I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.
Personally, I’m not against it, but I’m not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don’t think it will be viable for at least another decade.
To be frank:
- Good idea in theory
- Ancaps and cryptobros ruined it for the rest of us
- Monero is okay
A public forever storage of all transactions is not good but bad for privacy.
Send money to someone and they can see your wallet and all transactions.
Identifying wallet owners may require different levels of effort. But that’s kinda besides the point.
I thought Monero solves this issue, with a level of effort large enough that it’s almost impossible to crack.
and here lies the issue with asking about crypto in non-crypto circles… everyone thinks they completely understand blockchain in its entirely. what they actually have is a rudimentary understanding of a single blockchain as it was literally 15 years ago
of course the problem with asking in crypto circles is that they’re all trying to sell you their new big thing which is probably total trash
so really there’s no good way to ask and get reasonable answers about crypto
Have they solved the problem yet that proof-of-work essentially makes the whole thing an environmental nightmare and means it doesn’t scale to anything useful in terms of transaction rates? Or the problem that “proof-of-stake” is essentially just a “the rich get richer” scheme? Or the problem that transaction latencies are huge compared to traditional payment methods? Or the problem that blockchains do not have a defined point where a seller of some good or service can be sure the transaction is actually part of the longest chain? Or the problem that the blockchain only ever grows which means it is not feasible to work directly on it on most devices? Or the problem of uncontrolled deflation with a fixed money supply (well, shrinking really if you take into account wallets people lost access to)?
The whole concept is just deeply flawed and meanwhile 99% of actual uses that are not just research are basically scammers.
I could go through each of your concerns, but I’ll just leave it at two:
- rich get richer - someone needs to be trusted to confirm transactions properly. Requiring some skin in the game (proof of stake, mining, etc) with a reward is the way to do it in a trustless system. This exists in fiat currencies as well, with the main winners being banks and large borrowers, so I don’t see it as a serious issue.
- energy costs - mining cryptocurrencies has a high initial energy requirement, but it scales really well in terms of transactions, so if transactions double, we’ll see a modest (way less than double) increase to energy usage of the network as a whole. And in theory, mining operations would prefer cheap power, so that means whatever excess green power exists that would otherwise be wasted worldwide. There’s an ethical option to mining energy usage.
The reason I’m not going to go through each is because each problem has a solution, whether that’s in an already existing currency, or will go away as it scales.
Here are the real problems as I see it:
- way too many scams - which leads to…
- way too much volatility - most cryptocurrency users are speculators, so there’s…
- no mass of regular transactions to attract vendors
Even if we get past the FUD, we’re still going to have adoption issues because of the above. And I don’t have a good solution for that, but we need adoption to stabilize the currency and motivate solutions for problems.
I like the idea of cryptocurrencies, but we need a large institution to normalize it before people will adopt it, and I don’t see that happening. Maybe stable coins are the way forward, IDK.
One thing I’m interested in is GNU Taler, which is a relatively simple digital transaction system that preserves payer privacy. If we could get a big institution to use it (e.g. Mozilla for micro payments to websites), people may feel more comfortable experimenting with digital currencies.
GNU Taler isn’t cryto. (Which makes much better)
The problem with crypto is that there really isn’t anything to give it value. It basically is a super unpredictable stock.
I wouldn’t say “better,” just different. GNU Taler is centralized, so it’s only as reliable as the issuer, whereas cryptocurrencies are as reliable as the distributed network. So Taler can’t replace a fiat currency, it’s just a toolkit to create your own fiat currency.
So it’s great for privacy-minded folks in stable economies, but not great for international transactions or transactions where central authority isn’t trusted. Essentially, cryptocurrencies are supposed to replace precious metals and whatnot for barter.
So I’m excited to see what privacy products people make with things like GNU Taler because it can be used today, but something like Monero is preferred if it can stabilize and start being accepted in more places.
imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency
people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier
i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree
I’m not saying government fiat currencies shouldn’t exist, just that they aren’t needed for regular transactions.
Argument that monetary policy can be harmful
The natural business cycle has booms and busts, and government interference in that cycle (i.e. attempts to prevent the busts) can instead delay the busts and result in more severe downturns.
