The obvious difference is that encryption has many, many actually useful and productive applications.
So does crypto but likewise opponents of encryption disregard the positives and focus on the negatives to align with their preformed ideas. The only way out of this trap is to have an open mind and internalize the fact that all technologies can be used for good and evil and thus are relatively neutral overall. Humanity must take the good and bad and see where the path goes in order to advance as a species.
> So does crypto [...]
I'd wager that this is a lie. Please name one.
These systems are self referential. Great if all to do is speculate with value changes inside the system.
Other use cases? In short: no one has come up with any solution to the oracle problem.
As soon as you want to exchange anything crypto with anything but crypto (e.g. USD or a physical asset like a loaf of bread) you need trust.[1]
* Buying VPN relays anonymously, for connecting to through Tor, VPSes etc.
* Buying drugs.
* Donating to causes sanctioned by your country.
* Paying informants.
* Allowing you to prove you're the author of something, or knew a secret, later on.
* "Dead hand" schemes which release information if your wallet activity stops for more than a couple weeks. This keeps people from killing you to keep something from getting out.
* Online gambling.
* Evading financial controls to send money to your family abroad.
Some of this doesn't require any trust (e.g. proving you knew something before some date), most of the rest requires trust, but what makes crypto useful for these cases isn't lack of trust but auditability, anonymity and/or lack of control by authorities.
Honestly, using crypto for something like seems a bit nuts, like using a jackhammer to destroy a cardboard box.
Which is closely tied to the fallacy that using crypto(currencies) gives you anonymity.
Cash gives you better anonymity than any crypto currency currently in wide circulation for the applications you listed.
They are currencies. I've gotten paid for services in XMR.
> I'd wager that this is a lie. Please name one.
Alibaba ran a Foreign Exchange service on top of crypto. I don't know if it is still running or not. It functioned like Western Union. Customers sent local currency to Alibaba, Alibaba bought crypto with that local currency and in another country sold that crypto for foreign currency and then deposited it into the foreign currency account.
In any case, your argument presumes some desire to get rid of the correspondent banks. Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes — like criminals, avoiding sanctions, avoiding capital controls, etc — which is why crypto stays on those fringes.
Yes, it is for the fringes. One day Alibaba could find itself on the fringes, as collateral damage in some geopolitical dispute that locks it out of the centralized global financial system, as a result of which country it is based in.
I have no idea if this concern motivated Alibaba's reliance on crypto though.
Potentially the involvement of those banks is a feature and provides value?
Things to ponder...
I suspect cryptocurrency will be a store of value far further into the future than gold. Gold becomes plentiful once extracting resources from asteroids becomes economically viable.
The UN saved more than 40,000 USD per month in bank transfer costs by using blockchain.
It doesn't. Everyone who claims otherwise can't come up with a single credible example.
* Paying for VPN anonymously with Monero.
* Sending money for living to relatives that reside in countries that are sanctioned. What's more important? Knowing that your family is not hungry or following your government's doctrine?
* Hide money from abusive relatives.
In summary: Doing transactions without having to ask your principal for permission or having to reveal them. Seems quite empowering to me, but apparently not everyone thinks that being empowered is valuable.
We all agreed on the rules as a society, if somebody wants to empower themselves above them than that's not cool imo.
Of course, in authoritarian governments your point stands, but then the trade-off is undermining democracies as collateral damage.
Actually we didn't. None of us chose to be here. None of us has a choice over when or where we're born. We all arrive and grow up in societies structured and governed in ways that we've had no say over, and over which very few of us will have meaningful influence during our lifetimes. Some of this is OK, some of it isn't. Some places are more or less OK than others. But don't act like we should all simply accept everything about systems we've had no agency in building purely because we might live in a democracy.
What if you cannot find an existing system that is open for you and acceptable enough?
Ah, pretending that "work, family, studies" don't depend on political systems is peak HN.
> What if you cannot find an existing system that is open for you and acceptable enough?
Life is a series of compromises
Not strictly. Especially not if you switch four times.
> Life is a series of compromises
Of course it is. That's why living in a democracy and fiat system while also using crypto is totally fine.
It's splitting hairs now. Your original claim was, and I quote, "did you do so in order to enjoy different political systems, or more because of unrelated things like work, family, studies"
- Work is a spectrum between "you're forced to work at the collective farm and you don't even have documents to travel anywhere" (e.g., USSR, until about 1960s) and "move to whatever place you want and start your own company" (most of the modern world).
- Family is a spectrum between "divorce is fully forbidden, punishable, or fined" (most countries with heavy religious influences, even today) to "you're free people, do what you want". And not to mention things like child care and support, rigths of husbands and wives, rights of children etc. etc. etc.
- Studies is a spectrum between "women and/or non-believers and/or non-priviledged classes have no access to education" (really most countries until modern times, some countries even now) to "yeah, go ahead and study whatever you want" (most of the modern world).
And so on. To pretend that major things in life are not affected by politics is disingenuous at best. There's literally, right now, a huge ongoing debate in the US about healthcare (affects family) and student debt (affects studies).
Many people move, because they are following opportunities (and of course these are also affected by politics). Some people move from A to B and back to A. Sometimes from democracies to dictatorships. It does not automatically mean that they do so, because they prefer one or the other system. Some people accept a political downgrade when they move.
"I'm moving to A because my kids can go to school there without incurring heavy debt" is influenced by politics even if it's not explicitly acknowledged. Or even if the person doesn't think it's influenced by politics.
