Yes, yes we can.
The only things that ever justified the use of cryptocurrency were ideological fantasies and speculative gambling. Every other justification is just hype created as a post-hoc rationalization for one of those two things. If you look at any of them closely, they completely fall apart when compared with competitor technologies (such as fiat paper money esp. the US dollar, conventional banking, and even gold).
I look forward to a future where "crypto" again unambiguously means cryptography.
As for legal uses, yeah, there are not many at the moment. Maybe some day there will be a DAO-type org that is worth being invested in or something but not today.
Kinda sorta. Wasn't that back when people assumed cryptocurrency provided the same kind of privacy that cryptography does, which was (in retrospect), pretty dumb?
> as was being able to smuggle wealth out of a country with exit restrictions.
That one doesn't make much sense either. How are you supposed to get your cryptocurrency to smuggle out in such a country? Wire your money to a foreign exchange?
> As for legal uses, yeah, there are not many at the moment. Maybe some day there will be a DAO-type org that is worth being invested in or something but not today.
I agree the "best" actual use cases involve illegal activity, but I think even those are sketchy. Most of the ideas don't actually work unless cryptocurrency is ubiquitous, but that doesn't matter since it will never become ubiquitous without compelling use cases. And given the illegal activity it enables, even if it did have compelling use cases, it would probably be made illegal if it was on its way to becoming ubiquitous (which would instantly marginalize it in a way it could never overcome).
That use case at least makes some sense and isn't illegal, but there are probably only dozens of users who'd ever want to do something like that, which isn't enough to support a payment ecosystem.
There are also probably conventional alternatives that probably work for that. I'm somewhat paranoid about getting doxxed based on some teenage internet experiences. There are a couple of forums out there with paywalls that exist mainly to reduce moderator workload, and (10-15) years ago I was able to subscribe with a combination of Visa gift cards and PayPal. The gift cards let you enter (un-validated) identity information so they could be used like credit cards online, and PayPal didn't seem to like them but there was a long delay before they were detected. So I created a throwaway PayPal account with a small-denomination gift card as a payment source, paid for the membership, and abandoned the PayPal account (which would eventually get locked).
Well, there are currencies that do provide strong anonymity, so no?
But yeah agreed that cryptocurrency doesn't have that many use cases, just as cash has a declining number of them. I hope someone makes an Amazon-like platform for it.
But I have drugs to buy and cannabis to smoke and joints to roll before I sleep.[0]
More seriously, there are use cases for cryptocurrency (smart contracts are a different think, unaddressed here), they're just mostly illegal.
Whether that illegality is appropriate or not is another question.
That said, there are use cases for cryptocurrency.
[0] With apologies to Robert Frost.
Let me address this, then:
- they are not smart
- they are not contracts
- they are programs written in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest and most inefficient VM
- due to esoteric nature their own authors cannot find trivial bugs in their implementations that are exploited at scale which would make any real platform nonviable
- cannot be updated or reverted because blockchain
- have literally no use outside the virtual imaginary world of crypto
- have zero legal standing, and cannot be enforced
- in every single case would be more efficient and better served by Visual Basic running on a single Raspberry Pi from a sqlite database.
Literally everything I wrote applies to Uniswap.
> because somebody has to own and control that database and physical device.
You've missed the point completely.
Where exactly in this comment did I say that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33606218?
> If that is your point, it's a funny one to make in a thread about a CEX collapsing.
What's funny is inventing arguments for other people and valiantly fighting against them.
"Smart contracts" were mentioned as "other uses of crypto currency, as yet unaddressed". I addressed them. I couldn't even care less how you made the illogical leap from that to whatever you accuse me of.
> in every single case would be more efficient and better served by Visual Basic running on a single Raspberry Pi from a sqlite database
Let me rewrite this on point in a single sentence "this ineffecient unenforceable bug-ridden fest that can only use the imaginary tokens can be run more efficiently from a single Raspberry Pi".
Does this help?
But, you are still making the claim that a decentralized smart contract protocol would be better replaced with a centralized traditional database on a Raspberry Pi. We disagree.
Come on. You started with assigning me arguments and thoughts I never said and thought.
> you are still making the claim that a decentralized smart contract protocol would be better replaced with a centralized traditional database on a Raspberry Pi.
A person who claims that their opponent makes arguments in bad faith ignores everything their opponent says and keeps pretending their opponent said something he didn't.
There are eight bullet points. Read them. Understand them. However, I'm not going to continue this conversation.
Not that different from what is happening now with the crypto "exchanges", by the way.
I'm talking about how both bubbles were a consequence of all the money being pumped relentlessly by governments. That it was going to pop, we should not have no doubt. If it wasn't for crypto "exchanges", it would be a dot-com v2 (bigger and badder), or it would be something else entirely... but at the end of the day, as long as we have governments addicted to growth, we will have boom and bust cycles.
Banking may well collapse in the US (I'm not betting it will - quite the opposite, to be honest - but historically speaking it's not an impossibility.)
The issue is that if banking in the US collapses... well - we have much, much bigger issues than "crypto". You'd be far better served with a stash of dried/canned products and a gun or three.
Also - it won't be crypto that matters in this case. It will be the new currency of whatever regional nation states pop up in the US after the collapse, or if the federal gov manages to hang on, the new USD.
Side note - last time I bought in bulk (because hedging against this is relatively cheap, all things considered) split peas were the best bang for the buck in terms of cost/calorie. Just slightly beating out plain white sugar.
75 days of food for 4 people at 2000 calories per day cost about $350 (not including storage containers) and will last a very long time if it's composed of dried legumes, flour, oats, sugar, rice, oil, etc... in airtight containers.
If you cook yourself and rotate through, it's actually a fairly cost effective way to eat cheap and healthy (although without any additional inputs - also very bland) while also keeping storage on hand and not feeling like a complete prepper.
The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?