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Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? I don’t want my transactions public. I like exchanging cash for weed (legal in California) and nobody needs to know r

• ur-whale 5y ago
  > I don’t want my transactions public. First, not all cryptos share Bitcoin's open ledger characteristics. Look up Monero, ZCash, Grin, Beam : they all implement untraceable transactions, not just pseudo-anonymous ones like Bitcoin. Second, pseudonymous transactions is far from being the only interesting property of Bitcoin. Among others, no centralized control is a key aspect.
  • ninepoints 5y ago
    Complete transaction anonymity is not a feature. There are no protections against wash trading, and you have no way to gauge true market demand or pricing from transaction volume data alone.
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    > they all implement untraceable transactions As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?
    • ur-whale 5y ago
      > As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions? As a non-criminal, what you would you have a need for privacy?
    • lawn 5y ago
      Imagine if you have a business and someone uses their tainted coins (from a hack or extortion or whatever) and buys something from you. You then deposit this on an exchange... And get your account locked. Or worse, imagine using your Bitcoin wallet in a store, and the business owner sees that you have $100k in the wallet you just paid with (because it's public knowledge). He then calls his friends who will follow you and try to kidnap and torture you to hand them over.
• ninepoints 5y ago
  The explanation is simply that there are people that have bought in that want others to buy in also so they can liquidate for a profit. Meanwhile, others are susceptible to what amounts to FOMO-driven investment. The same sentiment that drove the beanie-baby craze, the dot-com boom, the subprime mortgage crisis, the current metaverse craze, and so on. Nothing new under the sun.
  • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >there are people that have bought in that want others to buy in also so they can liquidate for a profit. Is that any different than a ponzi/pyramid scheme?
    • TomSwirly 5y ago
      Consider this. Crypo cannot create or destroy fiat currency. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it's exactly because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did. And they expect someone else will buy it from them, in just the same way... So every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in. Doesn't that sound like the definition of a Ponzi scheme?
      • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        That means the ones at the bottom, whenever that bottom is gonna be reached, will be left holding the bags for those who got in and got out early.
      • scoopertrooper 5y ago
        Actually it can create fiat currency... in a roundabout way... The core of the coin ecosystem are the stable coins, which are generally pegged to fiat, but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash. So the same USD can be recycled many times to buy Bitcoin. Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value. Tether is essentially an unregulated bank with nominal deposits totaling 73 billion USD, no obligation to pay depositors, a huge amount of minimally disclosed liabilities, and unaudited financial reserves. Ponzi was but an amateur.
• riffraff 5y ago
  I'm not fond of cryptocurrency, but there are both traceable and untraceable ones. You could buy weed with untraceable crypto.
• f6v 5y ago
  When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
• themihai 5y ago
  Crypto doesn't try to replace cash. It tries to replace digital payments (i.e. bank transfer, paypal, credit card etc) and I'm totally fine with that. Some people like paypal, visa and mastercard, some people don't.
  • swarnie 5y ago
    Do digital payments need replacing? I haven't seen physical cash in almost two years (one exception, a contractor wanted to dodge some tax) and the system just works effortlessly. Tapping a card is easier and faster then counting change. I don't see how paying a $20 gas fee and waiting 15 minutes would improve the situation.
    • Fragoel2 5y ago
      First, physical cash is still the norm in most of the world. Second, higher competition in the payments ecosystem would force providers to reduce their fees. The glaring example is what is happening in San Salvador, where by using Bitcoin they are likekly to save 450 USD millions/year in fees.
      • morelisp 5y ago
        > by using Bitcoin they are likekly to save 450 USD millions/year in fees. More like shift 450mm/year into the pockets of the people running Chivo while creating a media circus to distract from the president's takeover of the judiciary. Freedom!
        • VMG 5y ago
          This is incorrect. The transaction costs are very low and you are free to choose whatever wallet you want.
          • morelisp 5y ago
            > The transaction costs are very low That's why the government even preemptively allocated $150mm for them, I guess? > you are free to choose whatever wallet you want. Unless you want assistance at one of the official facilities, or the promised stimulus. Half the population is supposedly on Chivo. Defaults matter, especially if your goal is graft and not a sustainable and beneficial economic policy. I also notice you only tried to contradict the parts critical to dear bitcoin, not about growing autocracy.
• ikt 5y ago
  you don't use crypto do you? playing with money is honestly just a fun thing to do, putting it into coins you think will do well or staking it to earn more or lending it via defi, or putting it into a yearn vault etc the other thing is that (for the 9 billionth time) people are clueless and associating all of crypto with bitcoin. There are tons of chains that aren't proof of work and there's also nothing suggesting proof of work can't run on renewable energy either, something like 60% of chinese mining was.
  • efrecon 5y ago
    But the problem isn't that it can use renewable, but rather "steels" renewable that could be used for other purposes
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    > there's also nothing suggesting proof of work can't run on renewable energy You act like we have infinite energy of all types. But we don't - it's close to a zero-sum game. 80% of US energy comes from fossil fuels. If your blockchain uses a huge amount of renewable energy, then some other application is forced to use fossil fuels.
• louloulou 5y ago
  Who's "we"? Maybe you don't need it. Personally, I don't need golf courses, professional football or a new phone every year.
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    Those do have negative externalities too. They are extremely regulated in how those externalities are handled though (how many golf courses are built, where, what their environmental impact is and so on). I don’t see a problem allowing e.g one Bitcoin to be mined but that doesn’t mean it should be any easier to set up a mining shop than to establish a new golf course.
