You spend and transact mostly in fiat, you borrow in fiat. You save some percent of your earnings in more finite stores of value (you and everyone else already do this so the concept is not controversial).
The idea is explained here: Ctrl + F "two monies"
http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...
You're honestly going to claim that an asset that is down more than 40% YTD is a hedge against inflation?
Also, you do realize this point of view "muh down YTD" is a meme comment yes? Stare at any 6month period of any chart and you can make any argument you want. Are stocks not inflation hedges generally? Yet they are down YTD too. In the period of monetary expansion from 2020 through 2021, did not BTC do just fine hedging this monetary expansion? Even in Wiemar Germany, gold did not go up in a straight line, it was extremely volatile. BTC is more volatile than almost anything else that still long term has worked to hedge expansion of liquidity. BTC moves in line with growth or contraction of liquidity better than anything else. Just look at the charts.
Additionally, my point is this is the framework. It can also be a failed experiment. But there is no scenarios where a finite asset can replace fiat currency. There is theoretical basis for same asset to replace other forms of scarce stores of value. In principle, BTC is a SoV asset, not a transaction currency or unit of account by virtue of its technical fundamentals (un-inflatable supply, expensive to transact, slow).
> BTC moves in line with growth or contraction of liquidity better than anything else.
> In the period of monetary expansion from 2020 through 2021, did not BTC do just fine hedging this monetary expansion?
How is it a hedge if it moves in line with liquidity?
Why is expansion of liquidity is something one would need to hedge against?
"mitigate the potential negative effects of" I guess..
>How is it a hedge if it moves in line with liquidity?
I don't know what you're asking? Liquidity expansion inflates assets, and BTC inflates more than almost anything, especially over a multi-year time frame.
It hedges just holding cash. It hedges the opportunity cost of not investing while invest-able assets are going up in value, and wages on a relative basis are not.
>Why is expansion of liquidity is something one would need to hedge against?
Sort of a philosophical question lol. Maybe you don't. If one wants to invest at all (why though?) this is a framework for thinking about that process.
What the everloving fuck are you talking about? Bitcoin is deflationary to the point that nearly everyone uses it as an "investment" vehicle, not to actually transfer money. Do you even know what inflation is?
The control of the BTC is maintained with possession of the private key stored in the bearer asset cash.
Holding gold certificates does not enforce any fundamental claim or control of the actual asset the backs the paper; possession of the physical gold does. You need to trust somehow that the holder will exchange the gold for the paper in the future, as well as actually have the gold at that time.
I don't know if it exactly like gold certificates, but it sounds pretty close to "I'll pay you with cashews" to me. It's not terrible - I bet a many people exchange goods like this every day.
Since we can't know the numbers for fiat, we can at least try to understand it for Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, sources seem to point towards the number being closer to ~2% of wallets hold ~70% of all Bitcoin.
If this is a better/worse distribution than fiat, we will never know.
Bitcoin is a nice mirror to look into. We need to eliminate money, go full star trek post scarcity utopia.
Electricity is scarce, and unholy amounts of it are needed to create this post-money utopia.
Could you source that claim? I find it absurd that you think such studies haven’t considered crypto exchange wallets in their analysis…
It's all public knowledge.
It was farmer that turned his farm into direct sales, used an Uber like service to deliver and used DASH as point of sale and store of value...is what I did illegal??
There are a ton of uses cases out there where blockchain tech can provide a faster better solution, not every single case but it's there.
Even the 'criminal' side is nothing compared to the USD and how it's used. That same argue applies even stronger to fiat currencies.
A bankless note isn't a new idea, ops solution is novel and well thought out and there are markets that it solves pain points.
Ordering food online vs. Terrawatts of energy wasted, Asics hardware and GPU prices and the created co2 of all of that.
Mmhhh difficult very difficult
Lol, compare and contrast apples to apples first and you'll see the cost in energy is negligible.
Also what do when POS drops and ruins your current strawman argument.
There was zero other way to pay for it, people were literally walking over to Columbia to get money they could use.
Anyway I can see your a bad faith actor, GLHF!
Don't get me wrong I am sure bitcoin is worse in terms of power usage, but not every crypto is automatically worse than what we have right now.
