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The more I know about cryptos, the more I remain skeptical. The only people I know that uses cryptos seriously are acquaintancies from latin america, and none o

• vbezhenar 7y ago
  With current Bitcoin volatility it's crazy to store money with it. I really love tech which allows me to remember passphrase and having all money locked inside my brain, so I would certainly use it if it weren't so volatile.
  • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    I always get downvoted for asking this but... doesn’t that seem like a really bad idea that makes you far far more vulnerable to physical crime? If a guy mugs you at an atm, the bank is going to flag something as suspicious. If a guy mugs you for your private key, you have no recourse for all of your holdings- and the getaway is a lot easier. Physical crypto crime feels like it would be very prevalent if it became “mainstream”
    • askmike 7y ago
      The idea of Bitcoin is a system without any centralized trust, eg. "what do you do if the bank mugs you" would be a counter argument. Some people used to think/want that Bitcoin was going to take over all other forms of money. I don't think many people still believe that. In that sense it's just like other forms of property that can be stolen.
      • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
        That’s a pretty good counter argument tbh. I don’t think it has practical merit in the US, but I’ll give you it could be viable in other contexts
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • DennisP 7y ago
      So if you have a lot, don't keep your main stash where it's easily accessible to you.
      • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
        How is crypto made non accessible besides storing your private key with a third party?
    • Sargos 7y ago
      By the time crypto goes mainstream people will be using smart contract wallets like Argent and Gnosis Safe that implement things like social key recovery, daily transfer limits, and other common sense measures.
      • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
        How do those differ from banks besides being subject to less regulation.
  • throwaway8212 7y ago
    You can use DAI (https://makerdao.com/en/ https://makerdao.com/en/) or BUSD (https://www.binance.com/en/lending https://www.binance.com/en/lending, 2.5% interest anually) which are tied to the USD value.
    • richardwhiuk 7y ago
      How tied? How much do you trust the company doing the backing? If you want to be tied, why not just track the dollar directly?
      • deweller 7y ago
        Makerdao DAI is decentralized and not backed by a company.
        • tobltobs 7y ago
          Again the question is "How tied?" I tried to get some info on their page and about the fifth sentence is: > In the unlikely case of a black swan event, the system will employ Emergency Shutdown, a last resort to guarantee the stable price. Hmm, I didn't wasted my time reading any further.
          • EGreg 7y ago
            One way is to use the BitShares model together with stop-loss orders, like this: https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf In order for that to happen, it has to be trading on multiple exchanges and for it to fail, all the exchanges’ stop-loss orders must fail at once. Nothing can be pegged with absolute certainty, though, unless you liquidate everyone’s position before the peg breaks. Look at how Soros broke the Bank of England.
          • cdiddy2 7y ago
            the MakerDAO system has two parts, the DAI token and the MKR token. The MKR token is the governance token the is used to vote on things like interest rates debt ceilings, and other decisions. As people take loans out by over supplying ETH and getting DAI, the interest paid on these loans is used to burn MKR, this provides the incentive to keep DAI stable so that MKR keeps getting burned. If the system collapses then MKR is printed to make up the difference and restore DAI to a dollar. This would be bad for the governance tokens since their stake of MKR would get diluted and the price would go down.
  • kozak 7y ago
    Which is fine until you want someone to be able to inherit your money.
    • ravingraven 7y ago
      Well, that would be stupid from your part if you kept wealth that should be inherited in Bitcoin-form, not a Bitcoin shortcoming. Just like it is not a shortcoming of cash that you can bury it in a hole in the desert and tell no one about it and expect it to be inheritable.
      • wpietri 7y ago
        Thinking you will know the day and hour of your death is extremely bad estate planning. Any wealth is potentially inheritable, because you can die at any time. (And yes, that is a shortcoming of cash. Which is why we've invented other ways to store value, and approximately nobody stores their money in random holes on other people's property.)
        • wgerard 7y ago
          Uh I mean, not that I'm a cryptocurrency enthusiast by any means, but wouldn't prudent estate planning include a prepared will or some sort of next-of-kin document that includes a mechanism for access to your accounts/passwords/passphrases?
