Minus using it in countries that have shitty government, no one has provided a use case for it.
And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at.
I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.
It is abused a lot, but for instance, for us, an honest b2b saas company, we get flagged like common criminals way too often when paying people who work for us in ‘shitty countries’. It’s always unblocked but it’s a huge strain with sending in paperwork, talking to idiots etc. Our main account has been blocked for 3 weeks and our account manager keeps apologising as the regulatory department is handling it and they don’t really talk to eachother.
I understand the criminal abuse, but it is just an easy way of paying out like you say to countries that banks flag (not sanctioned ones; just one that ‘normal people don’t send money to’).
International money transfers? I've been scalped by moneychangers before. Next time I need to pass money to a friend overseas I'd prefer to use crypto.
There are a lot of weird peculiarities of the international monetary system (things like the weird not-capital-controls that US citizens operate under where nobody will give them a bank account or whatever) that crypto just bulldozes through and I don't have to worry about when sending someone in a foreign country money.
Many banks won't give accounts to US citizens because that means giving the US government access. US citizens are subject to worldwide taxation regardless of residence.
Toxic description, and demeening to countries outside your own. Do you really have to talk like that about other people that live further away from you?
What? I live in one of these countries (not as bad as the one I described). My hometown is very serene and peaceful, until you are of a certain race or creed, then they are extremely racist. It is ultimately a backward place with backward people. Western folks like to pretend that every place is equally good until they have to raise their daughter in one of these places.
The first step to a country's growth is the acceptance of one's place in the world. Pretty much all of the emerging countries of today at some point kinda accepted the state that they are in and decided to get out of it (Japan, China, Indonesia today)
Mind you, I classify certain states in the US as shitholes. The fact that you _need_ a gun means that it is ultimately a shithole place in my book.
Yes, I don't condone crypto the same way I don't condone carrying guns to a bank (because you can't trust anyone), or building nuclear shelters on the off chance of a nuclear fallout, or building EM bombs in the escalating nature of warring nations in deadlock.
Whether you like it or not, things have external cost to them. "Let's spend a trillion dollar building a bunker for every citizen in the event that a nuclear fallout do happen". "Let's give everyone AC because its getting hot...and will keep getting hotter because we keep installing ACs". All of these things are "good" but people very rarely talk about their externalities.
There's a thing called "opportunity cost", "externalities" that no crypto bros ever brought up when discussing how bad their system compared to the current system.
Should we sacrifice the relatively very efficient global financial with one that can barely handle a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its precursor? What about user protection? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is perfectly possible to lose all of your coins due to fraud and there would be no way to recover it back. How is this even a reasonable financial system?
I think it's because it was promised or sold as something beyond national currencies, that offers some sort of anonymity, a way to make money relatively fast (or at least not lose any), etc.
Finally, most of it turned out to be just plain marketing made by those who needed more and more people in the system/scheme.
I’m no economist. But even without any training, all crypto including Bitcoin sounds like a scam. No regulation. Waste all that effort solving nothing of value. Can’t do refunds.
And it wasn’t just Luddites or the uneducated not understanding what was going on, but really smart people weren’t convinced and the benefits of the technology never solidified. In fact, turns out everything really was a scam.
There’s probably a bit of smugness from
Making correct predictions, and there’s also probably a bit of regret that we didn’t jump on the gravy train and sell at the peak even though we didn’t believe in it.
So far there is no evidence that it is a scam. The cryptographic promises are rock solid, it has on average done a better job of preserving value than the USD [0].
There is a brief window (2021-2022) where it was a bad time to buy and even that might not be the final word. The last time this happened was in 2018 where the price of bitcoin peaked at half it'd current value.
If anything, it is starting to look like Bitcoin is a respectable asset. It has outlasted several allegedly-reputable banks and is weathering a difficult credit environment quite solidly. It is still very risky, but it is hard to dismiss it.
[0] Over the last decade, say. Not much to hang an argument on, but it is the opposite of a scam.
No evidence it’s a scam except all the pump and dump schemes and the exchanges collapsing?
And Bitcoin is an asset now? Back in my day we were trying to buy pizzas and beer with it. Bitcoin illustrates the point very well. It’s was supposed to facilitate transactions. Except, there was never ever a plan, or a plan I understood anyway, on how that could be achieved.
> No evidence it’s a scam except all the pump and dump schemes and the exchanges collapsing?
That isn't evidence that bitcoin is a scam either. You can still buy and sell it. None of the crypto I own was effected by the exchanges going bust. The exchanges may well all be scams for all I know, and that would be very bad ... for the people who own exchanges.
Hell, I've even been used Tether - which is clearly a scam - and still gotten a valuable asset out the other side of the transaction. One of the promises of crypto that is holding is nobody has to trust the infrastructure even a little bit for the system to hang together.