It's easy to make it renewable with benefits to us. The solar panel on a bank building is giving energy to people.
And I'm not saying that the current banking system is perfect (it actually optimizes itself quite well) but it has much more features while Bitcoin/crypto doesn't have real solutions for huge issues.
Fraud, scams, money laundry, investment tools, sepa, bank account recovery, global market regulations, sanctions Support etc.
And it does all of that with billions and billions of assets.
While Bitcoin consumes energy.
In an utopian society we don't need banks and no PoW crypto but that's not what is critical now.
Besides aluminum smelter, due to high energy costs there are other critical industry affected as well: paper making and glass making. Bottles for example.
You seem to have nailed the use case well. This is exactly why'd someone use something like this.
I'm not saying it's a good idea (nor a bad one), just that those things are "features" in the eyes of the cryptocurrency users and proponents, not bugs.
In lieu of an elected government and sane central bank, monetary policy will be controlled by a cartel of your locality's most powerful gangs and paramilitaries.
There's a reason the example quoted is always Star Trek and not Somalia.
It’s easy to get paid in BTC if you land a crypto job, but it’s the groceries part that I can’t really imagine yet.
Usually a BTC maximalist means that within the context of crypto, they are BTC only and aggressively and passionately reject every other crypto token. This is what you call call a common maximalist stance.
Out of that group, a small minority is a believer in "hyperbitcoinization". This is an event where BTC becomes the dominant asset class, at the expense of gold, bonds, etc, with a market cap prediction for BTC ranging from 10-100T.
Even people with that (unlikely) hope, do not claim any currency replacement, only an asset shift.
So given the trilemma then, it sounds like Bitcoin maximalism means fixed exchange rates (since all countries use BTC), and free flow of capital (since that's the BTC ideal), which means no country can set independent monetary policy.
So you essentially have the Eurozone problems but across the entire world. Seems like many countries would try to avoid picking that side of the trilemma.
Everyone's a fiat incumbent in the long run.
Yes, that's a good thing.
> Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.
Currency that can't be manipulated or devalued by the state or central banks. In other words: eliminates the potential for exactly what's taking place worldwide right now.
The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.
1. Unpeg it from a gold standard.
2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon.
The power and greed were too intoxicating.
Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation.
Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope.
> 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon.
Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.
Until it backfires and creates the potential for a nuclear war.
Especially crypo-enthusiasts or even libertarians (I consider my self tangent to both these groups).
Gold is terrible for the following reasons.
* Supply is unknown so your market cap value is volatile to any sudden prospected windfall. This one is ESPECIALLY bad if you are a central government. Why would a central bank want to be beholden (with respect to purchasing power) to some random gold find that devalues the currency unexpectedly? (see wiki article about Mansa Musa who just went around destroying local economies because he just literally threw his gold around.)
* Gold is not very divisible, in that there are real costs to trying to divide the mint.
* Gold comes with high storage/security costs (especially if it is your currency back).
* Gold isn't really that transferable, the stuff is a pain in the ass to actually move around.
Gold has two things going for it.
1. It has manufacturing uses that provide real world value
2. Through out time people have a perception that it should have value. This perception spans across cultures and geography.
A website showing charts that demonstrate a shift in data since 1971 is not a conspiracy theory. That requires...an actual theory.
The Austrian school of economics radically simplifies economic theory to an absurd degree (I assume that's what you're signalling you follow given your statements). It treats empirical evidence as heresy. The only driving force behind all of their conspiracy theories and racist/anti-semitic dog-whistling is a belief that governments are evil and all inflation is bad. It's really reductive and anti-intellectual.
Inflation isn't inherently bad and not all inflation is the same.
In terms of geopolitics the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system has had many benefits. Much of the world eventually recovered by the mid-80s by the economic crises of the late-60s. Also in the history books.
War and debt are bedfellows. Everyone knows this. Also well known are the economic consequences of creating such debt by going to war. It turns out mostly authoritarian psychopaths will go to war or make crypto-currencies official currencies despite the economic consequences and impacts it would have on their citizens.
