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This feels like a Rick and Morty episode to me. They just reinvented cash money, with extra steps. Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the

This feels like a Rick and Morty episode to me. They just reinvented cash money, with extra steps. Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else. So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Maybe it could be useful in countries where the currency is devalued like some in South-America. But then all the extra steps seem to be a big hurdle to me. Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I guess, you can easily confirm if it's counterfit
capableweb 4y ago
> Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else. You seem to have nailed the use case well. This is exactly why'd someone use something like this. I'm not saying it's a good idea (nor a bad one), just that those things are "features" in the eyes of the cryptocurrency users and proponents, not bugs.
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  "for the crypto enthusiasts, the problem with the legacy financial markets wasn't that they were manipulated, it's that they weren't in on it." (reproduced here from memory)
  - sunshinerag 4y ago
    “For the fiat incumbents, the problem with crypto markets is it pulls capital away from their entrenched fiat scams”
    - rchaud 4y ago
      Brian Armstrong didn't buy his $133m compound with BTC, it was from the filthy, debased USD that he exchanged his Coinbase shares for. Everyone's a fiat incumbent in the long run.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  I don't know. The people I know that said "I really want my currency to have an unchecked exchange rate, that would do a lot for me" is 0. I also don't feel that's an honest representation of why anyone has gotten into btc (although I am sure some claim that's why they did it)
  - capableweb 4y ago
    The one I know who actually want to use Bitcoin et al and/or work in the space (not outside "investors" who just want to earn as much money as soon as possible), don't consider the exchange rate important at all and couldn't care less about it, as Bitcoin is not for exchanging it to USD/EUR/whatever.
    - ivalm 4y ago
      But presumably they care if bitcoin is still exchangeable to something (maybe goods and services?). The exchange rate to currencies determines the exchange rate to everything else. If they don’t care about exchanging bitcoin for currencies or goods or services then what is the purpose of BTC? Both currency and store of value use cases depend on exchangability.
      - arubania2 4y ago
        There is a concept called Bitcoin maximalism that means, in my understanding, that the whole world would switch to BTC so that the exchange rates to other currencies wouldn’t matter anymore. It’s easy to get paid in BTC if you land a crypto job, but it’s the groceries part that I can’t really imagine yet.
        ivalm 4y ago
        But even maximalists care to be able to use bitcoin to buy goods and services (eg be able to spend it). Since other currencies are also capable of being exchanged for good and services then the exchange rate to other currencies determines how much goods btc can buy (or there will be an arbitrage opportunity).
johnnymorgan 4y ago
I used dash to buy food for people in Venezuela during the height of the Maduro conflict (still ongoing really but this is while it kicked off) when all other methods had failed. It was farmer that turned his farm into direct sales, used an Uber like service to deliver and used DASH as point of sale and store of value...is what I did illegal?? There are a ton of uses cases out there where blockchain tech can provide a faster better solution, not every single case but it's there. Even the 'criminal' side is nothing compared to the USD and how it's used. That same argue applies even stronger to fiat currencies. A bankless note isn't a new idea, ops solution is novel and well thought out and there are markets that it solves pain points.
- Termitiono 4y ago
  I'm still questioning the real benefit compared to the downsides of it. Ordering food online vs. Terrawatts of energy wasted, Asics hardware and GPU prices and the created co2 of all of that. Mmhhh difficult very difficult
  - herbst 4y ago
    I am not sure the alternative (traditional banking) is so co2 neutral. As far as I know they all have plenty of huge buildings with hundreds of people wasting their time & resources working for them. Don't get me wrong I am sure bitcoin is worse in terms of power usage, but not every crypto is automatically worse than what we have right now.
    - Termitiono 4y ago
      You can see it as an idiotic PoW for all those people working in those banks. It's easy to make it renewable with benefits to us. The solar panel on a bank building is giving energy to people. And I'm not saying that the current banking system is perfect (it actually optimizes itself quite well) but it has much more features while Bitcoin/crypto doesn't have real solutions for huge issues. Fraud, scams, money laundry, investment tools, sepa, bank account recovery, global market regulations, sanctions Support etc. And it does all of that with billions and billions of assets. While Bitcoin consumes energy. In an utopian society we don't need banks and no PoW crypto but that's not what is critical now. Besides aluminum smelter, due to high energy costs there are other critical industry affected as well: paper making and glass making. Bottles for example.
nathias 4y ago
Money needs to be reinvented since politics has hijacked it and used it as a tool to deliver policy (at the expense of money's functions). I think it's evil to harvest the wallets of poor people for scraps, pile it together and give it to the richest, which is effectively what inflation is.
sumy23 4y ago
Cryptocurrencies are programmable money. Can you program traditional fiat currencies? No. Being able to program money should get hackers excited.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  What does it mean to "program money" in ways that aren't just moving money around with APIs, which is what we can do already with the existing system?
  - sumy23 4y ago
    Isn't moving money around with APIs just moving money around by sending messages, which is what we can do already by sending a check in the mail? How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of market cap is dedicated to providing: bank accounts, transfer services, security brokerage, options trading, credit default swaps, and other derivatives. You can easily implement the entire functionality of the entire global banking system on the blockchain. Rather than require hundreds of thousands of specialized bankers, you can do it with miners running nodes in the block chain. This is a huge efficiency improvement and allows for a more democratized system. You can think this is cool, or stupid, or dangerous, or all three. But if you aren't interested in the tech, why bother commenting on it?
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Except when someone who can program better than you can pick that money right out of your pocket (or so called "smart" contracts.) I identify as a hacker, and I don't think all things should be programmable. Votes should not be programmable or hackable. I'm almost certain that at certain point money shouldn't be either, given how rife the abuse can be.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Ah yes, programmable money. The Do Kwon special.
