I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al, but if you have some data on that, I'd be curious to hear about it. In particular I'm curious why cryptocurrencies were a better means of rescuing your bolívar-denominated wealth than any other currency or investment vehicle such as real estate, gold, dollars, etc.
Monero is.
> They also don't eliminate payment processor risk
Of course they don't magically solve all problems, but that doesn't make them useless.
> I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al
I've read some article from people who did it, but I don't think it's common.
The problem with leaving the country is, how do you take your assets with you? You cannot easily move a house, and you will get searched at the border and your gold, dollars, jewelry etc will get confiscated if found. With cryptocurrencies you can theoretically move any amount, by just memorizing 12 or 24 words, by hiding a piece of paper or by encrypting it and placing it online somewhere.
Overall I think that cryptocurrencies (and the internet overall) could use some better privacy strategies. Tor-like routing, no possibility of finger printing, etc.
[0] https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...
> Many, including Satoshi, believed cryptocurrencies provided privacy for payments.
(emphasis mine)
Satoshi's writings indicated that he understood the public ledger he was creating was not anonymous. He even talked about ring signatures as a possible method to add obfuscation.
(Ring signatures is one aspect combined with others that Monero uses to achieve financial privacy. Anonymity requires extra steps taken by the user. Financial privacy ≠ anonymity.)
But then again nothing is perfect, neither is Tor.
I'm not sure how many people here use BTC as a means of preserving the value of their money since most people would rather hold USD, but for sending remittances, it cannot be beat.
As another interesting anecdote, my sister is in Argentina and a bunch of friends started asking her how to buy BTC before the election yesterday. Seems that those that managed to move their Argentine pesos to BTC did so just in time: https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/argentina-central-bank-cu...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/here-s-ho...
There are also a few shops (even one very large shop) accepting some cryptos now, like BTC and Dash. I'm not sure what volume they are seeing in sales though.
cryptocurrencies are cash, not credit cards or banks. It's a category that is completely missing from the internet. hence all the drawbacks, but they have their also many uses, most of them hitherto unimplemented (because we never had cash on the net)
> why cryptocurrencies were a better means of rescuing your bolívar
I presume because bitcoin was available where all other currencies weren't
There are lots of these kinds of catch 22s in the world and they are much, much, much worse in developing countries that have a large disparity between haves and have-nots. There are places where you are basically locked out of commerce of anything larger than pocket money -- because that's the way the large institutions want it. If they allow you to do business as all, it comes with a really hefty price tag.
The potential Bitcoin for me has always been one of 2 things: 1) a potentially convenient way to do online shopping 2) a way to enable commerce for the poor or disadvantaged. For years and years, I was unable to to get a credit card in Japan because they were unavailable to people without permanent residence status. Even now, the only bank that agreed to give me a business account for my consulting company refuses to allow the business to have a credit card. I can not buy any business related supplies on credit. I can not make online purchases for my business in most cases. This is insanity, but there are no banks who care where I live and they have a monopoly.
This is the advantage of something like Bitcoin. It breaks the monopoly of the banks. Of course, that comes with a whole raft of problems, but it really is frustrating when people in privileged positions just refuse to put the effort into seeing that their privilege doesn't extend to everyone in the world.
Edit: I should actually add that patio11 does actually understand the banking difficulties in Japan, and has written a bit about it before ;-)
This is really pretty much a solved issue since 2007, at least in big parts of Africa. And with none of the bad whiff and dodginess, which inevitable comes with just about any crypto currency scheme.
I don't know if there's something similar in the UK, but in the US you can buy a money order with cash from any Walmart for a couple bucks in fees and solve the "they don't take cash" issue that way.
People use burner phones to get drugs for nights out. Theoretically none of this is really anonymous, you're pinging cell towers, you're probably on CCTV, etc etc. But realistically that doesn't matter and it works as a system.
Even something like Monero which might have claim to be truly untraceable really isn't because you're on like, an Intel ME machine and the NSA likely has backdoors in the Linux kernel and ... blah blah blah ...
But it's good enough.
Imagine if Hacker News required ID-verified real name front and center on every post. Throwaway accounts are impossible. They were never perfect anyway, but now they don't exist.
The discourse would change. Perhaps an individual might see it as being better, or worse, but it'd definitely be different.
The traditional banking system is that ID-verified world. Cryptocurrencies are the release valve.
FWIW I think Tether is bollocks.
They haven't. The developers are very upfront about its limitations.
It’s pretty easy to make bitcoin transactions anonymous.
1. Wasabi Wallet runs over Tor and has built-in support for CoinJoins: https://wasabiwallet.io
2. Samourai Wallet has Whirlpool, another mixing technology, among other security features: https://www.samouraiwallet.com/features
3. You can skip the usual exchanges and use Bisq for peer-to-peer trading over Tor, including selling BTC for fiat: https://bisq.network
4. Lightning network (a layer 2 network on top of Bitcoin) has exploded in popularity; it’s also a major privacy win for transactions: https://medium.com/breez-technology/lightning-network-routin...
