If the right to use cryptocurrency were legally enshrined, instead always on the verge of being criminalized by new legislation or rules, it would find an enormous number of legitimate use-cases, instead of being fully embraced only by criminals. It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users.
Cryptocurrency stands to provide the West with a major geopolitical advantage. If you look at the distribution of Ethereum consensus clients, you see they are concentrated in the West:
Of the current 14,000+ nodes, the US hosts 5,349 of them, and Germany 2,170. No non-Western jurisdiction comes close.
This is an industry that cannot thrive in more authoritarian jurisdictions, and will thrive in the West to the extent that authoritarian controls are limited.
The inability to hide the source of your funds isn't authoritarian.
> It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users.
It's been 15 years since cryptocurrency has existed and for the vast majority of those it's had zero regulation, and has been fully legal. It's not used for legitimate purposes because it's not useful for them.
Crypto is used for speculation, not as a currency. It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border, including countries who expressly allow cross-border crime (like Russia and cyber ransom, assuming the ransom doesn't target Russians). It's also heavily used as a mechanism to scam people, through pump & dumps, rug pulls, and the like.
We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole.
Of course it is. It's your own money, and some other party is forcing you to provide information about it under pain of imprisonment.
In the digital age, this now means making it illegal for supposedly free peoples to call cryptographic logic to encrypt their peer-to-peer transaction.
It's police state authoritarianism in the vein of what the Chinese Communist Party would endorse.
>It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border
It would be used by wide swathes of society if the legal uncertainty around it were lifted.
As it is, even with all of the restrictions imposed by advocates of a locked down financial system, it is lifting people out of poverty, whether through giving them access to stablecoins [1] in countries with unstable currencies, or giving them a new source of income [2].
The so-called AML system causes untold numbers of deaths [3] and should be totally replaced by a due-process-respecting law enforcement strategy.
>We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole.
The world at large is absolutely not better off with centralized control over money, for the same reason it's not better off with centralized control over the economy at large.
In the advanced economies, people deserve better than a financial system entirely dependent on centralized intermediaries and their regulators, as all of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts attest to.
People deserve better than being told that they cannot engage in private transactions with others without reporting the transaction to their government overseer. This idea is completely anathema to a free society.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptoverse-digital-coins...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/vcAc3Lyfqc
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...
Except that the vast majority of that money was invested for pump & dump ICOs. They were able to make back their investments in record time by stealing from fools.
> It would be used by wide swathes of society if the legal uncertainty around it were lifted.
There isn't any real legal uncertainty, except for not being able to use money laundering tumblers, though. Nothing indicates that anyone is interested in using cryptocurrency for anything other than speculation at any larger scale than it's being used currently. Wishes aren't reality.
> People deserve better than being told that they cannot engage in private transactions with others without reporting the transaction to their government overseer. This idea is completely anathema to a free society.
This already exists with banks and credit cards. They're required to do some amount of reporting (but not transaction-level) and are required to comply with sanctions and AML/KYC, but those are all good things in general for society while still allowing these private organizations to provide you privacy. There's even privacy laws written to ensure these companies provide some form of privacy.
It's honestly humorous to be discussing privacy as cryptocurrency is the least private form of currency. Even using tumblers, if you were to use a wallet for legitimate transactions, it wouldn't take much effort to unmask you.
Many VCs have had significant token holdings for years, so they are invested long term.
>There isn't any real legal uncertainty, except for not being able to use money laundering tumblers, though.
There is substantial legal uncertainty, with everything ranging from US senators publishing open letters calling for banks to be investigated for crypto associations [1], to major social media companies canceling very large token projects [2], with one of the two main concerns raised being an "evolving regulatory environment" (which in all likelihood is a reference to the recent very hostile regulatory approach the SEC has taken toward all crypto tokens) [3], to privacy technology being sanctioned.
>This already exists with banks and credit cards.
That is already completely wrong, but at least there is a pretense of respecting privacy rights, as the mandates are imposed only on trusted third party intermediaries, and not participants in peer-to-peer transactions.
>but those are all good things in general for society while still allowing these private organizations to provide you privacy.
That takes privacy away from people, so it is not a good thing.
>Even using tumblers, if you were to use a wallet for legitimate transactions, it wouldn't take much effort to unmask you.
Transaction encryption would make cryptocurrency private enough mass-consumer use. It would also preclude dragnet surveillance, as significant analysis is required to unmask a target who is using it.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/08/warren-ftx-crypto-r...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/reddit-community-points-ethereu...
[3] https://unchainedcrypto.com/reddit-to-discontinue-community-...
The last eight years has seen significant development to build the building blocks for a usable distributed ledger:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31797395
It would be very good if the privacy building block wasn't prohibited by counterproductive security state ideology.
Cryptocurrency is more of a blight than it is useful. It's the only reason that cyber ransom is possible.