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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I think the critical distinction is that the Internet also gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time communication, &c.

It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.

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It gave us an uncensorable, global, and decentralized payments system. To some people this is extremely valuable.

How so many people overlook this, I'm surprised by. Everyone at every level has been distracted by cryptocurrency being either a way to make money or an investment scheme. It'd be nice if it could be those things, but there are already other systems of actual investment. On the other hand, cryptocurrency, whether or not you hate them for their energy consumption, provide a means of independent economies being created outside of whatever regimes are in control. But that's boring.

Then again, hopefully we'll never need to see a future where everyone values the decentralized nature of crypto more than its monetary value at any given moment. If that happens, it might be under a regime where sneezing in public or looking in the wrong direction would lose you enough social credit that your bank account gets terminated.

Er all your transactions are tracked. They want to get rid of cash and they need people to want the technology that enables that. A couple of mining operators control the network and they just need to operate as one to do whatever they want with it. The lizards in charge of fiat probably own those mining companies. All transactions are tracked did I Mention. So everything you do is tracked. Read that again and think about how cash == freedom ... and crypto == total enslavement

Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam Grin, are all completely private and anonymous. Nobody can see you using those blockchains.

Each of these comes with a large asterisk:

Uncensorable, except for all of the times that providers have refused service because of (very reasonable!) KYC laws.

Global, except for all of the countries that will throw you in prison for using cryptocurrencies.

Decentralized, except for the structured oligarchy of miners who prevent protocol evolution on any decentralized currency of sufficient value.

Hully gee.

Not really:

- You cannot censor a Bitcoin transaction. You are talking about a completely unrelated issue and pretending this is an issue with Bitcoin.

- People in China are still mining Bitcoin and using crypto even with the ban. So it truly is global. Just like how drugs are global even though most countries have banned them: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/chinas-underground-bitcoin-m....

- Miners have tried to prevent changes to the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol more than once and failed due to community consensus of the users. Miners don't get to decide which protocol is run, the users ultimately do. If the miners choose to mine an unpopular protocol, people can and will simply fork the chain to a more favorable protocol. This has happened plenty of times.

"Some people" being mainly criminals and money launderers.

A lot more people than just criminals and money launders. But yes, criminals ironically tend to be some of the first adopters of new technology. So the fact that it's so popular with criminals should be the signal that it actually is really powerful technology.

Or do you think criminals are using crypto because they're uninformed reddit HODLRS hoping to moon?

Plenty of non-criminals adopted bitcoin. Then they un-adopted it once they found out it was actually not useful at all.

The criminals stayed though.

I've legally bought and sold quite a few things on craigslist using cryptocurrencies. I'm personally finding it easier and easier to use cryptocurrency as a payments system as time goes on. You really don't know what you're talking about.

You could have done that just as easily, or easier, using other payment methods that are not boiling the planet.

Could have but did not want to? I want to use crypto and so do plenty of other people. That's why the option to use crypto on craigslist even exists.

First, it was criminals, now it's the planet. You are all over the place my guy. I'm doing what's best for me economically speaking; the planet is just gonna have to figure out a way to survive because I'm for sure doing fine.

All right, so you're a sociopath.

Not a sociopath, just someone whose priorities are in the following order:

- my family

- my friends

- my country

- the rest of the world

I'm not going to restrict my own economic goals to save the planet at the expense of the things above.

I don't know how to tell the difference between that statement, and what a sociopath would say in the same situation.

Then you don't know what the definition of a sociopath is at all.

Does the definition of a sociopath say what they would say in that situation?

Would you go vegan to reduce your CO2 output, and does it make you a sociopath if you dont?

Already did.

Thanks for your sacrifice, now I know what kind of tree hugging hippie Im talking to. The unfortunate reality of the world is that sacrificers like you have to live with resource gatherers like me. And your opinion about me, unfortunately for you, doesn't really impact my day to day life in any meaningful way.

And Argentinians, and Venezuelans, and Nigerians, and the Salvadorian government...

There's flyover country, there's flyover countries, and ignoring the masses that make that up is equal parts condescending and ignorant.

No significant number of people in any of those use it.

El Salvador's wannabe dictator is pretty keen on it, though.

Define "no significant number."

And we aren't going to get anywhere in this discussion if your only rebuttal is "the leader of a country using it voluntarily is a dictator so that settles it." Do you have a rebuttal to my point at all?

I think the "power guzzling" claim is kind of ridiculous, considering that crypto currency consumes a tiny fraction of power compared to that of fiat currency. Disliking the hype and speculative aspects makes sense, but consideration for comparison shows energy use isn't a concern

Censor proof, private, transactions.

How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.

Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc...

I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.

There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked together except through using them together in a single transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.

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