I could ask the same for a lot of things, though? Time shares, collectible card games, collectibles at large, fashion at large, etc.

Not that I can or will wholly defend crypto. That just doesn't seem like a relevant complaint.

I do question the desire for everlasting permanence of the blockchain. I know we like to keep real estate deed records and such going back as far as we can, but even there we have limited utility of that. Encasing it in a technical solution that expands to cover more transactions does feel limited in usefulness. Largely ironic/funny that it makes it incredibly unsuited to criminal use.

> Time shares

They bring the probability that you will be harassed by police/landowners/elements/civilians when residing in an area way down. Personally, I take the harassment and sleep on the street. But it's not easy and many would pay not to.

> collectible card games

You have fun when you play them. People pay to have fun.

> collectibles at large

Idk some people just get weird addictions. I put collectables at large in the same bucket as crypto, no defense there.

> fashion at large

Looking good is more likely to get you laid. People like getting laid, and will pay for it.

Do note that the SEC's argument is usually along the lines of "if anybody is buying this to make money, then it is potentially a security." The "common enterprise" part makes it a bit different, but only a bit.

Also note that time shares typically are securities, in my understanding. In contrast to a house, which is not. My argument there wasn't to identify some other things that are or are not securities, but "things that are kinda useless." In the case of timeshares, I'd say they are actively more harm than good.

Crypto is for coordinating group behavior in the presence of powerful adversaries (e.g. governments), always has been.

Umm, OK. Funny that's not how it's been marketed. But I'm baffled as to how cryptocurrency is better for doing that than all of the other ways of doing that.

The drugs I've bought with cryptocurrency have been cheaper and of better quality than the drugs I've bought with dollars, by a wide margin. So there's that.

The marketing you're talking about is for the investors. By the nature of the product, the users have powerful adversaries and are probably operating in secret. You can't expect their use cases to show up in the marketing, that would defeat the purpose.

Sure, you get the bad with the good. There are definitely unsavory things going on under the covers. But you have to weigh that against the misbehavior of the powerful in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto.

It's a trade off, but I think it's a worthwhile one.

> in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto.

This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?

If you rely systems that involve implicit custodial trust, and you have power adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to shut you down.

This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists.

On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack.

I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application of secure multiparty computation (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff.

Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated, they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, and a contract moves the NFT to that leader's successor. Now their signing keys are authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys are not.

You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency.

For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.

> If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies

But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever.

But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems.

> If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor.

You could use blockchain for this, but equally you can use any of several other methods to achieve the same effect.

> For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online.

For me, this doesn't enter into is. I do think dissent is critically important. I don't see how blockchain is essential to doing that. Why bring in something as tainted as cryptocurrency when there are other options?

You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think would scratch the itch:

Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.

Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.

Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly trust people who have validated it.

The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent (this is the kind of thing I mean when I say "coordinating").

I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of ssh connections necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist.

Sneakernet / file transfer / scp will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?

What is both tamper-resistant enough that the government can't delete it, and also public enough that all parties can access the data, if not a public blockchain?

Simple example is that if governments control finance you can't coordinate if the government is your opposition. If you start sharing resources as a means of coordinating, governments can always just compel the banks to shut down your account.

Governments can't shut down crypto nearly as easily due to its decentralized nature.

I don't find this argument compelling at all, because I can't think of a historical example where fiat currency prevented coordination of antigovernment people.

I also find it interesting that the pro-cryptocurrency argument centers around being antigovernment. So it's a political thing, not a practical thing. That automatically means cryptocurrency has no chance of mainstream adoption. People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics.

This might be a political stance, but it's not exactly a radical one:

> Tech that mediates a relationship between two users should not give special powers to a third party.

It's not anti-government, it's anti-tampering. I'm most concerned with government tampering, but that's just me. I can exchange tokens with somebody who is concerned with alien tampering (something I don't worry about in the slightest) and we can all disagree about the "why" while still agreeing on the "what".

Maybe there's a subset of users that would prefer to have some authority they can appeal to when something goes wrong. That's fine, crypto isn't for them right now. But I suspect that those authorities will eventually abuse their position of trust, and it happens, I hope crypto is ready to treat them fairly. There's a lot of work to do.

OK, read this: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infin...

Many clear examples of it being used to coordinate in opposition to fiat because the governments can't be trusted. And it's working far as I can tell. We just don't hear about it in the first world because our culture is so apathetic about anything happening in poverty oppressed nations.

Worth adding I'm not pro-crypto or anti-government. For transparency I have less than $10 grand in crypto which is no big deal for me to lose overnight. I think there is a good enough case to invest but not enough to make it large part of my portfolio. I don't believe the hype but also think throwing it out with the bathwater is likewise unnecessarily absolutist.

"People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics"

Tell that from the majority of crypto users who reside in the third world and derive actual value from it. They are not politically homogenous (leftists and rightists use crypto on the third world) and most probably don't care much for decentralization as a means of political action. They just want something that works and is less corrupt than the incumbent system.

Economic actvity that you don't want a bank or government body to stop, so: illegal activity.

Mastercard and paypal have both shut down legal activity in the last 4 years on the backs of government decisions or targeting legal, but politically inconvenient activity and there seems to be no slowing down on that avenue. Pornhub is one recent major example of that.

The idea that it's just criminal enterprises that benefit from being able to participate in markets without interference is laughable at best given the increased interconnectedness between banks and the regulators themselves, especially not even 6 months after a rash of major banking failures within the traditional financial markets.

There is very little reason to have a favorable opinion of the SEC following the 08 collapse given their own hand in it or the banking failures existing now, especially when they refuse to clarify their position on what is or is not a security so people CAN legally operate in the space. It appears to many both inside and outside of the space that the SEC is wielding its regulatory arm to create winners and losers, and with their own track record it's a failing proposition.

It may be hyperbolic, but the holocaust was a legal activity in Nazi occupied territory.

Monero is private and perfectly usable for payments. I've gotten paid in Monero, works great. People just need to start using it.

Permissionless electronic worldwide payment. That's it. An optional but good to have part is anonymity, which you get with Monero.

Destroying our planet even faster by tons and tons of Asics garbage and CO2 production

Lucky enough VC is now going to ml

Giving individuals the power to be their own banks is not useless. Unpractical maybe, but not useless.

Imagine your business or employer is suddenly blacklisted by payment processors over political/cultural reasons.

The advantages of crypto should become pretty clear at that point.

imagine your crypto wallet being blacklisted by a 51% attack, over political/cultural reasons.

This hasn't happened to any large coins though, whereas people have had their bank accounts frozen for political reasons.

imagine when the bank was invented and somebody said, "imagine if somebody's bank account is frozen for political reasons." and somebody said, "this hasn't happened to banks yet, but somebody's satchel got robbed for political reasons"