You can have much lower transaction fees than in Visa / Mastercard (which sometimes you can't even legally charge customer with) so there's a bigger scam by your definition.
One has to find someone willing to trade to get goods -_- because dollars instantly turn into chicken soup when you're hungry.
For fractional banking you need a trusted system, this is outside of cryptocurrency scope but you can do it atop of cryptocurrecnies just fine, look at exchanges.
I do not. I am talking of the only way money enters this system. If there would be no money in the system no one would care. At the end of the day, in this time and place, our society decided money is the ultimate goal. I don't like it but it's what it is.
> You can have much lower transaction fees than in Visa / Mastercard
First of all: it's nonsensical to compare money to ... money? the problem with crypto"currency" is that it's not money and it's crossing that barrier which makes players lose money. Second, it's not inherent to the money system to use Visa / Mastercard. You can use other ways to transfer money -- but again, this is irrelevant.
To highlight this, Americans are grappling with Zelle (which is just rolled out) and ACH while their neighbors to the north have Interac running relatively seamlessly and Europeans have SEPA and even some countries have local feeless/reasonably priced quick transfer systems like Swish/iDeal, and discussing how Asians handle their transfer and payments would just shake heads on why those systems aren't available stateside (I'll pick India's UPI and the (mainland) Chinese system as representatives, but that doesn't mean similar systems aren't available elsewhere).
Brazil has one [0]: instant transfers to any account, 24/7, zero fees (at least for now). You can buy pizza, taxi rides and pay your rent with it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(electronic_payment_system...
Ultimately, someone needs to eat the cost of that. For barter, you need to eat the cost of wrongly-advertised products. For paper money, you need to eat the cost of either actively rejecting fake paper money or accept that from time to time you will have fake and unredeemable paper money. For coins, same thing, you need to verify that the weight is indeed what's expected or accept that some fake coins will end up in your coffers. For electronic systems (regardless of the form), someone needs to run the computers that verifies that transaction A did indeed happen.
Some pretend that only centralised electronic systems are the only ones having costs, while in fact it's far from the truth. Ironically, the credit card game in the US where they jack up the merchant fees way, way up is a counterexample that capitalism is fostering a pro-consumer market (I'm not saying that capitalism per se is broken, it's just the fact that capitalist policies in this area doesn't work out great). In Europe where they implemented caps, "rewards" type credit cards have gone down, but regular credit card and debit card usage have gone up. This is because the "rewards" system isn't pro-consumer, it looks like pro-consumer but instead it actually benefits only those who massively use them to the detriment of others. Unlike "rewards" type credit cards, regular credit cards acts more like a tool that can make or break finances who uses them not correlated to the frequency of use, and debit cards are essentially plastic wallets.
If I am a private financial institution, I’m having a grand old time converting the first 1% of dollars to crypto. I can still spend all of that money on salaries and construction and mega yachts. But when we are at 50%? You have half the dollars in the world. You can’t possibly spend them. This isn’t income any longer, it’s a liability. The only way to get to 90% is if you trigger hyperinflation.
Eventually to beat fiat currency you actually have to win the government over. They collected gold coins and issues dollars, because it’s fiat currency and you can do that. How do you collect all of the silver and not issue fiat currency? How do you collect all the dollars and not do the same?
Magic thinking. It’s all magic thinking, and I’m too old for this shit.
For the ultimate goal, I'd say that's wealth / power.
Honestly I've stepped back from the entire crypto space for a while now, the whole space pisses me off, it's all hype and no progress. Or rather, the work that was needed to be done has now been done (feeless, near instantaneous, anonymous, and consensus based transfers of money) is now possible, and yet I still hear the screams about bitcoin daily. It's an outdated technology. A paradigm shift for software for sure, but a now long outdated one.
I'm sure bitcoin maximalists will reply in rage, but I can't convince you to see the truth through your speculative emotions, so I won't even try.
You clearly misunderstood the OP. They’re talking about the fees to convert fiat to XYZ crypto. Where can you buy NANO with fiat & zero overhead?
rather the transaction fees.
