27 ms·

When Crypto was young it was this cool new technology that mostly interesting because of the underlying tech. But even back then it was mostly valuable for buyi

• lupire 4y ago
  Good government is a luxury many lack.
  • biohax2015 4y ago
    USD is available to anyone
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      What exactly do you mean by that, because if you do mean American dollar, I can point out multiple parties who simply cannot use US currency? Hell, I can point out to transactions that are prohibited if they even touch some type of activity and are in US dollars. In other words, could you elaborate?
    • TremendousJudge 4y ago
      Ask any Argentinian
    • whitepoplar 4y ago
      Nope
    • djbebs 4y ago
      Im sure the russians that just saw hundreds of billions of usd frozen would disagree.
  • cooljacob204 4y ago
    And that's a fair point. But the problem is Crypto is an investment playground by people from rich countries and legitimate uses of it in countries like say Venezuela is an extremely small part of total transactions.
    • devoutsalsa 4y ago
      The US dollar is used for shady stuff all over the world, but we’re not trying to ban it.
      • cooljacob204 4y ago
        Yes but it's used by far for more legitimate stuff. I would argue crypto outside of investing is not. Also I don't want to ban crypto. I want to crack down on these exchanges which encouraged everyone to gamble on crypto and lost a ton of people money.
        • aww_dang 4y ago
          The market is cracking down on these exchanges by bankrupting them. I'd prefer a privately run auditing and voluntary accreditation model.
      • danans 4y ago
        > The US dollar is used for shady stuff all over the world, but we’re not trying to ban it. That is because it is overwhelmingly used for standard non-shady stuff, like trading legal goods and services. Crypto can't make a similar claim.
        • throwup 4y ago
          https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181 > For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
          • 4y ago
  • TremendousJudge 4y ago
    Agree. For example, people who save in bitcoin or ether. They don't have any influence into how the system is managed.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    Is there any crossover in a Venn diagram of "government is so bad you need crypto" and "government is good enough that they won't shut off the internet to control the people"? If there isn't then crypto isn't very useful in those places.
    • notpushkin 4y ago
      It is hard to shut off the Internet (or at least should be, if it is properly decentralized). Point in case: Russia. Government has been trying to block everything they don't like for some ten years now I think. Controlling all the uplinks from the country is just not feasible (although they're working on buying everything out I believe), so it was in fact easier for them to make all the ISPs install some blocking equipment themselves, which works pretty poorly. Many times they were successful, but they couldn't shut Telegram down for example. When TLS ECH is finally adopted it's basically game over for them.
      • miohtama 4y ago
        If you shut down Internet, your economy suffers. Even China cannot block Github, because it would harm their economy too much. Chinese developers need to access Github (PyPi, NPM), or they are not productive. The global software industry is built on the top of Western science that relies of on freedom of information. Thus, they need to let free information to flow against the authorianship will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China
        • notpushkin 4y ago
          That's interesting! I thought China developers had npm / PyPI etc. mirrored so that they don't have to deal with the slowed worldwide versions. UPD: that said, I agree that the Chinese Firewall is about as far as you can shut off the Internet in a modern country (at least without turning into another North Korea).
    • philippejara 4y ago
      Most governments that are so bad you need crypto are not that bad because of repression necessarily, but because of corruption or incompetence. Corruption or incompetence doesn't care enought to "shut down the internet" and if they do odds are a bad job will be done of it.
  • 7speter 4y ago
    Yet some people still want to drown their pretty good government in a tub.
  • mxschumacher 4y ago
    and competition is healthy anyway, even for governments. That transfers of money in the US are relatively slow and relatively expensive is a technical issue for the FED to resolve; already a solved problem in the Eurozone.
• manofmanysmiles 4y ago
  So bad people did bad things to stupid people using made up numbers, so people with guns should take other made up numbers and give them to people with guns, and tell the people with guns to make sure the bad people don’t do bad things to the stupid people, because they know what’s best for them because they’re too stupid and incapable of becoming strong enough for the big scary world?
  • parker_mountain 4y ago
    Despite your tone, actually, yes.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • azangru 4y ago
    > so people with guns should take other made up numbers and give them to people with guns, and tell the people with guns to make sure the bad people don’t do bad things to the stupid people I think people who are doing the telling actually don't have guns; but are sitting atop a made-up hierarchy.
    • manofmanysmiles 4y ago
      This is true. However, the people with the guns believe in the hierarchy so effectively the people doing the telling have the force of violence behind their words.
