Paying someone in instantly with less fees in a decentralised P2P manner with an energy efficient and stable blockchain.
I see no cryptocurrency that can do this above legitimately. Most of them are owned by questionable foundations, crypto scammers and power hungry VCs.
Just because you don't doesn't mean nobody does.
A digital Las Vegas casino, where everyone is 'hodling', trying to get rich by losing their money while not using it for payments at all.
Still doesn't change the fact that it's all a house of cards based on waste and still exhibits a ponzi scheme (Proof of Stake is still bad) with no value.
I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets. Is that what you mean by other usecases?
What does crypto do better that the current system can't do? I cannot think of any in crypto that the current system already does better.
I can see that Monero is a complete success story where Bitcoin failed in its original vision. But then again it can't get out of being used outside of darknet markets, so it is generally unusable and banned by most companies, exchanges and fiat off-ramps.
It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
That ain't a fact; again, proof-of-stake exists and is used for no less than 3 of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
> and still exhibits a ponzi scheme [...] with no value
Just because you refuse to see the value in something doesn't mean it's "a ponzi scheme with no value".
> Proof of Stake is still bad
Care to quantify how?
> I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets.
Really? You're incapable of thinking how it might be used for licit trade? Or for decentralized finance applications? Or for arbitrary computing, in the case of e.g. Ethereum and Cardano? The technology has already been used for these things.
> What does crypto do better that the current system can't do?
Sending and receiving money electronically with minimum fees, maximum speed, and no limitations on how much or how little of your money you can send or receive. No, I ain't talking about Bitcoin; I'm talking about the countless other cryptocurrencies that have made transaction costs and speeds an actual priority - you know, almost as if blockchains are a new technology and not done evolving.
Hell, even if we do talk about Bitcoin in that context, its "slow" transaction settlement time is still considerably faster than those of credit card networks; I'm sure you've noticed that when a credit card transaction is "accepted" it still takes a day or more to actually move out of "pending" status and fully reflect on your card statement, whereas with Bitcoin the same level of assurance (if not more) happens within 10 minutes on average.
> It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
It doesn't need to; not every single cryptocurrency needs to succeed at its goals for the concept of cryptocurrency to be useful or beneficial to society.
Your argument is still at cost to the planet and other people's money in this MLM scheme that we cannot deny exists.
Proof of Stake is pointless and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins.
Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta, just don't work and scale at all. You might as well use the current system instead.
We both can see that DeFi applications are mostly scams [0] leading to people losing their money or having an expensive and pointless refund process when it all goes wrong. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/24/22800995/constitutiondao...
These are by and large wrappers around the existing systems; they "fix" it the same way things like Lightning fix Bitcoin's transaction speed (for example): by offloading off the main network.
> 13 years and still no progress.
Credit cards have had a 20-or-so year head start, and they only recently (i.e. around the same time as the advent of cryptocurrency) started to significantly evolve beyond magnetic stripes. Wire transfers are even worse off in terms of evolutionary speed. 13 years is still young.
> Your argument is still at cost to the planet
Not with proof of stake.
> and other people's money in this MLM scheme
By this logic literally every asset bought and sold in a market is an "MLM scheme".
> Proof of Stake is pointless
It only seems that way if you're deliberately ignorant of its vast advantages over both proof of work and centralized systems - particularly, the sheer lack of a "cost to the planet" and the ability to scale without ever needing to incur such an externalized cost.
> and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins
There are proof-of-stake blockchains like Cardano that actively penalize centralization and encourage decentralization (specifically by adjusting stake rewards such that any stake pool above some equilibrium becomes unprofitable).
> Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta
But not all; again, 3 of the top 10 are already proof-of-stake, with billions of dollars' worth of currency being transacted every day. Some are still being actively developed; that doesn't make them "beta", just like how Linux is both production-ready and still actively developed.
> just don't work and scale at all
The users of them - and the billions of dollars transacted through them - beg to differ. And we're still in the early stages; there is still plenty of room for scalability to improve: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-sol...
Is that your position on this, or am I missing something?
In 1999, you probably couldn’t use a Discover card in your local shop either, 13 years after Discover was founded. It took many years and many lawsuits to make headway against Visa/Mastercard.
Universal acceptance isn’t the right measuring stick here.
