> what if crypto becomes anathema?
From your lips to God’s ears.
I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
From your lips to God’s ears.
I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
https://twitter.com/carsonturner/status/1477520574620606465
And I just saw this article on Barron's today which compared BTC to a tech stock rather than a store of value like gold.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/coinbase-marathon-digital-m...
What better way to make something stick then make peoples livelihoods depend on it?
How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about this isn't going to solve anything.
Is that your position on this, or am I missing something?
Thinking specifically about the identity space for a moment, it certainly brings a new approach to solving a set of problems that still has yet to be solved well.
Should something be banned on the grounds that it’s not ready yet, or hasn’t evolved fast enough?
Plenty of tech on the cutting edge will appear this way before it has matured.
Back in 2022, we’re now looking at a technology that has not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some utility.
I'd argue there's a bit of false equivalence in this paragraph, but for sake of argument:
Leaded gasoline also solved an actual problem, and the industry innovated/evolved beyond that.
Facebook solved an actual problem, and created many more. I still recognize its value even if I refuse to use it myself.
I'm sure there are edge cases, but history is not generally on the side of those who have pre-emptively banned things before they come to fruition.
The problem I see with this current line of discussion is that most proponents of banning throw the baby out with the bathwater, and pretend this is all a single product called "crypto".
Banning "crypto" would be like banning insulation because of the issues with Asbestos.
And also because it’s not necessary; existing regulation will get us most of the way:
- if you are, in effect, selling a security, let this be regulated this like any other security
- if you are, in effect, running a bank, etc.
- if your coin X acts like an intermediary for transferring money to hostile jurisdiction Y, then regulate transfers to X like transfers to Y. Forbid these if necessary.
- if your manufacturing process is needlessly wasteful then forbid this manufacturing process (globally) under threat of forbidding your product
Etc
In 1999, you probably couldn’t use a Discover card in your local shop either, 13 years after Discover was founded. It took many years and many lawsuits to make headway against Visa/Mastercard.
Universal acceptance isn’t the right measuring stick here.
Even if a shop uses either of these cryptocurrencies, it is comically slow to be used as such anyway rendering them useless. Not to mention the volatility impact.
So please tell me retail shop I can make a purchase using cryptocurrency that is fast, truly decentralised, eco-friendly and doesn't have exorbitant fees.
We both know the obvious reasons that cryptocurrencies enable rampant ransomware [0], multiple rug pull scams [1], pointless NFTs [2] and is totally unregulated, I'm seeing crypto bros heralding 'we need decentralisation and web3' when this is all owned by VCs [3] And don't get me started on the Tether fraud [4].
I was being _generous_ in seeing if cryptocurrencies passes the 'retail shop test' and it can't even do that without burning the planet up making useless computations.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-treasury-warns-c...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-sc...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-milli...
- Spam has been a problem since the inception of email, and the majority of email is spam. We don't ban email.
- Baseball cards are similarly pointless. So are in-game cosmetic items. We haven't banned those.
The problems you're describing are mostly unrelated to crypto, have existed, and will continue to exist whether crypto remains.
This doesn't mean there are no valid criticisms of crypto - energy concerns are real, and need to be addressed - but if you wish to ban crypto for the reasons you've cited, you need to widen the scope of what you hope to ban.
Once banned that is where they will reside, I hear that Monero is thriving in that (illicit) environment, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum (paired with Tornado)
But for now banning is likely.
Come on. There are people in this very thread who are using it to evade draconian currency controls their governments have imposed. Are they lying?
Whether the positives outweigh the negatives in Crypto is subject to debate. But to refuse to acknowledge that ANY positives exist is outright bizarre.
There are lots of things I strongly dislike (eg: religion, guns) but to insist that there are absolutely zero positive aspects to these things in certain contexts would be intellectually dishonest.
While I don't directly pay with crypto, I still use it to pay for things at my local shop.
The UK has banned crypto derivatives: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-bans-sale-cry... and Binance. I suspect further action is coming against unregistered crypto outfits marketing to UK consumers.
If you're referring to proof-of-stake, that technology has already arrived, seeing as how multiple of the top 10 blockchains by market cap (Solana, Cardano, Terra) use it - and consequently do not have the negative impact on the environment that e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently have.
Would you risk life in prison?
The state has tanks and drones that rain death and destruction from the sky. What could the crypto people possibly do to counter that?
It would be very different if some crypto fanatics started an insurgency over wanting to have their computer money. I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
Do you think a domestic occupation would somehow go better?
> I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
In order for a cryptocurrency ban to actually have any real effect on the actual crypto fanatics (i.e. the ones who would be willing to take up arms to defend cryptocurrency), the US would have to pull some very draconian online censorship measures that would absolutely peeve the average American. Short of that, it would be comparable to the US' existing "ban" (via the DMCA) of digital piracy: pretty much ineffective, without pirates needing to take up arms as outright insurgents to defend it.