• danans 4y ago
  > I do hope it dies out, it should have been heavily regulated from the get go. On the other hand, if it had been heavily regulated from the get-go, there would be tremendous pressure to bail it out now, so maybe it's for the best that it wasn't regulated by the government. It would have been nice if there was a countervailing force to the billionaire-savior cults promoting it, but unfortunately our media environment promotes those ideas rather than combat them.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > On the other hand, if it had been heavily regulated from the get-go, there would be tremendous pressure to bail it out now, so maybe it's for the best that it wasn't regulated by the government. This isn’t true at all. The FTX collapse is more akin to something like Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which was significantly larger and did not get a bailout. The financial bailouts you’re comparing this to were mostly loans that were paid back with interest, which init equivalent to the government handing money over to compensate for someone’s fraud. The idea behind the regulation would be to prevent these situations from becoming so large in the first place. FTX deliberately avoided locations with regulation so they could perpetuate their fraud. So, no, regulations in the US would not have impacted how FTX operated in the Bahamas nor would they have any interest in bailing out a foreign company. Finally, regulation doesn’t cause bailouts. There’s no rule that says regulated industries get bailouts while unregulated industries don’t. You’re conflating two completely different topics and trying to pass them off as one in the same.
    • danans 4y ago
      > The idea behind the regulation would be to prevent these situations from becoming so large in the first place. I agree that's the idea, but how do you identify a ponzi scheme via regulation before it is revealed as a ponzi scheme? > Finally, regulation doesn’t cause bailouts. There’s no rule that says regulated industries get bailouts while unregulated industries don’t. I didn't say cause. I said pressure. Yes, the auto industry received a big bailout in 2008 and the cruise industry during the pandemic. There were other pressures that made those happen, right or wrong.
• camjohnson26 4y ago
  Always relevant: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
• P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  When bitcoin first came onto the scene I personally knew a guy who was running a website to act as an exchange. It was small because bitcoin itself at that time was very small. Then bitcoin had its very first dip and it became unprofitable to mine bitcoins. When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins. I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and considered it bullshit. Then when I saw what this guy did it just solidified my opinion that it can't be trusted. That's not to say that in theory there aren't uses for it, but it's 100% speculative and nothing else. People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical. If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold). a bitcoin has ZERO inherent value. It's not possible for the value of gold to go to zero, but it's absolutely possible for the value of a bitcoin to go to zero. crypto will never go away, but it absolutely should.
  • cft 4y ago
    Get ready for CBDC, surveillance of every transaction and economic unpersoning then.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      The government doesn't need a cryptocoin to monitor transactions, or to make using paper currency illegal. It can already do what you think it needs a cryptocoin to do, and it doesn't do it because it supports wealthy people being able to launder money and avoid taxes. US politics runs entirely on laundered money and misdirected/avoided taxes. You're lobbying for the swamp.
      • yonaguska 4y ago
        I anticipate CBDC being something for the peons to use, not the elite. Yes, the government can monitor transactions, but it currently has to jump through a lot more loopholes to do so. I understand and agree with your sentiment, with the additional point that smaller banks are also going to be made obsolete if a CBDC is rolled out. But the wealthy and connected will most certainly have their own way of getting around the system. Whether that means moving their money into physical assets, or onto the market, I don't know. I don't think cash is going to go away, but I do see the government incentivizing regular people to solely use CBDC, and once you're on that system, you are a serf.
• philippejara 4y ago
  As it stands, without crypto, you are pretty much a hostage to visa, mastercard, discover, and amex to exchange money effectively, and those companies are opinionated to a disturbing extent about who they deny business with when it comes to something so important. While those companies are not operated as some sort of common carrier of transactions crypto is essential for a free global society. Apparently Trump of all people actually tried to make it so[0], but Biden seems to have taken it down. [0]: https://archive.is/wrpvO https://archive.is/wrpvO
  • SoftTalker 4y ago
    What happened to cash? While I don't use it a lot anymore myself, I'm struggling to think of any service or product I use whose provider would not happily accept cash as payment. There are more than a couple of small restaurants here that only accept cash. My barber only accepts cash.
    • web3isgoing 4y ago
      Depends where you live. Most developed countries are moving away from cash. Some already have.
    • DennisP 4y ago
      Cash is risky for any business or charity that's not physically nearby.