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
          • alwillis 7y ago
            There’a an app for that: https://keys.casa/bitcoin-inheritance-plan/ https://keys.casa/bitcoin-inheritance-plan/
        • ravingraven 7y ago
          >Thinking you will know the day and hour of your death is extremely bad estate planning. I never claimed the contrary. The prudent thing to do is to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose: electronic cash. Convert from fiat to crypto as needed, not as a store of value.
  • EGreg 7y ago
    Listen, really, for storing large amounts, why would you not want to have any backups? Look at Shamir Secret Sharing and consider hiding the keys in multiple locations that only you would know. You would need N of them from any of N x 3 friends and 1 of them from you. Remembering where you stored one key is easier than remembering the seed phrase or whatever. For good measure, watch the beginning of The Bourne Identity. The rest is strictly optional If you are worried about forgetting even the location you stored the backup key, you might want to have an additional safeguard, that if you don’t “phone home” for a year, then afterwards you announce on a public platform that you are OK, then the machine storing one of the Shamir keys (the one which only you know) will also copy it to an account that anyone can open using your biometrics. That means, to steal your money, they have to kidnap you for a year, then go get N of your friends to give up your keys and also use your body to fake your biometrics and somehow get you to publicly announce you are OK (this last requirement would be well known to everyone around you, so if you forgot, anyone could tell you the personal key recovery procedure). The biometrics must include M of N things that remain stable over years, like your eyes, cardiac pattern etc.
  • cubano 7y ago
    Yes...except when you forget the password on your wallet after someone, as an incredible charity offering, sent you 0.75BTC, and that wallet turns out to be "ultra-secure and distributed", which means you can't recover the contents by sending an password change request email. Yes...I do currently have 0.75 BTC in a locked wallet where I forgot the password and it's totally frustrating.
    • overcast 7y ago
      With the prevalence of password managers, you really shouldn't ever have this problem.
  • novalis78 7y ago
    It depends on your time frame, really. Most people I know do a dollar cost averaging for long term savings and their return over the years beats a whole lot of alternative ‘safe’ asset classes.
• biolurker1 7y ago
  soon in a Starbucks near you though. Look it up..bakkt
  • Nursie 7y ago
    faild.
  • DagAgren 7y ago
    This, also, is a scam.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  I've used it seriously. Paying people in countries without a functional banking system is a real problem and bitcoin nicely helped with that. I also collected some donations for reocities.com which helped to keep it alive. I never bought any, just mined a bit and I never sold any either.
  • StavrosK 7y ago
    Similarly, I try to add it to all my side-projects that accept payment. I looked at a few payment providers and settled on OpenNode, as they had the right mix of an easy API, quick support and good documentation, though I would like it if they supported more cryptocurrencies. If you want cryptocurrencies to succeed, you need to make them widespread as a form of payment. I already lament Steam and Stripe removing Bitcoin support because of the rampant speculating, let's not do more of that.
    • solotronics 7y ago
      btcpay is pretty good too, it's an open source payment processor
      • StavrosK 7y ago
        I looked at that too, but 1% for my low volume isn't worth the hassle of running my own processor (which would have been more expensive even before factoring in the hours I took to set it up).
    • uncletammy 7y ago
      > If you want cryptocurrencies to succeed, you need to make them widespread as a form of payment. This! It's unfortunate that the most well known cryptocurrency failed to grasp this and refused to prioritize scaling so that it could accommodate demand. At the end of the day, if a cryptocurrency can't be used like cash, it has nothing to offer over existing solutions.
    • DagAgren 7y ago
      Unfortunately, Bitcoin as designed is technically incapable of being in widespread use for payment, due to a severe lack of network capacity, and a complete lack of interest in ever changing this. Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare.
• badrabbit 7y ago
  It's like cash, i frankly don't care about value either but a form of payment that is not tied to me specifically where I can exchange the money for goods and services is crucial to me. Not much different from a cash giftcard i can use to pay for things online
  • airstrike 7y ago
    Except it's not like cash because it isn't subject to relatively stable long-term economic policy but instead to market speculation. How would you like the dollar bills you have in your pocket to hold a completely random value tomorrow?