Paying someone in instantly with less fees in a decentralised P2P manner with an energy efficient and stable blockchain.
I see no cryptocurrency that can do this above legitimately. Most of them are owned by questionable foundations, crypto scammers and power hungry VCs.
Just because you don't doesn't mean nobody does.
A digital Las Vegas casino, where everyone is 'hodling', trying to get rich by losing their money while not using it for payments at all.
Still doesn't change the fact that it's all a house of cards based on waste and still exhibits a ponzi scheme (Proof of Stake is still bad) with no value.
I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets. Is that what you mean by other usecases?
What does crypto do better that the current system can't do? I cannot think of any in crypto that the current system already does better.
I can see that Monero is a complete success story where Bitcoin failed in its original vision. But then again it can't get out of being used outside of darknet markets, so it is generally unusable and banned by most companies, exchanges and fiat off-ramps.
It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
That ain't a fact; again, proof-of-stake exists and is used for no less than 3 of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
> and still exhibits a ponzi scheme [...] with no value
Just because you refuse to see the value in something doesn't mean it's "a ponzi scheme with no value".
> Proof of Stake is still bad
Care to quantify how?
> I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets.
Really? You're incapable of thinking how it might be used for licit trade? Or for decentralized finance applications? Or for arbitrary computing, in the case of e.g. Ethereum and Cardano? The technology has already been used for these things.
> What does crypto do better that the current system can't do?
Sending and receiving money electronically with minimum fees, maximum speed, and no limitations on how much or how little of your money you can send or receive. No, I ain't talking about Bitcoin; I'm talking about the countless other cryptocurrencies that have made transaction costs and speeds an actual priority - you know, almost as if blockchains are a new technology and not done evolving.
Hell, even if we do talk about Bitcoin in that context, its "slow" transaction settlement time is still considerably faster than those of credit card networks; I'm sure you've noticed that when a credit card transaction is "accepted" it still takes a day or more to actually move out of "pending" status and fully reflect on your card statement, whereas with Bitcoin the same level of assurance (if not more) happens within 10 minutes on average.
> It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
It doesn't need to; not every single cryptocurrency needs to succeed at its goals for the concept of cryptocurrency to be useful or beneficial to society.
Your argument is still at cost to the planet and other people's money in this MLM scheme that we cannot deny exists.
Proof of Stake is pointless and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins.
Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta, just don't work and scale at all. You might as well use the current system instead.
We both can see that DeFi applications are mostly scams [0] leading to people losing their money or having an expensive and pointless refund process when it all goes wrong. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/24/22800995/constitutiondao...
These are by and large wrappers around the existing systems; they "fix" it the same way things like Lightning fix Bitcoin's transaction speed (for example): by offloading off the main network.
> 13 years and still no progress.
Credit cards have had a 20-or-so year head start, and they only recently (i.e. around the same time as the advent of cryptocurrency) started to significantly evolve beyond magnetic stripes. Wire transfers are even worse off in terms of evolutionary speed. 13 years is still young.
> Your argument is still at cost to the planet
Not with proof of stake.
> and other people's money in this MLM scheme
By this logic literally every asset bought and sold in a market is an "MLM scheme".
> Proof of Stake is pointless
It only seems that way if you're deliberately ignorant of its vast advantages over both proof of work and centralized systems - particularly, the sheer lack of a "cost to the planet" and the ability to scale without ever needing to incur such an externalized cost.
> and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins
There are proof-of-stake blockchains like Cardano that actively penalize centralization and encourage decentralization (specifically by adjusting stake rewards such that any stake pool above some equilibrium becomes unprofitable).
> Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta
But not all; again, 3 of the top 10 are already proof-of-stake, with billions of dollars' worth of currency being transacted every day. Some are still being actively developed; that doesn't make them "beta", just like how Linux is both production-ready and still actively developed.
> just don't work and scale at all
The users of them - and the billions of dollars transacted through them - beg to differ. And we're still in the early stages; there is still plenty of room for scalability to improve: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-sol...
From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.
The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
It's not though. It's broadly a combination of ignorance of how the present system actually works, tinfoil hat economics and anarcocapitalist libertarian ideology.
It replaces one set of corruption (accountable to the people) with a whole new set of corruption. Money laundering, crime, wash trading, tape painting, spoof orders - an Inspector Gadget run shadow bank in the Bahamas printing ersatz dollars - the whole shebang. Out with the old criminals technically accountable, in with new criminals definitely unaccountable. This is strictly worse by all metrics. And that's before we even broach how terrible deflationary money actually is in practice.