Most wallets nowadays don’t let you reuse addresses; even with plain vanilla Bitcoin transactions, this makes it much more difficult to link an identity with a Bitcoin transaction.
And this is before Taproot and Schnorr signatures are added to the Bitcoin protocol in the not too distant future: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-schnorr-signature-taproot-softfo...
There's more but the point should be clear: it’s actually fairly easy to dramatically increase the anonymity of bitcoin transactions.
Also, anonymity isn't black and white. It would be very difficult for the Venezuelan government to prevent you from buying Bitcoin in-person and then walking out of the country, with your Bitcoin keys written on a small piece of paper or even memorized.
Effectively, the current situation is rather close to that: the financial system is predicated on Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that make moving large amounts of money for anonymous purposes dangerous for financial institutions. Given that cryptocurrency has struggled to provide any rationale for its existence other than the anonymous money flows that government regulation is trying to root out, dealing with it as a financial institution raises regulatory compliance red flags. As the article demonstrates, this means that your only real option is to rely on criminals and hope that money moves through the system fast enough that the government doesn't notice and the criminals handling your wealth don't skim too much off.
> other than the anonymous money flows
Are you saying that anonymous money is immoral and should be made illegal, and in the process dismissing all use cases that benefit from anonymity?
And no, cryptocurrencies are perfectly legal in most of the world.
Something else to point out is that just because a system is unsustainable doesn't mean it will collapse immediately.
And I do agree that unsustainable systems don't collapse immediately. I've been waiting for Tether to collapse for years. But I don't think cryptocurrencies as a whole are unsustainable (the larger proper exchanges that don't use Tether as their "fiat option" should survive).
Until a law is created that makes unmonitored use of physical and electronic cash illegal, anonymous money flows aren't across-the-board illegal.
One obstacle elitists have in instituting such laws is that enforcement would be costly, involving heavy-handed treatment of large numbers of end-users. Trusted third parties like banks are comparatively easy targets, being much less politically costly to repress.
Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?
The drug market being illegal means that for the vast majority of people it's only worth using for fairly inconsequential things. Recreational drugs for the weekend or the equivalent. You might not want to source your cancer drugs there for the same reasons you might not want to source your car or house loan from some random internet entity. Trust. And dealing in an illegal market makes the higher levels of trust very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.
I think the point is that cryptocurrencies will be relegated to second class currencies for as long as they can't or aren't treated with the same trust a fiat currency is.
> Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?
It has been fascinating to me to see how important brand and reputation are in the underground, otherwise struggling-to-be-anynomous markets. But then, even in the chans there were tripcodes.
For example, lets take donating to WikiLeaks as an example. Anonymity is not needed for that, since they have never been charged with any crimes.
The only thing needed was a way to get around the banking cartel, that blocked payments to them, even though WikiLeaks was not charged with any crimes.
If it was 2011, being able to donate to WikiLeaks, was something that many people needed crypto for, regardless of anonymity.
Each address is a new account, the paranoid of the groups create new accounts quite regularly for their transactions.
It is a low bar to learning this, I suggest reading the 101 level information first.
you ring fence all the addresses in that space with Monero over VPN or TOR: Monero swapped to Bitcoin, Monero swapped to Ether, Monero swapped to Tether (ERC20/OMNI/TRC20), a general balance in Monero since merchants accept that too, and transact there. Swap back out to Monero if you need a withdrawal.
Pencil pushers can track addresses on one transparent blockchain all fuckin day till your grandma gets tainted coins after Thanksgiving and all her accounts closed by some paranoid compliance officer and overzealous dumbass public servant, while the rest of us get every good and service we expected anonymously.
Is there a way to do this without going through some central exchange? I thought I'd read that (eg) Shapeshift was now doing KYC/AML checks, so would you still get identified there?
Bisq
XMR.to because your clearnet identity already owns Monero
But I do agree that the current valuation of Bitcoin is to a very large part driven by speculation, and from the network effect. As some comments here point to, Monero isn't even widely known despite being technically superior in many ways.
I'm only confident in one thing: that Bitcoin shouldn't be valued 10-100x (or more) than some other coins.
Probably the easiest way is Samourai Wallet
I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case?
You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow businesses to accept payments digitally, without the risk of their payment processor or bank completely ruining them? (PayPal horror stories swarm the internet.) Or how people in collapsing economies, like Venezuela with ridiculous inflation, can use them to cross the borders with their wealth somewhat intact?
And it's always dismissed with the same lazy arguments like "volatility" or "nobody uses it". Those are real issues for sure, but they don't invalidate the use cases.