For example, look at the recent inflationary period. We had a huge bull run largely fueled by really low borrowing rates, so when things started to crash, we couldn’t lower rates to encourage expansion (or at least as refused to go negative), so we instead threw money at the problem, which is an inflationary policy. The result was rapid inflation, and we had to rush to raise rates to get that back under control, and the rapid rate hikes resulted in bank failures, layoffs, and high borrowing rates. If we had instead raised rates slowly from 2014 or so and on, we could’ve cut rates instead of throwing stimulus money at the problem.
But the main problem with fiat currencies is that the issuing authority has a vested interest in tracking transactions. Cash isn’t really a thing for digital transactions, and if the government realizes it can discourage use of cash, it will.
Fiat and cryptocurrencies can absolutely exist. Use fiat when interacting with the banking system (loans, savings, etc), and use cryptocurrencies like Monero for keeping transactions private (e.g. shopping). The government raising rates only really impacts borrowing, so companies and borrowers will use the local fiat currency and you’ll get the desired effects.
what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain?
I’m honestly not familiar enough with international transactions to really weigh in on this. Maybe it’s a good idea, IDK.
aren’t needed for regular transactions
but that kinda defeats the point of a central authority having control: the value of any currency is entirely based on what you can use it for… unless you tied their value in a way that the government regulates - eg to have a banking license you must swap USD for eUSD and visa versa on a 1:1 basis without fees (perhaps they burn eUSD to get new USD; IDK - you can’t oversupply. it gets tricky)… anyway, beside the point: regular transactions is exactly what the government needs some control over
Energy costs are magnitudes less than banks
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energy wasted on solving increases exponentially
Which is balanced by decreased value of additional coins, so less interested miners should drop out.
But the energy itself is kind of misleading, because miners will flock to lower cost energy, which should primarily be excess green energy. If we actually adopt this at scale, I expect energy companies to help in mining crypto with their excess energy generation, which should work well since that excess should be fairly consistent I’m a global scale.
That said, I’m extremely interested in seeing how proof of stake works out for Ethereum, since it just seems wasteful to mine coins for verifying transactions. But I think it’s a lot less wasteful than opponents make it out to be.
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you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%
POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)
some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)
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Much like the claim that it improves privacy cryptocurrency has not really achieved any of its claimed advantages and its successes are mainly in the field of scamming people out of their money.
Not true for Privacy Coins
Manual targeted identification is possible even if you use public WiFi + VPN + Tor with 100 nodes. It’s just a matter of user behavior analysis. Same goes with anything digital nowadays. You’re either protected only from automatic spyware (Google, Meta etc) or not protected at all. At least some entity you’re interacting with (whether it’s a website, a person, a company or whatever else) is going to have some sort of tracking to it unless there are no network devices and physical surveillance agents in the area. Finding someone isn’t hard. It sometimes can require irl interrogation though. At least that’s what I know. Even if something I said isn’t true, digital cryptocurrency transactions are still a little bit better than using a credit card (maybe unless you buy a fake entity but that’s still breakable). I don’t know any better alternatives (cash doesn’t count because it’s not digital)
Ah yes, the classic WiFi+VPN+Tor with 100 nodes trick.
Good luck, I’m behind 12 proxies
Ha, you left your virtual window open
I dislike it being misused for gambling on it’s value, but see the importance of currencies like Monero.
i think it’s really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don’t use crypto personally, but it’s important that something like it exists.
cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it’s obviously not going to replace “normal” money any time soon.
i feel like it’s kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you’re trading lots of electricity for “not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations”. obviously it has it’s flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.
edit: oh yeah, i didn’t mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it’s private and it’s an esperanto word :P)
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They’re called Privacy Coins for a reason. Monero is just one.
It’s more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It’s certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it’s not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.
Also note that lightning is an off-chain centralized approach. It loses a lot of benefits of decentralized layer 1 like bitcoin and monero. Privacy at a centralized entity is like having no privacy at all.
Look up a network map of lightning, it’s not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.
The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.
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I assume you’re talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that’s not part of someone’s threat model, is Bitcoin still reasonable private?
As in, if we remove state-level actors from the threat model, is Bitcoin still safe enough? I’m more interested in not getting doxxed for my choice in VPN, email service, etc if I choose to run for office, and Bitcoin is accepted by enough places to be useful enough.
