[angusturner]

The thing is though, once you regulate crypto then what’s the point? You are left with a highly inefficient/expensive and immutable database.

Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But this is a stupid thing to solve for, because without trust and regulation you can’t even have a functioning society.

[angusturner]

I would actually say that scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology at the moment.

(Unless you count speculation/gambling).

[echelon]

I'm 99% against crypto and think it's mostly a tool for wasting limited human innovation capital, enabling fraud, terrorist financing, ponzi scheme gambling, and pump and dump rug pulling.

There are a few areas where I find crypto interesting or useful:

- The existing banking and payments industry is too Christian / Mormon. It extra-judicially regulates anything it views as "vices". This industry is supposed to be dumb payment rails with hooks for FinCEN to stop crime. It's not supposed to be your pastor. If anything, business integration with regular payment rails would help them be better regulated.

- "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations. If you look at it long enough, it doesn't even feel like crypto. Just a new type of efficiency.

The latter may make the former a non-issue, especially if the existing fintech industry receives more competition from upstarts that don't have to pay the legacy gateways and their frictionful fees.

[Nursie]

> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance.

This seems to be 'regulatory arbitrage' rather than anything concrete to do with the tech though. i.e. there's nothing inherent in a stablecoin that can't be done more simply, it's just currently a way to skirt bureaucracy and fees, which are already diminishing in many places.

[angusturner]

Yeah this is what I don’t really get about the stable coin hype.

In Australia for example, we are almost cashless now and most bank transfers are instant and cheap - no blockchain required.

Digital currency is a good idea - unclear what value the blockchain part actually provides?

[disgruntledphd2]

> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations.

Yeah, these seem like a really good (potentially the only one) use case for crypto. Note that these are really just replicating dollar (and potentially euro) dominance for a new age, and whoever ends up winning here will probably be the new Visa/Mastercard (with all of the problems that entails).

[tim333]

>seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations

Barely. If $1m of crypto moves from one private wallet to another how do you know who's doing it or what the purpose is? Could be something legit, could be paying for drugs/terrorism - no definite way of knowing.

[echelon]

I was under the impression Circle with USDC was trying to be very FinCEN / AML compliant. That you had to agree to their terms to be able to use the token, that you couldn't transact off of a regulated exchange, and that they do plenty of KYC to know what's going on.

I might have the wrong assumptions?

[tim333]

I'm not sure of the details to be honest. Certainly if I want to change normal US$ in a bank into USDC then I have to go through KYC etc. If I then transfer it to a private wallet and then send it to someone else's wallet for an iffy transaction they'd see on the blockchain it was me but not necessarily who the other wallet was.

A way to make it less traceable is to transfer it to an iffy crypto exchange, change it and then withdraw it somewhere else. Some of those are not very good at keeping records and the like. Like I use mexc who can change usdc and when I wanted to do my tax return they said they couldn't retrieve transactions over 18 months ago - they delete the data they say. And mexc isn't the worst.

[WinstonSmith84]

> scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology

the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally (unlike tradfi), nobody is hiding anything (until we go to Monero and similar, but that's different). What's however happening, and we come back to the first point, is the lack of "rules" so that in effect financial "crime" is legal.

[alistairSH]

the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally

There's a public ledger I can visit to see who's bribing Trump this week?

[immibis]

Illegal Internet stuff in general is an application of Bitcoin. That includes money laundering, drugs, porn (in communist places like Texas), etc.

Apparently before Bitcoin was Liberty Reserve, which was a centralized database.