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      Payments to remote distances become cumbersome.
• bombcar 4y ago
  Somewhere between "internet nerd project for buying drugs" and "every single Super Bowl ad" regulation should have stepped in. That kind of shit gives the scams a legitimacy they can't buy otherwise.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    And by definition, a Ponzi must continue to expand, and expand quickly. Regulators are literally waiting until cyrpto completely runs out of possible new customers to intervene. The government is maximizing the damage that crypto does. Thank god we haven't gotten to crypto for kids yet, but crypto bonuses on credit cards is getting very close.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The government moves very slowly and basically waits until the problem is over before regulating it.
      • Ferret7446 4y ago
        As it should. The problem with government is that it lacks perfect knowledge, which would only be exacerbated by acting too early.
        • majewsky 4y ago
          > The problem with entities is that they lack perfect knowledge, which would only be exacerbated by acting too early. FTFY. Nothing about this is exclusive to governments.
      • hda2 4y ago
        That's a very good thing.
  • MivLives 4y ago
    2017. That last crypto boom. After that whole run we should have probably looked into more regulations.
• aww_dang 4y ago
  The great part about this is that you are not forced to use cryptocurrency. It is entirely voluntary. I like cryptocurrency as an open platform. I don't have a problem with the market clearing out the speculative mania. I do disagree with detractors who admit that they have no use for cryptocurrency demanding regulation. If you like regulated markets, stick to them. If you love the security of the petrodollar, good on you. Live and let live. Can I just publish a few cryptogames without the obscene generalizations? The worst part of this is that the entire FTX debacle comes on the heels of SBF demanding even more regulatory capture. Shades of Bernie Madoff. The insider connections to regulatory bodies and SEC board members. History repeats itself.
  • jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    no one should be allowed to use a system I don't like!!!
• b0sk 4y ago
  As long as there are a) scammers and b) people willing to invest in scammy things, these sorta things never die. They'll learn and adapt and come up with newer ways. Still the cynicism towards crypto on a whole is healthy and a much needed thing we need.
• archontes 4y ago
  I'm not sure it should be regulated. But it should be dyed. I should have the ability to say, "No crypto in my retirement portfolio, please." and have that be a knowable and enforceable property.
• Zaskoda 4y ago
  There's this unfortunate mixing up of the technology, the community, and the bad actors within the community. Ultimately, more crime gets committed with USD than with cryptocurrencies, yet we don't blame the dollars for those crime the way we blame crypto. There's a bigger paradigm here that I believe few people understand and that I will desperate attempt to explain. I may be about to write a word salad, but here's hoping. When the Internet was young, before e-commerce was a thing, it was a delightful space where you could publicly post your e-mail address and never worry about the repercussions. If you ran a server and a hacker gained access, it was on you to improve your security. Eventually, commerce found the Internet and everything changed. Once money was involved, bad actors started to get involved. This is when we started to experience the delights of e-mail spam, a problem we never really fully solved. And something changed about how we handle those hackers. Now that money is involved, if a hacker gains access to your system, instead of being responsible for your own server you can just call the police. And wow, did they crack down on hackers in the early days. They were bad at catching them, but when they did the punishments were disproportionate. It made things safe enough for commerce to grow, but it didn't make us nor the Internet much "better" in the long run. Rather, it put us in a rut. Compare that with introduction of Bitcoin - which was money from the moment it was created. Because Bitcoin was about money since the beginning, it also attracted those bad actors from the beginning. However, the Bitcoin paradigm is different. Instead of being connected to the existing financial system, it's a self-contained Internet-native system where the responsibility of security is put (to some degree) in the user's hands. But we users are a bit lazy, especially after being hand-fed dumbed-down UX for decades. That makes us vulnerable because we trust instead of verify. But Bitcoin teaches us to learn, to understand, and hopefully to be more responsible. I believe that Bitcoin and it's derivative technologies have created something akin to a bug zapper. It attracts bad actors like nothing ever has before. And the only viable retort is to improve technology and educate - the opposite of the traditional system where we give the state a monopoly on violence and then ask them to fix it for us. If you look over the history of cryptocurrency, you'll see a history of rising and falling value and popularity tied to hacks, exploits, crimes, scams, etc. Often, the news declares the end of the entire enterprise. Yet, each time, the scene not only comes back - it comes back stronger. What I see is greed and wealth attempting to exploit Bitcoin the way the traditional system gets exploited - but always failing in the long run. And with each failure, the wealth in play gets absorbed into Bitcoin. Meanwhile, we continue to harden and improve Bitcoin and the ecosystem around it. In my mind, it's like a worm that is slowly eating the world's wealth through an ongoing interaction with bad actors. I do not believe it can nor should be stopped. So this idea that crypto is inherently a scam is the result of scammers being drawn to crypto. It's easy for the public to believe this. But Bitcoin and things like it are, in my opinion, the medicine we need to move through this and on to something else.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  On one point, I fully agree with you - the whole purpose of regulations is to stop schemes from getting out of hand before the money is gone, because once it's gone, it can't usually be recouped. But that said, I feel something is fundamentally lacking in our education system that people were convinced to put money into this shithole because Matt Damon or Tom Brady or Giselle Bundchen said it was a good idea. I mean, I have sympathy but part of me is like "Stupid is as stupid does". When celebrities started hawking crypto, it was the definite equivalent of "shoe shine boy giving stock tips" to me.
