you yet to justify going to these algorithmic extremes."
The utterly extreme zero-trust proof-of-work crypto algorithms that have been significantly contributing to climate change over the last decade are not necessary to achieve privacy, and most of the time not even used to achieve it either.
Significantly contributing to climate change? Nonsense. The US petrodollar has single handedly caused climate change. The greed of the upper class and their alignment with the middle east has caused climate change.
How anyone could believe a digital token of value, a keypair, and voluntary usage of energy to participate in a decentralized network could possibly be a major contributing factor in climate change, while shipping barges and oil rigs are in full operation, is beyond me. A part of me wish I was capable of such levels of delusion.
I am a strong believer in climate change, but I feel many are pulling the "causes climate change" card in their arguments like "think of the children!"—a subtly dishonest way to trap their interlocutor because no one sane would want harm to come to the children, or to climate.
I am also a strong knower in climate change. The evidence is irrefutable. But it is strange to me that the one real threat against the banking and financial industries, the one real opponent to a stranglehold on money, somehow coincidently has been associated with the literal destruction of this planet via climate change. And people are really buying it!
Crypto has a lot of flaws but climate change is not one of them. I guess I need to just deal with these lemmings parroting whatever the authorities have on the agenda to psychologically take out opponents, but never thought I would see them successfully wage war on mathematics like this.
"the voluntary usage of energy" is the referred part you also recognize as such. When that usage is the size of a small country consumption it becomes worth talking about - just like the shipping barges and oil rigs. You don't fix a wrong with another wrong.
Yes, it has other potential uses than Ponzi scheme. However, when it’s advertised as a probable positive ROI it comes from being a ponzi. If that’s not accurate enough, one could then say that it’s remarkably ponzi-esque.
Id claim some hypocrisy in that one shouldn’t advise crypto while disavowing a Ponzi scheme as both result in monetary losses and are supported by aggressively false advertising and new entrants.
Most fiat currencies today are characterized with the same elements as those of ponzi schemes, its slower over time, but nevertheless it is the same elements with the central bank printing money from nothing.
Crypto can be suborned into any existing ponzi scheme easily by allowing exchanges of these fiat assets and leverage from any of those fiat systems.
Those crypto systems which have ballooned as a result of that would then accurately and appropriately be considered ponzi schemes, even though its just a small leg of the entire ponzi scheme.
There is no effective way for an individual to tell inflows and outflows from the system, and any financial banker is aware of frauds that can create the illusion of price action through the use of leverage, and collusive wash-sale contracts (similar to options). That is how gold and metals commodities are largely suppressed.
Without visibility, those frauds don't come to light, but visibility is a tradeoff when it comes to privacy, especially in 0 trust environments.
Edit: If you are going to downvote, at least do the courtesy of explaining why. If you do not, it simply looks like some brainless person using a bot is trying to censor people, and any intelligent reader will see that for what it actually is. Put another way, use your words, or look like a shill.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Nobody here that would otherwise just downvote will write a counterargument because you complained about it, keep the reddit bot downvote whining where it belongs.
> Crypto can be suborned into any existing ponzi scheme easily by allowing exchanges of these fiat assets and leverage from any of those fiat systems.
>Those crypto systems which have ballooned as a result of that would then accurately and appropriately be considered ponzi schemes, even though its just a small leg of the entire ponzi scheme.
This can happen to literally anything else that isn't prohibited from being traded using fiat currency.
>There is no effective way for an individual to tell inflows and outflows from the system, and any financial banker is aware of frauds that can create the illusion of price action through the use of leverage, and collusive wash-sale contracts (similar to options). That is how gold and metals commodities are largely suppressed.
I assume you're talking about the price in non-crypto currency that was paid for the crypto? if so yes, you can't really tell the inflows and outflows, but that is also true for everything that can also be traded outside centralized exchanges(including stocks), and commodities are even worse given most of them will be traded outside any exchange for industrial use and with even less transparency. I don't see the argument against crypto here inherently.
Yes, crypto can be used for scamming, this is a post discussing exactly one of those cases, but that's no different from anything else. It has a real tangible value in a world where you can be effectively cut off from global financial processing if 3-4 US companies -that got quite opinionated after the patriot act- decide they don't want to do business with you. Until payment processors aren't held to the standards of common carriers, crypto is imperative.
You are right. Money without depreciation violates the second law of thermodynamics and hence it is a Ponzi scheme in a physical world. This also includes any gold based money.
There can be no economic perpetuum mobile in the real economy on earth because humans need food which is produced by growing plants which capture sunlight.
Gold will be there long after humans have gone extinct. That violates the concept of a store of value. It means that gold doesn't store any value. It means humans delegate the storage of value to each other by utilizing gold and in that respect it is identical to fiat.
The property that fiat and gold have in common is the lack of holding costs that anything including the human body has in the real economy.
"Are you Edward Snowden or in a societal position comparable to that of Edward Snowden? No? Then society probably isn't quite dysfunctional enough for you yet to justify going to these algorithmic extremes."