The Rise of Digital Currencies: What It Means for Traditional Banking

That depends entirely on the currency.

Ethereum l2 has way lower (less than a tenth) transaction fees than credit cards and barely has an impact at all on the environment because there is no mining.

And cryptocurrencies do have consumer protection services but no one ever uses them.

More importantly, however, Visa and mastercard collude and boycott japanese anime and manga websites because they think anime and manga promote gender stereotypes, so credit cards can fuck right off.

Don't forget how easy it is to launder money with cryptocurrency.

All of those points are true for some crypto projects, and untrue for others. There are some projects with their own Blockchain that have ultra-low fees, others with quick transactions, and others whose algorithms are much more environmentally friendly. (There are other projects and tokens they are full-on scams with no redeeming value whatsoever).

And consumer protections are something that can be added to crypto, but out of necessity they involve trusting some entity to arbitrate when protection is required. Cryptocurrency is designed to be trustless, so any protections need to be added on top, like the escrow someone else talked about.

The worst thing that ever happened to crypto was for it's price to balloon. Because improving all those other aspects that make it usable as a currency took a back seat to "wen moon?". OG Bitcoin explicitly rejects improving its energy footprint and fee structure because it sees itself as a Store of Value.

If ur using shitcoins and memecoins sure. If ur using monero then u have significantly lower transaction fees, zero surveillance, zero advertiser tracking, and u cant be debanked or have ur funds frozen.

U still have consumer protections when ur using it as a currency (like intended) cos its not like someone selling something for monero is suddenly above the law just means that if u send ur money to a Nigerian prince u aint getting it back, ohh and u can still use crytpo through a traditional exchange with all of said consumer protections.

Monero transactions are mined every minute and can be verified instantly. To fool this u would either need to make multiple transactions within the span of 1 minute (perfectly timed to the unpredictable timings of the blockchain) or collude with the entire network to delay mining a particular transaction.

The environmental impact of monero is extremely minimal compared to other coins due to it using an algorithm limmited by cpu cache not compute like most currancies. Also crypto is playing a significant role in providing a way to instantly shed load from the grid in responce to the unpredictable nature of renewable energy (most cryto mining operations make more money from selling energy to the minute by minute power grid than they do from mining crypto).

XRP at least has instant feeless payments. No consumer protection though. Some banks use it for intra-bank transfers.

Most of these things are only true for bitcoin. Basically every other cryptocurrency is way more efficient, instant, and has extremely low fees. Bitcoin had a bit of a hostile takeover a few years ago because companies that run bitcoin exchanges wanted to incentivize their own alternatives where the exchanges could pocket more of the fees, and almost every problem in crypto now derives from that takeover.

False, false, and mostly, if not entirely false.

1. Higher transaction fees: It is totally possible to send literally any amount of money around the world in a cryptocurrency for less than a penny on multiple different cryptocurrencies. You can send this amount of value from anywhere with an internet connection at any time of day or night and the receiver will have access to it very nearly instantly.

2. slower transaction times: Transactions on multiple ethereum layer two networks such as polygon or other layer one networks such as solana settle very nearly instantly and on bitcoin seven blocks is considered fully final with no possibility of reversal which takes 70 minutes and on Monero 10 blocks is considered final, which takes 20 minutes. A credit card transaction takes 3 days to fully settle, as does an ACH transaction.

3. Environmentally wasteful: How many resources does the banking sector use to build bank branches requiring mining of stone, etc. Electricity, gasoline to use armored cars, gasoline to transport employees to work, etc. Proof of work mining does indeed require a lot of electricity, but it also requires a lot of extremely cheap electricity. And a lot of extremely cheap electricity is renewable electricity such as hydro and solar. So a lot of proof of work mining uses these renewable resources. There are also other security mechanisms such as ethereum with the proof of stake method, which uses very little energy. And there are other more novel proof mechanisms such as proof of burn, etc. that also use very little energy.

4. Consumer protections: Any crypto commerce site worth its salt implements multi-signature escrow so that there are three parties to a transaction, the buyer, the seller, and an arbitrator if they are required. Since you can self-custody your cryptocurrency in your own wallet, you do not need to worry about protections from fraud, such as credit card theft, because it's a push-based method and not a pull-based method. Some thought must be given to holding large amounts of what is basically cash, but that is easy enough to do through multi-signature accounts and keeping only a small amount of crypto on a mobile wallet or laptop at all times.