• kragen 4y ago
  I see this point of view a lot on Hacker News because it's dominated by people living in places like the US. Let me add a little perspective on how Bitcoin is used in lower- and middle-income countries from my personal experience. If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it’s not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. Argentina is a stable democracy, far from being “a failed state,”† but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it’s basically impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is real estate (“ahorrar en ladrillos”), which of course grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone bought “as an investment”. Historically, Argentines have saved by buying dollars, but that’s limited to US$200 a month now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job (about a third of total employment is under the table): <https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-cepo-cambiario-se-cumple-un-ano-la-restriccion-impuesta-macri-n5129832 https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-cepo-...> Something like 300,000 people out of a country of 40 million are legally permitted to buy dollars. You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it’s AR$305. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 79% of their value to peso devaluation. In fact, whatever savings you had in pesos a week ago have lost 4%. I’ve been using Bitcoin to get paid for several years at this point where I live here in Argentina. It’s currently 14 years after Bitcoin’s invention, and some people think it’s regressing instead of progressing. Well, 14 years after the internet’s invention was 01983; not only couldn’t you get so much as a weather report online, much less IRC, but many of the early interesting experiments like NLS at SRI had shut down, and more and more places were disabling guest access to their hosts—you couldn’t run so much as a game of ADVENT without getting a username. And a password. Things were seriously regressing. The only people you could talk to on the internet were other people who really bought into the subculture. In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated, "government insured" bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years. The US did something similar in 01933. There was no recourse for this scam. You might think alternatives to banks like credit unions would protect their customers better, since the customers are the owners, but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That’s more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500. But we’re not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you’ll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a couple years ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland’s 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.) Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina, 70% in El Salvador; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked: <https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-unbanked-countries https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-...> And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise!‡ It’s well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%. <https://archive.fo/ZRXzS https://archive.fo/ZRXzS> Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. A few billion dollars a year might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it’s enough to keep several million people alive. Even in the US, it’s common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can (“civil forfeiture”); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don’t seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.) Transaction fees are usually high enough that you wouldn’t want to use Bitcoin to pay for a can of Red Bull or even a restaurant dinner. But it’s extremely practical as an alternative to Western Union or US$100 bills or gold; even when transaction fees are high, they're low compared to the black-market spread. So, Bitcoin doesn’t have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like “instant and extremely low-fee ACHs” and “decentralized utopia”, this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon—the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn’t expect that in 15 years they’d be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later. I think that, by providing workarounds to the people who need them, cryptocurrencies probably not only ameliorate the most immediate and pressing concerns of poor parts of the population like Venezuelan immigrants and MS-13 victims, but probably also adjust the power balance in a more liberal and democratic direction. This will improve the chance of those concerns being ameliorated by public policy over the next decades as well. But it’s hard to tell what will really happen. Of course, when saving money or making a living becomes illegal, I guess they count as "buying illegal shit". But that doesn't make them bad. The potential disaster scenario is that, by making most taxation impossible, cryptocurrencies destroy the modern welfare state without providing anything to replace it. So the public hospitals close, the enormous police force starts to support itself by extracting tribute, and the infrastructure decays. Pretty similar to what’s happened in the US over the last 50 years, in fact, only more so. However, at this point I think the modern welfare state is already doing a good enough job of destroying itself without any significant help from cryptocurrencies—as evidence, I can point to Maduro, Macri, Bolsonaro, Trump, and Brexit, and metonymically to the social changes they betoken. So at this point I’m more worried about cushioning the collapse than preventing it. ____ † We’ve remained democratic since 01983, electing presidents from three different political parties (UCR, PJ, and PRO), and there’s no serious insurgency. It’s the economy and government policy that are ruinously unstable, to a point that seems satirical to anyone accustomed to the US, but is lamentably common worldwide. Rich people sometimes say they don’t know of legitimate uses of Bitcoin outside of “failed states”. ‡ Family remittances are specifically exempted from the US sanctions on Iran, but good luck finding a US bank that’s willing and able to take that risk: <https://www.wiggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/26580_advisory-family-remittances-from-us-to-iran-not-prohibited-by-iranian-transactions-regulations-martini-glasser-november-2011.pdf https://www.wiggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/26580_advi...> See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.