    • npo9 7y ago
      Sounds like as good of a deal as right now where do the dollar bills I hold are guaranteed to be worth less tomorrow, with occasional periods of it being worth significantly less.
      • wpietri 7y ago
        The US inflation rate has never been more than 4% annually in over 30 years. Bitcoin often moves more than 20% in the span of a few days. If you don't like volatility, you don't want Bitcoin.
  • ISL 7y ago
    Cryptocurrencies store everyone's transaction records in a public ledger. It is, in general, less anonymous than cash.
    • badrabbit 7y ago
      You're not wrong but I and some others use brand new wallets for meaningful transactions.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
• technofiend 7y ago
  >Not even argentinians, that just buy as many dollars they can. A friend from Argentina was lamenting to me that's not very much after new currency controls were imposed through December. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/argentina-election-prompts-central-bank-to-slash-dollar-purchase-limit-2019-10-1028635978 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/argentina-el... On Monday, the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina moved to limit the amount of dollars that can be purchased to stanch large outflows of foreign reserves from the country and keep the peso steady, according to Al Jazeera. Dollar purchases are now restricted to $200 per month via bank accounts and $100 per month in cash until December. It's a huge cut from the $10,000 limit and currency controls imposed in September to protect the economy following the August primary election, where a surprise sweep by Fernandez sent Argentina's stocks, bonds, and currency sliding.
  • TremendousJudge 7y ago
    It's important to note that in Argentina there is a black market for dollars -- You can buy dollars at "blue" price, which is more expensive. This means that the government is subsidizing the difference. After the primaries, the price of dollars started ballooning and the government (which was clearly set to lose in the national elections), set a price for purchasing USD and a USD 10,000 per month limit. So what the Argentinian people did was as follows: get paid in ARS, buy as many USD as you can afford at the official (lower) price, then go to the black market and sell at a higher price, which netted them more ARS than they had at first. Repeat until you reach the USD10000 limit. They call this "hacer puré" (make mashed potatoes), and caused the unofficial price to go even further up. This scheme is basically "free money" for the people at the cost of the federal reserves, but it's nothing new for the Argentinian economy (the 90s were crazy). After the national elections, the government cut back on the limit down to USD 200 per month, rendering the scheme unusable (for now). Source: I live next to Argentina
• kobasa 7y ago
  Thankfully your circle of acquaintances isn't even remotely close to representing the wider world out there and the plethora of legitimate use cases that it presents for all sorts of people in this world. Just last week a friend of mine from another country was suppose to send me a few hundred bucks. He could have sent it 'traditionally' but he would have been harassed about why he was sending money abroad and wasted considerable time and effort going to a physical bank branch. Instead in under a minute he sent me some Ethereum and we both were able to confirm the transaction near immediately. I'm now able to use that in the way I see fit directly within a Chrome extension within the browser I'm typing this on. I can take this money and start earning interest higher than any bank will give me within a few minutes. And this is just the beginning of cutting out middleman and processes that feel as cumbersome as sending a letter vs an email.
  • ppf 7y ago
    > my friend sent me $300 > Oh wait, now it's $310 > Damn, now it's $200 The other downside, as you mention, is that the only main use for Eth is speculating on experimental lending platforms.
    • kobasa 7y ago
      You can send a stablecoin if you have a problem with volatility. There's even a native one called Dai which is outside the traditional banking system.
      • ppf 7y ago
        And how is it pegged? Someone asked the various exchanges very nicely if they could only trade it for $1?
        • robcohen 7y ago
          Dai is explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnoQOlVTMeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnoQOlVTMeg
• cryptica 7y ago
  This article makes me bullish about the future price of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Imagine that there is a very large community of people around Bitcoin and all it takes is for 1 strategically placed person to do something extremely risky and ruthless and then the whole community benefits. If just 1 person out of a community of 1 million manages to secure a massive loan and unscrupulously starts buying up Bitcoin with it then that person goes bankrupt; that person might go to jail, but everyone else in that community will profit from that act and bear 0 culpability. Creditors cannot get that money back. The unscrupulous buyer may go to jail and loses access to their coins in the process (thus reducing the remaining circulating supply of Bitcoin). The value stays in the network. Cryptocurrency is an unjust financial scheme but IMO it's less unjust than any other financial scheme of our modern time such as those found on Wall Street or the Silicon Valley startup funnel with all the hype-driven unicorn startups which allowed a select few crooks to extract billions of dollars from the economy whilst providing no value in return. So long as the current international fiat system (the giant pyramid scheme that it is) is allowed to continue, cryptocurrency will thrive. Fiat money will flow towards any financial scheme which is less fickle than itself; and unfortunately, at this stage in history, even speculative cryptocurrencies which can handle only 4 transactions per second seem to fit that description.
