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> it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently Yeah, but who actually needs that "problem" solved? Money launderers? Drug dealers? Scam

> it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently Yeah, but who actually needs that "problem" solved? Money launderers? Drug dealers? Scam artists? Adolescent boys whacking off to Ayn Rand books in their mother's basement?

dkirill 4y ago
People not privileged enough to have access to western banking
- rrdharan 4y ago
  Yet somehow sophisticated and well informed enough to keep their keys secure and not get scammed.
  - dkirill 4y ago
    I don’t understand your point. Are you implying that people don’t have access to western finance because they are not sophisticated enough? If you don’t luck into being born with good citizenship lots of things you might take for granted are inaccessible. It has nothing to do with level of sophistication
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      The point is that people who were the most impacted of the fall of FTX and all those others exchanges are actually people in developing countries that lost ALL their savings. It was perhaps a few thousands dollar for people in the western world, an alternative way to do some investing, but lots of people in countries with bad financial systems (lets say Argentina or Venezuela) tried to use crypto as their stable banking system and it failed them miserably and now lost almost everything. So while in theory crypto offers that alternative that should be better than those shitty countries economic policies, in practice, this gave them something worse than their local bank. Yes Yes, you can use a hardware wallet and would have avoided all of that, the reality is that a very high percentage of people were just using the tools offered to them and didn't think it was all a giant fraud.
      - dkirill 4y ago
        Fair. Crypto is not just ftx/investment tho. It’s also a mean to transfer wealth outside of your country. It might be risky but any option is better than none
      - nightski 4y ago
        SVB depositors were almost in the same boat. Maybe not this time, but there is no guarantee the government will bail you out. In fact, Janet Yellen (who has a lost any credibility she may have had imho) even said they don't intend to extend that protection to all banks. They prefer to pick & choose who they extend the protection to (especially rich liberal donors).
        jboy55 4y ago
        Only depositors who had more than 500k deposited. For SVB, a high number for sure, but its not a counterpoint to someone posting how putting trust in crypto bankrupted a large number of people in developing countries when they mistakenly thought they could trust crypto more than a bank.
        nightski 4y ago
        FDIC insurance is 250k, not 500k. It's not Apples to Apples, but it demonstrates that the banking system is not rock solid either. Not only that, if you really want to look at exploitation of the poor look no further than our large banks in America.
    - JasserInicide 4y ago
      "Western finance" is heavily regulated (well, consumer banking anyway) and for the most part is pretty secure. Crypto is completely unregulated and chalk full of bad actors distracting you with grandiose promises while fleecing you behind your back. Every other month there's a report of some massive theft/data breach at an exchange.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Conversely, part of those regulations involves excluding whole countries from the system, most of them for purely political reasons.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Banking is doing just fine with cell phones in places like Africa.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  This argument comes up so often, it needs a name like the "think of the children" mantra politicians use to promote bad policies.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Well that’s useful for everyone, just not useful ENOUGH. Everyone needs to know the system they are using has integrity. Let me be clear, this does not mean the regular financial system doesn’t have integrity. As I said the current system is better so I don’t see your point as some sort of counterpoint to my observation that crypto has utility, it’s just relatively low or tuned to less in demand needs.
incrudible 4y ago
Soon enough, governments will attempt to eliminate cash transactions, control every financial transaction, and limit the ways money can be spent on undesirable products, i.e. put quotas on fossil fuel or meat. Whether crypto can actually mitigate that is an open question. Arguably, a society that accepts strict financial controls would also prosecute crypto users.
- sowbug 4y ago
  Fortunately, the US Supreme Court has already decided that money is speech deserving of 1A protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC I don't believe for a minute that today's Court would expand that reasoning to digital currencies, but it is a foot in the door.
Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
Who needs privacy? Drug dealers and scam artists... Crypto solves (to a degree) the problem of a huge amoount of power belonging to the few people who run the financial system. Huge consentration of power is not a good thing. Power corrupts and so on. Crypto puts everyone on equal footing - rather than say the people/companies who have a banking license enjoying an unfair advantage over everyone else (like the power to create money from thin air in the fractional reserve system). The credit card companies, PayPal and the like get to decide which companies are worthy to exist and which not. If they don't like a business, they can just cut them off from receiving money. E.g. VPN provides who don't keep logs are all banned from receiving credit/debit card payment, PayPal, etc. - they have to resort to receiving cash by post and crypto.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  That's an awful lot of workaround to solve the social problem of "my regulatory agencies aren't regulating well enough" -- a problem which will still exist afterwards.
  - sowbug 4y ago
    It's not to solve that problem. It's to have the option to route around it.
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      It certainly can't route around it. US: https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti... CA: https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/osfi-bsif/med/Pages/20221116_let.aspx https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/osfi-bsif/med/Pages/20221116... EU: https://www.bafin.de/EN/Aufsicht/FinTech/Geschaeftsmodelle/DLT_Blockchain_Krypto/DLT_Blockchain_Krypto_node_en.html https://www.bafin.de/EN/Aufsicht/FinTech/Geschaeftsmodelle/D... and so on.
      - sowbug 4y ago
        Fraud existed long before digital currencies, and nobody is seriously advocating to legitimize it. I hope that even if you love the current financial system, you'd still be in favor of giving its competitors a chance to exist.