> The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin incentives clean energy production and makes renewables more profitable) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
If you build a bunch of green energy then waste it all, you haven't incentivized anything. You've just wasted a bunch of green energy - without that benefit accruing to the actual grid. Any time the price goes up so does the budget for waste. It's everyone's loss.
> What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
I would say if they're happy with digital money they can open a Wise Multicurrency account.
But they're not happy accepting bitcoin. [1, 2] They're being forced by an authoritarian dictator to accept it, at gunpoint.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/majority-salvadorans-do-n...
What kind of data would change your mind?
To quote Bitfinex right before they fired up the Tether printer:
BTC could tank to below 1k if we don't act quickly
[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/how-merlin-lost-patience-trying-...
Iirc the btc/eth market caps are more than the amount of "printed" USD throughout the pandemic.
Does tether printed act the same on inflation as USD printed?
Not evident what that has to do with the Tether printer?
And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?
Shortly after that exchange, they realized they could just take the money out of the Tether bank account, and use it to satisfy their withdrawal requests. I speculate this is the moment they realized that they did not have to actually back their USDT, and turned on the printer.
> Of course, prolonged bouts of that would've reduced trust in crypto and exchanges, reasonably so.
I think that is a completely reasonable alternative explanation.
> And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?
Check this out. Protos did the legwork to figure out where all the USDT issuances were going. Of $96B in outbound distributions to market makers, $36B went to Alameda and $24B went to Cumberland. That's almost 70% of all distributions ever made to large accounts.
[1] https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...
Not only that, is another way for us to save money in cash since we have an extremely limited to other currencies (we have 50% annual inflation so saving in our national currency isn't an option)
Tell me, where are you from? Do you have free access to other currencies where you live? Because I don't, and where I live we have 50% inflation (even 100% for groceries). It's not taxes when we don't get anything in return and we can't even save in the currency we are paid.
I'd like to see how you live here for a year.
Again though, why not USDC?
But yes, is another way many freelancers are paid here, it's not just bitcoin and ETH, many use stablecoins.
I only find kinda selfish the comfortable position to be against ALL cryptocurrencies (which don't do such a damage to the climate like bitcoin.) while living in the first world, even those
Why?
>The value that supposedly backs your local currency simply does not exist
Tell me something I don't know...
>Is it not fairer that everyone gets 50%?
What? Why? Why should anyone working for abroad let the government decide how much money they get from their hours spent working?
All the more reason why cryptocurrencies might be useful to blue collar people.
You think you have used less energy than the average El Salvadorian who uses BTC? It's really entertaining to see the watt-police coming out when many of these same people have A/C or heat turned up in their house way beyond the maximum survivable bands of the temperature range.
but you can not fix a broken thing with another, even more broken thing (which is this greedy cryptomania)
it is broken government that is the problem and it causes far more ills than monetary inflation
what needs fixing is government. you cannot have a stable meaningful life, society, economy without a semi-decent government that is accountable, democratic and somewhat competent
if the financial system still needs fixing after you fix government it would probably be a marginal patch and not starting from zero
Please understand that people like me who live in third world countries have third world problems, worrying about the climate change is sometimes not in the top of our priorities when we don't even now if we'll have 50, 100 or 30% of anual inflation. And I find unfair how sometimes we are told and scolded by the first world when they didn't get there via green policies, really.
But please take at heart my previous comment. Climate change may sound like an elite concern but it is not. It is actually representative of our deepest global problems.
The reason that the so-called "third world" still has third world problems is that political and economic systems everywhere ignore environmental and social conditions, focus on resource extraction, enriching a few elites etc.
Some form of digital technology would surely help us solve those very difficult problems or at least make them less painful and unsustainable, but cryptocurrencies is nowhere close to do so. It is simplistic, economically more than naive, has the wrong builtin assumptions about society (complete lack of trust) etc.
In any case, good night and good luck
This actually better reflects the way man is, where society works when most people are relatively honest and a minority of criminals and sadistic politicians, bankers, police, tax authorities should be distrusted.
I'm all for people using crypto to use a little less A/C, heat, or drive less to balance it out if those in a warm (or cool) comfy house are a bit upset about it. Probably shouldn't be compelled though unless you're gonna create a Watt Police.
And everyone harmed by the rather sizable ecosystem of outright crime that takes advantage of cryptocurrency.
You don't really believe this, do you?
They aren't:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/some-salvadorans-claim-funds-...
“Making renewables profitable” is the same talking point as “utilising excess power” as I see it, or at least a minor variation of it.
Yes, and landmines make blood donation more profitable, but that doesn't make them a net moral good.
In other words - increases energy prices for everyone.