Maybe people wouldn't repeat the 2012 talking points 10 years later if crypto had improved in any way since then. But no, all that has happened is the growth of a massive speculative bubble on top, while the fundamental issues remain the same.

Remittances and online retail is already done quite well with centralized systems. "Trustless decentralization" is only relevant when you are doing things illegal. Which, as it turns out, is the main usecase of cryptocurrency.

“Nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide” goes back even further than 2012.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm saying. What I am saying is that cryptocurrencies are so horrible in every way except anonymity that the ONLY reason you would use it is for illegal activities, speculation, or paranoia.

i personally use it as a passive, diversified savings instrument, but i don't mess with altcoins or trading. most crypto is actually exceptionally bad for anonymity, worse than cash, and the proportion of criminal activity it facilitates is 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than the conventional economy: https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

it is in fact so bad for anonymity that i suspect you have not read much about it!

i don't disagree that it features a lot of hype bubbles and ridiculous speculation, but that's hardly specific to cryptocurrency. how's your local housing market been looking lately?

It isn’t even that good at anonymity for the most frequent use case compared to alternatives. By far the most transactions that may benefit anonymity are local and involve relatively low values. Cash is a perfect fit for that and gives you even more (and a lot easier) anonymity then cryptocoins.

Cryptocoins only prove them selfs superior if the transaction is located to far away to conveniently travel, or involves such large sums that gathering or carrying as cash becomes inconvenient (or impossible). I would think that over 99.99% of people never engage in such transactions where they additionally require—or even prefer—anonymity.

s/cryptocurrencies/encrypted communcation

And does the mainstream crypto outside Monero help you to hide things? You are still dealing with some actors and surely they keep records if you don't solely do face to face activities. In which case why even bother and not just go with Euros or dollars...

this is the exact same argument as politicians saying that encryption is only useful for child pornographers

I thought this too, but then looked into and saw that fiat currency use for illicit things is an order of magnitude more then crypto (as a percentage of total use).

zero knowledge proofs have other uses, for example proving to your family members no-one has bought the same gift for the same person, without revealing the nature of the gift.

Can you link a couple of sources that show companies that successfully leverage this use cases?

i run a small retail business that only accepts crypto and it's been doing fine

Is it a small laundromat, or do you just not want to accept money from all customers?

What do you sell/provide?

Could you tell us why you chose to do that?

partly to seize a market niche and avoid fees, partly as a proof of concept for others (i wrote up the technical details), and partly because the product is crypto-adjacent, which most CC processors won't touch. i highly recommend the software i use, you can fairly easily turn it into an automated vending machine for digital goods that relies on no middlemen: https://btcpayserver.org/

my business is not even close to legally questionable but i prefer not to dox myself on this account. i found a friendly CC processor that i'm waiting on approval from, so it will be hybrid eventually.

A trustless descentralized system that manages to process a handful of operations a second by spending as much energy as a country?

remittances - money laundering.

online retail - drug & illegal sales - essentially money laundering

trustless decentralized computational systems - There is still trust, it's just in the code. Which also tells you how "decentralized" they are.

i urge you to think about things a little bit before talking

Trustless or distributed trust (up until the point of a 51% attack)?

fair enough, but in the same way that conventional systems are only 'secure and encrypted up until the point of being beaten with a wrench'

Conventional systems don't tell you all the time how they save the trust issue.

And conventional systems are old and grown and have a ton of security features and is still getting finetuned.

if i want to send money to a family member in bangalore, i don't have to trust anybody by using crypto. this isn't some nebulous promise, it is intrinsic to the design of the system -- i perform a transaction in my bed room, and the money is transferred to a new ownership address, which nobody else has control over. this trivial use case is profound and there is no parallel for it in the conventional financial system. that isn't to say it has perfect security, but it eliminates the need for middlemen while preserving the benefits of digital systems. it's optimized for autonomy and freedom over safety -- giving someone the power the revoke transactions can also be used against you. "grown and have a ton of security features and is still getting finetuned" is also true of crypto

> ...which nobody else has control over.

Control may be distributed, though it certainly is there. And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

> ...but it eliminates the need for middlemen...

Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least. And if it's L2 then you're trusting that middleman. Then for the family to get useful fiat from crypto they need an exchange.

> And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

what is your threat model here? what practical attack do you think is going to happen?

>Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least.

miners are not middlemen, they have zero control or ability to interfere with the transfer of funds. wiring money involves handing control of the funds to a middleman like a bank, who you have to trust to do what you ask. there are incentive structures but it is ultimately a human system. this is not the case with eg bitcoin -- any individual miner or validator who didn't want to process your transaction would simply be replaced by one of the thousands of others. if you're savvy you can simply run your own node.

They control the whole network if they want.

You make it out as the miners would not own the Blockchain which is just wrong.

And it's not that you can run a node, you actually should run a node.

After all decentralization doesn't work if only big players own it.

But now you need to be tech savvy as you said it yourself.

And every Blockchain has this problem and the fact that there are many Blockchains makes this eve worse.