Re:GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine
by fragmede on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:43PM
(#25936511)
The fundamentals of bitcoin are illegal drug deals and money laundering. We can argue over how much that's worth, given the volume of BTC, and difficulty of the necessary conversion back to currency that banks/landlords/cafes/etc will accept, but that's not zero.
Re:GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine
by vimy on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:47PM
(#25937055)
I don’t think that’s accurate anymore. Bitcoin ten years ago was like the www in 1995. Now we have DeFi which runs on crypto. DeFi is to banks what e-commerce was to retail stores in 2000.
Re:GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine
by fragmede on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:06AM
(#25938433)
To keep the analogies, GP asked if the Internet was useful for anything, I gave one - 'buying pizza on webpages' - and you're objecting to my use of the word 'webpage' vs 'app'.
Underneath all the talk of smart contracts running on ETH, behind DApps, the system at large skirts money laundering laws, and that's not a property of the system that conveniently just happened. A big reason for choosing crypto over something boring and normal, ie banks and the whole regulated financial industry, is because it skirts money laundering and other financial regulation, and because it's outside of the regulated financial industry, a lot of users don't believe they have to pay taxes on any gains made. For those that don't believe in the concept of taxes, that's very attractive.
The only varying metric it has is the denomination you measure it in. Whether that is Venezuelan Bolivars or USD.
Everything else is set in stone.