PKop 4y ago
It's a non-sovereign store of value (potentially). It's not meant to substitute completely for fiat credit for day to day commerce or transactions, just to be used a store of value to hedge currency debasement which is coming due to so much sovereign debt. It's gold in a more transmittable form. You spend and transact mostly in fiat, you borrow in fiat. You save some percent of your earnings in more finite stores of value (you and everyone else already do this so the concept is not controversial). The idea is explained here: Ctrl + F "two monies" http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.html http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Aren't like 90% of all bitcoin held by a few whales? Why would I want any part of that system it has worse distribution than fiat.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I'm curious about those numbers for both cases myself, but I know that only one of them you can actually get the numbers from (although only the number of coins in wallets, not coins belonging to users, as a user can have many wallets), the other one is completely in the dark as no one can really say who has what. Since we can't know the numbers for fiat, we can at least try to understand it for Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, sources seem to point towards the number being closer to ~2% of wallets hold ~70% of all Bitcoin. If this is a better/worse distribution than fiat, we will never know.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    I think thats generally believed to be hot wallets for exchanges, but if it is true, it's about the same as the stock market so you're probably already engaging in something like that: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-... Bitcoin is a nice mirror to look into. We need to eliminate money, go full star trek post scarcity utopia.
rglover 4y ago
> Only, without the oversight of a central bank Yes, that's a good thing. > Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea. Currency that can't be manipulated or devalued by the state or central banks. In other words: eliminates the potential for exactly what's taking place worldwide right now.
- erulabs 4y ago
  With inflation at the rate it's at, I can't help but laugh at "crypto is so volatile!" That argument made sense in the endless bull markets - but these days? What's not volatile? I-Bonds? The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.
  - rglover 4y ago
    It certainly could have been if our government didn't: 1. Unpeg it from a gold standard. 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. The power and greed were too intoxicating.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Yes, because tying deflation and inflation to the rate of 'how quickly do we mine gold' is a brilliant way to run an economy. Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation. Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope. > 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.
      - not2b 4y ago
        This was exactly the history of the American economy in the 19th century. Rapid episodes of deflation would regularly bankrupt farmers, who couldn't sell their crops for enough to repay their loans.
      - rglover 4y ago
ipaddr 4y ago
I was reading an email exchange from Atari employees in 1984. There was one comment.. computers are not useful for anything but playing games. It's all marketing fluff. Here we are 40 years later communicating with computers. I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  It is certainly possible. But there are a few important thoughts here. 1. That people have been wildly wrong about various technologies before is not evidence that a given specific technology will succeed. 2. Many critics don't doubt the technical capabilities but instead worry about the social harm of systems developed using cryptocurrencies.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era. That reminds me of a line from a track by Apollo 440: "Mick Jagger came up to me and I said 'I've seen the future' and he goes 'Yeah, if there is one...'".
- unmole 4y ago
  They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    They laughed at Columbus and they were right! Columbus said "I think the earth is like half the size everyone else says it is and I'm going to sail around it" and everyone with reputable mathematicians said "Nope" If America didn't exist, and Columbus was relying on his plan, they all would have starved to death roughly where the East Coast is
    - unmole 4y ago
      I don't like the Columbus reference either. I was merely quoting Carl Sagan.
nsv 4y ago
> like some in South America Or Turkey, who's inflation is around 70% right now.
rvz 4y ago
> So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Given that E2EE encrypted messaging apps such as Signal give criminals, extremists and scammers a hiding place such that the messages are totally unreadable by anyone else, does that mean we should tell Google and Amazon to ban Signal off of their servers because they are enabling such a communication service that benefits these criminals, extremists and scammers? Also how does one 'hide' their transactions on a transparent ledger for everyone to see and trace even if they do use it for ransomware or illegal stuff? Is that why regulators haven't banned those cryptocurrencies yet and instead have targeted privacy-coins in new regulations requiring exchanges to de-list them? [0] Seems like Stripe [1], Moneygram [2], Checkout.com [3] etc still seem to see that some of them have a use case. Perhaps that explains why they also waited for regulations before proceeding to use them [0]. [0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IPR25162/cryptocurrencies-in-the-eu-new-rules-to-boost-benefits-and-curb-threats https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IP... [1] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram-ceo-sees-a-future-in-stablecoin-remittances https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram... [3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin [4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/09/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-innovation-in-digital-assets/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I'd be interested to see the ratio of criminal/legitimate activity on Signal as compared to criminal/legitimate BTC transactions.
rchaud 4y ago
It does feel like a Twilight Zone episode. In 2011, you could buy coffee and pizza w/ BTC (at non-conformist boutique shops but still). Now, not even those stores would accept it as a method of payment, and you'd be stupid to spend it on goods and services anyway, because BTC's value is wrapped up in the idea that it's a 'digital asset' instead of a currency.
sbarbarian 4y ago
rick and morty is on-point, also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54
helloworld11 4y ago
>So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. This just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority. Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum? Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people. How fucking tedious to see a so-called hacker site shit so much and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

