Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.
There’s a whole world of shady crap going on in the ‘legitimate’ financial space.
But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.
"For the love of money is the root of all evil: ..." -- 1 Timothy, 6:10
It's not the money that is evil, it is the things we do because of the desire we have for it.
Further correction though, it actually says “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”
If you really go down the rabbit hole, pride is probably the root of all evil. It’s certainly the root of greed.
That depends on the translation you're using[0] ... it might be interesting to go back to the original (as best we can).
Also "all kinds of evil" can be interpreted in (at least) two ways, so it's ambiguous anyway.
But as with all these things, it's perhaps best to use the text to spark a search for a truth, or at least a useful guiding principle.
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Timothy%206:10
9 and those wishing to be rich, do fall into temptation and a snare, and many desires, foolish and hurtful, that sink men into ruin and destruction,
10 for a root of all the evils is the love of money, which certain longing for did go astray from the faith, and themselves did pierce through with many sorrows;
That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.
That's exactly the use of crypto. Illegal being based on a random law by a random government in a random country.
Had I been able to transfer Eth, which I didn’t see as an option last August, I would have been delighted with such a choice.
Bitcoin did not solve any real problem and you still need an additional mechanism to make sure that the thing you get back, actually happens.
You can do those same transfers cheaper and faster on an Ethereum layer 2.
Hedera is the way.
What happens when the product is faulty or not even arriving?
That's part of proof of stake of our society.
The same with lawyers and normal contracts.
All of it is part of our proof of stake.
Visa provides insurance and fraud detection.
Crypto promised solving the issues of the fiat.
It just doesn't do that at all and need all of the mechanics of our proof of stake system while consuming a lot of energy for it's own proof of work.
I can sell crypto to anyone, anywhere.
That cannot be used to purchase anything, anywhere.
Its only useful for a very narrow subset.
So, yeah, the "no questions asked" part is wrong. You can send money to anyone on earth, after a middleman takes a cut on your fiat exchange, the transfer, and the next fiat exchange, with questions asked, public for the world to see.
Unless you're actually going to directly use the cryptocurrency (which is generally impossible), it needs to be converted to/from fiat, which requires a bank transfer.
So after 20 mins of clicking some buttons I get my fiat currency in my bank account. And it costs 2 usd + some negligible amount.
That's because being tied to something, or having intrinsic value is not how things gain value.
Things, crypto, dollars, gold, and towels, have value because people WANT them. That's it.
You even touched on it: "some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value" - crypto provides a service people want, therefore by your own words it has value.
The mining network is a lot more productive than the US military which has vastly negative economic output. At least ASICs doesn't wander around wrecking countries in a semi-random fashion. The mining network even operates at a profit, which is much better than the US government by a huge margin. Someone thinks they are worth the money.
> Things, crypto, dollars, gold, and towels, have value because people WANT them. That's it.
People would want a lot of things if those things were free, question is what the demand curve is.
It's being tied to US state law, via the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC Article 12 for Digital Assets), https://www.clearygottlieb.com//news-and-insights/publicatio...
Article 12 – dealing directly with the acquisition and disposition of interests (including security interests) in “controllable electronic records,” which would include Bitcoin, Ether, and a variety of other digital assets ... Control under Article 12 is designed to be a technology-neutral functional equivalent of “possession.” It generally encompasses circumstances when a party has the “private key”It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.
Let's be realistic here, most of dictators evading sanctions do it (i) with good ol' bags of $/€/CHF/£, (ii) gold/platinum/diamonds/..., (iii) whatever ad-hoc currency satisfies the two parties (promises, shares, goods, ...); in short everything but traceable-in-the-open digital currencies where most of the in/egress feature mandatory KYC.
If you believe e.g. that the US/EU firms still doing business in Russia are doing it in ETH/BTC, I have a port in Serbia to sell you.
If you are in the circles where having to move $10M illegally is a common occurrence, paying a guy $10k to take a train between Russia and China with a bag of cash and bribe the border guards another $10k is much better than trying to weasel your way through the KYC process of Coinbase.
But I wouldn't.
Of course, people there may use it for that purpose, but that demand is a negligible part of the overall demand for cryptocurrencies.
Actual definition: In the Western world, a "criminal" is any person tried and convicted of breaking the law.
Your definition is, however, correct for how it sometimes works and how "they" would like it to work. (where your use of the word "mandate" means "whichever direction the wind is currently blowing").
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293...
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services:
> 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions
If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.
There are two things here that are simultaneously true:
1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.
2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.
"We first document that 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities".
How much of the actually meaningful use is legal? E.g. buying good and services, not evading laws, regulations, sales taxes etc.
Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than bitcoin.
What do you think would be an acceptable percentage of speculation?
https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/forex-trading/statistics...
Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.
For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.
Why didn't you name one?
If you're buying illegal black market shit, you're darn well gonna do it using the Red, White, and Blue's Green!
This is also proof of cryptocurrency's use-case as a method of value transfer (ie. currency). Crime and porn are the traditional testing grounds for new disruptive technologies. I remember this thing called the Internet...
You'd do better to argue 'currencies are usually tied to a productive country with some measurable GDP and therefore [...]'.
Bank system is terribly inefficient comparatively and it is a huge market