rybosworld 4y ago
Never ceases to surprise me when folks align cryptocurrency with these things. Money laundering, drug dealing, scamming old people, these things have all existed well before cryptocurrency. Arguing that central banks and a few other non-elected decision makers should be able to influence our lives by devaluing our savings is... insane. It's Stockholm syndrome really. A few wealthy people decide your money should be worth less because a bunch of other wealthy people have made bad decisions for decades and now there's too much money floating around. Coincidentally, the interest rate adjustments won't tangibly affect the wealthy people! That's not something I want to continue to support.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > That's not something I want to continue to support. What’s your solution?
  - nightski 4y ago
    Not the parent but buying assets and not holding more fiat than I need personally.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Yeah. Each medium of wealth storage has tradeoffs, so being categorically opposed to one type because of ideological principles seems suboptimal to me. For example, fiat may be subject to devaluation, but is stable, widely accepted, highly liquid and (cash) is anonymous. Bitcoin is subject to speculation, so prices are highly volatile, amongst other downsides. Land tends to maintain or grow in value, subject to interest rates, tax environment, and adjacent developments, and is very illiquid.
- Domenic_S 4y ago
  > Arguing that central banks and a few other non-elected decision makers should be able to influence our lives by devaluing our savings is... insane Perhaps, but a currency that devalues based on news, scams, pump & dump schemes, and so forth isn't the solution. Crypto doesn't transfer the power of value to you, it transfers to people with a big enough following - or botnet - to amplify whatever news (false or not) that impacts their crypto the way they want it, up or down. Your premise is reasonable, but your conclusion doesn't logically follow from it.
sowbug 4y ago
Who needs free speech except for assholes? Who needs freedom of association except for troublemakers? Who needs the fourth amendment except for criminals?
hardtke 4y ago
A totally legitimate use case for crypto is moving money into countries that have bogus official exchange rates (e.g. Argentina). I've got multiple friends that hire developers in Argentina and pay them using crypto in order to avoid the 90% haircut.
int_19h 4y ago
Drug dealers would be a good example, yes, especially in a society that bans so many things for such utterly stupid reasons. This applies to both kinds of drugs, by the way. Online black market shops selling generics from India also use crypto heavily.
dimva 4y ago
Yea, all of the above. And that's a pretty big market, enough to support its current price (around $30k I believe)
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Put down the Atlas Shrugged and step away from the computer.
- benburleson 4y ago
  I think the main demographic supporting the current price is people who bought it as a speculative investment.
lezojeda 4y ago
[dead]
realce 4y ago
The problem is central banks devaluing currency. It's an esoteric topic to many people, so crypto turned into a blinking pinball machine of tech, but the problem was always the devaluing of currency by the Fed.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  The point of central banks is to control their monetary policy. Like, that's why they exist. Plus while a bank may devalue its currency, the point of it is to keep it stable -- something we haven't seen from crypto in any meaningful sense. Even the so-called "stable coins" are anything but.
  - realce 4y ago
    > The point of central banks is to control their monetary policy. There's plenty of people out there who disagree with central bank's existence and policy. I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable. It's all just money, and money isn't entirely rational to begin with.
    - cmh89 4y ago
      >I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. Something that depreciates can still be stable. The US dollar loses value at a relatively predictable rate. We can see what an unstable currency looks like right now by looking at Argentina, where the peso has lost 47% of its value in a year. BitCoin is more like the peso than the dollar, hence why its called unstable. > All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable. Currency isn't an illusion, it's a social construct, and its a deeply embedded social construct.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
defrost 4y ago
Countries that don't want to be tied to the US dollar for trade between themselves outside of the US hegonomy. In abstract terms, independant trade without ties to a dominant financial gorilla (once a time the pound sterling and perhaps one day the Yen (or other)). That was a clean enough goal from the outset, my personal objections (expressed in cypher forums back in the day circa the bitcoin paper dropping) are wrapped in the failure to tie the OG bitcoin to some form of verified "energy used to mine" signature (a curly one) and the high energy cost of verifying OG bitcoin transactions. With 20/20 hindsight it was likely a premature release, in fairness it was more of a proof of concept begining that lasted longer than expected and then took off.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Countries that don't want to be tied to the US dollar for trade between themselves outside of the US hegonomy. What currency do you propose people, companies, and countries trade in? And why that currency?
  - defrost 4y ago
    Pairs of people | companies | countries can directly trade in goods and services by some agreed ratio if that can be satisfied (eg: Australian Iron Ore + Rare Earth Concentrates in exchange for Chinese electronics is an ongoing tade at some agreed ratio) A currency is abstraction for trade in wider circles where (the common case) trade between two parties isn't sufficient ( typically parties supply | demand a basket of various resources, various energies, various intermediate and finished goods ) and for trade to take place the guarantors must have faith in the agreed abstraction for transfer of credit; additional mechanism that verify transactions are an added bonus. Both now and through history many currencies have been used and are being used. I've given examples of US dollars, the Pound Sterling, in the context of this sub thread bitcoin is an obvious example of a currency that has been used to facilitate trade; less obvious but important examples of currency are the word of a trusted person of faith (as used historically along the original Silk Road and today throughout Hawala and similar mechnaisms). What strikes me as odd about your question is the implicit assumption that I favour one singular currency over all others.