• marcosdumay 7y ago
  > none of them for storing value That one is a plus. Money is a transactional tool, speculation and storing value do not add to its main value. As an aside, everybody that I know that ever brought some crypto coin did it for speculation. The more likely explanation is that I'm looking at the wrong country, but if speculation suddenly stoped being a main use of BTC, I would start to seriously look at it.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    Storing value is considered to be one of the three functions of money [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions]. And the fact that BTC's value fluctuates so wildly (in an era where fiat currencies like the dollar tend to remain a lot more stable) is one of the obstacles to mass adoption. It turns out that making a currency behave "gold-like" carried with it the disadvantages to the gold standard that induced so many countries to move away from it.
    • lawn 7y ago
      What he should have said is the focus on being a store of value, while rejecting the other functions (high fees work against being a medium of exchange). In practice when people say "store of value" they mean "speculative vehicle that will make me rich". That is the real problem that's causing volatility and making cryptocurrencies worse at it's intense purpose: as money.
    • marcosdumay 7y ago
      I'm not saying that money isn't useful as a storage of value. What I am saying is that there is very little social benefit from that usage. To decide whether a currency is successful, one should look exclusively at its use as a means of exchange, ignoring any use as a storage of value or speculation target.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        The social benefit to storing value is de-risking against the future (2). I keep some money in my bank account so that if I need to buy food for a month with no source of income I can(1). If the money in my bank account buys a third as much food tomorrow because it lacks stable value as a store, that's bad for society, because if I'm going to starve to death, I might as well use the remaining energy I have to burn some stuff down or eat the rich. (1) Ideally, I of course live in a society that doesn't consider it acceptable to let people starve to death and has a secondary system for routing food from supply to necessity without demanding I exchange stored value for that food, lest I die because I have no measurable stored value. I'm using a simple model here, and we can probably move the particulars around to find something that a society doesn't provide which is considered valuable enough that people store up private wealth to acquire it (and lacking the ability to do so, would resort to burning the system down). (2) There is probably an interesting question in whether such privatized de-risking against the future is actually a societal benefit (because of the risk that it becomes simple hoarding). Is that risk why you have discounted value-store as a societal benefit?
• lentil_soup 7y ago
  And Venezuelans don't really buy to store value either. It's just one of the ways to go around currency controls. And lately not even that, as more and more local business are accepting US Dollars either by cash or bank transfer.
  • Scoundreller 7y ago
    Or for a while, with gas being so cheap, you could run your miners off nearly free electricity with generators. Or through AC mains. So instead of exporting energy directly via tanker, they would export indirectly down the wire.