Because fiat enables them to be as much. If you can print money, you don't need public consent to go blow people out of the water, nor to justify obscene spending on the military. Every war the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam has been a banker war, not a state war.
What's reductive and anti-intellectual is deluding people into believing that giving the government (or even worse, "economists" or central bankers) authority over their wealth is, somehow, going to multiply or protect it when we have ample examples to the contrary.
To your point, governments historically are evil and inflation is bad (it's arguably an inherent property of government as you're giving absolute power to the unproductive class). The idea that it's not (MMT) is the rationalization of a failed economic strategy that's put everyone's well-being in the crosshairs.
The idea that any of that is untrue is a result of unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination (or, in certain cases, someone who has directly benefited from the scheme). Any way you shake it, to think that what's happening isn't the result of malfeasance is denial, wholesale.
Mayer Rothschild codified the potential for this way of thinking with his Economic Inductance theory:
> Currency, or deposit loan accounts, has the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (interests). When applied gradually, the public adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up, depending on their resilience capacity.
Flip on the television if you need insight into what people do when they "crack up."
All inflation is bad is a highly reductive argument. It is much more complicated than that and most economic models indicate that a certain amount of inflation is a good thing for overall growth. This is why, in the US, the Federal Reserve targets 2% inflation. There are a lot of positive effects to inflation and trying to control it so that it grows moderately is a good thing. There are decades of research as to why this is the case even though I suspect it won't sway you I suggest you try reading it if you are seriously interested in educating yourself about what you're talking about.
Do I believe the current economic conditions are the result of a scheme among elite bankers? No. A conspiracy involving more than two people is not sustainable and not a conspiracy. Financial regulation is managed in most Western countries by democratic representation. In the US they created the Federal Reserve system. If you want to see what they get up to they publish their board meeting notes, research, reports, results of votes, etc. It's open information.
If Americans have a problem with the system they're free to vote for representation that will introduce laws that will change the way the Federal Reserve is run... although in my experience very few people even know what the Fed does or that they have a website.
I don't need the thought experiments of a long-dead banker who didn't live to see the formation of the Federal Reserve. The quote you're citing is antiquated. Banks today don't make money on deposits like they did in this Rothschild's day and people aren't worried about runs on a bank's reserves anymore.
Although if they're invested in crypto via Tether or any other stable coin they ought to be.
At the end of the day, now matter what happens, somehow the system always calibrates to ensure that the typical human being is a wage slave for life. Spectacular improvements in productivity and technology are somehow never returned to the worker, the system then just increases the cost of living, or creates new jobs, many of no real purpose.
It's a system to both maximize work and consumption, which is as anti-economical as it gets. It's also a system that crashes when it doesn't grow. It's also a system that completely ignores every externality and wrecks everything in its path.
But yes, I'm sure you're right that from within this system, everything you say is technically correct.
I am criticizing the implication that the banking system is run by vast conspiracy and that the gold standard was a better system.
> John F. Kennedy, 1961
Kennedy was talking about the Cold War and the need for and limits of secrecy in governance during times of war.
Yeah, dude.
> Do I believe the current economic conditions are the result of a scheme among elite bankers? No.
You're their ideal customer.
> A conspiracy involving more than two people is not sustainable and not a conspiracy.
You, like many people, highly underestimate the role of hierarchy in a conspiracy. The people at the top don't have to tell you it's a conspiracy or explain why they're having you do what you're doing. They just say "hey, manager, go do this" (who wants to keep their job and will do something, even if it's irrational) and then that edict trickles down till you get to a lower-level worker who's only concern is "will I get my paycheck?"
It's why it's possible and why it works. Most people are timid cattle that are deathly afraid of their "superiors" and this logic enables psychopathic behavior quite well. Couple that with folks like yourself who are desperate to explain away evil in the world and you have a pretty kick ass machine for corruption.
> The quote you're citing is antiquated.
Who decides that? You?
Monetary policy in the US is federally regulated by the Federal Reserve. Their meeting minutes, votes, etc are all public information. We all benefit from this regulation. Because of it, banks are forced to disclose their finances as part of their SEC filings. Ever notice how they claim to care about the environment and the Paris Agreements and yet their investments in oil and gas have increased in the last couple of years?