I guess, you can easily confirm if it's counterfit

capableweb 4y ago

> Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else. You seem to have nailed the use case well. This is exactly why'd someone use something like this. I'm not saying it's a good idea (nor a bad one), just that those things are "features" in the eyes of the cryptocurrency users and proponents, not bugs.

metalliqaz 4y ago
"for the crypto enthusiasts, the problem with the legacy financial markets wasn't that they were manipulated, it's that they weren't in on it." (reproduced here from memory)
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  “For the fiat incumbents, the problem with crypto markets is it pulls capital away from their entrenched fiat scams”
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Brian Armstrong didn't buy his $133m compound with BTC, it was from the filthy, debased USD that he exchanged his Coinbase shares for. Everyone's a fiat incumbent in the long run.
jstummbillig 4y ago
I don't know. The people I know that said "I really want my currency to have an unchecked exchange rate, that would do a lot for me" is 0. I also don't feel that's an honest representation of why anyone has gotten into btc (although I am sure some claim that's why they did it)
- capableweb 4y ago
  The one I know who actually want to use Bitcoin et al and/or work in the space (not outside "investors" who just want to earn as much money as soon as possible), don't consider the exchange rate important at all and couldn't care less about it, as Bitcoin is not for exchanging it to USD/EUR/whatever.
  - ivalm 4y ago
    But presumably they care if bitcoin is still exchangeable to something (maybe goods and services?). The exchange rate to currencies determines the exchange rate to everything else. If they don’t care about exchanging bitcoin for currencies or goods or services then what is the purpose of BTC? Both currency and store of value use cases depend on exchangability.
    - arubania2 4y ago
      There is a concept called Bitcoin maximalism that means, in my understanding, that the whole world would switch to BTC so that the exchange rates to other currencies wouldn’t matter anymore. It’s easy to get paid in BTC if you land a crypto job, but it’s the groceries part that I can’t really imagine yet.
      - ivalm 4y ago
        But even maximalists care to be able to use bitcoin to buy goods and services (eg be able to spend it). Since other currencies are also capable of being exchanged for good and services then the exchange rate to other currencies determines how much goods btc can buy (or there will be an arbitrage opportunity).

johnnymorgan 4y ago

I used dash to buy food for people in Venezuela during the height of the Maduro conflict (still ongoing really but this is while it kicked off) when all other methods had failed. It was farmer that turned his farm into direct sales, used an Uber like service to deliver and used DASH as point of sale and store of value...is what I did illegal?? There are a ton of uses cases out there where blockchain tech can provide a faster better solution, not every single case but it's there. Even the 'criminal' side is nothing compared to the USD and how it's used. That same argue applies even stronger to fiat currencies. A bankless note isn't a new idea, ops solution is novel and well thought out and there are markets that it solves pain points.

