That was an "ok" argument maybe 5-8 years ago, now there's too much evidence that no legitimate use case exists, and every alleged one turns out to be a fraud or a get-rich-quick scheme.
If no useless speculation scheme has ever thrived as long and as much as BTC, and it keeps on going, at what point do you have to ask if your opinion just doesn't fit with reality?
The shady exchanges and shitcoins muddy the waters but have fundamentally nothing to do with BTC and a handful of other top cryptos.
Yes, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme famously ran for decades, with everyone invested calling doubters idiots and pessimists.
Until it all fell apart.
As an aside, I can think of exactly one person who benefitted from Madoff's scheme: former New York Met Bobby Bonilla, who is set to receive about USD$1.2MM from the team every July 1 through 2035. Bonilla's contract was bought out by the Mets in 2000, and instead of paying him the USD$5.9MM he was owed, the team offered a deferred payment scheme (with payments starting in 2011), as they were looking at double-digit returns from their Madoff investments in the deferred decade.
Madoff was a single individual controlling the narrative.
Bitcoin has no central actor.
The same problem existed with FTX/SBF. But when they went down, it wasn't like Bitcoin died with them.
from my perspective, there is simply a lack of coverage of things that function without incident, which are very numerous and solve frictions for a lot of people, whether you’re in the market for that or not
like construction sites that showed “how many days since an incident”, because people only heard about the incidents
that's not my standard.
cater to a market because the market exists.
there are many people in the crypto space now and they have frictions and pay to reduce those frictions, and are not defrauded in the process.
its just too late to care about your standard. you can search for it if you want, but its at the expense of so many other opportunities that have nothing to do with fraud.
its the entertainment sector, its the collectibles sector, its the financial services sector..... and the crux of most arguments and moving goalposts are that all those sectors in aggregate are worth zero when crypto is involved (or that crypto is worth zero because you're not the market for any of those sectors? lol? its a paradoxical antiquated argument)
when the only trend is that crypto-versions just begin catering to even more sectors and pulling in those audiences, or crypto-natives begin being interested in those sectors.
Privacy that is obtained by obscuring signatories or blending assets is just laundering.
"Laundering" is a bullshit concept invented to legitimize total surveillance of financial transactions. This KYC/AML stuff is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance. We must resist it vigorously for the exact same reasons we resist warrantless dragnet data collection.
I can exchange gold, or textiles or something, and not expect surveillance of those transactions. I do live in a country that requires some reporting of those for tax purposes, but not tracking of the assets the way crypto does.
The moment I pick up a monetized piece of paper that the government printed with a serial number and all that, which is guaranteed by the full faith of the government, and is standardized by the government in a global financial system, I accept some side effects, such as the government's expectation of tracking and standardization.
Similarly, the moment I pick up a crypto currency, I accept all the technical limitations / requirements of complete ledger accessibility, and methods of circumventing that are no more sophisticated than laundering.
In effect, with gov-backed money and crypto, you are forced into a system of surveillance. I don't see the privacy angle one bit.
>Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?
Next message someone listed features, not example applications. I had two responses: that's not an application, and in addition I somewhat sloppily said that even that feature (privacy) does not exist (because it's just laundering which is defeatable).
Monero has numerous privacy features. It mixes in multiple transactions into one so that amounts, sources and destinations can't be correlated. To an outside observer, it looks like everyone is constantly transacting with everyone else. Maximizes the anonymity set.
More things then just fraud are illegal.