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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Why can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam?

I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property.

All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.

(sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)

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I disagree with the characterization that the primary use is a scam. That’s like saying the primary use of email is to receive ads and phishing mail.

Are there numbers on what the primary uses of cryptocurrency are? I would guess remittances, purchasing illegal things, purchasing legal things, and ransomware - but I'm not sure in what order.

I think it also depends on what you count as "use". The #1 function of Bitcoin is as a speculative asset.

I think the interesting use is more in the blockchain than the currency. Public, verifiable, tied to an identity, decentralized statements that can be used as public records or provide an audit trail. Cryptographically & blockchain secured bodycams is an example that I've been looking into recently

The problem is that the distributed consensus in a blockchain is only possible if that blockchain is also used as a currency. If you remove the currency aspect, it's no better than a Git repository, which also has a merkle tree ( but no way to say which repo is the canonical one).

I am not sure remittance counts as a "use", especially if it is only useful for remitting money because it is also actually "used" for settling ransomware payouts or buying cocaine.

Aren't those things also purchased with usd, euro, yen, won, rmb, etc?

Yes, though (to their benefit) traditional currencies don't work as well for ransomware. Possibly the same for illegal purchases.

Remittances seems like one of the true benefits of cryptocurrency... but that's why I'd like to know what amount of usage is actually that and what is, let's say non-beneficial.

Ah I see what you're getting at now. Understandable.

Yes, take a look at this article by Coinbase for some well-sourced numbers: https://blog.coinbase.com/fact-check-crypto-is-increasingly-...

The primary use of cryptocurrency is in its name - a currency.

So... What do people use the currency for, mostly? That's what I'm asking.

Transactions, investment, store of value. Just like any other currency.

I have a lot of digital artist friends who used to rely on live performances and installations for their money, now they're seriously killing it selling NFTs

Some of them opt out of more environmentally unfriendly stuff like Ethereum for sure

Personally I've developed systems for paying for everyday things like your bus fare or phone bill using crypto in a country where there's a hell of a lot less confidence in fiat (Brazil) -- hell check out the history of the Brazilian Real if you want an idea of what real candycorn money looks like

Personally I just feel a hell of a lot of privileged bullshit out of people arguing that crypto is some good for nothing shit. Yeah sure great try living in a country where your government is fucked. We truly don't live in some francis fukuyama neoliberal fantasy world where we can trust stuff like traditional financial markets which have gone and failed us in the non english speaking world time and time again. I welcome any and all alternatives

TL;DR [CITATION NEEDED] ;-)

Wow, you can actually pay your bus fare and phone bills in Brazil with crypto? That sounds either very impressive or totally unbelievable.

I could not find anything on Google, so if someone could you link/cite to some actually used examples (I guess apps or utility website?) that would be very helpful. Sincere thanks.

As with anything cryptocurrency related, it's safe to assume that the justification is contrived and the actual use case is niche, at best.

My experience as a Brazilian is that I've never seen anyone using cryptocurrencies in real life. On the other hand, the government's new instant payments system (Pix), allows anyone with a mobile phone to easily make small payments. In less than one year since launch it's already ubiquitous.

by the way you try searching in portuguese?

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comprar%20passagem%20d...

plenty of options now wow so hard to find

yeah i mean not like a condescending tone is going to covince me to try and convince you to give away PII on this one i mean this account is linked to my name you can do your thing

Because email has no value except as a means of communication. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are massive speculation scams. It's popular because everyone wants to hold one in the hopes it goes up in value. There's no reason for it to go up in value except that other people think it will go up in value and want to buy one too.

You're buying a number on a blockchain somewhere in the hope someone else will want it for more money, that's it.

I’m curious if it is actually such a large scam with too many people that they can’t let it fail.

there is no such thing. Too big to fail is another coded way to describe political allies and backers who get influence in the government through their contributions. The size of the problem isn't the issue, it's who has the problem that is.

Good point. Slightly conspiratorial but probably fairly accurate.

it depends on how you count. if you measure "primary use of email" by number of emails, then yes spam wins out, but that's only because a tiny fraction of human users are sending out tens of millions of spams. if you measure "primary use of email" in terms of users, the vast majority of people who use email use it for useful, non spammy purposes. The same can't necessarily be said for cryptocurrencies, as far as trying to prove that cryptocurency has a large userbase that is not there just for speculation/inflation and/or illicit use cases.

Considering that almost all legitimate users have been priced out of the market due to ever-increasing transaction fees and increasingly draconian regulations (often stricter than for non-cryptocurrency) and the resulting interoperability issues...

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the primary use of cryptocurrency nowadays is as either casino chips or a money laundering mechanism. The economics no longer make any sense for anyone else.

Is it so worthless that no one uses it, or so useful that only the highest-value transactors are willing to pay the fee?

It’s like arguing the most popular restaurant is so crowded, no one goes there anymore.

Plenty of crypto has low transaction fees these days.

which may even be technically true - if measured in quantitative terms :-)

Absolutely.

And of course new sectors that are not established can seem like snake oil, simply because they are new industries.

The internet has steamrollered many industries and fundamentally changed the way they work.

Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big boss, money.

It will take another ten years for this industry to mature. But in amongst the sham and drudgery we have the first non-violent system of currencies.

> Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big boss, money.

Isn't that a "they laughed at Galileo" argument?

They thought the Internet was snake oil. They thought Napster was snake oil. They thought BitTorrent was snake oil. ... but they also thought Pixelon was snake oil.

lighting the earth's natural resources literally on fire to create currency is pretty violent towards human life.

I wouldn't agree that piracy is the same thing as a scam, so the analogy doesn't really works. When people download a bittorrent client, most of the time they know exactly what they're doing and that's what they're going to get. No scam here. The thing is that bittorrent moves information, and crypto moves money, and there's a bigger chance of things being a scam when it's about money. Maybe something like religions and sects would be a good analogy? Religions will bring you lots of information you may not care about, and sects will try to scam you of your money. But some religions have mandatory donations so the analogy isn't perfect.

I like your analogy. I'll add another. VHS. The early adopter to VHS tapes was the porn industry. No longer did people have to watch porn in a seedy movie theater, they could do it privately at home.

So, yeh, early adopters may often be driven by the seedy side of culture.

For how long though? Cryptocurrency is almost a decade old, yet the fundamentals of them don't look good (IMO).

That's actually the best analogy I've heard, and I'm a crypto believer!!!

But it doesn't negate the value of the technology. Yes, piracy is neat and useful, but illegal. But was the benefit of piracy that you got free stuff? Or was it that it was an easier system than any other at the time?

Don't gnu/linux ISO images make up a considerable proportion of bittorrent traffic nowadays?

You should check out the amount of crap on Rarbg or say even Rutracker. And those are just the public ones.

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