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I use Monero for private transactions and I am thankful for the existence of a private, untraceable currency (like most cash transactions IRL). I am concerned by the amount of energy expended on crypto-mining… it is a dreadful use of energy that could be used for far more productive purposes.
Honest question, since the goal of cryptocurrencies is to illuminate the banking system. Roughly how much energy does the banking system use? Because if mining uses less than that, it would be a net improvement.
It’s possible to see an estimate of how much electricity is being used for bitcoin (obviously not the only currency being mined). Higher prices results in more mining so the amount of electricity varies all the time. Here’s a graph showing estimates of energy consumption. I guess you can come up with an estimate because you could have an idea of how much it costs to mine a bitcoin and you would see them entering circulation on the blockchain.
During its peak in 2021 it was using about the same amount of electricity as Norway or Argentina uses in a year (according to a University of Cambridge analysis).
Compared to these amounts the banking system would be using a tiny proportion given that fiat currencies don’t need to be mined they are just created by the banks when they issue loans.
Don’t forget the other things that go into the banking system though. You’ve got the mining for minerals to make their buildings. You’ve got the gas that it takes to get employees to and from work, the electricity to power those buildings, the electricity to make and distribute coins and physical money, The presses and machines to make physical currency, etc. And there’s probably a ton I am missing.
You can certainly include all that stuff too, but the banking system provides services for 67% of the world’s population. Bitcoin is owned by about 100 million people.
And I don’t think Bitcoin is the end-all, be all cryptocurrency. In fact, I don’t even have any. What I prefer using is Monero. It is still a proof of work coin yes, but instead of using ASICs, it uses CPUs, so it uses a lot less power. Having ASICs Promotes centralization of mining hashrate, and therefore it’s easier for the government to require rules be followed. A few examples are OFAC compliant transactions only, mixers, etc.Monero does not have that problem because how are you going to ban CPUs from being used by normal people without just straight out banning the use of any computing device? And that would not go over well.
The banking system uses magnitudes more.
The big banks pushed a huge misinformation campaign to convince people that cryptocurrency was using lots of energy, but its negligible next to the banks.
Its like tobacco companies trying to convince us that smoking is healthy. You need experts to disprove the well-funded misinformation
Nice tech surrounded by scams.
I see no point for it to exist.
https://help.gumroad.com/article/156-gumroad-and-adult-content
This is a recent one that came up, but this happens every few months. If payment processors just did their jobs there wouldn’t be as much of a need for other ways to do transactions. It’s also still a pain in the ass to send money to individuals in other countries even when everything works the way it’s intended.
Morgan Stanley boot licker this one
No, I have no love for financial institutions.
What value does a crypto bring by itself? It’s not land or a business so you can’t develop it. It’s not a person or application so it can’t perform labor. Crypto is not even physical so I can’t eat it, burn it, or use it as a paper weight.
It’s only purpose is to be speculated on for trading purposes for REAL MONEY. Crypto currency life cycle ends with it being exchanged for another currency, that’s just redundant. It’s a griff like speculation on old comic books was back in the 90’s, except you don’t even get nerd crap you’re trying to offload.
Finally it’s not backed by the violence of another country. Ever since USA moved off the gold standard “the faith and credit of the US government” which is a fancy way of saying the military industrial complex. That’s real and powerful if not ambiguous, which is more than I can say for a list of completed math problems. You and your kind are too weak to have a currency.
You are not an economic revolutionary. You are part of an insular group participating in a ponzi scheme that is desperately trying to get mass adoption so you’re not “holding the bag”. In crypto there is someone always “holding the bag” because crypto has no innate value.
I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life
The initial idea and the aspect of “fuck the banks” intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.
There’s lots of people who use the dollar and other currencies I don’t like. But I still use the currency. Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policies and promises for 15 years. It’s money whose supply can’t be diluted through inflation. You can be your own bank. That has never changed. Whatever it originally promised, it’s still doing.
Being your own bank is 99% of the problems crypto runs into. It turns out being your own bank is hard and makes most people into marks. This is of course, by design, and most of the space, the vast majority of the space, is scams.
Also bitcoin has kept its promises just as much as USD has. That’s not really a useful metric.
