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It’s not really a technology. It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion. Crypto losers will see people point out how was

It’s not really a technology. It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion. Crypto losers will see people point out how wasteful it is, how few problems it actually solves and how many it creates, and they turn their blind eyes and wonder “Why is EVERYBODY so wrong?” Grow up. Build something that matters. I volunteer at a soup kitchen and I’ve seen regulars disappear and come to find out, some of them get killed by gang violence. Some are hooked on dangerous drugs and can’t get access to effective programs to help them. Some turn to crime when they can’t come up with enough money from working to get off the streets. Why should ANYBODY care about crypto, when it doesn’t propose any solutions to these problems that are present as a result of the current economic system? Crypto would only make it worse, if it did anything at all! 100% of crypto is a shameless grift, and the afterlife will treat none of them very kindly.

sshlocalhost98 4y ago
I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?
- im3w1l 4y ago
  During the trucker protest in Canada, the government froze the bank accounts of participants. That the government can do this, shut down movements it doesn't like with the click of a button, is a dangerous centralization of power. Crypto (at its best) safeguards democracy by serving as a check on such power. This still leaves the option of shutting down dangerous protests using the police which requires the cooperation of a lot of people - thus less dangerous, striking a better balance between freedom and safety.
- derbOac 4y ago
  So... I am not at all trying to advocate for crypto here, but the putative value is in having an anarchic currency that is easily exchangeable. That is, if you had money and wanted to convey it digitally outside of traditional regulated institutions, how would you do it? There's gold, art, etc but that's not easily movable. Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries. To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent? I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.
- theelous3 4y ago
  Nothing really. A nice vehicle to strip retail investors that don't understand money or tech, or the tech of money. Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense. Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    I’m seeing the concert ticket thing around lately as something this space could “solve”. But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that? I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?
    - Eji1700 4y ago
      They absolutely aren't. Or at least not in the way people think. IF the tech has value it won't "Kill ticketmaster". It'll be adopted BY ticketmaster to make sure they have to pay fewer people on the front line to strip money from your wallet. The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.
    - soneil 4y ago
      It's a nice idea in theory, but only in theory. So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away. So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice. So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?" As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition. So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.
- Eji1700 4y ago
  A lot of people seem to have an outdated concept of what crypto is and what advantages it offers. For the record my stance is "some of this will probably stick around, but most of it is junk". There's stuff like bitcoin, which is basically a digital asset. There's stuff like monero, which is basically a digital asset that's very hard/impossible to track. So anything blackmarket/anti governmental. There's stuff like USDC (stablecoins), which is literally supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar, and "supposedly" backed to some % (depends on the coin. Tether is an infamous nightmare waiting to happen to most people in and out of the scene). The main use being that it's VERY cheap and easy to move stable coins(not just for crypto trading but say if you want to send someone money), and you can get great interest rates on them by staking (6-8% compared to the average savings account of "fuck you for asking"). And then there's basically everything etherium spawned with smart contracts, which is just a token that can execute actions based on programmatic conditions. None of that is "new" so to speak. Any code/database can already do something like that, but the quasi decentralized nature mixed with certain features does open some theoretically interesting opportunities. It gets complicated from there and EVERYTHING above is filled with caveats and issues and other problems, but it certainly seems to have stuck around for quite some time, and had quite a lot of legit business use, for a "scam". There is 0 doubt that something like 90% of the coins out there are scams, and of the remaining 10% probably 99% of those will fail for some reason or the other, and of that remaining % a LOT of this will probably wind up abstracted waaaaaaaaay out like IP addresses are for the modern user, but yeah there's probably something there.
- throwaway239058 4y ago
  There are cases where crypto solves a problem better than anything else, but they're pretty niche. I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it. It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it. So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.
syzygyhack 4y ago
> It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion. Except the part where a tiny fraction of a populace can print an infinite amount more of it, sure. But that's just a small thing, amirite?
beaconstudios 4y ago
crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  That's a pejorative take on capitalism. Given a list of possibilities for action, profit is merely an ORDER BY mechanism to prioritize them. Incentives matter in the buyer/maketplace/seller realm of economics.
  - beaconstudios 4y ago
    it's a descriptive take on capitalism. profit is the motivating force for businesses, and in the crypto economy the profit is primarily derived from speculation and scamming. in the real world, at least capitalism is driven by demand that often comes from actual utility. crypto is like if the entire economy was wall street, including boiler rooms and market manipulation.
    - I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
      Profit might be #1 , but immediately after profit there is a huge moat to protect profits. When you don't build anything of value the only moat you have is your political ability to convince people that you are. I mean banks and insurance companies don't have to justify their existence, whereas the massive campaign that crypto enthusiasts mounted on the interwebz is telling that they are not even sure that their movement can survive.
    - smitty1e 4y ago
      Capitalism and Marxism are ideas. The historical acts, good or bad, due to these ideas are owned by the actors.
      - beaconstudios 4y ago
sigmoid10 4y ago
Cryptocurrencies do solve several issues, but some of them have become less important and others are, well, not so transparent for ordinary people. Do you remember when bank transfers using ebanking still took several days when you did them on a friday afternoon? For many banks this is actually still a thing. Yes there's Paypal and Venmo and god knows what these days, but good luck trying to send large amounts of money that way or sending anything abroad (especially to a country where the service is not available). Which brings us to point nr 2: There are many people with lots of money who would prefer to send it not just faster and easily verifiable, but also away from the prying eyes of governments and banks with strict oversight. Bitcoin only works if you manage to get it anonymously (e.g by giving some dude cash and hoping he's not monitored by the NSA), but other Cryptos give you privacy for all transfers and still keep verifiability. Every drug dealer, money launderer or tax evader can easily sneak millions of dollars across continents in an instant. This used to be damn difficult when using hard currency or art or any other tangible asset (and when you did it electronically you would set off even the most trivial alarm systems). So yeah, there certainly are big problems that were solved - the question is: Did we really want them to be solved.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Are there really counterparties with millions of dollars of privacy preserving crypto in every country? Like say you are a cocaine kingpin. You instruct your minions in countries where you sell your product to buy crypto. How do you access that value where you live? Or say you are a wealthy Russian with millions of rubles that you want to move out of the country. Is there really a seller with unlimited willingness to exchange their crypto for rubles?
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    You're assuming that the counterparty must be purely transactional. But there are people with big money in this system who have no problem holding vast amount of digital currency. They wouldn't have any problem accepting it as payment for larger investments. Also, imagine you sold one ton of cocaine and now you want to move the money out of the country. You'd instruct your dealers use their local crypto handlers to transfer the money from cash and then wire the digital assets to your crypto wallet. You can now cross any border with that wallet and access it in any country and noone will be able to inspect it if you do it right. And there's already a lot of infrastructure for getting cryptos back to cash - even (and sometimes especially) in poorer countries (think of an ATM, but you can use your crypto wallet to withdraw).

