Nothing I do is illegal; I pay my taxes; sometimes I make mistakes. Why would I ever want to use crypto over real money?
Being able to anonymously transfer value should be a fundamental right, as part of our fundamental right to privacy. In the past, cash could be used for that, but with society going increasingly cashless and some governments trying to make large cash transfers illegal, crypto is now the only way to keep this right.
It’s like saying money laundering should be a right or evading taxes should be a right.
Cash transactions and commerce has been regulated for most of human history, whether it’s been for tax collection purposes or to regulate certain types of transactions.
People who work in cash businesses have never had a right to anonymity. They’ve always had to report sales receipts and earnings so they can pay income, sales taxes or value added taxes.
If you want to buy things with cash, you can. If they don’t take paper currency, use a gift card.
Keep in mind, you’re on camera everywhere and your phone is always tracking you. Practically speaking, it’s very unlikely you’ve been anonymous for some time.
Most of human history. People were born with this right.
Even in Hammurabi's code, receipts for agents, witnesses, and contracts, were only used for settling disputes in court where fraud may have been committed. Those instances with conflicting claims were a tiny minority of overall transaction volume, meaning receipts were optional and not required for the vast majority of transactions; especially between trusted parties.
As far as that "state" was concerned, all transactions were anonymous until a dispute was brought to court.
How long do you believe KYC has existed? How long do believe believe banks have existed?
When Mansa Musa decimated the global gold market for atleast a century by distributing large sums of money to millions of people on his Hajj (possibly the single largest event of anonymous value transfer in human history), what regulation or law did he violate?
This was a relatively recent event where human history is concerned.
Why? That doesn't seem like that would produce good outcomes. It's not a 'fundamental right' to transfer unlimited amounts of money with no oversight.
Money is not speech. If you care at all about governments being able to function from taxes, financial regulation, and myriad other things, you don't want people to be able to anonymously transfer as much money as they want.
Even cash has regulations about reporting, especially over certain amounts.
Crypto is never going to be the option that is best for me. Nor most of 8 billion other people on the planet.
But legitimacy and legality diverge.
Not sure if it’s marketing BS or similar, but I’ve read that some people used it to circumvent defunct government or hyper inflation.
If that’s true, then I side with those that want to live a decent life despite corruption and (international) politics exploiting and oppressing them.
Again, I don’t know how reliable that info is, and I doubt that there isn’t a better solution.
1 - Banks can make mistakes.
2 - Banks can be slow.
3 - Banks making it really hard to do transfer large sums of money.
I can't solve 1, but I can tell you that crypto definitely doesn't solve it. Because making a mistake with crypto is irreversible. The money is just gone. Mom forgot her password because she's getting old? Well, too bad, now Mom is broke and her money is gone forever.
Two is a solvable problem and it's getting better over time. It used to be even slower.
But 3, I'm in favour of. I want it to be hard for me to transfer away my life savings. I want there to be many steps in which my ID is checked and people look me in the eye and verify that yes, this is the thing I want to do. Because I am an idiot, and if you give me a gun I will shoot myself in the foot. I don't want it to be easy to accidentally go broke.
If I could have paid with, say, a dollar-backed stablecoin from a reputable institution, I could have made the payment digitally and closed the sale/rental without waiting days for a bank to mail me a check. In the apartment rental case, I might not have gotten passed up because someone else arrived check-in-hand ready to close the deal.
Curiously, this also describes the process of mining the next block in a PoW blockchain...
Capital controls are a political topic. You can disagree with them, dissent is important, but it’s also important to be honest and say that you’re seeing an advantage through breaking the law, which is like discovering that your business is more profitable if you don’t pay taxes.
It was useful to me for that use case. How would you have done that?
Tomorrow, I might not be able to buy goods from some of their vertical intergrated partners.
Freedom to transact has many forms. Sue you pay youre taxes and do nothing illegal now. But that is only true as far as you follow their laws of what is right and not illegal.
Sure, that's true, but you don't need the exchange to transfer value if you're using Bitcoin. Granted, you need them to get that value in your local currency and in cash (just like you need another Bank to transfer Paypal into cash).
> No exchange will touch it, and in extreme cases, the blockchain can be forked to undo a transaction.
How often has the fork happened though ... twice? three times? If we're getting into that kind of rareness, we'll lose all relevance. Banks sometimes outright steal from their customers, but it's so rare that I wouldn't put it up as an argument against using a bank.
As for receiving tainted coins: that's a more interesting point. Has anyone ever tried tainting large wallets by transferring known-bad coins to them?
So you shouldn't use non-crypto convenient near-realtime payments? Stripe seems to have similar events regularly judging by the "Support HN" posts.
It's an issue that seems to arise from misaligned incentives, and regulators are looking the other way, as they do on many things in banking.
It is definitely an area where regulation can help but the point is that you don't need to wait to give your business to someone else.
Lots of things would be vastly improved if only improbable things would happen (Google fights SEO-spam! Fusion brings unlimited energy too cheap to meter! Humanity unites in peace!), but would you place your bets on them happening instead of assuming the messed up reality we're in an dealing with it?
Payment processors are currently a form of zero representation government that decides what businesses are allowed to exist online, and they frequently abuse this power. They can only by avoided by using crypto. This is the one big use case of crypto i see as important, really...
I hear this quite a lot. Do we have any figures that say it’s actually happening at any scale?
https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/crypto-argentina-black-m...
Same as companies using offshore bank accounts for the same purpose, or paying out cash in envelopes.
People getting paid in USDC of course still need to convert a large amount of it into local cash/cash-equivalent because they still have to pay rent, pay for food etc.
So, "people in countries with high inflation"... is immediately reduced to just "freelancers".
I struggle to imagine how freelancers were paid before the advent of crypto.
someone not using a product doesn’t mean it’s not useful