Some people have because regulation does work some times.
Bitcoin's supply is regulated via a timed algorithm, meaning, it doles out an increasingly diminished amount of Bitcoin on a pre-timed cycle that will end in ~2140. In order to get that Bitcoin, "miners" need to perform work (via calculation of a nonce which as an auto-adjusting difficulty of computation—the "proof of work") that can't be faked or manipulated.
The beauty of that is that, unlike a central bank, no one can go and change a variable in a database to say "omg we have more money now!"
Most people are panicky and hair-triggered, very few are patient. Especially with a new technology that has the potential to make outsized returns early on, of course, you're going to get a lot of gamblers entering and exiting the market.
This is why you see dips when headlines like "China bans mining!" or "Crypto is doomed, look at Luna!" are printed. It conflates things and uses people's ignorance against them (not unlike traditional financial markets/instruments).
Controlling the supply of a coin does not mean the coin's actual value can't be manipulated by dedicated actors, and in the case of cryptocurrency, the "mystique" of the tech behind it, the ease of creating new systems on top of it that are complicated for ordinary users to understand, and the general fear people have of missing out on a speculative investment (as well as the general fear they have that they might be in a speculative bubble) make coins like Bitcoin particularly vulnerable to specific kinds of social manipulation, scams, and phishing, all of which end up affecting the price of the coin.
The fed can't release new Bitcoins, sure, but in exchange, now random celebrities on Twitter can cause sell-offs and spikes in value; random Discord groups can pump coins so they can sell off and make a profit before they crash. You haven't gotten rid of currency manipulation, you've just changed who's doing it.
This is why anything that isn't Bitcoin is referred to as a shitcoin, and why the conflating of Bitcoin with everything else is so problematic. The former is designed to prevent that manipulation, the latter leverages it.
I mean, if nothing else, shitcoins crashing/spiking regularly cause Bitcoin's price to adjust as well. Tera isn't Bitcoin, but that didn't make Bitcoin immune from volatility when Tera's price crashed; the manipulation techniques that work on shitcoins seem to fairly regularly have knock-on effects on Bitcoin as well.
I don't buy that social manipulation has no influence on Bitcoin.
What is the incentive for Average Joe to use BTC for transactions while USD exists?
The average Joe will be the last person to use it daily, just like every other technological invention. That's why they're average.
I didn't say that.
> you're telling me that Bitcoin's price stabilizing is reliant on it being the only possible currency that people can use
Nor did I say that.
---
Obsoletion of the incumbent options will come through a few means:
1. Hyperinflation (where I think we're headed). Basically, what happened in Germany in the 1920s. Instead of a Rentenmark, though, we'll get CBDCs which are a hyper-limited, state-issued digital currency that's used as a political weapon. They'll give it to people for "free" to encourage adoption (because they can mint as much as they want) but not tell them that it expires or can't be used for certain purchases the regime disagrees with. This will create a financial caste system where free/wealthy people use Bitcoin and the proletariat use the CBDC (i.e, they become slaves of the state). I think this is most likely as state power will fight to the death to not give up control of money (that's their only control against the people) but they will tolerate an "elite" class that can bribe their way out of control.
2. Natural transition. As more options for accepting Bitcoin (e.g., if Square/Block add lightning payments to their terminals, circumventing Visa/MC/etc.) become available and people understand it, they'll be incentivized to use it via discounts, perks, etc. Think early days of "order online" and how a lot of people scuffed at that.
It would be unfortunate then if there was a large amount of evidence that Bitcoin's price was partially tied to the stock market's health, and that global volatility and market issues in general affected the value of cryptocurrency just like they affect the price/value of everything else.
> 2. Natural transition
I think this is what a lot of us are getting at; Bitcoin as it stands is worse at transactions then pretty much every other currency and platform today. It's not competitive with those platforms for most people. That's not to say that it has no usecase at all, but for mass-market adoption and for the average person's use-case, Bitcoin is an awful transaction method.
So when people tell me that I need to think long term, I'm curious how they expect to get to the long term given that in the short term Bitcoin is basically awful for mass-market usage and isn't going to be adopted by ordinary people for ordinary transactions until after its fundamental problems like volatility are solved. So it all feels pretty circular.