sshlocalhost98 4y ago

I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?

im3w1l 4y ago
During the trucker protest in Canada, the government froze the bank accounts of participants. That the government can do this, shut down movements it doesn't like with the click of a button, is a dangerous centralization of power. Crypto (at its best) safeguards democracy by serving as a check on such power. This still leaves the option of shutting down dangerous protests using the police which requires the cooperation of a lot of people - thus less dangerous, striking a better balance between freedom and safety.
derbOac 4y ago
So... I am not at all trying to advocate for crypto here, but the putative value is in having an anarchic currency that is easily exchangeable. That is, if you had money and wanted to convey it digitally outside of traditional regulated institutions, how would you do it? There's gold, art, etc but that's not easily movable. Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries. To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent? I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.
theelous3 4y ago
Nothing really. A nice vehicle to strip retail investors that don't understand money or tech, or the tech of money. Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense. Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I’m seeing the concert ticket thing around lately as something this space could “solve”. But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that? I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?
  - Eji1700 4y ago
    They absolutely aren't. Or at least not in the way people think. IF the tech has value it won't "Kill ticketmaster". It'll be adopted BY ticketmaster to make sure they have to pay fewer people on the front line to strip money from your wallet. The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.
  - soneil 4y ago
    It's a nice idea in theory, but only in theory. So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away. So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice. So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?" As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition. So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.
Eji1700 4y ago
A lot of people seem to have an outdated concept of what crypto is and what advantages it offers. For the record my stance is "some of this will probably stick around, but most of it is junk". There's stuff like bitcoin, which is basically a digital asset. There's stuff like monero, which is basically a digital asset that's very hard/impossible to track. So anything blackmarket/anti governmental. There's stuff like USDC (stablecoins), which is literally supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar, and "supposedly" backed to some % (depends on the coin. Tether is an infamous nightmare waiting to happen to most people in and out of the scene). The main use being that it's VERY cheap and easy to move stable coins(not just for crypto trading but say if you want to send someone money), and you can get great interest rates on them by staking (6-8% compared to the average savings account of "fuck you for asking"). And then there's basically everything etherium spawned with smart contracts, which is just a token that can execute actions based on programmatic conditions. None of that is "new" so to speak. Any code/database can already do something like that, but the quasi decentralized nature mixed with certain features does open some theoretically interesting opportunities. It gets complicated from there and EVERYTHING above is filled with caveats and issues and other problems, but it certainly seems to have stuck around for quite some time, and had quite a lot of legit business use, for a "scam". There is 0 doubt that something like 90% of the coins out there are scams, and of the remaining 10% probably 99% of those will fail for some reason or the other, and of that remaining % a LOT of this will probably wind up abstracted waaaaaaaaay out like IP addresses are for the modern user, but yeah there's probably something there.
throwaway239058 4y ago
There are cases where crypto solves a problem better than anything else, but they're pretty niche. I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it. It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it. So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.

