Thoughts on Cryptocurrency?
Thoughts on Cryptocurrency?
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
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
Much like the claim that it improves privacy cryptocurrency has not really achieved any of its claimed advantages and its successes are mainly in the field of scamming people out of their money.
Not true for Privacy Coins
Manual targeted identification is possible even if you use public WiFi + VPN + Tor with 100 nodes. It's just a matter of user behavior analysis. Same goes with anything digital nowadays. You're either protected only from automatic spyware (Google, Meta etc) or not protected at all. At least some entity you're interacting with (whether it's a website, a person, a company or whatever else) is going to have some sort of tracking to it unless there are no network devices and physical surveillance agents in the area. Finding someone isn't hard. It sometimes can require irl interrogation though. At least that's what I know. Even if something I said isn't true, digital cryptocurrency transactions are still a little bit better than using a credit card (maybe unless you buy a fake entity but that's still breakable). I don't know any better alternatives (cash doesn't count because it's not digital)
I dislike it being misused for gambling on it's value, but see the importance of currencies like Monero.
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)
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.
It's more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It's certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it's not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.
Trust me on this. I know what you're thinking, "Blindly trust an internet stranger? No thank you." That's good, but this time, you should listen because you care about your privacy.
It's not different enough to matter... yet.
Identifying users was still trivial as of 2 months ago, which is the last time I brushed up on implementing smart contracts. Bitcoin Lightning came out somewhere around 7 years ago. Unless something fresh and hot hit the market within the past 60 days, and has been implemented, do not, I repeat DO NOT trust your privacy to bitcoin, especially if you're doing something your governing body disapproves of.
Monero's privacy protections are still a generation ahead, but still not a big headache for the good ol' 5-Eyes. Probably not for the 14-Eyes either, but who knows what they know.
I see no point for it to exist.
https://help.gumroad.com/article/156-gumroad-and-adult-content
This is a recent one that came up, but this happens every few months. If payment processors just did their jobs there wouldn't be as much of a need for other ways to do transactions. It's also still a pain in the ass to send money to individuals in other countries even when everything works the way it's intended.
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.
Nice tech surrounded by scams.
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.
The banking system uses magnitudes more.
The big banks pushed a huge misinformation campaign to convince people that cryptocurrency was using lots of energy, but its negligible next to the banks.
Its like tobacco companies trying to convince us that smoking is healthy. You need experts to disprove the well-funded misinformation
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.
I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life
It's not real currency, it's a token.
I can't use it to pay my taxes to the US federal government and it must be traded in for actual currency to do so.
Just like a token at an arcade.
They are also vehicles of wild speculation... And unlike stocks (where I gain partial ownership of a company) and bonds (where I gain a claim on their monetary inflows and primacy if the venture crumbles), crypto gives me... What exactly?
I don't get to be an owner or a creditor. I become... Holder of a mining incentive?
I'm sorry it's not what a lot of people seem to think it is.
You can also not use euro to pay for your federal taxes in USA. You can however convert your euros to USD in order to pay for them. If you think euros are more trustworthy and give you full self custody, then it's a good reason to hold your money in euros . Plenty of people do that in the world; they store their money in USD rather than their inflated less reliable national currency.
Victim to speculation? Unfortunately yes, but same thing goes for stocks, even basic foods and raw materials nowadays. What do they give you? Whatever matters to you: full privacy? Full ownership? Freedom of movement for your money? Not one central entity deciding on the amount that's printed? Voting power in the tech that's being built? Most stocks nowadays don't give you anything as well, but the fake belief on how much it's worth and a lot of people agree nowadays they don't represent true value of the company in many cases (Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.). You don't get voting rights, you don't get dividends. A lot of Cryptos do give those.
Having said those counter-arguments, of course there's flaws too and frankly more with the majority of them. It's those select few that could matter on long-term
The original idea was to take back control of our money from greedy and corrupt banks and politicians. Very very very few people use it as that now though. Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
As we are in the privacy sublemmy: All of the privacy issues have already been solved, those that keep saying that it is a log of everyone you ever paid kept forever have no idea what they are talking about. Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns. There are also other ways to obfuscate and stay anonymous.
Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns.
Then how do you connect the incoming money to the outgoing money (and split it up or combine it in the process assuming most income flows do not exactly match a spending flow exactly in value)?
edit: since the well-akshullies are out already, I'll say this is massively simplified because anyone who cares about the actual cryptography or terminology can go read the fuckin docs; it's detail that isn't necessary here.
Wallet addresses are just the public part of a public/private key pair. You can generate another public key with the private key so the address is different, but your private key can still sign transactions for both addresses.
Yes, its the change that makes block chain analysis so effective
Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
It sucks, I don't see how it could ever get past this.
Wait till you hear about stocks and derivatives. No way are they ever gonna make it big time. Only used by sleazeballs trying to get rich.