    • louloulou 5y ago
      Sure, all businesses are regulated within the jurisdictions in which they operate. But if I want to set up a mining machine in my house, I don't see how a government can say that running my heater is fine but running the miner is not.. are they monitoring my electricity usage down to the device level? How?
      • alkonaut 5y ago
        Can you grow a ficus but not cannabis? Are they monitoring your gardening to the plant level? The answer I suppose is that a) what’s legal isn’t necessarily what can be enforced and b) just like no one would find your single cannabis plant, this is probably about industrial level mining where authorities have insight through permits for construction, permits for yearly emissions, use of cooling water and so on.
        • louloulou 5y ago
          Well if it only applies practically to industrial level mining, I guess that's a good thing. Since it would decentralise mining and makes it more profitable for individuals who can freely ignore the law à la file sharing, cannabis, etc. Hopefully it will make the network more robust.
• swalsh 5y ago
  Not all crypto is money. ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off. This plus infrastructure like ipfs enables a brand new internet. Completely decentralized and free of the strangle hold of large tech companies. To me, money and profit is less important than freedom. Web 3.0 to me is a chance to build a better future. (For the record, I have no investments in btc, eth, or any proof of work chains. I am invested in AVAX, which has a more energy efficient consensus protocol)
  • onedognight 5y ago
    > ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off. Run by babies who will manually change the output of the computer when it calculates something they don’t like.
    • 3r8Oltr0ziouVDM 5y ago
      Not possible unless majority of the nodes accepts the change.
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    It's funny and sad that when people talk about their "freedom" in 2021, it's almost always some sort of madness: freedom not to get vaccinated; freedom not to wear a mask; freedom to use cryptocurrencies.
    • oytis 5y ago
      Isn't freedom always a freedom to do something the majority won't like and/or find absurd. Most of it is really absurd, but some things pave way for the future, and it justifies tolerating the rest of it. I personally don't believe in cryptocurrency and blockchain in general, but also I must say if I believed in it 10 years ago I would be financially much better off :)
    • 5y ago
• 3r8Oltr0ziouVDM 5y ago
  It's great for doing cross-border transfers without restrictions as an example. For privacy there are Monero and mixers. The solution for volatility is stablecoins. DeFi can be useful for traders, you can trade without trusting any platform to hold your assets. The most important thing: it's an open source alternative to the traditional financial system, anyone can use it for anything without asking anyone else, and it evolves very fast because there is a lot of competition and no restrictions.
• roenxi 5y ago
  > Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? This is a fundamentally unfair question. People waste lots of resources on things I don't think we need. There is a powerful principle in modern economies that if people have money then they don't need to justify what they think is a good idea to you, me, the government or anyone else unless there are compelling reasons to. "Do you need this?" isn't a question that is asked anywhere except when there is measurable harm. Mining bitcoins doesn't cause measurable harm. If it does, then that is an argument that we shut down the electricity grid - a different debate. We may as well ban half the technology we have. People don't need any of it.
  • Retric 5y ago
    We also ban quite a few things like CFC’s. Cryptocurrency might not be inherently significantly harmful to the environment but proof of work coins are, so it just comes down to a question of benefit vs harm. That doesn’t mean we need to ban Bitcoin as a country mandating all computation bound proof of work coins on date X would allow for a transition. However existing miners already have significant investments and are going to keep trying to profit from them which makes such transitions problematic.
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    But we do have good reasons to ban it. It does cause measurable harm. It’s exactly the same argument that led to the ban of CFCs, incandescent light bulbs, direct electric space heating, and cars without catalytic converters the list goes on and on.
• lawn 5y ago
  Using cash is fine, but what if you need to use digital payments? Then you need to rely on third parties (VISA, PayPal, Stripe etc) who will of course charge fees from your business, or completely block you. For instance, there are tons of stories of PayPal randomly pulling the rug under legitimate businesses, and destroying them in the process. Or how the US government blocked payments to WikiLeaks when they presented proof of war crimes US committed. Crypto is like digital cash in this sense, as nobody can prevent you from paying with it.
• azth 5y ago
  In addition to what was mentioned, the hope is that once cryptocurrencies stabilize (especially the bigger ones like bitcoin, eth), they will be a hedge against government induced inflation.
• lordlimecat 5y ago
  The utility of crypto comes from two factors: its decentralization, and its pseudonymity. The decentralization is only useful in a world where the central authority (e.g. banking system, governments) are not trustworthy, and this excludes legal activities where a legal remedy is enormously valuable. I've heard that international transactions are a use case, but realistically if a country reneged on a financial transaction the remedy is and always would be soft- or hard-power based (diplomacy, sanctions, military). The pseudonymity is only useful to the extent that you don't want the government to track you. But our societies have generally decided that the government should have oversight into how we spend our money to stop criminal activity. Agree or not, this is the consensus: so it makes no sense to argue that the government should then tolerate a system that undermines its rules. If we wanted to allow anonymous transactions, we could do so much more efficiently by simply removing KYC regulations on the banks. We aren't going to do that, and in fact KYC is broadly being implemented at crypto exchanges so for the overwhelming majority of crypto users there is no real benefit: you're already centralized and everyone already knows what you're doing. Even for the speculative investors there is limited utility: they could simply invest in derivative securities on traditional markets without incurring the incredible cost of performing crypto transactions.