Speculators can generate a lot of noise but it also creates a toxic atmosphere where anyone spending feels like they’re the sucker for not holding it instead. That’s how after a decade there are a tiny number of non-Bitcoin businesses which would notice if Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow.
I thought even Bitcoin maximalists have given up on this nonsense by now? Fiat money is legal tender backed by the taxation power of a nation state and ultimately, the monopoly on violence. This is why I always write crypto"currency" -- even naming so, crypto shills have pulled an ingenious move pretending their scam is a currency which it utterly is not.
This is why I described it as a very weak one because it doesn’t even have the commitment of a bank behind it and the extremely highly operating costs means there’s a real long-term risk of not being able to find a buyer.
Cash: Not backed by anything but literal 'trust' in the government. It's fiat, and has been since 1971.
Government Bonds: similar to cash, also relies on the trust and "too big to fail" ethos.
Houses: Greater fool theory. People realized they can simply ban building them to make theirs worth more, as the remaining home supplies are in far-off, economically irrelevant (undesirable) areas.
Stocks: Over 90% are owned by the top 10%. Someone had to make it to sell it to someone else, just like crypto.
The question is: whose value is being lost, and do they care enough to take action?
They’re the same old running on different infrastructure: assets, shares of ownership in a business/protocol, certificate of ownership of a digital item, and yes occasionally, currencies
Yes, that's the current pension system.
1. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to win
2. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to lose
3. No one is set to gain by advocating for the "current pension system".
Pension fund managers are guaranteed to win, and they win more as life expectancy goes down.
> 2. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to lose
Literally everybody else loses, as inflation eats away at the buying power of older peoples' ongoing or soon-to-start pension payments, and young people pay in to a system that there is now no guarantee they will earn from in 40 years time.
> 3. No one is set to gain by advocating for the "current pension system".
Plenty of people stand to gain, see above, as well as politicians interested in protecting the status quo and electability above all else.
Maybe the current US pension is set up like this, maybe not, that's debatable perhaps. But it's not an inherent feature of the systems everywhere unlike the problem with crypto"currencies".
If benefits-defined pensions are any indicator then both are unsustainable, and certainly not the future.
Or the central bank decides to flip a switch and create trillions of dollars in money with the stoke of a key and distributes it to parties it feels needs them (mostly banks and other financial parties [0]).
This is also a very short term limited view of money. A stable currency is not the norm for most of history. Even today's relatively stable system in western democracies is very short.
If you take a longer, broader view of currency and monetary policy you'll see that the system is not sustainable an there is value in an alternative money supply thats based on rules and not reliant on the wisdom of central bankers appointed by politicians. Whether crypto is the answer is different question. But to think that somehow western central bankers are beyond approach and figured it all out in the last 50 years is naive.
Ideal for malware ransom payments.
I can send $1000 USD to someone in France who wants EUR for $7 with Western Union.
How does Bitcoin or Ethereum let me do this for less?
Retail FOREX is pretty similar. It's a zero sum game with broker's fees, plus you're playing the game with a lot of very experienced, very well funded institutional investors.
I think crypto has basically eaten any interest in retail FOREX, but a few years back it was gaining some traction and I was amazed at how many people were playing a (typically highly leveraged) game that was clearly not in their advantage.
The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However, with transaction fees it becomes a scam because there's a set of players who are guaranteed to win and there's another set of players who, en masse, are guaranteed to lose. It utterly doesn't matter what you do with your crypto"currency", this is the underpinning scam of it.
And once you entered the game, the only way for you to not lose money is to find a greater fool who will take over your crypto"currency", everyone who owns some becomes a proponent of it. It's an ingenious scam.
And no, nothing in the real world is like this. In the real world, the amount of currency increases when a bank extends a loan which then creates more value by such things as being using as capital, allowing you to enjoy a home now instead of decades later and so forth. Also, stocks are not a zero sum game -- companies actually create value and so forth.