Censorship resistance. Digital money that does not require constant "authorizations" from incompetent, flaky, slow, or even sometimes corrupt payment processors or other financial entities. Money that works even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send it truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this.
In other words, money created by people for the people.
Just playing devils advocate, but isn’t it’s usage reliant on traditional systems like electricity, ISPs, hardware makers, software makers, mining operations, etc?
Say you were in California during rolling blackouts, or Florida post hurricane that knocks the power out for weeks, or an authoritative country that has historically turned the internet off on its citizens during protests/uprisings. How would it all work?
Kind of like saying "what good is Bitcoin during a hurricane Katrina scenario" but by that point its survival, not money you're worried about.
Banking systems has more choke points. If money is on your bank account and it gets blocked, that's it, nothing can be done about it.
With Bitcoin, even if internet in the entire country is blocked, you still have options: you can transmit data by phone. There are many ways to smuggle 250 bytes out of a country.
You can also just memorize the mnemonic phrase (so-called brainwallet) and move yourself out. They won't find your bitcoins even if they strip-search you. (But if they know you have them, wrench attack might work, no defense against that if your privacy is compromised.)
All the other things are not necessary for using cryptocurrency, they just need to happen somewhere. So the system can route around the damage. Mining is not possible in your country? That's OK, it will work as long as there's at least one country where mining is possible.
So Bitcoin resilience is not about working when power is out, obviously. It is about giving people options to route around the damage. If your bank blocks you, you can't go to another bank to get money on your account, since that money resides within a particular bank. But Bitcoin is global - you can access your funds from any computer in any country, as long as you have a private key.
Those banking systems are the primary method of turning fiat into bitcoin & vice versa, so those banking choke points are defacto choke points for bitcoin as well.
At some point we will have CBDCs which crypto exchanges and banks will support, so legacy bank chokepoints should disappear altogether.
There are also devices for offline transactions.
> sent via HAM radio
You probably want to transmit your private key in a secure manner. HAM radio is not a good way to do this: http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-dismisses-encryption-petition
You are correct in that technically HAM does not allow for encrypted communications, but that's not an issue here, and probably would be very low on the list of concerns in a situation where your only comms channel is HAM.
Relying on HAM radios and satellite links are both legacy systems and we can’t pretend any significant percentage of the global populace could conduct Bitcoin transactions without centralized 3rd party services subject to the same regulations as the banks, much less use HAM radios, especially the poor and unbanked who always seem to be the goto demographic the proponents of cryptocurrency point to as the people benefiting greatly from cryptocurrency.
It’s on par with saying when supply chains fail we have farming, hunting and gathering. Very few people are capable of getting fresh water much less living off the fat of the land.
I like the technology and do see it as still in the early stages of adoption, but I liked the freedom of the early internet, unfortunately that didn’t stop SV and VC money from putting a strangle hold on it, making it the shit-hole sandboxes it is today, exploiting people and farming their attention and data for advertising dollars.
It is not censorship resistant, the entire system could be censored. Heck, FinCEN is already moving forward with regulations that require regulatory reporting on crypto transactions touching US institutions in a similar way to CTR reports. Bitcoin exists only because it is not a threat to governmental monetary control, and could be squashed the moment that changes.
The government can deliver serious blows to BTC but I’m not sure it can be totally destroyed.
Banning bitcoins as I described would mean the vast majority of all banks in the world would not be able to act as on/off ramps to crypto so it could never hit mainstream as a medium of exchange. It would also be worthless as a store of value because you wouldn't be able to get that value anywhere useful. It might live on as some part of the existing shadow banking networks, but it would never deliver on the promise of currency available to the masses & disconnected from arbitrary nation-state monetary policy.
I'd like to be clear in my viewpoint though: I am not anti-crypto. I think there are many improvements it can bring to the existing global financial infrastructure. I just don't have any faith that it can deliver on promises of freedom from government regulations & control. If it exists, it will always exist because of government forbearance in killing it, not despite government antipathy.
I think the real joker is the black market. Modern drug organisations are Apple sized businesses that also have their own enforcement of violence and justice systems, and so on, making them effective non-geographic states.
I live in Denmark, we’re a rather small country, we frankly have less authority behind the Danish Krone than some drug organisations would have behind whatever crypto currency they fancy.
In all seriousness, the entire concept of money has always been created by people.
IMO, cryptocurrency seems like a religion. I’m seeing a lot of belief of what said religion will do for you.
You're the one who sounds like they are subscribing to a religion and haven't actually even attempted to understand what financial freedoms are suddenly afforded to you when you use cryptocurrency.
Collateral requirements vary by asset and account country according to national law. Generally it’s 50% LTV on equity collateral but leverage can be higher depending on the case.
I paid for a house with their margin to avoid triggering gains on long term positions, while waiting for some locked up options to liquidate.
Financial freedom is an interesting topic, and one that I don’t have much expertise in.
What is cryptocurrency freeing you from? You listed several opportunities that cryptocurrency could provide you, but I don’t exactly see the correlation with financial freedom.
Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff. If I want to trade on margin on Fidelity, I need to sign some forms, go through a lengthy application process which may or may not actually be accepted to finally be able to trade with high interest rates and non-transparent margin requirements (my fidelity margin requirements change out from under me nearly every single day) routed through rent seeking, too-big-to-fail hedge funds and dark pools with T+2 order execution and restrictions on when during the day I can trade (only during day trading hours). Oh and don't accidentally trip up a "good faith" violation and have your account suspended from margin trading for a month even though you've done nothing wrong, and their antiquated systems simply aren't able to account for the fact that you weren't, in fact, trading money you didn't have.
Just let me do what I want with my money, it's pretty simple. Sure maybe there are negative externalities that come with that, but freedom isn't free.
We probably have differing perspectives of what freedom means. Financial freedom to me means dedicating my time to doing things that enrich my lived experience.
> "Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff"
I don't know if it is your intention, but I find that to be dismissive and unnecessary. I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss opposing viewpoints with civility.
Giving people loans with "no questions asked" has lead to significant amount of problems in the past.
The current systems may not be perfect, but they do exist for a reason. Chesterton's Fence and all.
Yes, I know it's not happening much. Bitcoin has failed (so far) as a payment/exchange system, and that's cause for sadness to me, but also a good way to look at the history and ask the questions about why it has failed and how to go about creating a better "King-proof Money".
Further, even if you got there, governments could simply ban bitcoin. It then becomes extremely hard to use as a common medium of exchange because literally no legal business could accept it without risking the business and their life outside of prison.
It would also render useless the scenario of fleeing a despot country with hard currency assets intact because wherever your destination, those assets are still illegal to use.
All of this means that, at any point, governments could reduce bitcoin to-- at best-- another side of shadow banking, like how drugs can be a medium of exchange in the criminal world. That does not allow room for common usage by the masses.
Bitcoin & other crypto exist because nation states allow them to exist.
Besides, it would be naive to take pog trading advice from boosters who are holding a hundred million Alf pogs.
That implies a sincerity in their beliefs.
While it's difficult to figure out what people's true motivations are, the promotion of new cryptocurrencies, the "get in early" rhetoric, leads me to believe most cryptocurrencies are little more than pyramid schemes. The ability to mint/mine/farm currency without paying in directly doesn't really negate that since it is intended to become more difficult as time progresses. The actual value comes from speculative investments from a growing number of people.
Added bonus: both will confirm the recipient name, and if I truly, actually fuck up the payment, I can get the money back again rather than it disappearing into the ether.
Finally: the money I have transferred is now available to actually spend on things straight away, without needing to then reconvert it to real people money with a sizeable cost.
Instant payments should be coming to the US in 2023. See https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm
All technology becomes outdated at some point, if cryptocurrency is useful to me right now to perform basic financial operations how is that not a use case?
The nice thing is that if your account is closed on the weekend, the thing you need to buy probably is too.
How can the same people who make this argument turn around and in the same breath decry Bitcoin for being nothing more than a speculative store of value? You can’t have it both ways.
No one buys Bitcoin to spend it. This much is abundantly clear. And Bitcoin, as an inflation-proof global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, never had to do anything other than sit there as an idle speculation to fulfill its primary role as safest safe haven asset. That’s what makes it such a powerful idea.
Many here are fairly libertarian, at least regarding drugs. Do you agree with every classification of every drug in US law and that all punishment for them is perfectly appropriate?
In the past you’d be denied banking for the color of your skin or treated differently based on genitalia.
Illegal is only defined by imperfect governments. So yes, it allows for illegal things, that’s a great thing.
It also means you won’t have an account closed for thoughtcrime, or cheering the wrong political party. It means an authoritarian government can’t keep you locked there. And it means you can avoid myriad kafka-esque dystopic mishaps of “the system”, nightmarish AI flagging slip ups that close your account or prevent you from sending money to a relative in need in another county because it’s Sunday or you forgot to renew you drivers license.
Not to mention you can now use code to manipulate your money, give early users real equity in your company and design fully digital co-ops, avoid some of the burden of blatant classist laws like accredited investors, and design incentive mechanisms for your startup that are guaranteed in code.
Monero and other privacy coins don’t have a traceable ledger.
Now clear this up for me... how do you send a ton of cash anywhere in the world in minutes without risk? Is it easy to smuggle out of an authoritarian gov? Can you manipulate it with code?
Cash is a great way to pick up bitcoin anonymously though, you make a good point.
No, I don't support all laws in pretty much any regime. But I do believe that the ability to enforce laws is important. The only thing that consistently works more poorly than having rules is not having any rules at all.
You are of course welcome to move to a lawless state if this is really what you want, but I suspect you would not find it to be the utopia you dream of.
How is this anything but dismissive? Your whole post was insinuating it’s only utility is for illegal things, in context implying that’s what makes it non-valuable. If you weren’t making that claim, then there’s no point to your post. Don’t hide from your own claim and act coy now. It was obviously dismissive, and now just looks like you’re backsliding. Not to mention the straw man turning “some laws are bad and you should be able to resist them” into “live in a lawless state”. Or that you ignore the litany of non-illegal uses I added.
In fact, I’m skeptical of 99% of the field, I believe without PoS it should fail and isn’t worth the cost, and I was a harder skeptic until recently and changed my mind because I honestly believe I’ve seen some truly interesting uses now outside of being a freer currency.
Get outside of “pro” or “anti” box and think in terms of utilities and specifics, and if you reply reply to my specific claims.
Thanks, but no thanks.