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.
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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
Not true for Privacy Coins
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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.
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
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Use Monero. Since the amount you send is private, who you send to is private, you are private when you send. Unless you are targeted specifically, it’s unlikely that your transactions will be figured out.I use Monero a lot and I don’t really care about the fiat value of it because I’m using it as a currency to buy my food, pay my insurance, pay for my phone bill, etc.So what happens is since I have to pay bills in it, I end up buying it every single month and then spending what I need on bills and saving the rest.I am not it for number go up like the rest of these crypto bros are. I want to ditch the manipulative government fiat system entirely, and that’s the end I hope to achieve by opting out.
BTC, ETH, and XMR are the only ones that matter. Some stable coins (USDC, GUSD) are okay, too.
BTC (Bitcoin) is good because it’s the most widespread. If a vendor accepts crypto, odds are they accept BTC. However, the blockchain is easily traceable.
ETH (Ethereum) is good because its blockchain is far more versatile, so it can be used for other things than just crypto payments. However, it’s less widely used for payments than BTC and is also easily traceable.
XMR (Monero) is excellent. It’s extremely difficult to track an individual user. Your transactions are private. There are some possible attack vectors for the future, but they’d require that you be an actual target to be worthwhile. Someone that’s going to track you is going to find a different way than XMR to do it. XMR isn’t as widely used as the others, though, and it’s also not on as many crypto exchanges. Kraken has it.
However, crypto as an investment is not a good idea. Spend your crypto.
Ethereum is unregistered security token.
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.
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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.
No as it pretty much a scam
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“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
fuck that utterly horrible shit
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.
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