I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.
Personally, I’m not against it, but I’m not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don’t think it will be viable for at least another decade.
To be frank:
- Good idea in theory
- Ancaps and cryptobros ruined it for the rest of us
- Monero is okay
i think it’s really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don’t use crypto personally, but it’s important that something like it exists.
cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it’s obviously not going to replace “normal” money any time soon.
i feel like it’s kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you’re trading lots of electricity for “not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations”. obviously it has it’s flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.
edit: oh yeah, i didn’t mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it’s private and it’s an esperanto word :P)
Nice tech surrounded by scams.
I’m for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin
But, sadly, I’m against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn’t been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA’s https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn’t even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d’etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.
So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I’ve became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.
I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.
PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I’m using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that’s where the value literally is today. I’d also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they’d be technically viable.
fuck that utterly horrible shit
The initial idea and the aspect of “fuck the banks” intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.
There’s lots of people who use the dollar and other currencies I don’t like. But I still use the currency. Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policies and promises for 15 years. It’s money whose supply can’t be diluted through inflation. You can be your own bank. That has never changed. Whatever it originally promised, it’s still doing.
Being your own bank is 99% of the problems crypto runs into. It turns out being your own bank is hard and makes most people into marks. This is of course, by design, and most of the space, the vast majority of the space, is scams.
Also bitcoin has kept its promises just as much as USD has. That’s not really a useful metric.
A public forever storage of all transactions is not good but bad for privacy.
Send money to someone and they can see your wallet and all transactions.
Identifying wallet owners may require different levels of effort. But that’s kinda besides the point.
I thought Monero solves this issue, with a level of effort large enough that it’s almost impossible to crack.
and here lies the issue with asking about crypto in non-crypto circles… everyone thinks they completely understand blockchain in its entirely. what they actually have is a rudimentary understanding of a single blockchain as it was literally 15 years ago
of course the problem with asking in crypto circles is that they’re all trying to sell you their new big thing which is probably total trash
so really there’s no good way to ask and get reasonable answers about crypto
Have they solved the problem yet that proof-of-work essentially makes the whole thing an environmental nightmare and means it doesn’t scale to anything useful in terms of transaction rates? Or the problem that “proof-of-stake” is essentially just a “the rich get richer” scheme? Or the problem that transaction latencies are huge compared to traditional payment methods? Or the problem that blockchains do not have a defined point where a seller of some good or service can be sure the transaction is actually part of the longest chain? Or the problem that the blockchain only ever grows which means it is not feasible to work directly on it on most devices? Or the problem of uncontrolled deflation with a fixed money supply (well, shrinking really if you take into account wallets people lost access to)?
The whole concept is just deeply flawed and meanwhile 99% of actual uses that are not just research are basically scammers.
I could go through each of your concerns, but I’ll just leave it at two:
- rich get richer - someone needs to be trusted to confirm transactions properly. Requiring some skin in the game (proof of stake, mining, etc) with a reward is the way to do it in a trustless system. This exists in fiat currencies as well, with the main winners being banks and large borrowers, so I don’t see it as a serious issue.
- energy costs - mining cryptocurrencies has a high initial energy requirement, but it scales really well in terms of transactions, so if transactions double, we’ll see a modest (way less than double) increase to energy usage of the network as a whole. And in theory, mining operations would prefer cheap power, so that means whatever excess green power exists that would otherwise be wasted worldwide. There’s an ethical option to mining energy usage.
The reason I’m not going to go through each is because each problem has a solution, whether that’s in an already existing currency, or will go away as it scales.
Here are the real problems as I see it:
- way too many scams - which leads to…
- way too much volatility - most cryptocurrency users are speculators, so there’s…
- no mass of regular transactions to attract vendors
Even if we get past the FUD, we’re still going to have adoption issues because of the above. And I don’t have a good solution for that, but we need adoption to stabilize the currency and motivate solutions for problems.
I like the idea of cryptocurrencies, but we need a large institution to normalize it before people will adopt it, and I don’t see that happening. Maybe stable coins are the way forward, IDK.
One thing I’m interested in is GNU Taler, which is a relatively simple digital transaction system that preserves payer privacy. If we could get a big institution to use it (e.g. Mozilla for micro payments to websites), people may feel more comfortable experimenting with digital currencies.
imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency
people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier
i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree
bringing back cash anonymity
Most cryptocurrencies do not have this. It is trivial to tie bitcoin to an identity. Given the nature of publicly posting the transactional records, all it takes is tying any given purchase to someone one time, to identify them and view their entire purchase history.
Monero being an exception.
They’re called Privacy Coins for a reason. Monero is just one.
I see no point for it to exist.
Morgan Stanley boot licker this one
No, I have no love for financial institutions.
What value does a crypto bring by itself? It’s not land or a business so you can’t develop it. It’s not a person or application so it can’t perform labor. Crypto is not even physical so I can’t eat it, burn it, or use it as a paper weight.
It’s only purpose is to be speculated on for trading purposes for REAL MONEY. Crypto currency life cycle ends with it being exchanged for another currency, that’s just redundant. It’s a griff like speculation on old comic books was back in the 90’s, except you don’t even get nerd crap you’re trying to offload.
Finally it’s not backed by the violence of another country. Ever since USA moved off the gold standard “the faith and credit of the US government” which is a fancy way of saying the military industrial complex. That’s real and powerful if not ambiguous, which is more than I can say for a list of completed math problems. You and your kind are too weak to have a currency.
You are not an economic revolutionary. You are part of an insular group participating in a ponzi scheme that is desperately trying to get mass adoption so you’re not “holding the bag”. In crypto there is someone always “holding the bag” because crypto has no innate value.
I use Monero for private transactions and I am thankful for the existence of a private, untraceable currency (like most cash transactions IRL). I am concerned by the amount of energy expended on crypto-mining… it is a dreadful use of energy that could be used for far more productive purposes.
Honest question, since the goal of cryptocurrencies is to illuminate the banking system. Roughly how much energy does the banking system use? Because if mining uses less than that, it would be a net improvement.
It’s possible to see an estimate of how much electricity is being used for bitcoin (obviously not the only currency being mined). Higher prices results in more mining so the amount of electricity varies all the time. Here’s a graph showing estimates of energy consumption. I guess you can come up with an estimate because you could have an idea of how much it costs to mine a bitcoin and you would see them entering circulation on the blockchain.
During its peak in 2021 it was using about the same amount of electricity as Norway or Argentina uses in a year (according to a University of Cambridge analysis).
Compared to these amounts the banking system would be using a tiny proportion given that fiat currencies don’t need to be mined they are just created by the banks when they issue loans.
Multiple governments want to have their own cryptocurrencies and bitcoin was recently accepted in ETFs (for investment) which is why its value it skyrocketing right now.
Stablecoins might become actually viable methods of payment or cryptocurrencies created by governments. But stuff like bitcoin, ethereum, and all the ethereum tokens, will probably never become used by a large section of the population for payments. The value just fluctuates too much.
What interests me most is the blockchain being used for voting. Wouldn’t surprise me if that happened.