dkirill 4y ago

People not privileged enough to have access to western banking

rrdharan 4y ago
Yet somehow sophisticated and well informed enough to keep their keys secure and not get scammed.
- dkirill 4y ago
  I don’t understand your point. Are you implying that people don’t have access to western finance because they are not sophisticated enough? If you don’t luck into being born with good citizenship lots of things you might take for granted are inaccessible. It has nothing to do with level of sophistication
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    The point is that people who were the most impacted of the fall of FTX and all those others exchanges are actually people in developing countries that lost ALL their savings. It was perhaps a few thousands dollar for people in the western world, an alternative way to do some investing, but lots of people in countries with bad financial systems (lets say Argentina or Venezuela) tried to use crypto as their stable banking system and it failed them miserably and now lost almost everything. So while in theory crypto offers that alternative that should be better than those shitty countries economic policies, in practice, this gave them something worse than their local bank. Yes Yes, you can use a hardware wallet and would have avoided all of that, the reality is that a very high percentage of people were just using the tools offered to them and didn't think it was all a giant fraud.
    - dkirill 4y ago
      Fair. Crypto is not just ftx/investment tho. It’s also a mean to transfer wealth outside of your country. It might be risky but any option is better than none
    - nightski 4y ago
      SVB depositors were almost in the same boat. Maybe not this time, but there is no guarantee the government will bail you out. In fact, Janet Yellen (who has a lost any credibility she may have had imho) even said they don't intend to extend that protection to all banks. They prefer to pick & choose who they extend the protection to (especially rich liberal donors).
      - jboy55 4y ago
        Only depositors who had more than 500k deposited. For SVB, a high number for sure, but its not a counterpoint to someone posting how putting trust in crypto bankrupted a large number of people in developing countries when they mistakenly thought they could trust crypto more than a bank.
        nightski 4y ago
        FDIC insurance is 250k, not 500k. It's not Apples to Apples, but it demonstrates that the banking system is not rock solid either. Not only that, if you really want to look at exploitation of the poor look no further than our large banks in America.
  - JasserInicide 4y ago
    "Western finance" is heavily regulated (well, consumer banking anyway) and for the most part is pretty secure. Crypto is completely unregulated and chalk full of bad actors distracting you with grandiose promises while fleecing you behind your back. Every other month there's a report of some massive theft/data breach at an exchange.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Conversely, part of those regulations involves excluding whole countries from the system, most of them for purely political reasons.
red-iron-pine 4y ago
Banking is doing just fine with cell phones in places like Africa.
throw_pm23 4y ago
This argument comes up so often, it needs a name like the "think of the children" mantra politicians use to promote bad policies.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Well that’s useful for everyone, just not useful ENOUGH. Everyone needs to know the system they are using has integrity. Let me be clear, this does not mean the regular financial system doesn’t have integrity. As I said the current system is better so I don’t see your point as some sort of counterpoint to my observation that crypto has utility, it’s just relatively low or tuned to less in demand needs.