Termitiono 4y ago
I'm still questioning the real benefit compared to the downsides of it. Ordering food online vs. Terrawatts of energy wasted, Asics hardware and GPU prices and the created co2 of all of that. Mmhhh difficult very difficult
- herbst 4y ago
  I am not sure the alternative (traditional banking) is so co2 neutral. As far as I know they all have plenty of huge buildings with hundreds of people wasting their time & resources working for them. Don't get me wrong I am sure bitcoin is worse in terms of power usage, but not every crypto is automatically worse than what we have right now.
  - Termitiono 4y ago
    You can see it as an idiotic PoW for all those people working in those banks. It's easy to make it renewable with benefits to us. The solar panel on a bank building is giving energy to people. And I'm not saying that the current banking system is perfect (it actually optimizes itself quite well) but it has much more features while Bitcoin/crypto doesn't have real solutions for huge issues. Fraud, scams, money laundry, investment tools, sepa, bank account recovery, global market regulations, sanctions Support etc. And it does all of that with billions and billions of assets. While Bitcoin consumes energy. In an utopian society we don't need banks and no PoW crypto but that's not what is critical now. Besides aluminum smelter, due to high energy costs there are other critical industry affected as well: paper making and glass making. Bottles for example.

nathias 4y ago

Money needs to be reinvented since politics has hijacked it and used it as a tool to deliver policy (at the expense of money's functions). I think it's evil to harvest the wallets of poor people for scraps, pile it together and give it to the richest, which is effectively what inflation is.

sumy23 4y ago

Cryptocurrencies are programmable money. Can you program traditional fiat currencies? No. Being able to program money should get hackers excited.

Jasper_ 4y ago
What does it mean to "program money" in ways that aren't just moving money around with APIs, which is what we can do already with the existing system?
- sumy23 4y ago
  Isn't moving money around with APIs just moving money around by sending messages, which is what we can do already by sending a check in the mail? How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of market cap is dedicated to providing: bank accounts, transfer services, security brokerage, options trading, credit default swaps, and other derivatives. You can easily implement the entire functionality of the entire global banking system on the blockchain. Rather than require hundreds of thousands of specialized bankers, you can do it with miners running nodes in the block chain. This is a huge efficiency improvement and allows for a more democratized system. You can think this is cool, or stupid, or dangerous, or all three. But if you aren't interested in the tech, why bother commenting on it?
polygamous_bat 4y ago
Except when someone who can program better than you can pick that money right out of your pocket (or so called "smart" contracts.) I identify as a hacker, and I don't think all things should be programmable. Votes should not be programmable or hackable. I'm almost certain that at certain point money shouldn't be either, given how rife the abuse can be.
rchaud 4y ago
Ah yes, programmable money. The Do Kwon special.

PKop 4y ago

It's a non-sovereign store of value (potentially). It's not meant to substitute completely for fiat credit for day to day commerce or transactions, just to be used a store of value to hedge currency debasement which is coming due to so much sovereign debt. It's gold in a more transmittable form. You spend and transact mostly in fiat, you borrow in fiat. You save some percent of your earnings in more finite stores of value (you and everyone else already do this so the concept is not controversial). The idea is explained here: Ctrl + F "two monies" http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.html http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwntoday 4y ago
Aren't like 90% of all bitcoin held by a few whales? Why would I want any part of that system it has worse distribution than fiat.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I'm curious about those numbers for both cases myself, but I know that only one of them you can actually get the numbers from (although only the number of coins in wallets, not coins belonging to users, as a user can have many wallets), the other one is completely in the dark as no one can really say who has what. Since we can't know the numbers for fiat, we can at least try to understand it for Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, sources seem to point towards the number being closer to ~2% of wallets hold ~70% of all Bitcoin. If this is a better/worse distribution than fiat, we will never know.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  I think thats generally believed to be hot wallets for exchanges, but if it is true, it's about the same as the stock market so you're probably already engaging in something like that: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-... Bitcoin is a nice mirror to look into. We need to eliminate money, go full star trek post scarcity utopia.

