But it's not an alternative to the financial system, outside of crime in order to do anything useful with it you have to move it back into the existing financial system.
I literally just answered the question about energy use.
Crypto could arguably become a potential alternative financial system. Bitcoin by itself is not.
Crime is primarily conducted in USD (by volume). The purpose of financial compliance is not to eliminate crime but to manage it, and arguably the techniques we have used to create exclusionary financial systems have done more harm than good (better the terrorist you know in your financial system than the terrorist who doesn’t even use your financial system that you don’t have any awareness of, aka. The Patriot Act missed the mark).
Further, the existing system is working about as well as the war on drugs. Every recommendation I have read is to find ways to shore it up, rather than find new ways to conduct financial crimes oversight, and the primary recommendation for the resulting inevitable escalation is to build a gigantic skynet of information sharing that looks an awful lot like surveillance capitalism.
I personally view Bitcoin as a runaway proof-of-concept. It’s rather insane how successful it’s become considering how it got started.
If we look at it from a product / market fit perspective, there is clearly a product / market fit. And that’s in the face of the intact existing financial system, Visa’s volume, the USD, etc. That’s probably a point worth considering.
Crypto could arguably become a potential alternative financial system. Bitcoin by itself is not.
Crime is primarily conducted in USD (by volume). The purpose of financial compliance is not to eliminate crime but to manage it, and arguably the techniques we have used to create exclusionary financial systems have done more harm than good (better the terrorist you know in your financial system than the terrorist who doesn’t even use your financial system that you don’t have any awareness of, aka. The Patriot Act missed the mark).
Further, the existing system is working about as well as the war on drugs. Every recommendation I have read is to find ways to shore it up, rather than find new ways to conduct financial crimes oversight, and the primary recommendation for the resulting inevitable escalation is to build a gigantic skynet of information sharing that looks an awful lot like surveillance capitalism.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/...
I personally view Bitcoin as a runaway proof-of-concept. It’s rather insane how successful it’s become considering how it got started.
If we look at it from a product / market fit perspective, there is clearly a product / market fit. And that’s in the face of the intact existing financial system, Visa’s volume, the USD, etc. That’s probably a point worth considering.