All of what you say applies to most cryptocurrencies.
But I'm aware of at least one digital currency that is

• without fees
• usually confirmed in less than one second
• eco-friendly because it requires no special hardware to operate the network and it uses very little energy

It has also zero inflation, is decentralized and designed with incentives that increase the degree of decentralization over time.
It also has no built-in limits regarding transactions per second.

Consumer protection without middlemen/centralization is hardly possible.

I'm hesitant to drop a name here, because I don't want to come across as a shill, but if you're interested we can discuss the attributes of this gem.

That's a good way to put it. Indicator of accelerated social decay. It truly is.

Your anger should be directed toward the Citizens United ruling, which makes these insane contributions possible in the first place.

FWIW, Elon Musk personally donated more than double that $129M to the Trump campaign—more than double the amount that the entire crypto industry has donated in three election cycles, despite there being a $6.6k campaign contribution limit for individuals per candidate per cycle. That limit shouldn't be trivial to bypass, and it should be probably be lower. Or, in some fantasy land where America is something like a democracy, elections would be publicly funded with an equal amount given to each candidate.

Don't hate the player.

I own BTC, and disagree with crypto's existence.

It may make my life easier to follow along in the mold society takes, even if I disagree with it. It isn't going away just because of me. The winning team ain't losing. Then they'd be the losing team... and not winning.

Crypto is an unsecured investment vehicle, not a currency, because the set of goods and services it can be directly, legally exchanged for is small.

And it makes me sad. I really want cryptocurrencies to be useful for actual transactions, because it solves a lot of annoying problems, such as:

• international cash transfers - e.g. send a cash gift to a friend in another country
• person-to-person ad-hoc transactions - cash works, but cryptocurrencies can protect personal banking info for cashless transactions
• avoids network fees - credit/debit card companies charge fees to merchants, and businesses pass that on to customers; cryptocurrencies sidestep that entire system

But yes, the primary use right now of cryptocurrencies is speculation, which is incredibly annoying because that causes fluctuations, which discourages its use as a currency.

Also businesses are not going to sign contracts on alternative currencies. Like find me an insurance company that accepts bitcoin and pays the claims* in bitcoin. And the biggest share of bank businesses is b2b banking.

* maybe they have some bitcoin if they do cybersec insurance to pay for ransomware.

I don't really see the appeal of currency anarchy in general. Do the proponents of that really think that the power in that space wouldn't be held by what essentially amounts to digital currency warlords (anyone with a lever to apply power and the matching lack of morals to do so)? Not to mention that some regulation of finances are a good thing, it is not as if every currency intervention by central banks is done for bad reasons.

Digital currency doesn't necessarily need mining (which is the main power waste).

The ledger is also a pretty shitty model (given the growth issue), but maintaining a ledger is a fair way to earn crypto (sans mining)

I agree that scaling power comsumption is unsustainable - both ecologically and ecoomically!
But power consumption is no inherent attribute of crypto, but a design choice.
Bitcoin just refuses to adjust.
Ethereum did that not very long ago.

What I'm trying to say is: there are designs available that operate at a very tiny power consumption.
Don't lump all crypto together with Bitcoin.

Wait what?

No, dictators fucking love central banks and fiat currency.

They like it even better than anything, because a dictator almost always controls the central bank. Plus, the dictator and his buddies almost always own everything, and when you own property you need fiat currency to stay in power. Fiat currency inevitably leads to hyperinflation. With hyperinflation, you get way wealthier owning property than having cash. At that point they don't need the central bank that they control.

...and the hate is strong.

Algorithmic stablecoins that are actually unhackable (all possible endpoints have been formally verified) exist too. They offer the best of both worlds. I’d like to see something like that on Monero’s successor (whatever that is).

edit: I was thinking that successor would be Midnight...but Midnight is closed source, which is a dealbreaker for me...especially with cryptocurrencies. Perhaps ZCash?

That's how all currencies work. The value is whatever we believe the value is. You could make the currency paper sacks and that would still be true.