When regulation kicks in (and it will — no government wants its citizens to be fleeced by rogue nations like DPRK and Russia), are there really any legitimate use-cases?
Even if your sending end is regulated, at the other end, there has to be a regulated bank. If not, the person who is receiving the "money" could be breaking their country's laws. Cryptocurrencies don't magically change that. Otherwise, PayPal or Venmo could allow accounts to be created for those people in US dollars and do the job even more inexpensively.
Are you referring to some specific regulation here?
Country A: person uses government regulated exchange/on-ramp to acquire crypto or mines it.
Country B: person receives crypto and trades it for local currency using a government regulated exchange
Which specific laws or regulations are being broken from which specific countries?
It doesn't work to tell the government that it isn't currency, they will just patiently explain to you that they decide that.
Did you really think that getting around money laundering laws is as easy as converting to nonmonetary assets before transfer?
What part of the article or Molly White's coverage are you referring to?
Better phrasing would be niche legitimate use cases not worth supporting, at least not domestically, if you’re America, the EU, China, India or Japan.
Why not? Having open source protocols that compete with PayPal and VISA and aren’t funded and controlled by central states can be a positive thing.
Sure. That isn't what crypto has become. After ten years, it's fair to call it given the amount of fraud, dishonesty and resource misallocation. Again, not saying ban it. Just tax it, regulate it closely, and keep an eye on the folks doing it to make sure they're focussing on doing it abroad.
To what practical end?
I think exploration should continue. But in the academic, not product, space. Crypto has the potential to be toxic. Licensing regimes for potentially-toxic products is highly precedented.
> Having open source protocols that compete with PayPal and VISA and aren’t funded and controlled by central states can be a positive thing.
I personally like that there is another choice than just yet-another-centralized-and-cumbersome system.
Huge advancements in zero knowledge cryptography have been made in the last year. Ethereum activated Proof of Stake in September. New DeFi primitives are released regularly.
It's actually hard to keep up with all of the research and releases which is why your comment is so perplexing unless it was made in bad faith.
What people mean here is that general innovation is dead in token industry, finding a new niches, new industries. All attempts have dies in 2018 or so. Decentralized storage, decentralized compute (with blockchain), decentralized LoRaWan, decentralized identities, decentralized off-chain ownership and so on and so forth. All failed spectacularly.
The only innovation remaining is simply more advanced instruments for scammers and illegal finance operations. That is innovation, but not particularly interesting for mass market.
Strong emphasis on "domestically". If you want to send money from one of those entities to another one, it gets hairy quite fast. I remember a time before SEPA and it was horrifying.
You can still have horrifying experiences with SEPA today. A German company once required that I send them CHF to their German IBAN. Which breaks several of the conditions for smooth SEPA transactions. IIRC for something like 30 Euro in value I had to pay 10 Euro in fees.
Wordwide is also problematic. If you can PayPal helps, but PayPal is its own hell, as many shop owners know. Credit Cards work but I can't send money via CC to a friend on the other side of the world, or can I?
I don't think Bitcoin or crypto is it but it would really be beneficial if we had some kind of money that is a first class citizen of the internet.
A lot of people have a limited set of experiences, such as sending wires or Wise payments to/from a specific country, and it works well for them, without realizing there is an entire world of other scenarios outside of this scope where it is not as well suited.
Almost all delayed transactions are due to fraud. The delay is often implemented to protect the sender from losing funds.
How does crypto handle fraud?
[1] https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/restrictions-money-in-min...
> How does crypto handle fraud?
Not every transactional system needs to adhere to the same set of antiquated and arduous AML checks and balances; which often break (either by allowing fraud to occur or incorrectly flagging and delaying valid transactions). For comparison, Cash App has no dispute mechanism:
https://cash.app/help/us/en-us/6501-sent-money-to-the-wrong-...
Cash App is US only and thus doesn't apply to your initial comment. Let's stay on topic please. Thank you.
Reiterating what I wrote in another comment, since you seem to be viewing this solely from your own experience:
> A lot of people have a limited set of experiences, such as sending wires or Wise payments to/from a specific country, and it works well for them, without realizing there is an entire world of other scenarios outside of this scope where it is not as well suited.
And Cash App is just an example; people are happy to send money with it, despite the lack of dispute and reversibility. Many people have friends and family across the world now and would probably be fine sending money to them without strict, slow, and costly AML checks on every transaction.
So the real question is: what is the technological benefit offered by decentralized ledger-type technologies versus traditional ones? The answer for many is that the technology is much worse in fundamental ways. Additionally the governance issues of a decentralized system or organization are very challenging to address.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Action_Task_Force
As to your fundamental question, the above might already hint at it: decentralization. It’s an open source spec; shared and unified across the globe, that is not in the control of any one state government or private company. Other features like near-instant settlement times, programmability, 100% uptime, privacy (ZKP), permissionless usage, minimal transaction fees (L2)—these are all practical bonuses that do improve on the status quo in today’s payment processors.
And that transaction is completely public, and can be traced back to both of you.
Or you never get the money out, but suddenly have a bunch of stuff and you get hit with taxes you can't pay because you didn't take the money out.
Countries aren't just going to let people evade AML because it finances stuff much worse than Johnny buying weed from a guy in Mexico, it finances terrorism and it's infinitely easier to follow the money than anything else.
Anything that gets big will get sued to hell and it's ridiculous to think otherwise.
If they do outright ban transaction privacy, at least that would involve explicit legislation with some risk of backlash - seems preferable to the status quo where the privacy violations are more covert.