syzygyhack 4y ago

> It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion. Except the part where a tiny fraction of a populace can print an infinite amount more of it, sure. But that's just a small thing, amirite?

beaconstudios 4y ago

crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.

smitty1e 4y ago
That's a pejorative take on capitalism. Given a list of possibilities for action, profit is merely an ORDER BY mechanism to prioritize them. Incentives matter in the buyer/maketplace/seller realm of economics.
- beaconstudios 4y ago
  it's a descriptive take on capitalism. profit is the motivating force for businesses, and in the crypto economy the profit is primarily derived from speculation and scamming. in the real world, at least capitalism is driven by demand that often comes from actual utility. crypto is like if the entire economy was wall street, including boiler rooms and market manipulation.
  - I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
    Profit might be #1 , but immediately after profit there is a huge moat to protect profits. When you don't build anything of value the only moat you have is your political ability to convince people that you are. I mean banks and insurance companies don't have to justify their existence, whereas the massive campaign that crypto enthusiasts mounted on the interwebz is telling that they are not even sure that their movement can survive.
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    Capitalism and Marxism are ideas. The historical acts, good or bad, due to these ideas are owned by the actors.
    - beaconstudios 4y ago

sigmoid10 4y ago

Cryptocurrencies do solve several issues, but some of them have become less important and others are, well, not so transparent for ordinary people. Do you remember when bank transfers using ebanking still took several days when you did them on a friday afternoon? For many banks this is actually still a thing. Yes there's Paypal and Venmo and god knows what these days, but good luck trying to send large amounts of money that way or sending anything abroad (especially to a country where the service is not available). Which brings us to point nr 2: There are many people with lots of money who would prefer to send it not just faster and easily verifiable, but also away from the prying eyes of governments and banks with strict oversight. Bitcoin only works if you manage to get it anonymously (e.g by giving some dude cash and hoping he's not monitored by the NSA), but other Cryptos give you privacy for all transfers and still keep verifiability. Every drug dealer, money launderer or tax evader can easily sneak millions of dollars across continents in an instant. This used to be damn difficult when using hard currency or art or any other tangible asset (and when you did it electronically you would set off even the most trivial alarm systems). So yeah, there certainly are big problems that were solved - the question is: Did we really want them to be solved.

maxerickson 4y ago
Are there really counterparties with millions of dollars of privacy preserving crypto in every country? Like say you are a cocaine kingpin. You instruct your minions in countries where you sell your product to buy crypto. How do you access that value where you live? Or say you are a wealthy Russian with millions of rubles that you want to move out of the country. Is there really a seller with unlimited willingness to exchange their crypto for rubles?
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  You're assuming that the counterparty must be purely transactional. But there are people with big money in this system who have no problem holding vast amount of digital currency. They wouldn't have any problem accepting it as payment for larger investments. Also, imagine you sold one ton of cocaine and now you want to move the money out of the country. You'd instruct your dealers use their local crypto handlers to transfer the money from cash and then wire the digital assets to your crypto wallet. You can now cross any border with that wallet and access it in any country and noone will be able to inspect it if you do it right. And there's already a lot of infrastructure for getting cryptos back to cash - even (and sometimes especially) in poorer countries (think of an ATM, but you can use your crypto wallet to withdraw).