Has anyone actually found a use for cryptocurrency and/or the blockchain yet that is not "burn a shit-ton of power on arguing over units of cryptocurrency are worth anything"?
Another example is how many porn sites and filesharing sites are also accepting Bitcoin. Eg ManyVids allows you to pay with Bitcoin via Lighting, which transfers the BTC almost instantly for quite low fees. There's obvious privacy advantages to that over credit card payments.
A non-monetary use-case is my OpenTimestamps protocol, which I was able to recently use to prove a specific DKIM key was used in the past: https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1322270551898030082
Though that use-case really just piggy-backs on the financial use-cases - if not for them OpenTimestamps in its current form would not be secure.
Really? The market begs to differ.
Bitcoin Cash market cap of ~$4.8B is good enough for it to be used as P2P Electronic Cash System that Bitcoin was built for.
edit: missed financial speculation
Quote from article: "The anonymous whale sent 15,987 Bitcoin worth $166 million, paying a fee of $23.46"
Tell me, what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M?
Also for someone with $166M cost of a large transfer seem negligible even if it was in the 100s of thousands. Unless they need to move it all the time continuously, in which case I'd ask, why do they need that?
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
Also, the $10K threshold for additional AML scrutiny has been the same amount for nearly 50 years. It should be close to $50k in today's dollars due to inflation.
$10,000 (1970) = $10,000 x 1880/35 = ~$537,000 (2020)
Large transfers of hundreds of millions USD happen between institutions all the time.
I don’t think this is interesting or unique, or a convincing example of why Bitcoin is worth the enormous environmental impact.
I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees.
If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large instantaneous transfers. If that is something you care about, there are a myriad of options superior to Bitcoin.
I have sent multiple international wires over the years and money always goes missing either from the sending/receiving fees, or the intermediary bank in New York takes a small cut.
Maybe if you have an account with billions of $$$ then you get a special deal, but us normies have to pay.
Sure, when Alice pays Bob, Bob pays Charlie, and Charlie pays Alice a small amount of money a lot of it cancels out. But not all, and over millions of transactions one bank can end up owing another a lot of money. You have to cash out at some point, as banks hate trusting people with money for no interest. So banks then resort to armored vehicles full of cash and gold bars so they can square up.
When they're moving money they balance the cost of additional security against the risk of loss and that's what gets reflected in the bill for the bank wire.
Sent a few thousand dollars from my Fidelity account to a Frankfurt-based friend’s UBS account last week. Zero fees. Note that I sent, and they received U.S. dollars. I believe they incurred about a dollar of slippage in the FX conversion to Euros.
Works today, lots of great content, earn crypto while using too.
You're a few years late on the let's-hate-blockchain trend. Time to update your optics.
That's not to say your comment doesn't have some merit -- I think a lot of blockchain proponents are also of the type to believe that manual edge case dispute resolution (otherwise known as "the law") can be completely removed from blockchain use cases. And of course that is a bit farfetched. But is that a bad goal to strive for? I don't know, I think it would be kind of neat to have some sort of algorithmic countervailing force balancing against an otherwise unstoppable proliferation of bureaucracy, corruption and regulatory capture that I see almost everywhere in the world. Is that such a bad thing?