> Some people accept a political downgrade when they move.
Yes, they do. Because the reasons may be [1] "I don't want my kids to be subjected to gay propaganda, I'm going back to the country that upholds traditional values", and this is again is influenced by politics even if it's not explicitly stated and the person doesn't understand that.
[1] I know of some people who moved back to Russia for this stated reason.
Horrible
> Buying a subscription to gay.com from Syria.
That is not a credible example. Here are some reasons:
1) Paying for porn? Paying for porn when the implication is that it's illegal and could get you in trouble? Who would do that?
2) Cryptocurrency isn't anonymous, and is usually highly traceable.
3) And even if it was anonymous, what good will it do when your DNS lookups will divulge you're looking at gay porn?
4) Oh, so now someone's supposed to be using some elaborate TOR/VPN setup in a repressive country, just so they can pay for porn?
5) What, exactly is the process for converting Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency again?
6) etc.
> Your on the clock..
Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?
>> Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?
> The other poster is probably very confident because gay.com redirects to https://lalgbtcenter.org, which is an LGBT advocacy group in Los Angeles.
I doubt they knew that. It's inconsistent with their thought of "buying a subscription to gay.com," and it raises the question of why someone in Syria would even be interested in a LA-focused advocacy group. Plus in their reply indicated they thought of it as a porn site. What kind of advocacy group has a paywall that someone would want to see behind?
I have. However you illustrate an important point about cryptocurrency: it's an exercise in political ideology without practicality.
> The debt ceiling grows every day.
If you're that worried about inflation, shiny gold seems like a better option.
Try that trick with some digital currency :-)
Crytocurrency is difficult and costly to trace and exchange identifying not available to Syria.
VPNs would be used
Same process for other currencies on Binance and other exchanges.
1. Deposit your money in a bank. Wire it to Binance. Buy Bitcoin.
2. Go to a McDonald's.
3. Hire a gig worker through an app, pay them in cryptocurrency to buy a Big Mac with fiat and give it to you.
4. Eat your $55 Big Mac, and wonder at the amazing real-world utility of cryptocurrency.
That's objectively worse.
By using crypto the person now has written a public record of that payment. An attacker now can use correlation attacks to try to identify the user.
It's worse in almost every way for that user.
Public record that Syria cannot easily track with bitcoin or no trail with Monero.
I'll give you a bitcoin wallet address can you tell me who owns it?
It depends on the address. But assuming the person is using the same address for multiple transactions then the attacker only has to be able to correlate one address with a person (or a person's device if they have access to it).
This could be a completely innocuous transaction, including something as seemingly innocent as signing into a Dapp.
Compare that to a non-blockchain transaction, where if the attacker hacked an random ecommerce site (say a supermarket) that doesn't automatically allow them to tie all records to transactions on the site that is a problem.
> Worse than a credit card? How?
If I buy something at my supermarket with my credit card, even with home delivery AND even if the supermarket kept the credit card number there is nothing tying that transaction to gay.com.
- buying drugs/porn/VPNs/etc in a country that has a backwards stance on them
- anonymous donations
- purchasing services (eg commissioned art) without revealing your identity
- sending money to friends and family during hyperinflation/freedom from government (mis)management of currencies
Freedom of speech (eg cryptography) is not worth much without the ability to actually use said freedom to drive a change (e.g. requiring work, thus requiring money.)
- Not having anyone watch out for you
- Buying slaves/child porn/weapons in countries with a “backwards stance” on them
- You don’t need crypto for that. A lawyer could do it for you.
- See above
- Use any other currency that’s not undergoing hyper inflation
- Not having anyone "watch out" for your communications
- the ability to pirate or download content illegally
- can have a lawyer handle secure communications
- just use a different messaging service
Clearly we value the freedom and privacy provided by encryption to ignore these arguments.
Encryption is EXTREMELY useful, as history has proved. It has a great many beneficial uses, or at least benign. Yes it can be used by criminals, but that’s hardly its only use.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t seem to provide anything but something to speculate on, a way to sell hardware, and an unfathomable waste of resources. When people point out things it’s “better” at they always seem kind of sketchy, of require you to old the same values (independence from central government above all else). I see no inherent good after 14 years, just massive problems.
So no, I don’t think they’re comparable myself. I don’t find them similar at all for the purposes of the point I’m trying to make.
- Be banked;
- Live in a country with a somewhat stable currency, in which exchanging to another currency is legal;
- Live under a regime that does not impose authoritarian censorship on whom you can exchange value with;
- Use payment processors that only abuse your privacy when you aren't looking.
These conditions are not the case for everyone, everywhere. Is it so difficult for you to imagine that:
- Crypto, once matured, could enable the ~2 billion people that are unbanked to own their own money?
- Someone living in a country with a hyperinflationary currency, that bans currency conversions and precious metals, would like to use crypto to preserve their life's savings?
- Someone might want to donate to an entity opposing an authoritarian, human-rights abusing government, without painting a target on their back? (And no, we both know lawyers are not viable for this.)
Throughout human history, there has not been a single government that has not egregiously failed its people or abused/destroyed the wealth of its citizens.
You seem to think that we have arrived at some special time where this will never happen again. That is not the case. Encryption protects your speech, and cryptocurrency protects your wealth, from governments that will inevitably fail you as surely as the sun will rise.
https://blog.chain.link/44-ways-to-enhance-your-smart-contra...