4 ms·

Well, crypto has still not demonstrated any use cases. The coins are just pumping for another round of ponzi scamming.

• adastra22 3y ago
  Being able to transfer funds internationally instantaneously (or near enough), and protection from both censorship and confiscation are not use cases?
  • c0balt 3y ago
    Maybe in edge cases, e.g., Ukraine where the money conversion is not a primary concern. But for any real use case beyond "illegitimate" businesses, like Scams, it seems that the censorship and confiscation is not really stoppable. This starts and ends with the conversion from regional currency <> crypto where, e.g., a country may coerce exchanges to blacklist your wallet(s). This even has precedent in the US with wallets containing stolen assets being blacklisted from major exchanges making them hard to use at best.
    • adastra22 3y ago
      If you're using an exchange, you're missing the point ;)
      • MBCook 3y ago
        So it’s a fungible store of value that cannot be turned into useful currency. Lovely. So everyone just needs to buy enough bitcoin until every business randomly decides to start accepting bitcoin? Can you provide any examples in history of a similar non-government currency having to wait for such a circumstance? Or a government one that wasn’t just waiting for a predetermined switch over date?
        • adastra22 3y ago
          Why do you need to turn it into dollars or euros for it to be useful currency? Just transact directly.
  • vrighter 3y ago
    not instantaneously, and with outrageously big fees (which will only increase due to the limited supply). And no recourse if someone manages to steal stuff? No, that is the opposite of protection.
    • adastra22 3y ago
      Lightning transfers are instantaneous and low fee. No recourse is the complement of self sovereignty. It is a tradeoff to be made.
      • MBCook 3y ago
        Right. That’s why the FDIC and police exists. Society decided this 100 years ago. We don’t like the Wild West and scams. We like safety.
        • adastra22 3y ago
          > transfer funds internationally
      • vrighter 3y ago
        ttc fees increased since lightning became a thing. It gains speed by compromising security. Lightning enables whole new classes of attacks. You also need to have a server or something constantly online, or trust someone to do it for you. Trust, for a supposedly trustless system.
  • acdha 3y ago
    A better way to phrase this: why has it had no real impact on the market if those claims are true? Companies like PayPal and Western Union don’t seem worried, people never suggest it for in-country transactions, etc. suggest that the marketing isn’t true and the high transaction costs and lack of security matter more.
    • babelchips 3y ago
      Because it’s happening slowly and people aren’t paying attention.
      • acdha 3y ago
        If a decade and a half with many billions invested is getting such slow adoption, why do we think that’ll change?
        • adastra22 3y ago
          You have oddly fast timelines for adoption. These things take time.
          • acdha 3y ago
            None of the competitors needed anything like decades. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc. had far more usage with a year or two of launch, and nothing like the high percentage of companies who started using them and removed the option because the fraud / benefit ratio was dismal.
          • MBCook 3y ago
            The iPhone came out the year before crypto. One of them literally changed the entire world. The other caused totally unnecessary climate change and a bunch of people lost all their money. So, I’ll ask the question that I seem to have to ask in every thread. It’s been 15 years. How long do we have to wait? 30? 50? 100?
            • 3y ago
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  I kinda like the distributed ledger aspect, but there are lots of ways to do that. The thing that annoys me about crypto is all the wasted compute; it's not like when we succeed in factoring a large number, that creates sufficient downstream utility to be a positive externality. A lot of the alleged advantages over other kinds of currency only make sense if you're a) paranoid enough to think governments are out to get you on general principle but b) optimistic enough to believe in society where property rights are taken seriously and digital abstractions will continue to be convertible.
  • babelchips 3y ago
    You’re referring to Proof Of Work (PoW). There are other methods which aren’t energy sinks.