You're telling me that stabilization requires increased use. In your words, "a system like Bitcoin if adopted at a standard-level (i.e., long-term prospects) would not see fluctuations in price because it wouldn't be able to".
I am telling you that Bitcoin won't get increased use if it doesn't (at least) stabilize. So it doesn't really matter whether Bitcoin would have fluctuations at that point, because nobody who's not a speculative investor, dedicated to the cause, or an extremely niche user wants to deal with the fluctuations in order to use it as a currency today.
Bitcoin's supply cannot be manipulated, unlike fiat. The currency pair BTC/USD is very much manipulated, as is pretty much any asset paired to USD.
These are two different concepts.
And it's worse than just that the currency pair BTC/USD is manipulable. USD prices have a loose mapping to actual value, the relationship between BTC/USD isn't just arbitrary numbers. It's not just that the exchange rate between BTC and USD is changing, independent of the USD the actual market value represented by a Bitcoin is changing.
In other words, you do not need to manipulate the supply of a currency in order to manipulate the amount of purchasing power or value that each "unit" of that currency represents.
Bitcoin proponents often try to bring up supply manipulation like it's some kind of unique category, but it's really not. Currency manipulation does not require control of the supply.
Do you think that people care about inflation because there are more dollars in existence? No, they care because they can't make the same level of purchases with the dollars they're holding.
Bitcoin's price relative to the dollar indicates what you can buy with it; when that price changes it's no comfort to people that technically the same number of coins exist. They care about what the coin is worth, and Bitcoin's worth can be manipulated regardless of what its supply is.
Only 6.02% of their reserves are held in "digital tokens," the rest are held in traditional assets and cash: https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports (scroll down to "Reserves Breakdown").
- "but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin."
How do square these two parts of the sentence? The ability to cause a panic in the Bitcoin space on command by crashing another cryptocurrency sounds a lot like manipulation to me.
These are indirect effects as they are events that occur outside of Bitcoin but cause people who have Bitcoin to sell or trade it.
You can cause panic in traditional finance markets, too. It's the exact same principle at play.
If the claim is that Bitcoin is only immune to specifically direct manipulation (where direct is a narrow sub-category of manipulation techniques), then... sure, maybe that's true, but it's also not that impressive and doesn't change all that much about the end-user's risks, since the more general forms of currency manipulation still seem to be entirely possible.
> You can cause panic in traditional finance markets, too. It's the exact same principle at play.
I don't think that's being debated, people are just pointing out that Bitcoin's price can be still be manipulated by powerful actors.
I expect that to take decades as the government/media are and will continue to attack Bitcoin and influence public opinion as it directly interferes with their business model.
> Bitcoin's price, yes, but not the actual currency itself.
Again, as a user, who the heck cares? The Bitcoin in your wallet changes how much it's worth, it's the same outcome as normal currency manipulation. If the effects are the same, and the changes to the value of the currency are the same, then the specific details about how that effect was caused don't matter to end users.
Second:
> That will be the major psychological void to fill in for people: thinking about Bitcoin as a currency, not an investment or gambling device.
I just finished talking to someone a day ago on this very site who argued with me for ages that Bitcoin was a store of value and shouldn't be thought of a currency and accused me of not understanding the history of the coin because I pointed out correctly that many early proponents of Bitcoin were pushing it as a currency for regular everyday transactions.
And I am so not willing to have the same exact conversation a second time just with the the details and direction swapped out. All of these arguments always being with, "hah, people should research Bitcoin more before criticizing it", even though everyone in the community who says that is constantly making contradictory claims while arguing that they represent some kind of community consensus or coordinated effort.
But to summarize the problems with the specific claim being made this time around:
Bitcoin is bad at everyday transactions for a dozen reasons that have been already explored in depth over and over again in the past and that are easy to research. If your goal is to make an everyday transactable currency, Bitcoin is a bad choice for that, for obvious reasons -- even without getting into the technical reasons why a deflationary asset is in general a bad fit for transactions, all you need to do is look at the history of Bitcoin's price; that's not a chart that indicates a healthy currency intended to be used for normal purchases. Honestly, the characterization of Bitcoin as a rarely-transferred store of value is a stronger argument, and even that isn't a particularly strong argument.
