I've yet to see cryptocurrencies actually solve a problem that your everyday average person has when buying groceries or going out to eat.
They just make things more difficult and confusing, and all these attempts to alleviate that just lead us straight to "banks, but worse".
How is “Everyone can see every transaction you have ever done” censorship-resistant, doesn’t that mean you have to be extra careful about every single person or service you have ever transacted with?
And, excluding the $5 wrench seems a really, really large oversight when it results in every single asset or piece of ”money” you own being irretrievably, instantly stolen.
Nothing prevents us agreeing to trade those bitcoins for cash or anything else.
You are correct that some Bitcoins are "tainted", which is why it's not the absolute, most perfect cryptocurrency. But they are still censorship resistant. That was my point. They still can't be confiscated.
And to further your argument, if you want to find the best crypto that is actually fungible - that would be Monero (all Moneros are the same, there are no "tainted" or "blacklisted" Moneros). However, because of that very fact it is banned on exchanges and blacklisted everywhere. It's just too good.
Bitcoin is good enough to get popular yet at the same time shitty enough (traceable) not to get outright banned, that's why BTC is here to stay while better coins like Monero will perish.
> How is “Everyone can see every transaction you have ever done” censorship-resistant, doesn’t that mean you have to be extra careful about every single person or service you have ever transacted with?
Just to reiterate. It's because not even the government can confiscate your Bitcoin (them beating you into telling your seed phrase means you still giving it up and let's not pretend there aren't 21st seeds and duress phrases just for this very reason).
> And, excluding the $5 wrench seems a really, really large oversight when it results in every single asset or piece of ”money” you own being irretrievably, instantly stolen.
Again. Anyone with significant amount of crypto will not be public about it, will keep duress phrases, 21st seed words and extra wallets while giving up the minimum. In theory, with $5 wrench you could keep beating a totally innocent person hoping they give you a crypto wallet that doesn't even exist and if they gave you one, you could keep beating them until they give you the "other one" and the "third one", it just isn't a solid argument.
They can really easily do that though. A court can say "give us your keys or you are going to sit in jail until you do and we will record your conversations so if you tell the keys to someone else, we'll sell them"
It's not much in its favor, but a sufficiently motivated person can resist handing over cryptocurrency better than they can any other asset.
If I've got $20 bill or a gold bar in my pocket, I can use it at the store if I can get to the store, but someone could easily confiscate it from me. If I have a $20 bill or gold bar buried in the woods behind my house, it can't be easily confiscated from me, but I can't use that at the store, even aside from whether I can access a store. If I have a cryptocurrency wallet, I can use it in the hypothetical cryptocurrency store if I can access it, and it also cannot be easily confiscated from me (assuming reasonable security measures).
The real criticism is "what cryptocurrency store?" and that's the real reason cryptocurrency isn't very useful. I'm not arguing that cryptocurrency is good or useful, I'm arguing very narrowly for one specific point: "owning cryptocurrency" is more like knowing something than it is like possessing something.
So? If sums is high enough they STILL can't confiscate it. In some cases it is preferable to spend some time in jail versus giving up outrageous fortune. They still can't take it by force. Also, only a few countries with backward laws (like the United States of America) have laws that allow that. Something insane like what you propose would never be possible in a developed country with a solid judicial branch like Estonia, for example.
This also doesn't account for a government being able to just outlaw cryptocurrencies. They may not be able to confiscate your bitcoin, but they sure can throw you in jail for trying to spend it at the grocery store. Or impact your ability to access the blockchain, etc.
It doesn't even do that properly, because there is no guarantee of service given by the system. Miners could just decide that they don't like you very much and refuse to process your TX. Or they could conspire to blackmail you: "pay us or your tokens are useless". Sure, someone might be willing to process your TX, or you could try to do it yourself, but that might take a long time or it might fail altogether.
Furthermore, as the Ethereum rollback has shown when the original "DAO" was hacked, the vast majority of crypto project have some sort of backdoor that can and will be used.
The only thing crypto "solves" is oversight by governments, and the people who are interested in that the most are criminals or actors who have been sanctioned like North Korea or Russia. Somehow, I don't quite see the value in that.
Some miners perhaps. But others will like every tx that pays a decent transaction fee and these tend to eventually get your tx included.
Second: so long as there's one single mining pool that is not colluding, then any censorship attempt is going to be moot. You would need to have, not just 51% of mining-pool collusion, you need 100%!
Third: even if you had 100% collusion, this "problem" is actually being solved with technology, it's called Stratum V2 protocol. Stay tuned.
Last but not least: I'm really surprised this level of ignorance still exists in the HN community wrt crypto. I guess we are still early.
Now, if you're suggesting one-off cases like this are the counter-argument for the censorship argument, I'll bring you the bad news: this has never happened on chains that are not shitcoins, e.g. bitcoin.
Crypto only solves what it was designed to: A specific version of the byzantine generals problem. Turns out, nobody needed it solved.
People still use it as a permisionless financial platform, which allows the delivery of novel consumer goods. Primarily gambling, speculation, and other forms of entertainment.