And the US Dollar in cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less. Money will always be used by people you disagree with. And you should not try to use the money itself as a way of limiting what people do. For if you do, one day it could be you that finds himself unable to spend his money the way he wants to because someone else, more powerful than you, disagrees with how you spend that money.
Using money that is yours should never be illegal. Prosecute the bad people for the bad thing they did in the first place to get the money / the bad thing that someone paid them money for.
It's much easier to follow someone using a public ledger than having to beg/subpoena banks for records with the broken/outdated AML/KYC/KYB system, with bank secrecy in many places, with banks participating in illicit activities too sometimes, etc.
> Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.
This is a completely made up statistic and it is showing your bias and/or ignorance about the topic. The lower estimates from industry sources like Chainalysis (0.15-0.62%) contrast sharply with higher academic estimates (23-46%) because the latter tend to include illicit activities that happen off chain but get "washed" on-chain which explains their own huge range of estimation... it is hard to quantify but nobody serious ever came close to 99%.
Something for which there are estimates close to 90% is the volume of transactions happening on centralized exchanges, and since these are required pretty much everywhere to follow AML procedures, just like traditional banks (sometimes even more intrusive than banks), it means it is just as easy, if not easier, to prosecute criminals who would use these... with the added bonus of having a public ledger with records of their activity on-chain.
> cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less.
That is exactly what many are proposing, or at least a core argument of many anti-cash proponents.
Crypto is not money. Money is coupled to a value; crypto is as much a currency as paintings are: completely arbitrary.
Effectively, human work. Money is an abstraction over the relative value we assign physical goods; instead of bartering, we collectively agree on using money as an intermediate form. The financial system, then, is a lot more abstraction over the value of producers of things—and thereby human work.
Of course it's way more complex than that, but that's the basic difference between real-world money and crypto currencies.
I'm not a crypto bro by any means, but I think crypto satisfies those criteria.
If you want to know the actual answer however. The answer is debt. Or more specifically assets and liabilities on various bank ledgers. Those banks organically set the value to monetary systems. This system would fall apart without a forced taxation system for a given currency.
The actual value is debt and taxation. I'm not complaining, who am I to criticize? But that is the answer.
One could conceive of such a crypto ledger system, and that would be a CBDC.
Wrong. For all intent and purposes, you could switch any cryptocurrency with whatever FIAT in your sentence and it still applies. I don't hunt money and wear it as a necklace (lion teeth). I don't mine it out of a gold mine. It is given to me in exchange for work.
Given.
Exchange.
If you and I agree that we only accept little tin circles; What's the difference? When you say money, what are you referring to? Just the US bank note? Some brass coins? Any FIAT?
Today's FIAT have nothing to do with what currency, basically just a fancy IOU note, used to be.
Currency WAS representative of human work. Directly. The oldest known form are lion teeth. You had to WORK to get them. It was direct proof of work. And it was important to keep that link so no arbitrary value is taken or added to it.
The next major leap of currency was IOU notes. Notes that banks respected between each other. One bank gives you some paper that says "trust me, bro, I'm worth 2 lion teeth". You go to another bank and can exchange that paper back to 2 lion teeth.
At one point in time, the US bamboozled the entire world and declared the US dollar as some form of new gold bar (what it was previously tied to, gold; proof of work). Tying all of FIAT to it. A value that can more easily be arbitrarily changed. And, since then, propaganda reigns supreme and people like you are born. Praising a nonsensical paper as some kind immovable artefact of mankind.
Language evolved.
Law evolved.
Currency didn't evolve.
And, for some reason, you are fighting its evolution.
Government backing, our shared delusion, unicorn dust, take your pick: whatever it is, it's something stable enough that it doesn't experience quintuple digit deflation in a decade.
You're being downvoted but as someone running an AI generation site, I can't even imagine the kind of bottom of the barrel filth you'd attract not even having the tiny deterrent of KYC.
You wouldn't end up being "just another generation site with crypto", you'd become a magnet for everyone who's generating things they're scared of having their legal identity tied to.
I had to stop supporting logged out users because 99% of the CSAM generated on the site came from people trying to skirt the basic login requirements.
Sorry but your privacy doesn't trump my not wanting to run a child porn site, and the overwhelming majority of the public manages to live through having to login in and pay for things with traceable money.
And before the conversation goes there: is it a perfect filter? No. But a 99% reduction (realistically near 100% reduction) in unwanted behavior is what I'd call very effective.
The moment you say "Please stop with FUD" I instantly assume that the reason you're actually worried about FUD is because it's directly linked to the value of your tokens.
genai.orchid.com (Note: I am not just affiliated with this company, but am "in charge of technology" for it... however, I haven't actually used this demo we are building, except to understand how to better generalize it into our overall platform; I thereby cannot vouch for the "quality", though I will happily vouch for it not stealing your money or anything.)