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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 remem

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 5y 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 5y 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).
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Yes, moving the money into crypto is going to be the relatively easy part of using it for drugs. Finding liquidity where you want to spend time may not be so easy. You say "think ATM", the street value of a ton of cocaine is tens of millions of dollars. Nice ATM.

maxerickson 5y 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 5y 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).
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Yes, moving the money into crypto is going to be the relatively easy part of using it for drugs. Finding liquidity where you want to spend time may not be so easy. You say "think ATM", the street value of a ton of cocaine is tens of millions of dollars. Nice ATM.