Imagine I am the director of Tether.
I print $1 billion in Tether out of thin air.
I then buy bitcoin with it on a UST/BTC exchange.
Bitcoin price goes up.
If you want to call that something other than manipulation, then :shrug:, more power to you. But my main takeaway is still going to be that banannaise's original comment seems to be mostly accurate.
I'd highly recommend taking the time to rethink that position. The systems being implemented now will permanently enslave you. Bitcoin is the only escape. And no, I'm not being hyperbolic.
Recognizing that there are significant problems with current financial systems does not automatically imply that Bitcoin in specific is a reasonable or feasible alternative to those systems.
Candy bars are unhealthy for me, and I can recognize that, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to eat dirt. In other words, it's not enough for Bitcoin proponents to point out that traditional fiat systems have problems, they need to prove that Bitcoin meaningfully solves those problems or improves upon them. All of you've done so far in this thread is argue about how narrowly people should apply the word "manipulation", you haven't demonstrated that banannaise's original comment is wrong in a way that ordinary currency users would care about.
I think most of the real-world evidence we have shows that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just as manipulable as existing systems regardless of whether or not they have a fixed supply, and in fact are currently somehow impossibly managing to be regularly manipulated to an even higher degree than existing fiat systems.
I already did but you didn't like my answer.
Where's the merit?
In 2011, you could buy coffee and pizza w/ BTC (at non-conformist boutique shops but still). Now, not even those stores would accept it as a method of payment, and you'd be stupid to spend it on goods and services anyway, because BTC's value is wrapped up in the idea that it's a 'digital asset' instead of a currency.
I identify as a hacker, and I don't think all things should be programmable. Votes should not be programmable or hackable. I'm almost certain that at certain point money shouldn't be either, given how rife the abuse can be.
How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of market cap is dedicated to providing: bank accounts, transfer services, security brokerage, options trading, credit default swaps, and other derivatives. You can easily implement the entire functionality of the entire global banking system on the blockchain. Rather than require hundreds of thousands of specialized bankers, you can do it with miners running nodes in the block chain. This is a huge efficiency improvement and allows for a more democratized system. You can think this is cool, or stupid, or dangerous, or all three. But if you aren't interested in the tech, why bother commenting on it?
Or Turkey, who's inflation is around 70% right now.
Given that E2EE encrypted messaging apps such as Signal give criminals, extremists and scammers a hiding place such that the messages are totally unreadable by anyone else, does that mean we should tell Google and Amazon to ban Signal off of their servers because they are enabling such a communication service that benefits these criminals, extremists and scammers?
Also how does one 'hide' their transactions on a transparent ledger for everyone to see and trace even if they do use it for ransomware or illegal stuff? Is that why regulators haven't banned those cryptocurrencies yet and instead have targeted privacy-coins in new regulations requiring exchanges to de-list them? [0]
Seems like Stripe [1], Moneygram [2], Checkout.com [3] etc still seem to see that some of them have a use case. Perhaps that explains why they also waited for regulations before proceeding to use them [0].
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IP...
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram...
[3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
This just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority.
Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum?
Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people.
How fucking tedious to see a so-called hacker site shit so much and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike.
Here we are 40 years later communicating with computers. I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.
If America didn't exist, and Columbus was relying on his plan, they all would have starved to death roughly where the East Coast is
That reminds me of a line from a track by Apollo 440:
"Mick Jagger came up to me and I said 'I've seen the future' and he goes 'Yeah, if there is one...'".
Hindsight is 20/20, so of course someone will still make that mistake 40 years down the road. We can barely predict with any meaningful accuracy what will happen next year. The idea that we can predict 40 years out is the very height of hubris.
1. That people have been wildly wrong about various technologies before is not evidence that a given specific technology will succeed.
2. Many critics don't doubt the technical capabilities but instead worry about the social harm of systems developed using cryptocurrencies.
Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else.
So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Maybe it could be useful in countries where the currency is devalued like some in South-America. But then all the extra steps seem to be a big hurdle to me.
Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.