You're misinformed. I recommend reading Traces in the Dark.
It's a nice technology that should exist as an alternative to personally identifyable and government-ID-connected transactions. It's not perfect in any way though
I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don't have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).
Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the "crypto world", but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:
- Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money's value is not diluted by supply inflation.
- You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
- It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
- At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can't say the same for most other coins.
- And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other "stranded" supply. Pretty powerful stuff.
Monero's privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.
"Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to"
I think that's the biggest flaw in your thinking. Monero has this built-in from the start and everyone using it knows it and supports this approach. It affects how legislators can manipulate the coin because they can't, it will keep on living. It already affects the true value of the coin with all privacy included, because you can see how exchanges are unwilling to list it or are delisting it if they already did so, so there are no (or hardly any) institutions or billionaires manipulating the price because of the high risk factor of losing their money. You're forgetting that people in power nowadays are brainwashing us to accept that a wanting a fundamental right like privacy equals you're doing criminal activity or have plans to do so. There are A TON of reasons why bitcoin will never include such strong privacy features, because there are so many factors that influence this decision to make it possible, and the dominant reason you see that matters to btc holders (or any other crypto token for that matter) is NUMBER GO UP. Privacy is not a number go up reason. So it's not a tech issue, it's a people issue
Use Monero. Since the amount you send is private, who you send to is private, you are private when you send. Unless you are targeted specifically, it's unlikely that your transactions will be figured out.I use Monero a lot and I don't really care about the fiat value of it because I'm using it as a currency to buy my food, pay my insurance, pay for my phone bill, etc.So what happens is since I have to pay bills in it, I end up buying it every single month and then spending what I need on bills and saving the rest.I am not it for number go up like the rest of these crypto bros are. I want to ditch the manipulative government fiat system entirely, and that's the end I hope to achieve by opting out.
I'm using it as a currency to buy my food, pay my insurance, pay for my phone bill, etc.So what happens is since I have to pay bills in it, I end up buying it every single month and then spending
how do you do all them things, if it's not too much trouble?
For my food I buy an Instacart gift card and then just go pick it up when it's ready. My insurance is through a friend who pays dollars and I pay them back in Monero and the phone bill is another gift card.
Edit: I am very seriously thinking about launching a phone service that accepts Monero only and would be a stable price in Monero.You can get some pretty decent deals from the carriers if you have more than a few lines on a business account.
I'm going to have to look into it again. Can you recommend any services that accept it? Most only support Bitcoin, if any (e.g. ProtonMail).
Monerica.com. Is a business directory of other businesses that accept Monero? A green checkmark means somebody has successfully used that business. A red X means that somebody tried and it was a scam.
Also, if you have a GitHub and use a business that has not been used before and has no checkmark or crossmark, then please tell them about it with your GitHub. And you can always use services to convert from Monero to Bitcoin if necessary such as Trocador.app.
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.
No as it pretty much a scam
BTC, ETH, and XMR are the only ones that matter. Some stable coins (USDC, GUSD) are okay, too.
BTC (Bitcoin) is good because it's the most widespread. If a vendor accepts crypto, odds are they accept BTC. However, the blockchain is easily traceable.
ETH (Ethereum) is good because its blockchain is far more versatile, so it can be used for other things than just crypto payments. However, it's less widely used for payments than BTC and is also easily traceable.
XMR (Monero) is excellent. It's extremely difficult to track an individual user. Your transactions are private. There are some possible attack vectors for the future, but they'd require that you be an actual target to be worthwhile. Someone that's going to track you is going to find a different way than XMR to do it. XMR isn't as widely used as the others, though, and it's also not on as many crypto exchanges. Kraken has it.
However, crypto as an investment is not a good idea. Spend your crypto.
Ethereum is unregistered security token.
I think a lot of us first heard about bitcoin when Paypal shut down donations to Occupy Wall Street and later WikiLeaks.
Both of them turned to bitcoin to accept permissionless donations.
Bitcoin was just the first majorly successful coin. I think most orgs should accept Monero these days, for Privacy reasons.
Its awesome if you have some, its basically all time high price these days 😉
Well it was until today. It just went on sale
It's really useful for committing crimes on the Internet but as a daily cash replacement I remain unconvinced mostly do to the woeful speed of confirming transactions in most currencies I'm aware of.
I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn't the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.
Amazing but transaction fees are still too high for normal daily use.
Monero transaction fees are between $0.01 to $0.00
Compare that to a bank wire feez which can easily be $100
Not with L2s like Bitcoin lightning. Your fees come in under a penny in most cases and are not tied to chain space because they are not on chain. This is 100-1000x less than credit cards, for example.
Lightning is the universal answer
fuck that utterly horrible shit
I like crypto specially because I'm paid by crypto transactions and at the same time I have investments in crypto and I'm making good money 👍👍.
You don't say...
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.