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  There is plenty of future potential for crypto currencies. However, there are a few yet to be addressed technical problems with the current blockchains that make them unsuitable for anything but speculative investment and very light/experimental usage (i.e. only a handful of transactions per meaningful timeunit). The main technical challenges have to do with scaling issues. Facebook's recent proposal for Libra is interesting in the sense that it proposes some workable solutions for these. If you ignore the permissive vs. permission-less fundamentalism by some in this space as well as the political controversy, they actually did a fine job technically moving things forward with a better contract language than solidity and a loosely permissive and potentially long term permissionless system not unlike Ripple and Stellar. Also, Ethereum is on a slow path to sharding and proof of stake. Sadly, that means it's currently unusuable for anything that requires scaling numbers of transactions/users. That in turn means most of what is currently running on it is a bad joke in terms of scalability. Most of the serious things associated with it happen on so-called side chains. This is just a fancy name for a convoluted and centralized database. Also it means anything building on the current version is going to face repeated disruptive forks in the network. That makes anything depending on Ethereum a proof of concept at best. That's the vast majority of (at this point mostly failed) ICOs on this platform. IMHO a few things will happen in the next few years. 1) several of the currently well funded startups will start producing working products with actual users and revenue (the non speculative variety). Given the level of funding these companies received they would have a long runway for getting there and no rush to hit the market until several years from now earliest. In terms of tech startups, this would actually be relatively fast. 2) Most of the early startups in this space will fail. I expect a dotcom style consolidation phase where all of the BS, scams, etc. will fade away or be abandoned. This will take some time and be chaotic and generate a lot of negative news. 3) Several fin tech companies and banks are already integrating blockchains into their technology stack and the transaction volume depending on this will hit an exponential growth curve a few years from now. Most of this stuff is operating under the radar currently but are doing the right things from a technical point of view to make this scale. These will be mostly using permissive blockchains based on Ripple, Stellar, Libra, or similar. 4) Central banks outside the US and EU may start using blockchains because it makes sense. E.g. China has some plans here and and has an obvious opportunity to establish themselves as the digital currency of choice in most of South America, Asia, and Africa (basically anywhere with a weak, inflation challenged currency, and a lack of widely used banking products). Libra was after this opportunity as well. 5) Most of the utopian stuff in this space is IMHO doomed because it doesn't solve a problem people have other than fulfilling some political/idealistic agenda. That means I expect most of the financial success to be in permissive rather than permission-less systems. Legislators are pretty much going to require this for anything serious and most institutions with access to money are not going to want to come anywhere near the scams, criminals, and money launderers currently trading bitcoin. Bitcoin as such may survive as a convoluted alternative to owning gold (which is it's only use today). 6) The US and EU will take their sweet time adjusting their legislation. Short term we can expect nothing more than platitudes from ignorant politicians and very little in terms of any coherent/meaningful new laws in this space. The status quo is that most of the parliament members across nations lack the knowledge to have a coherent point of view. IMHO china is going lead by example here because they don't have this problem and have a clear incentive/goal. Then the west will catch up, eventually.
• bdcravens 7y ago
  Even in Venezuela, with their huge currency issues, Bitcoin makes up only hundredths of a percentage point of transactions (I did the math in a comment elsewhere but I’m on mobile right now)
• xur17 7y ago
  I've been using it to buy gift cards since the vendor gives a larger discount for using bitcoin. My exposure to price volatility is limited since I purchase the bitcoin a few seconds before buying the gift card.
  • txru 7y ago
    That's just arbitrage, though. You're converting your liquid cash assets into another differently liquid type of cash using a less liquid form of currency, because you have special knowledge about the transfer process. Bitcoin in this is a material asset, like a house to flip in an underappreciated/subsidized market.
    • xur17 7y ago
      That's fair. That said, I have been getting more comfortable with refilling less frequently and just holding a buffer in BTC.
    • mindslight 7y ago
      The seller of the gift cards likely gives a better price because payments cannot be reversed, which is a real benefit.
      • xur17 7y ago
        And fees are significantly lower.
      • papln 7y ago
        Also the gift cards are likely obtained via illegal activity so a harder-to-trace transaction process is beneficial to the seller.
• strathmeyer 7y ago
  Anyone who uses crypto seriously wonders how people can use banks. Your reddit link is some guy writing a couple of paragraphs about having customers too stupid to buy it themselves. Their entire job is based around keeping people too ignorant to control their money.
  • semiotagonal 7y ago
    As long as there is a hurdle where people can be "too stupid" to use BTC without getting scammed, BTC will never see wide adoption.
    • tuesdayrain 7y ago
      Just like debit cards are not widely adopted :)
• arcticbull 7y ago
  A single transaction costs 2 weeks average wages in Venezuela so it's highly unlikely they're using it.
• superkuh 7y ago
  Hi. You can get to know me. I'm an american and I regularly use bitcoin to pay for services, pay for physical products, and donate to causes over the internet. I've been involved in bitcoin since 2010 or so. I did not get rich but I still see the obvious utility of having a means to transfer value without trust or centralized control. This was especially true after the US state dept. started using the big credit card corps as a means to impose their will politically.