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.
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:
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:
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