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Which is not necessarily a good thing.
by sabas123 1y ago
Which is not necessarily a good thing.
- coolcase 1y agoIt's like a kitchen knife. Can be good or bad.
- close04 1y agoCorrect in principle but not all that insightful because it's something almost universally true. "Fentanyl! Ads! Widespread surveillance! Can be good or bad". You have to look at the reality. Crypto has been used overwhelmingly for scams and crime.
- CelestialMystic 1y ago> Crypto has been used overwhelmingly for scams and crime. So has regular currency.
- vkou 1y agoThe overwhelming use of regular currency is crime? Where?
- CelestialMystic 1y agoThere are transactions happening all the time in regular cash for weapons, drugs etc. Large banks have been found to be knowingly processing funds from terrorists, drugs dealers and have got fines. If you anti-war, you would also include the wars that are financed partly by the ability to print money. These transactions while not the majority of transactions I would wager is far larger in terms of dollar value that the whole crypto ecosystem. The reality is that criminals will find loop holes in a system and they will exploit it if it is worth exploiting. Many of the checks done in banks now impede transactions. I was buying a car (private seller) and I couldn't transfer the cash without going through a fraud check, even though I had signed the transaction with a card reader in the app. It turned a 30 minutes of test driving the vehicle and checking docs into 3 hours of wrangling on the phone. BTW I am not the only person having these problems with banks in the UK. As for what crime we are referring to as well in this scenario needs clarifying as well. I suspect that most of crypto transactions are through darknet drug markets. These markets reduce the risk of violence to basically zero when purchasing drugs. While I am not one of these people that is pro-legalising all drugs, the reality is that people are going to buying them.
- throwaway1854 1y agoWherever any consumer-level illegal drug transaction has happened, which is everywhere.
- vkou 1y agoThe overwhelming use of fiat in my town does not consist of buying and selling street pharmaceuticals.
- notpushkin 1y agoBut not necessarily a bad thing either. If everything else fails, I know I can still have two things to pay with: cash and crypto.
- coolcase 1y agoGold being the ultimate. Cash can be diluted and crypto has unlimited supply (via alt coins). Gold is backed by physics and minted in neutron stars!
- briansm 1y agoStrictly speaking, directed energy is the ultimate. Both crypto and gold are both just embodiments of energy, gold being the physical embodiment (via mining and refinement) and crypto being the virtual embodiment.
- coolcase 1y agoNot really. Gold has no more energy than carbon per gram. E=MC^2. And total energy is unavailable. Carbon had more available chemical energy. (Why we can burn coal not gold). Bitcoin doesn't store any energy. Bitcoin is like a F1 car going around a track forever, with your name scribbled on it.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoBoth gold and bitcoin are a variant of "proof of wasted energy" or more euphemistically "proof of work". Why that makes it valuable is beyond me, but it isn't really a new thing considering the historic value of gold being much more than its utility as a material.
- briansm 1y agoThe 'value' in them is that they demonstrate that energy is currently so cheap and abundant to Us that we can waste it frivolously. It's a sort-of flex, showing off, a demonstration of (energy) wealth. Humanities's peacock feathers.