The original idea was to take back control of our money from greedy and corrupt banks and politicians. Very very very few people use it as that now though. Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
As we are in the privacy sublemmy: All of the privacy issues have already been solved, those that keep saying that it is a log of everyone you ever paid kept forever have no idea what they are talking about. Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns. There are also other ways to obfuscate and stay anonymous.
Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns.
Then how do you connect the incoming money to the outgoing money (and split it up or combine it in the process assuming most income flows do not exactly match a spending flow exactly in value)?
edit: since the well-akshullies are out already, I’ll say this is massively simplified because anyone who cares about the actual cryptography or terminology can go read the fuckin docs; it’s detail that isn’t necessary here.
Wallet addresses are just the public part of a public/private key pair. You can generate another public key with the private key so the address is different, but your private key can still sign transactions for both addresses.
That is not how public/private keypairs work in most algorithms but even if it was, the fact that the public key is used to verify the signature comes from a specific private key means that both (or all) public keys could validate all transactions signed with that private key.
I recommend you read BIP-44 since this has been a standard for years in Bitcoin. Your other crypto knowledge seems woefully out of date as well, from your questions in your other post. Time to brush up, I think.
Yes, its the change that makes block chain analysis so effective
Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
It sucks, I don’t see how it could ever get past this.
Wait till you hear about stocks and derivatives. No way are they ever gonna make it big time. Only used by sleazeballs trying to get rich.
You’re misinformed. I recommend reading Traces in the Dark.
It’s not real currency, it’s a token.
I can’t use it to pay my taxes to the US federal government and it must be traded in for actual currency to do so.
Just like a token at an arcade.
They are also vehicles of wild speculation… And unlike stocks (where I gain partial ownership of a company) and bonds (where I gain a claim on their monetary inflows and primacy if the venture crumbles), crypto gives me… What exactly?
I don’t get to be an owner or a creditor. I become… Holder of a mining incentive?
I’m sorry it’s not what a lot of people seem to think it is.
You can also not use euro to pay for your federal taxes in USA. You can however convert your euros to USD in order to pay for them. If you think euros are more trustworthy and give you full self custody, then it’s a good reason to hold your money in euros . Plenty of people do that in the world; they store their money in USD rather than their inflated less reliable national currency.
Victim to speculation? Unfortunately yes, but same thing goes for stocks, even basic foods and raw materials nowadays. What do they give you? Whatever matters to you: full privacy? Full ownership? Freedom of movement for your money? Not one central entity deciding on the amount that’s printed? Voting power in the tech that’s being built? Most stocks nowadays don’t give you anything as well, but the fake belief on how much it’s worth and a lot of people agree nowadays they don’t represent true value of the company in many cases (Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.). You don’t get voting rights, you don’t get dividends. A lot of Cryptos do give those.
Having said those counter-arguments, of course there’s flaws too and frankly more with the majority of them. It’s those select few that could matter on long-term
I’m for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin
But, sadly, I’m against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn’t been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA’s https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn’t even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d’etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.
So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I’ve became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.
I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.
PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I’m using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that’s where the value literally is today. I’d also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they’d be technically viable.
I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don’t have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).
Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the “crypto world”, but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:
- Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money’s value is not diluted by supply inflation.
- You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
- It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
- At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can’t say the same for most other coins.
- And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other “stranded” supply. Pretty powerful stuff.
Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.
“Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to”
I think that’s the biggest flaw in your thinking. Monero has this built-in from the start and everyone using it knows it and supports this approach. It affects how legislators can manipulate the coin because they can’t, it will keep on living. It already affects the true value of the coin with all privacy included, because you can see how exchanges are unwilling to list it or are delisting it if they already did so, so there are no (or hardly any) institutions or billionaires manipulating the price because of the high risk factor of losing their money. You’re forgetting that people in power nowadays are brainwashing us to accept that a wanting a fundamental right like privacy equals you’re doing criminal activity or have plans to do so. There are A TON of reasons why bitcoin will never include such strong privacy features, because there are so many factors that influence this decision to make it possible, and the dominant reason you see that matters to btc holders (or any other crypto token for that matter) is NUMBER GO UP. Privacy is not a number go up reason. So it’s not a tech issue, it’s a people issue
It’s a nice technology that should exist as an alternative to personally identifyable and government-ID-connected transactions. It’s not perfect in any way though
