> The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life.
But there are a ton of very obvious uses for cash aside from for things that are illegal. I use it every single day.
But there are a ton of very obvious uses for cash aside from for things that are illegal. I use it every single day.
To a much lesser degree. I wouldn't be able to use cryptocurrencies for any of the things I use cash for.
But that wasn't what was being asserted. The original assertion was "It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy"."
The same thing cannot be said of cash.
(I don't agree with the assertion I quoted, to be clear. Aside from buying illegal goods, it's good for evading banking regulations and fees, but that's neither here nor there.)
1's value being a traceable permanent record and 2's value is no direct stepping in between a transaction or control over a holding.
both of those, to many skeptics, are actually negatives and give more control and power to sovereign entities, not less.
i am not including the pseudoanonymity of it for two reasons, 1) depending on the crypto, currently the level of sophistication to transact in a manner that any given address cannot personally identify you requires massive amounts of personal responsibility / knowledge and most importantly to most people, effort and 2) because the major way the current digital fiat channels handle the transaction volumes that they do is that they're built on a foundation of authentication linking to personal identification, and so the theorycraft of "sure it has a huge ecological footprint but it could replace the many-many-many times larger ecoprint of the entire fiat banking system" is disingenuous to me because in order to actually replicate that, any main network would be a duplicate of the current authentications backed by men with guns, it would just allow that sidechannel of p2p to have it's wild west.
i do find it a touch humorous that those who want to shatter the fiat-police complex are quick to engage the legal system to protect and recoup from bad actors.