rglover 4y ago

> Only, without the oversight of a central bank Yes, that's a good thing. > Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea. Currency that can't be manipulated or devalued by the state or central banks. In other words: eliminates the potential for exactly what's taking place worldwide right now.

erulabs 4y ago
With inflation at the rate it's at, I can't help but laugh at "crypto is so volatile!" That argument made sense in the endless bull markets - but these days? What's not volatile? I-Bonds? The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.
- rglover 4y ago
  It certainly could have been if our government didn't: 1. Unpeg it from a gold standard. 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. The power and greed were too intoxicating.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Yes, because tying deflation and inflation to the rate of 'how quickly do we mine gold' is a brilliant way to run an economy. Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation. Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope. > 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.
    - not2b 4y ago
      This was exactly the history of the American economy in the 19th century. Rapid episodes of deflation would regularly bankrupt farmers, who couldn't sell their crops for enough to repay their loans.
    - rglover 4y ago

ipaddr 4y ago

I was reading an email exchange from Atari employees in 1984. There was one comment.. computers are not useful for anything but playing games. It's all marketing fluff. Here we are 40 years later communicating with computers. I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era.

UncleMeat 4y ago
It is certainly possible. But there are a few important thoughts here. 1. That people have been wildly wrong about various technologies before is not evidence that a given specific technology will succeed. 2. Many critics don't doubt the technical capabilities but instead worry about the social harm of systems developed using cryptocurrencies.
jacquesm 4y ago
> I wonder if in 40 years someone will read your comment and wonder how clueless some were in this era. That reminds me of a line from a track by Apollo 440: "Mick Jagger came up to me and I said 'I've seen the future' and he goes 'Yeah, if there is one...'".
unmole 4y ago
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  They laughed at Columbus and they were right! Columbus said "I think the earth is like half the size everyone else says it is and I'm going to sail around it" and everyone with reputable mathematicians said "Nope" If America didn't exist, and Columbus was relying on his plan, they all would have starved to death roughly where the East Coast is
  - unmole 4y ago
    I don't like the Columbus reference either. I was merely quoting Carl Sagan.

nsv 4y ago

> like some in South America Or Turkey, who's inflation is around 70% right now.

rvz 4y ago

> So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Given that E2EE encrypted messaging apps such as Signal give criminals, extremists and scammers a hiding place such that the messages are totally unreadable by anyone else, does that mean we should tell Google and Amazon to ban Signal off of their servers because they are enabling such a communication service that benefits these criminals, extremists and scammers? Also how does one 'hide' their transactions on a transparent ledger for everyone to see and trace even if they do use it for ransomware or illegal stuff? Is that why regulators haven't banned those cryptocurrencies yet and instead have targeted privacy-coins in new regulations requiring exchanges to de-list them? [0] Seems like Stripe [1], Moneygram [2], Checkout.com [3] etc still seem to see that some of them have a use case. Perhaps that explains why they also waited for regulations before proceeding to use them [0]. [0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IPR25162/cryptocurrencies-in-the-eu-new-rules-to-boost-benefits-and-curb-threats https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220309IP... [1] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram-ceo-sees-a-future-in-stablecoin-remittances https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram... [3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto#stablecoin [4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/09/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-innovation-in-digital-assets/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

rootusrootus 4y ago
I'd be interested to see the ratio of criminal/legitimate activity on Signal as compared to criminal/legitimate BTC transactions.

rchaud 4y ago

It does feel like a Twilight Zone episode. In 2011, you could buy coffee and pizza w/ BTC (at non-conformist boutique shops but still). Now, not even those stores would accept it as a method of payment, and you'd be stupid to spend it on goods and services anyway, because BTC's value is wrapped up in the idea that it's a 'digital asset' instead of a currency.

sbarbarian 4y ago

rick and morty is on-point, also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54

helloworld11 4y ago

>So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. This just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority. Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum? Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people. How fucking tedious to see a so-called hacker site shit so much and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike.