So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...
…But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.
AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful.
Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful.
If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay.
Think "and" instead of "or".
But that's not how any of those things are being sold.
I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.
Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?
Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.
If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.
> You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.
Truer words were never spoken. It is hard to get this across to people with the completely understandable "I didn't do anything wrong so nothing can happen to me" attitude.
As Beria said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"...
Only if there was something at least as good to replace it. Cryptocurrency isn't that.
Disruption just for disruption's sake is a Bad Thing.
> NFTs is a really good use case.
Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.
The NFT discussion always ends up at "its just a link to a jpeg", when there are NFTs that have nothing to do with images.
> Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.
I don't really think NFTs have a real use case, but i can see why it might. It is effectively a digital certificate of authenticity that cannot be faked. But like a physical certificate of authenticity, it is worth as much as the general market would place trust in it. And it isn't much, since collectors of digital goods currently do not value authenticity (realistically) - they value the actual digital good, and thus, a copy is as good as the "real thing".
Therefore, collectors can only really exist for physical goods, and thus NFTs don't actually provide much value, beyond the ability for someone to speculate with it.
Like let’s say my sink keeps leaking so you suggest smashing it. Great, you fixed the leak, but I have no sink now.
Now if you came along and said you’d smash my sink and then replace it with a better sink, I’ll allow it.
People are not hung up on the disruption part. People are hung up on having no sink.
Too many people just want to do things but not actually think anything through. And then they are surprised it fails.
The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.
Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization.
> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it.
I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is.
I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.
A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature.
I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society.
Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.
A functional crypto can go downhill for a lot of reasons. Technical failures. Association with scams.
But I am not sure how a tightly controlled supply over time, or asymptotically fixed supply, coin can have runaway inflation - if everyone starts demanding more of the coin for goods and services, there just isn't more of the coin for that.
Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired?
Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system.
Was it desired?
Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations?
No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.