I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property.

All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.

(sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)

Remittances seems like one of the true benefits of cryptocurrency... but that's why I'd like to know what amount of usage is actually that and what is, let's say non-beneficial.

Some of them opt out of more environmentally unfriendly stuff like Ethereum for sure

Personally I've developed systems for paying for everyday things like your bus fare or phone bill using crypto in a country where there's a hell of a lot less confidence in fiat (Brazil) -- hell check out the history of the Brazilian Real if you want an idea of what real candycorn money looks like

Personally I just feel a hell of a lot of privileged bullshit out of people arguing that crypto is some good for nothing shit. Yeah sure great try living in a country where your government is fucked. We truly don't live in some francis fukuyama neoliberal fantasy world where we can trust stuff like traditional financial markets which have gone and failed us in the non english speaking world time and time again. I welcome any and all alternatives

Wow, you can actually pay your bus fare and phone bills in Brazil with crypto? That sounds either very impressive or totally unbelievable.

I could not find anything on Google, so if someone could you link/cite to some actually used examples (I guess apps or utility website?) that would be very helpful. Sincere thanks.

My experience as a Brazilian is that I've never seen anyone using cryptocurrencies in real life. On the other hand, the government's new instant payments system (Pix), allows anyone with a mobile phone to easily make small payments. In less than one year since launch it's already ubiquitous.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comprar%20passagem%20d...

plenty of options now wow so hard to find

You're buying a number on a blockchain somewhere in the hope someone else will want it for more money, that's it.

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the primary use of cryptocurrency nowadays is as either casino chips or a money laundering mechanism. The economics no longer make any sense for anyone else.

It’s like arguing the most popular restaurant is so crowded, no one goes there anymore.

And of course new sectors that are not established can seem like snake oil, simply because they are new industries.

The internet has steamrollered many industries and fundamentally changed the way they work.

Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big boss, money.

It will take another ten years for this industry to mature. But in amongst the sham and drudgery we have the first non-violent system of currencies.

Isn't that a "they laughed at Galileo" argument?

They thought the Internet was snake oil. They thought Napster was snake oil. They thought BitTorrent was snake oil. ... but they also thought Pixelon was snake oil.

So, yeh, early adopters may often be driven by the seedy side of culture.

But it doesn't negate the value of the technology. Yes, piracy is neat and useful, but illegal. But was the benefit of piracy that you got free stuff? Or was it that it was an easier system than any other at the time?

Counterpoint: most "tech people" I know — including people who have worked in crypto — both know about it and also think it's a scam.

If someone only knows crypto from stories in mainstream press or cable news, they’d probably incorrectly assume “tech people” are almost universally for it.

I think everyone is talking past each other, because no one's exactly defining what the "scam" is, so you're talking about different things.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that, say, deep in the BitCoin code there is some algorithm giving Satoshi Nakamoto a dollar for evert transaction.

On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority of buyers are buying simply because they hope that someone else will buy at a higher price tomorrow, or next year.

This causes everyone to cheer-lead about how everyone else needs to buy or HODL, because they simply want to drive the price up.

For me, personally, I'd say this is what I'd call a "scam," in the sense that a MLM company is a "scam": that the motivation of the majority of people extolling the virtues of buying crypto tends to be simply personal enrichment.

I fall into the latter camp. I don’t begrudge the former. I just don’t think it’ll last and have little taste for speculating.

What is interesting about distributed ledger consensus via proof of work only remains interesting when there's a disconnect between the economy and good government. If your government is corrupt, or your economy is corrupt, you want the two to be disconnected. The problem is that the latter - corrupt economies - dominate over the former.

If you have a functioning government, you can use the legal system to enforce contracts, and then ledgers don't need to use proof of work. If you don't have a functioning government, or you can't let the legal system look at your contracts, then blockchain starts to look interesting.

The first economist says, "Look at that $20 bill."

The second says, "That can't really be a $20 bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up already."

They walk on.

Ha ha ha. That would only be possible with a government issued digital currency. Any private company running a "stablecoin" is guaranteed fraudulent. Can't be legit.

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/1398722723543760897

I once bought donuts from a food truck with BTC and the donuts were good but the payment process was really slow.

How would a merchant of physical goods even know about something like Celo, whatever that is?

Tether is one stablecoin, and arguably the worst example since it is literally the one coin every coiner will agree with you is a bad stablecoin. Do a deep dive on MakerDAO's DAI instead.

> Nothing about blockchains, DLTs, crypto, at its core is a scam to me

Which I took as an implication that you didn’t see Tether as a deeply troubling or a scam

Tethers management is the problem - obfuscation and using other crypto as collateral instead of just USD.

It's just that widely available, totally unregulated financial instruments will always be primarily used to run ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and meaningless speculation (meaningless in that speculators are largely just speculating based on what other speculators might do).

https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/8/why-does-iota-use...

Tether smells extremely fishy and seems to be used for a huge amount of trade volume on BTC and other cryptocurrencies.

Hi there. I've published a few papers in top conferences on BTC and ETH. I don't own a cent of crypto and believe that a lot of it is a very bad idea.

I find it endlessly frustrating when people insist that the only way to disagree with enthusiasts is to be ignorant.

No, the scam part is the idea that crypto is going replace fiat and as such will be worth many times more in the future than it is now.

I'd also be very, very surprised if there wasn't price manipulation going on with crypto trading.

But while his claim is true, in a Boolean sense, I don't know what exactly we're supposed to conclude about the world based on it. This isn't a ratio I've ever seen talked about before.

I'm guessing they're insinuating that the size of the feds balance sheet is somehow related to inflation, which it is only in a fairly loose sense.