Crypto + scam exchanges is more trustworthy than fiat + reputable banks. The reputable banks often turn out to be cardboard cutouts in front of corruption.
> And now people hoard it like gold.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with this but yes, people do. They are treating it like an asset. It doesn't matter what people intended for something to do, what it does is what counts. If someone owns a bitcoin they own an asset currently worth around $20k, and with pall the evidence suggesting that it will go on being worth around that much for the next 2 years. Your incredulity doesn't change that.
HN as a whole used to love anything crypto/NFT... the tide shifted as more and more ICOs, token offerings, exchanges and whatnot turned out to be pure rug pulls and at the same time, none of the promised benefits of cryptocurrencies failed to materialize.
In my case, I became anti cryptocurrency when it became clear to me that transaction cost will never approach zero and we will never use cryptocurrency for normal everyday transactions because the price of cryptocurrency is too volatile.
Most of the people who bought and sold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are speculators. My interests don't align with their interests. I want a stable currency (whose value doesn't fluctuate) with close to zero, if not zero, transaction costs. That was the whole point of cryptocurrency for me. If it can't do that, I have no interest.
Crypto is trying to fix a social problem (currency) with technology, with obvious outcomes. It's not about empowering a new generation of solutions or allowing the unbanked access to financial services. It's about replacing the current money masters with techbros.
Thankfully, they've mostly shifted to AI scams now.
If there's herd behavior, it's because it's so easy to cite examples of crypto fraud and false promises, and for many (but not all) in the tech sector fraud is verboten.
Most governments around the world are against crypto because it undermines KYC and AML efforts. No amount of wall street lobbying will change that because the bureaucrats believe that "national security" is at risk if crypto is allowed to proliferate. Central bank digital currencies are popular among regulators and the national security apparatus precisely because they centralize control. It's also why Circle and USDC are widely accepted - all the advantages of being decentralized have been neutered to the point of uselessness.
Because crypto and its industry is a complete scam and nothing that it has produced is of any value.
Crypto is a complete grift and there is not a single person in it for the technology. The only reason it exists is because of the regulatory arbitrage and loopholes that needs to be closed which will shut crypto all down.
All in all, crypto is full of greed, scamming, grifting and completely the lawless shady behaviour of evading regulations.
That is why we hate it and it needs to be extinguished by drafting crypto laws in every country.
Essentially, money is a network of trust. Bitcoin is a network that enables trustless consensus. It provides tremendous value IMHO (along with opportunities to scam people).
This news is about Binance being increasingly isolated. Mastercard’s deals with others (e.g. Gemini) are going strong.
A single bitcoin is currently valued over 25,000 USD and has shown to go up to over 60,000 USD. It has literally made tons of crypto million and billionaires. Ethereum has shown it's able to replace a lot of middleman banking with smart contracts but being turing complete is difficult to make secure. There are many profitable and successfully operating DAOs exclusively managed via smart contracts. Saying cryptocurrency space has failed to provide value is provably false.
I'm happy for the couple of people that got tangible financial benefits out of it and that weren't already wealthy beforehand, but this isn't exactly a benefit for society as a whole. All the rest has simply failed to materialise in any meaningful way.
What I don’t get about smart contracts is how the conditions are validated
I have a contract that Brad Pitt wins the Oscar in the next 3 years how is that validated ? Is there some widely accepted source of truth ? Couldn’t the provider be hacked or be tempted to be fraudulent.
I’m assuming the source of truth isn’t the Oscar academy cause web scraping could break easily.
Still it’s a lot of faith in human honesty and site security for automatic execution worth millions
The keyword you are looking for is Oracle. Oracle blockchains/coins are services which consolidate real world data into the block chain. Of course you then have to trust the oracle chain
Ponzi provided a lot of value to some of his early investors until the whole thing collapsed (of course all of that happened way faster).
> value is provably false.
None of what you said would suggest anything like. What you're talking about is redistribution. People buying tokens using real money from those who bought them cheaper creating:
> tons of crypto million and billionaires
in the process. Could you explain at what point this actual value is created?
I think cryptobros just have a different perception of what "providing value" is. Bitcoin's fiat value or the fact that it has made millionaires is hardly an indication of it, since the same can be said of cocaine.
Smart contracts keep having bugs. And all I hear from DAOs is that they're cornered by the agents with the most tokens - how is that an innovation over the current state of affairs in society?
Nonsensical cope. If that were true, HN would not love solar, wind, fission, fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc. HN is hype about potential/new technologies that might make sense and have real applications. Cryptocurrencies aren't that.
Something that has sporadic price fluctuations, is used as a gambling token for speculation, and cannot send value instantly to another person (crypto waiting times are over 9 hours) is not a currency.
And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at.
I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.