incrudible 4y ago

Soon enough, governments will attempt to eliminate cash transactions, control every financial transaction, and limit the ways money can be spent on undesirable products, i.e. put quotas on fossil fuel or meat. Whether crypto can actually mitigate that is an open question. Arguably, a society that accepts strict financial controls would also prosecute crypto users.

sowbug 4y ago
Fortunately, the US Supreme Court has already decided that money is speech deserving of 1A protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC I don't believe for a minute that today's Court would expand that reasoning to digital currencies, but it is a foot in the door.

Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago

Who needs privacy? Drug dealers and scam artists... Crypto solves (to a degree) the problem of a huge amoount of power belonging to the few people who run the financial system. Huge consentration of power is not a good thing. Power corrupts and so on. Crypto puts everyone on equal footing - rather than say the people/companies who have a banking license enjoying an unfair advantage over everyone else (like the power to create money from thin air in the fractional reserve system). The credit card companies, PayPal and the like get to decide which companies are worthy to exist and which not. If they don't like a business, they can just cut them off from receiving money. E.g. VPN provides who don't keep logs are all banned from receiving credit/debit card payment, PayPal, etc. - they have to resort to receiving cash by post and crypto.

dsr_ 4y ago
That's an awful lot of workaround to solve the social problem of "my regulatory agencies aren't regulating well enough" -- a problem which will still exist afterwards.
- sowbug 4y ago
  It's not to solve that problem. It's to have the option to route around it.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    It certainly can't route around it. US: https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti... CA: https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/osfi-bsif/med/Pages/20221116_let.aspx https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/osfi-bsif/med/Pages/20221116... EU: https://www.bafin.de/EN/Aufsicht/FinTech/Geschaeftsmodelle/DLT_Blockchain_Krypto/DLT_Blockchain_Krypto_node_en.html https://www.bafin.de/EN/Aufsicht/FinTech/Geschaeftsmodelle/D... and so on.
    - sowbug 4y ago
      Fraud existed long before digital currencies, and nobody is seriously advocating to legitimize it. I hope that even if you love the current financial system, you'd still be in favor of giving its competitors a chance to exist.

rybosworld 4y ago

Never ceases to surprise me when folks align cryptocurrency with these things. Money laundering, drug dealing, scamming old people, these things have all existed well before cryptocurrency. Arguing that central banks and a few other non-elected decision makers should be able to influence our lives by devaluing our savings is... insane. It's Stockholm syndrome really. A few wealthy people decide your money should be worth less because a bunch of other wealthy people have made bad decisions for decades and now there's too much money floating around. Coincidentally, the interest rate adjustments won't tangibly affect the wealthy people! That's not something I want to continue to support.

andsoitis 4y ago
> That's not something I want to continue to support. What’s your solution?
- nightski 4y ago
  Not the parent but buying assets and not holding more fiat than I need personally.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Yeah. Each medium of wealth storage has tradeoffs, so being categorically opposed to one type because of ideological principles seems suboptimal to me. For example, fiat may be subject to devaluation, but is stable, widely accepted, highly liquid and (cash) is anonymous. Bitcoin is subject to speculation, so prices are highly volatile, amongst other downsides. Land tends to maintain or grow in value, subject to interest rates, tax environment, and adjacent developments, and is very illiquid.
Domenic_S 4y ago
> Arguing that central banks and a few other non-elected decision makers should be able to influence our lives by devaluing our savings is... insane Perhaps, but a currency that devalues based on news, scams, pump & dump schemes, and so forth isn't the solution. Crypto doesn't transfer the power of value to you, it transfers to people with a big enough following - or botnet - to amplify whatever news (false or not) that impacts their crypto the way they want it, up or down. Your premise is reasonable, but your conclusion doesn't logically follow from it.

