[jrm4]

Not what I've seen here. This is one of the few topics here where I think emotion STRONGLY gets in the way of reason. Too few people are "first princpl-ing" this to understand that the crypto-train, to some extent, is happening whether any of us like it or not.

[imtringued]

The problem with the cryptocurrency advocates is that they have zero clue about money. Neoclassical economics declares money irrelevant and not something to study, so there is hardly any research how money influences a society beyond central bank policy about how much money there should be.

Here is a tip. Money is a transaction cost reducing device. That is it's primary function. By transaction costs I don't mean just fees that a bank or payment service provider charges you, no I mean every economic cost that is involved in negotiating payments. You could think of transaction costs as friction and money as a lubricant. If you have to exchange currencies this causes friction, if you have to physically transport goods or meet in person to barter with them this causes friction. If the value of the goods you are trading is unknown this causes friction. The purpose of money is to be better than some alternative world without money and most cryptocurrencies are hardly better, they are worse or outright useless. The legitimate niches that cryptocurrencies occupy will barely even influence the real world.

[jrm4]

I 99% agree and and also argue that the 1% is significant.

Money is sometimes that, but it's also merely a store of value. And I think this what people are missing. I agree that we're almost certainly not going to say paying for coffee in bitcoin.

But where it has legs is as the 401k/money in the mattress replacement; a space that's still very "competitive," i.e. a lot of the options here still really suck, thanks to inflation and/or third parties.

[tedivm]

Honestly I hear this a lot from crypto advocates, but it just seems like wishful thinking on their part. There are a ton of legitimate complaints about cryptocurrency that come up, and the fact that after a decade the field still hasn't made any real progress is telling to me. At this point the "shitcoins" have mostly collapses, NFT has been devalued, and use cases seem to be disappearing. While I do think things like migrating away from proof of work have been helpful, I still don't believe that we're going to see larger adoption.

I do think you are right that this is a topic where emotion strongly gets in the way of reason, but I think the people lacking reason are the advocates and not the critics.

[peyton]

What progress do you want cryptocurrency to make? They’re bearer assets. You can go pay people with them today.

[imtringued]

The most obvious first step is to stop all initial coin offerings against money. If the cryptocurrency is a security, then that is ok, but there are some regulations that need to be followed. In the EU there are plenty of companies willing to manage a security token offering for your company. A security token is basically a cryptocurrency that acts as an informal stock.

[peyton]

I don’t see what that has to do with cryptocurrency like Monero, the topic of this post.

[zirgs]

It's been almost 15 years. There's still no valid crypto use case outside of speculation and crime.

[mrangle]

Speculation is all that is required for validity.

Parallel to barter, desire-to-use is all that is required for use-case.

Governments are going to remain challenged by the need to now assert that possession or use of a legal instrument, with no inherent illegal characteristic, is now evidence of intent to crime.

Not that I don't expect them to rise to the occasion. As they have been by implementing crude sanction power in place of legislation.