• calculatte 4y ago
  Are you pretending that the government's ability to create fiat currency out of thin air doesn't endanger anyone? Printing trillions over the past few years is what is throwing us into a worldwide depression. You think the "spooky scary government" is harmless? The US government has used its funds to kill over 20 million people since WWII without officially being at war. 90% of those killed in US drone strikes are bystanders. Domestically, we see unrestrained corruption from nearly all of our elected officials leading to every outcome to its own citizens. Poisoned water supplies, missing disaster response, war. But as long as your bank account is insured, everything is cool? Cryptocurrency was created for, and remains suitable for, valid uses that are not "drugs and other illegal stuff." But this is a new technology without guardrails. Bad actors are a problem. So is FUD from competition and disinformation like the parent. This is a growing technology that requires a level of knowledge to safely use until it is mature enough for mass adoption.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    If the fiat system is so bad why did Bitcoin copy it then? The only exception is RAI which does not copy the fiat system by allowing negative rates. Negative rates allow the system to reduce the money supply.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• at-fates-hands 4y ago
  >> It never had a real use outside of scamming people and buying illegal shit, Some anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying. I work at a large health care company. When crypto and blockchain was getting popular, there was a huge push in the company to adopt blockchain and to a degree, crypto. I'm talking hour long presentations by blockchain companies, videos, and trainings. It was heralded as the dawning age of technology where people can be treated and pay in crypto, while at the same time, all their medical files being securely stored on the blockchain. They pushed it as the next step in 100% digitizing health care. 3 months later? It was dropped. Not just dropped, either. It was silenced throughout the entire company. The sharepoint sites promoting it internally were gone, the videos, presentations, and trainings were all scrubbed from the company sites and resources, like it never existed. I started asking around and found out the executives found out about several exchanges going under and taking millions of people's money and how blockchain was more of a solution in search of a problem. That combination became too toxic for them to invest and be associated with.
• bergenty 4y ago
  Outside of cash there needs to be a viable method to do anonymous transactions- be it illegal or not. I don’t think crypto is going away for this reason alone.
  • eldaisfish 4y ago
    Cash is backed by the military force and economic heft of the country issuing it. For an alternative to exist, it must first and foremost be able to hold its value reliably and that is precisely the niche filled by gold. Crypto will never fill that void.
    • mekster 4y ago
      > hold its value reliably It can and that's what it exactly does by keeping its value outside the reach of external influences such as military forces and economic decisions by a handful of people but only governed by its own mathematical law. It's just that people don't understand the nature of crypto but only see it as a new risk asset class which is disappointing after its 13 years of existence and it's the only reason it's going up and down massively by people not having the fundamental belief of what it's actually about.
• LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > It never had a real use outside of scamming people and buying illegal shit HashCash was invented to make spam expensive and save email. > Everyone was yelling at people to hold. Don't spend it, it will go to the moon! No, most of us "in the community" were having fun buying pizzas with it. The vast majority of the people involved early started for the features it unlocked, we didn't foresee being able to ride it to riches like this because nobody could picture our families using it or putting money into it. We thought it would remain a protocol-level thing. > And sure it keeps your money away from the spooky scary government. Horses for courses. I like having some "untraceable" internet money for buying things overseas, like servers, etc. If I wanted to have posters put up in Moscow I could find and pay someone in BTC but not from USD. > But I prefer my government insured bank account using a government managed currency and recourse for any scams/hacks that might happen to me. Generally, yes. Modulo inflation, "haircuts", forced confiscation, looking suspicious because you have too much money, etc.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > trusted celebrities on an ad A fool and his money…