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The utility of crypto comes from two factors: its decentralization, and its pseudonymity. The decentralization is only useful in a world where the central auth
by 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.