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Part of the issue is that rightly or wrongly, all of its strengths have effectively been regulated out of existence. I needed to quickly send some money intern

Part of the issue is that rightly or wrongly, all of its strengths have effectively been regulated out of existence. I needed to quickly send some money internationally for a perfectly legal purpose. I have an old Coinbase account I wanted to use for the purpose that I hadn't left any money in (because crypto is not a good investment vehicle). Thanks to changes in KYC laws, I found myself completely unable to do this. I had to give them a very uncomfortable amount of information just to unlock the account (including a scan of my driver's license and my social security number). At this point, they still wouldn't let me deposit any cash without further verification. They then proceeded to refuse to let me verify every payment method I tried using (including debit card, PayPal, checking account... they were "unable to verify" any of them). There was some third party service they wanted to use that would literally log into my bank account to provide verification (??!!), but I drew the line there. So I just ... gave up. Forget any of the more interesting uses of crypto. We're not even talking gray market goods here (it would be interesting for people who need cheap insulin to be able to order it from international pharmacies in countries with lax laws, for example). We're talking boring ordinary transfers, effectively made impossible by regulation. And yes, there are a lot of scams in crypto. It's not very economically or environmentally efficient (usually). Maybe it deserves to be regulated out of existence. But I do know that for a while it was able to do some things that were difficult or annoying to do in other ways.

eli 3y ago
Well yeah of course it would be easier to send money without any KYC laws. That has nothing to do with crypto.
- bscphil 3y ago
  The point is that crypto used to be able to do that, trivially. So it very much speaks to the question of whether crypto has any strengths versus other approaches to the same problems. It used to, and doesn't anymore.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    Unfortunately, that strength mostly boils down to "you can launder money with it". The idea that it would maintain that property indefinitely seems naiive at best. "I've made the perfect platform for criminals, but for some reason there are a lot of people using it for crimes and now law enforcement is shutting me down! This is an outrage!" This reminds me of why there are so few ways to simply send someone a large file on the Internet. All of the easy ways make it too easy to spread copyrighted worked, so they all need to suck in one way or another to avoid being shut down.
    - bscphil 3y ago
      This is actually sort of an example of what I'm talking about. Yeah, part of the strength of cryptocurrency is that it allows bad people to do bad things. Sort of how part of the strength of encrypted messages is that they allow bad people to do bad things. Same with file transfers. The defenses people give of file transfers, chat encryption, etc etc are pretty straightforward: certain things should be equally usable by both law-abiders and criminals, for both legitimate and illegitimate ends. That kind of broad protection is the only way to insure that the civil liberties of all users are protected. Some of the illegal things that people do with these tools are unfortunate, but protecting them remains worthwhile. What I'm saying is that the people who invented cryptocurrency believed basically the same thing about finances - that we would be better off treating the ability to transfer money as an absolute right, kind of like Signal treats encrypted messaging as an absolute right. The fact that the government doesn't see this as "legitimate" is kind of the point. (It was illegal to export many forms of encryption for *years.) As someone who at some points has used cryptocurrency for completely legal money transfers, I've directly benefited from the ease of use and simplicity this entailed. Is it "naive at best" to hope that Signal will indefinitely maintain the property of protecting my chats against intrusion by third parties? Maybe! But that doesn't change the point that the fact that Signal does this is the whole reason I use Signal!
      - jandrese 3y ago
        Signal gets away with it because money doesn't change hands. Law Enforcement is mostly about protecting money. If Signal became a platform for scamming people out of their retirement savings they would get in trouble.

eli 3y ago

Well yeah of course it would be easier to send money without any KYC laws. That has nothing to do with crypto.

bscphil 3y ago
The point is that crypto used to be able to do that, trivially. So it very much speaks to the question of whether crypto has any strengths versus other approaches to the same problems. It used to, and doesn't anymore.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Unfortunately, that strength mostly boils down to "you can launder money with it". The idea that it would maintain that property indefinitely seems naiive at best. "I've made the perfect platform for criminals, but for some reason there are a lot of people using it for crimes and now law enforcement is shutting me down! This is an outrage!" This reminds me of why there are so few ways to simply send someone a large file on the Internet. All of the easy ways make it too easy to spread copyrighted worked, so they all need to suck in one way or another to avoid being shut down.
  - bscphil 3y ago
    This is actually sort of an example of what I'm talking about. Yeah, part of the strength of cryptocurrency is that it allows bad people to do bad things. Sort of how part of the strength of encrypted messages is that they allow bad people to do bad things. Same with file transfers. The defenses people give of file transfers, chat encryption, etc etc are pretty straightforward: certain things should be equally usable by both law-abiders and criminals, for both legitimate and illegitimate ends. That kind of broad protection is the only way to insure that the civil liberties of all users are protected. Some of the illegal things that people do with these tools are unfortunate, but protecting them remains worthwhile. What I'm saying is that the people who invented cryptocurrency believed basically the same thing about finances - that we would be better off treating the ability to transfer money as an absolute right, kind of like Signal treats encrypted messaging as an absolute right. The fact that the government doesn't see this as "legitimate" is kind of the point. (It was illegal to export many forms of encryption for *years.) As someone who at some points has used cryptocurrency for completely legal money transfers, I've directly benefited from the ease of use and simplicity this entailed. Is it "naive at best" to hope that Signal will indefinitely maintain the property of protecting my chats against intrusion by third parties? Maybe! But that doesn't change the point that the fact that Signal does this is the whole reason I use Signal!
    - jandrese 3y ago
      Signal gets away with it because money doesn't change hands. Law Enforcement is mostly about protecting money. If Signal became a platform for scamming people out of their retirement savings they would get in trouble.