Even if a shop uses either of these cryptocurrencies, it is comically slow to be used as such anyway rendering them useless. Not to mention the volatility impact.
So please tell me retail shop I can make a purchase using cryptocurrency that is fast, truly decentralised, eco-friendly and doesn't have exorbitant fees.
We both know the obvious reasons that cryptocurrencies enable rampant ransomware [0], multiple rug pull scams [1], pointless NFTs [2] and is totally unregulated, I'm seeing crypto bros heralding 'we need decentralisation and web3' when this is all owned by VCs [3] And don't get me started on the Tether fraud [4].
I was being _generous_ in seeing if cryptocurrencies passes the 'retail shop test' and it can't even do that without burning the planet up making useless computations.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-treasury-warns-c...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-sc...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-milli...
- Spam has been a problem since the inception of email, and the majority of email is spam. We don't ban email.
- Baseball cards are similarly pointless. So are in-game cosmetic items. We haven't banned those.
The problems you're describing are mostly unrelated to crypto, have existed, and will continue to exist whether crypto remains.
This doesn't mean there are no valid criticisms of crypto - energy concerns are real, and need to be addressed - but if you wish to ban crypto for the reasons you've cited, you need to widen the scope of what you hope to ban.
Once banned that is where they will reside, I hear that Monero is thriving in that (illicit) environment, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum (paired with Tornado)
But for now banning is likely.
Come on. There are people in this very thread who are using it to evade draconian currency controls their governments have imposed. Are they lying?
Whether the positives outweigh the negatives in Crypto is subject to debate. But to refuse to acknowledge that ANY positives exist is outright bizarre.
There are lots of things I strongly dislike (eg: religion, guns) but to insist that there are absolutely zero positive aspects to these things in certain contexts would be intellectually dishonest.
While I don't directly pay with crypto, I still use it to pay for things at my local shop.
The UK has banned crypto derivatives: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-bans-sale-cry... and Binance. I suspect further action is coming against unregistered crypto outfits marketing to UK consumers.
If you're referring to proof-of-stake, that technology has already arrived, seeing as how multiple of the top 10 blockchains by market cap (Solana, Cardano, Terra) use it - and consequently do not have the negative impact on the environment that e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently have.
Thinking specifically about the identity space for a moment, it certainly brings a new approach to solving a set of problems that still has yet to be solved well.
Should something be banned on the grounds that it’s not ready yet, or hasn’t evolved fast enough?
Plenty of tech on the cutting edge will appear this way before it has matured.
Back in 2022, we’re now looking at a technology that has not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some utility.
I'd argue there's a bit of false equivalence in this paragraph, but for sake of argument:
Leaded gasoline also solved an actual problem, and the industry innovated/evolved beyond that.
Facebook solved an actual problem, and created many more. I still recognize its value even if I refuse to use it myself.
I'm sure there are edge cases, but history is not generally on the side of those who have pre-emptively banned things before they come to fruition.
The problem I see with this current line of discussion is that most proponents of banning throw the baby out with the bathwater, and pretend this is all a single product called "crypto".
Banning "crypto" would be like banning insulation because of the issues with Asbestos.
And also because it’s not necessary; existing regulation will get us most of the way:
- if you are, in effect, selling a security, let this be regulated this like any other security
- if you are, in effect, running a bank, etc.
- if your coin X acts like an intermediary for transferring money to hostile jurisdiction Y, then regulate transfers to X like transfers to Y. Forbid these if necessary.
- if your manufacturing process is needlessly wasteful then forbid this manufacturing process (globally) under threat of forbidding your product
Etc
Would you risk life in prison?
The state has tanks and drones that rain death and destruction from the sky. What could the crypto people possibly do to counter that?
It would be very different if some crypto fanatics started an insurgency over wanting to have their computer money. I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
Do you think a domestic occupation would somehow go better?
> I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
In order for a cryptocurrency ban to actually have any real effect on the actual crypto fanatics (i.e. the ones who would be willing to take up arms to defend cryptocurrency), the US would have to pull some very draconian online censorship measures that would absolutely peeve the average American. Short of that, it would be comparable to the US' existing "ban" (via the DMCA) of digital piracy: pretty much ineffective, without pirates needing to take up arms as outright insurgents to defend it.
How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about this isn't going to solve anything.