i recommend reading the original bitcoin whitepaper to understand what is new: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper
The Bitcoin whitepaper outlines a P2P payments system, today it isn't used as such, rather a store of value, not even Stripe is using Bitcoin for payments at all.
So what use are these cryptocurrencies for, if not for scams and fraud?
Cancellation resistance. Protection from oppressive governments trying to squash freedom. Protection from retroactive laws targeting previously legal transactions. Asset protection.
And look I agree with you. And everything I posted above carries a huge cost given the volatility of most cryptocurrencies, but unfortunately we live in times where if you truly care about freedom from tyranny, your behaviour is going to overlap heavily with criminal behaviour.
So you're back to the current regulated system that works, is stable and is the best we have.
> Speed is one advantage of crypto payouts. Reach is another. Millions of talented freelancers live in countries where it’s hard, if not impossible, to open a local bank account. For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts. With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC in minutes. With the addition of USDC, Stripe cross-border payouts extend to more than 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries—a majority of the world’s population.
Say, you get paid in USD.
You got paid: 10000 USD
Income tax: 15%
Government exchange rate: 130 ARS per 1 USD
Unofficial exchange rate: 330 ARS per 1 USD
10000 USD * 130 = 1300000 ARS and then 1300000 * (1 - 0.15) = 1105000
10000 USD * 330 = 3300000 ARS and then 3300000 * (1 - 0.15) = 2805000
You got paid: 3300000 ARS (fair market value)
Government rate: (3300000 - 1105000) / 3300000 = 0.66
Unofficial rate: (3300000 - 2805000) / 3300000 = 0.15
> With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC
That is just people opening bank accounts, but with extra steps.
How is this decentralised money that was promised by crypto and blockchain? You may very well use Wise, Moneygram and other regulated alternatives which works better, is also relatively faster and is more stable and widely accepted than these USDC tokens.
https://www.circle.com/blog/how-to-build-trust-usdc-audits-a...
I don't see any fully independent verifiable real audit of their entire reserves anywhere with USDC, and a lousy blogpost by Circle isn't strong enough evidence and no substitute of this.
Curious what US Treasury, FinCEN, OFAC, etcs take on this is. The plumbing is easy, it’s the laws, regulation, and compliance that are the work.
High level, Stripe is reaching for growth when there isn’t much innovation to be had in financial utilities besides reducing waste and inefficiencies by cannibalizing your business or someone else’s while the industry continues to commodify basic services like payments, cross border transfers, and deposit accounts (lending and data is the last bastion of profits for financial services).
https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-...
It is a fragile, brittle system that is highly likely to fail, you only need to look here to see why. [0]
This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?
They are just pieces of code in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest VMs. They encode primitive trivial rulesets and are still so complex that their own authors fail to see trivial errors even after multiple audits.
An actual real world contract such as buying or selling property (which I've done several times now) would be a beast of such byzantine proportions that it would take until the heat death of the universe to write and audit it. And it would still be unenforceable after that.
I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor.
One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work.
It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.
One single failure on an airplane can kill hundreds of people, even a single line of code could crash several planes. There are just thousands of accidents waiting to happen. Planes do not work. They have had a hundred years to make planes perfectly safe. Every year more and more people fly. It is a system designed to fail.
Crypto is a lawless 'decentralised' wild west that has zero accountability for when anyone loses their money in smart contract hacks, scams, wallet draining and rugpulls, in all cases your money is gone with no refunds or consumer protection.
So yes, it is a system designed to fail.
Of course, I’d say the benefits of cryptocurrencies are far smaller than the benefits of the internet (it’s pretty hard to compete with connecting almost the entire world into a single instant global network for the first time). But some benefits do exist, and I feel like you’re being wilfully blind if you disagree with that.
Of course, you might feel that the downsides (massively) outweigh the upsides. And that’s fine. Others will disagree.
One thing I think we can all agree on is that crypto is at least decentralized and permissionless enough to not go away any time soon, no matter who wants it gone.
I would agree with you that more regulation is needed, but to keep saying there is zero regulation is either ignorant or disingenuous. Regulation can also coexist with something that is decentralized and is not obviously adversarial, e.g. we have regulations for gold markets to prevent scams, etc.
The list of course is too large for this comment section so somebody has already done parts of the work. [0]
Any user would be very lucky to get their money back in these situations, but like I said, no refunds or consumer protection in the crypto space when you lose your money.
---
EDIT: So? My point still stands about accountability, regulations or not, even Paypal knows the buying and selling of crypto assets is completely unregulated after 15 years.
The main point of this thread is that there is more evidence of broken smart contracts causing more damage to consumers and there is nobody to hold scammers accountable when a rugpull happens.
Because nobody is going to get their money back for them.
How is crypto, this brittle, 'decentralised' broken and unregulated system going to augment or replace the current financial system?
I think it is easy to dismiss as a value proposition. In the end, the future will show, so we probably should not spend too much time speculating.
They don't deny the existence of negative rates.