No offense, but that's a very egocentric view. You may be (probably) a middle/upper-class westerner who has never encountered censorship, but I assure you there are billions (literally) of people on the planet for whom censorship is an issue.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD? There's probably already a decent stream of it into the country (from exporters and remote workers) so exchange could be done internally, lessening the above problem. Its value is far more stable than any crypto, it can actually be used in foreign trade without lossy conversions, it's just as easy to use, you can get bank accounts, etc.
I'm sure there are local traders savvy enough to get a +30% premium in local cash which they then immediately exchange for more durable assets.
So international traders wouldn't but national ones that know the country, they would.
If I could sell my crypto for +30% and then immediately use that money to buy gift cards at a store (just brainstorming here) and could put those online and redeem them and cash out with a 10% slippage, allowing me to keep +20%. Why wouldn't I do it?
I don't know such a method since I'm Western-European. But if I'd be from Venezuela, then I'd know to what extent a plan like this is feasible among: friends, family and perhaps even certain strangers.
>>Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD?
That's a good question. The only use-case I can see where cryptocurrencies are a better fit is when digital/international payments need to be made. Crypto allows that without any formal approval, from the state, for a USD/EUR supporting payments/e-wallet/banking firm to operate in that country.
Also international waters.
Also digital goods.
However it won't be soon. It's financial infrastructure - just different from the ordinary. And that takes decades to build. Cards were accepted at only few establishments at first too.
So is the view that PayPal/Zille will block their transactions.
> billions of people for whom censorship is an issue I would love to read a source on that. PayPal/Venmo isn’t the de facto exchange in the world and many newly industrialised countries have robust p2p payment systems like mPesa/UPI.
2) Not all currencies have the privacy implications of Bitcoin.
3) Not all currencies have the inherent environmental cost that 'proof of work' currencies like Bitcoin do. Is preventing the hoarding of wealth really a goal here?
A key tenet of crypto is that you cannot, in fact, do that. To make the system secure it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated, of course, but so far blockchains that don't have "number go up" have been stillborn.
I don't think this is even debatable anymore. We were promised decentralization and transaction costs at a fraction of traditional payments. Instead we have astronomical transaction/gas fees and effective centralization around a different cast of characters.
Of course there are positives. For instance, if you are sending large sums, it can be cost-effective. But, this is far from the world of micropayments and fractional penny transaction costs, and that money is going somewhere.
Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital.
I'm not anti-crypto, but it is kind of silly to keep pretending it's close to or even on track to realizing its early promise.
And yet again a bunch of tech-enthusiasts are forced to face that fact that their breakthrough technology does not infact lead to the techno-utopia they imagined, and instead is heavily directed by human factors, and leveraged/exploited by the same types of systems and entities that had the most power/influence prior to it.
Can't wait till we start again on this cycle with widely deployed machine learning systems in about 15 years. The same exact arguments of "it's just a technology." "It doesn't matter how it will be used in society." "By nature it's more [democratic/egalatarian/...]" "It will help to remove people problems by being tech".
Which will yet again change to: "Wait what?" "Not like that." "It's not supposed to be used like that". "It's been corrupted and taken over by X. Who could've foreseen this??"
If you're designing tech without designing how it will interact with society, you're just designing foot-guns. Hopefully at somepoint as an industry we'll get past this stage from teenage "look what I can do isn't this cool" to resonsible adult "Yes I have the freedome/ability to do this, and here's how I'll do it responsibly."
However, Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake, so this won't be relevant once that transition is complete.
2. If the centralized legal system is needed, then what's the point? The immutable crypto ledger say GO, the people with guns say NO. Which one's right?
Said in a different way to do all financial transactions on the blockchain would use a lot more energy then it currently does.
140TWh out of 170000TWh is about 0.8%. relative impact is bigger than 0.08%. Coal is 36% of the power mix. Under the assumption that most bitcoin mining happens connected to the grid (seems reasonable) and that these grids contain coal powerplants (also reasonable with the exception of Iceland), that 0.08% translates to 0.22% of global coal based emissions. On a global scale, being responsible for 1/500th is a lot (for me at least)
the numbers are more relatable when looking at absolute impact. Assuming a average coal power plant of 600MW (you can find bigger, but this is a representative plant near me[1]). That’s 5TWh/yr per plant. Bitcoin then represents 28 of such coal powerplants running at 100% capacity 24/7. That - to me - seems like a massive amount of CO2 for a niche application.
And if I read your source correctly, that’s just bitcoin
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale
Coal is about 36%
2) Beyond censorship, one needs safety. It may not be censored, but its certainly traceable, so how useful is the lack of censorship without anonymity?
3) If we take it that it solves this (both 1 and 2), then moving on to the other part of the question, how does it solve it better than any other distributed infrastructure? You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth (like the gold mining analogy in the payment article), and without the insane environmental impact.
4) Let's say it solves 1, and 2, but we can't do better and I am wrong in 3. Is this problem worth the massive environmental cost to solve?