You have the choice between a free, transparent, technically stable, instant payment system (< 10 seconds until 100'000 EUR), using a stable currency.
or
an unregulated system where unknown people create and control the currency, that is generally slow, often with high payment or exchange fees and where you need to trust a lot of unknown parties (software, tools, network, coins, etc), where you can lose your key, that is falsely transparent (you see transactions, but you don't know who control the network).
Mhhh...
It is not transparent as to how much currency debasement is taking place, nor does anybody outside a small group at the ECB have any control over it.
It is quite clear who owns decentralized networks - the participants. Are they perfectly equal? No but they are more egalitarian than what they seek to replace.
Decentralized networks are more resilient to outages than the electrical supply of some countries. It may not make sense for you to use but millions around the world have found a use for it.
Also noteworthy, cash payments are limited to 10,000 Euros (1000 Euro in Spain)
By the way, currency debasement is not an economic term. The only people who use it are conspiracy theorists and crackpots, as far as I know.
Fed’s Powell begging people to quit their jobs atm. So, it this the public mandate you are talking about?
Out of curiosity, where did you read this?
Proof of stake blockchains operate on the basis of more dollars = more votes, for this to be true for proof of work blockchains one would first need to spend that capital for mining equipment.
It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate on an equal footing, everyone can run a node and get a complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness. It is challenging and expensive to get the same kind of insight into the stock market.
The European Central Bank has arguably failed its mandate of keeping price stability within the eurozone when some countries have more than 20% inflation.
Currency debasement is more commonly known related to coins but I'll leave the term as is
I have friends that can pay rent but don’t have much left over. There are people in my city that live hand to mouth. I know plenty of people who are well off enough, but aren’t ever going to (or have the technical inclination, or sore cash to) run a node.
> get a complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness
I’m sure this is a real benefit for all the single parents struggling to feed and cloth their kid.
The reality is, most people don’t have the resources (time, technical or monetary) to participate in “egalitarian” crypto currencies. Moreover, even if they all did, it still wouldn’t be egalitarian, because they’d still be out-purchased by those with capital. So we’re back to where we started, except with more e-waste, energy bills and more exaggerated hyper-capitalism.
One doesn't need to run a node to use the system but it is accessible to everyone, just as the code is there to be scrutinized publicly.
The entire point was to reform currency where economic policy is more predictable and the currency less susceptible to kleptocracy.
Interestingly enough the inflation rate of both Bitcoin and Ethereum is now lower than that of major world currencies. So while volatility still needs to trend lower for day to day usage, the case for a store of value has already been established in the past decade and anyone can see the price history and number of wallets increasing exponentially.
I'm curious how you think people "make money" on crypto. Wouldn't those people getting rich be doing it at the expense of people losing money investing in crypto?
Of course everyone cashing out at the same time would be akin to a bank-run. In practice this doesn't happen since people bought in at different times and have a different cost basis.
If I bought 10k of ethereum at one point in time and sold if for 100k, I put 10k into a pot which I took 100k out of.
Basic math tells me there won't be a "rising tide" for the boats that are left when anyone else pulls out.
I do not see how crypto is not a zero sum game, actually its a negative sum game if we deduct the mining costs, lost coins and the exchanges fees. Wasnt this supposed to work without whaleish, centralised exchanges?
Just to clarify - this really depends on which chains you are talking about. Some proof of stake chains implement direct on chain governance, in which stake does directly translate into explicit voting power to implement policy changes. Polkadot in particular does this. But Ethereum, does not have anything resembling on-chain governance. Ethereum validators have no more say in what makes for valid ethereum blocks then what proof of work miners had to say. The folks that really matter is everyone running non-validating nodes and the people who choose to interact with those nodes for their transactions or inspecting the chain history.
It's not that simple. They could rise interest rates more but Italy and Greece would probably default on its debt, which would make euro a lot more unstable than keeping 20% inflation rate in three very small eastern european countries which corresponds to 3.6% of the whole EU population. Current inflation in euro zone is ~10%.
Errr, no. One dollar one vote is not equal footing. If you have more dollars you can buy more votes. That's the opposite of egalitarian.
Yeah, Bitcoin has really held up great in value in comparison to euros or dollar… it’s only down 70 % on top of those currencies‘ inflation.
It is still one of the best performing assets in history
Even putting that aside, it’s not equal footing because the wealthy people who are wealthy based on the traditional economy make crypto a defacto plutocracy because they can afford to buy their way into it one way or another.
Because of that, as part of the "West", I hardly see any benefit of crypto, unless you are in some other camp (aka: "anti-West").
This is what I meant.
We all know what happened to Jews in the 2nd WW in europe. I think it is now the time for "anti-West" people that you decide.
Bitcoin is now a solution to a second Holocaust?
It’s an interesting thought exercise but ultimately the lesson is “don’t let fascists gain power” because technology can’t save you.
The greater awareness these days of efforts to repatriate some relatively minor bits of lost wealth to Jewish descendants has perhaps distorted the problem space of those times quite a bit for an unfortunately vocal group of strong crypto advocates who hold up theft from the Jewish people as a pillar of reasoning in favor of crypto.
It’s fantastic when repatriation can happen, less so (in my mind) for monetary reasons and more so for the symbolism of regaining at least some small bit of what was lost in the horror and injustice.
But focusing on ww2 in the way some crypto folks do… the closes analogy I can think of (and maybe not a great one) is that it’s like focusing on the people caught in the twin towers on 9/11, but below the impacts and able to escape. And then saying “My goodness, they lost all their laptops and computers! If only they’d had VM cloud desktops!
That part of "West" you are referring to also had ultra low or even negative interest rates, thus eroding the buying power of Euros and other peripheral currencies. No wonder European countries also account for some of the highest numbers of bitcoin nodes (per capita).
Transparent you say? Could you point me to the SEPA explorer where I can inspect every single transaction and account balance please? Here is the one for ethereum https://etherscan.io/ and for bitcoin https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions
Ethereum and Bitcoin are transparent on transactions but intransparent on beneficial owner. Who is Satoshi?
Transparency plays both ways, and be sure that every address can be deanonimized
Seems people everywhere are largely the same.
Checkout via Paypal or debit/credit cards is much more straightforward and user-friendly, which is why they are still widely used (along with local services like Swish). A crypto wallet app that just requires scanning a QR code is even better, and miles ahead of anything SEPA/PSD2 offers in terms of user experience.
If it’s so great, why is nobody using it?
If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen?
Have you used Apple Pay? Works quite well.
> If it’s so great, why is nobody using it?
Where I live people pay by scanning QR codes all the time.
> If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen?
They do! People are getting scammed on these systems all the time; usually the provider agrees to repay the funds to keep them quiet.
Its quite lovely on invoices i must say.
Whats probably not there is that not every EU country uses this but that is matter of time. The banks are international, popular features spread. It will probably become standard very soon.
An interesting way to phrase it but do you have any sources to back your claim?
I know that Binance is being investigated for money laundering and sanctions violations. But this could just be a consequence of corporate greed and operating in unregulated markets (not some conspiracy against west).