… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
Dollar bills have the inherent value that some very grumpy men with guns will kick down my door and take me away if I try to make them myself.
Cryptocurrency is only worth something until a technical weakness is discovered and exploited, or until governments make it illegal, or until the creators of the currency reveal the back door they left in the system (such as that supposedly-lost Bitcoin wallet with a few billion coins in it) and cash it out, and then it’s all over and your digital tulips aren’t worth the flash cells they’re stored in.
Only to criminals.
Get around laws against money laundering, smuggling, extortion, and theft, I think you mean. Banks aren’t in the business of censorship, and even if yours is, there are plenty of others to choose from who’ll be more than happy to take your money and not ask too many questions about your politics.
Yeah, that’s what all the scammers say.
That’s not what “inherent” means, and it didn’t prevent North Korea from printing their own for decades anyway.
As for the other points:
Recently one of the mods on Beehaw was asking for an anonymous way to receive donations, which banks don’t allow. I don’t think they intended it for any of those.
Except for porn.
Take your money, yes. Give it back… not so much.
Still, there are plenty of scams in crypto… unfortunately, the same scams keep being run on all kinds of assets. Avoiding crypto won’t shield you from them, only learning about them may give you a fighting chance.
All cryptocurrencies other than Monero are completely useless to criminals. Most cryptocurrencies are designed to be traced. The only thing more traceless than Monero is paying in cash.
In other words, you’re wrong, crypto is even more useless than that
Ransom is almost always collected in Bitcoin. Buying drugs online was one of the first things you could do with Bitcoin.
Ransom is collected in Bitcoin only because it’s popular… but it’s fully traceable, so needs to get money laundered. When possible, it’s collected in XMR, which has a fully anonymous transfer mode.
Still…
Earlier this year, a guy I knew, came asking me for help, because he’d been “investing” in crypto, but suddenly one of the exchanges locked his funds for “suspicion of fraud”. Turns out, the “investing” he was doing, came as a “trade secret” from a “cute lady” he met on Facebook, who taught him how to put in EUR into one web, exchange it for BTC, transfer those to another web, exchange them for USDT, then transfer those to an exchange and convert them back into EUR, all at a favourable rate, getting him something like 5% per day (that’s a 5 billion % APR!). But, here’s the catch: he was only allowed to do it only a day! So he patiently kept doing it for like a month, with small amounts like 500-1000 EUR each time… until suddenly, his last transfer got frozen. He contacted the (second) website, and they asked him for 1000 EUR to unfreeze the 1000 EUR in BTC he had there, pending to convert to USDT.
That’s when he called me… and I told him “man, you’ve been had, you’ve been laundering money for who knows whom!”
A few days later, he managed to contact some more people in a similar situation, some guy with up 500K “locked up” like that, a car dealership owner, who sent the initial 1K unlocking fee… and a 10K legal fee… and a 25K certification fee… and was asking around whether he should send another 50K representation fee… all of that after having laundered who knows how many millions 🤦
Notice how they went from the BTC laundering, to a basic Nigerian scam with direct transfers, so full bank tracing that they’ll have to launder later. I also knew another guy whose father fell for that scam… in the early 1990s! The simplest stuff has been doing the rounds for decades, even centuries, and it keeps working.