sowbug 4y ago

Who needs free speech except for assholes? Who needs freedom of association except for troublemakers? Who needs the fourth amendment except for criminals?

hardtke 4y ago

A totally legitimate use case for crypto is moving money into countries that have bogus official exchange rates (e.g. Argentina). I've got multiple friends that hire developers in Argentina and pay them using crypto in order to avoid the 90% haircut.

int_19h 4y ago

Drug dealers would be a good example, yes, especially in a society that bans so many things for such utterly stupid reasons. This applies to both kinds of drugs, by the way. Online black market shops selling generics from India also use crypto heavily.

dimva 4y ago

Yea, all of the above. And that's a pretty big market, enough to support its current price (around $30k I believe)

DonHopkins 4y ago
Put down the Atlas Shrugged and step away from the computer.
benburleson 4y ago
I think the main demographic supporting the current price is people who bought it as a speculative investment.

lezojeda 4y ago

[dead]

realce 4y ago

The problem is central banks devaluing currency. It's an esoteric topic to many people, so crypto turned into a blinking pinball machine of tech, but the problem was always the devaluing of currency by the Fed.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
The point of central banks is to control their monetary policy. Like, that's why they exist. Plus while a bank may devalue its currency, the point of it is to keep it stable -- something we haven't seen from crypto in any meaningful sense. Even the so-called "stable coins" are anything but.
- realce 4y ago
  > The point of central banks is to control their monetary policy. There's plenty of people out there who disagree with central bank's existence and policy. I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable. It's all just money, and money isn't entirely rational to begin with.
  - cmh89 4y ago
    >I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. Something that depreciates can still be stable. The US dollar loses value at a relatively predictable rate. We can see what an unstable currency looks like right now by looking at Argentina, where the peso has lost 47% of its value in a year. BitCoin is more like the peso than the dollar, hence why its called unstable. > All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable. Currency isn't an illusion, it's a social construct, and its a deeply embedded social construct.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

defrost 4y ago

Countries that don't want to be tied to the US dollar for trade between themselves outside of the US hegonomy. In abstract terms, independant trade without ties to a dominant financial gorilla (once a time the pound sterling and perhaps one day the Yen (or other)). That was a clean enough goal from the outset, my personal objections (expressed in cypher forums back in the day circa the bitcoin paper dropping) are wrapped in the failure to tie the OG bitcoin to some form of verified "energy used to mine" signature (a curly one) and the high energy cost of verifying OG bitcoin transactions. With 20/20 hindsight it was likely a premature release, in fairness it was more of a proof of concept begining that lasted longer than expected and then took off.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Countries that don't want to be tied to the US dollar for trade between themselves outside of the US hegonomy. What currency do you propose people, companies, and countries trade in? And why that currency?
- defrost 4y ago
  Pairs of people | companies | countries can directly trade in goods and services by some agreed ratio if that can be satisfied (eg: Australian Iron Ore + Rare Earth Concentrates in exchange for Chinese electronics is an ongoing tade at some agreed ratio) A currency is abstraction for trade in wider circles where (the common case) trade between two parties isn't sufficient ( typically parties supply | demand a basket of various resources, various energies, various intermediate and finished goods ) and for trade to take place the guarantors must have faith in the agreed abstraction for transfer of credit; additional mechanism that verify transactions are an added bonus. Both now and through history many currencies have been used and are being used. I've given examples of US dollars, the Pound Sterling, in the context of this sub thread bitcoin is an obvious example of a currency that has been used to facilitate trade; less obvious but important examples of currency are the word of a trusted person of faith (as used historically along the original Silk Road and today throughout Hawala and similar mechnaisms). What strikes me as odd about your question is the implicit assumption that I favour one singular currency over all others.