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It's not that cryptocurrency is inherently a scam, but people have found no good use case for it yet (other than scamming people). It seems like that for any p
by ZainRiz 8y ago
It's not that cryptocurrency is inherently a scam, but people have found no good use case for it yet (other than scamming people).
It seems like that for any problem that you could conceivably use a cryptocurrency to fix, we can easily find other solutions that are actually much cheaper and much more efficient.
That's not to say there aren't any problems that cryptocurrencies are better at, there could be, but so far no one has discovered them.
- bfuller 8y ago>but people have found no good use case for it yet Buying drugs is a great use case
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoAlso ransom and extortion.
- dmckeon 8y agoAre crypto-currencies not effective as a money-laundering method? I had assumed that part of the great rise and fall of BTC was dark money flowing in & out on its way to some clean-looking equivalent, plus some speculation on the side.
- nerdwaller 8y agoI’d argue (generally) no, because literally every transaction is in the ledger. Then there are two ways to get value back out: 1. At some point you want to get fiat back out, thus associating your identity to transactions. While there are some exchanges that are less stringent on verification requirements, the tie is pretty simple to see via the surveilled central banking system in most countries that tends to maintain the strict-ish verifications. 2. Exchange for goods. Unless this is off-chain, it’s again pairing a physical good back out somehow in an exchange of things.
- cslarson 8y agoYou can get around this by "washing" via a privacy coin like monero.
- UncleEntity 8y agoYou can also "wash" physical bank notes but that in no way helps you launder the money, you still need a plausible explanation on how it is in your possession when The Man comes asking.
- nerdwaller 8y agoDefinitely a good point, though really depends on where how that Monero trade happens. If it’s ever traded/redeemed on an exchange, that privacy mostly disappears.
- liamzebedee 8y agoForgive my naivety, but I feel this is down to the earliness of the ecosystem and infratructure. We are getting more and more validation of relatively simple use cases (CryptoKitties) in combination with the current state of the art in dapp tech (Metamask provider, Ethereum’s 10s block time for finality, centralized exchanges and early decentralized exchange). Once the blockchain tiramisu becomes less like a delicately constructed interaction of tech and more like a modular/mature stack, perhaps the UX barrier to entry will be low enough to reap the network effect.
- TylerE 8y agoBitcoin is over 10 years old. That’s almost half as old as what most people would call the modern internet. Stop using that “early days” cop out. It still has the same fundamental issues.
- cslarson 8y agoBitcoin has little to do with the value that will come from blockchain.
- jsloss 8y agoBitcoin is an example of the value that has and will come from blockchain. It has everything to do with it.
- jsloss 8y agoRight, 10 years in and bitcoin has proven it's value as a digital alternative to gold. Ethereum is 4 years old, and the vast majority of "tokens" even younger. Crypto is very much still early. I don't mean this as a "cop out" but rather a sober reality of how much further the tech has to go. Would it not be more fair to compare crypto progress to that of the early internet? It took most of a decade of development before the modern internet was born, another decade before the bubble burst and a few more years before pundits stopped calling it a fad, and recognized the business value. We should all be skeptical of those who would over promise and under deliver on new technology, but I can't imagine why we wouldn't assume an optimistic stance towards it.
- CryptoPunk 8y agoSeems to be useful for representing and trading assets. See all the ERC20 tokens and all the Decentralized Finance applications built around them. Or the ERC721 token interface for representing in-game assets that can move across gaming worlds. Adoption of these open standards means a large number of applications can be accessed from the same wallets.