Ok sure. I’m not saying it’s useless. Crimes (as defined by whatever local jurisdiction) and capital flight are definitely uses for crypto, and in such cases you have no choice but to live with the volatility.
Why should I use it for legitimate transactions?
Mathematically feasible sure. But the computational cost to actually do transactions doesn’t pencil out and is in no danger of penciling out any time soon… and the other solutions are much simpler and work fine.
Crypto to me feels like the biggest example ever of engineers/math people inventing something cool because it’s cool and then discovering it doesn’t actually solve any real world problems. I absolutely agree that the technology being developed because of web3 could end up being important, I just don’t think we’re super close and I don’t think there’s any guarantee that owning cryptocurrencies, NFT’s, etc is a good way to get exposure to the thing that eventually works.
Part of the Libertarian argument for BTC has been that the government might decide to prohibit various transactions you may think are legitimate. At least on 22, “uncensorable transactions” was often talked about.
If the thing you want is priced in it, you’d want to use it.
It’s not gonna replace a debit card, but if you want to buy something from a person or business you don’t feel comfortable giving your debt card info to, crypto transfer is way way safer. They can’t abuse your crypto wallet the way a malicious person could do with your bank card info
They aren’t though. Absolutely no way would I use crypto for crimes or capital flight. For crimes it’s not untraceable enough and there are entire countries whose primary industry is assisting with capital flight for very reasonable rates.
Uh this is just wildly incorrect. Your risk of getting scammed with crypto is exponentially higher than it is with a credit card. Amex is waaaaaaaaaaaay better at security than anyone is in crypto without some serious cybersecurity chops.
Amex has a system to resolve fraud because the Amex card has huge loopholes for scammers that Amex can’t remove. So if you get scammed you have the opportunity to petition them and when they’re ready, if they decide to do so, you can get paid back from the fraud they allowed to happen.
And you get scammed and pay with crypto you have what recourse?
I’d recommend not sending crypto around the world all willy-nillily.
One situation is me deciding to send crypto to someone shady/scammy. I’d say just don’t do that. No one is making you do that stuff.
Another situation is me sitting at home doing nothing and getting alerts that my credit card is being used 2 states away by scammers.
You don’t hand over the keys to your wallet to make a crypto transaction. You kinda do with credit cards.
It’s not but even if it was, most people just don’t do business with people and businesses they don’t trust much. Paranoid edge cases aren’t enough for any crypto to get widely adopted as a currency. Fwiw yeah don’t use debit cards for anything, you have way more recourse with a credit card.
Same way the dollar has? People using/not using the dollar to buy stuff is probably pretty stable over time.
Oh so just don’t get scammed is the answer, ok. How does crypto make that easier again?
Its a catch-22. It won’t be used as a currency enough until its steady enough to be used as a currency and it won’t be steady enough to be used widely as a currency until it’s widely used as a currency. The notion that it’ll get there without intervening steps is pure underpants gnomes.
This is why I just can’t bite on this. The crypto enthusiasts mostly come across to me like people who have fallen for an MLM. They’ve got rebuttals to my objections but those rebuttals are extremely weak/thin and don’t really address the meat of the issue at all.
The issue is how in the fuck is something with fixed operating costs this high and actual value added this low a good idea. And the only answer to that is ‘I don’t know and I don’t care because someone will pay me XXX% more than I bought it for today so I’m right’. Which is fine, but it’s just straight no chaser greater fool investing which I’m really not into and would be against my religion if I had one.
Sure? I’m not the one arguing that it will be adopted as currency, take it up with the crypto bros.
Your objections seem based on the incorrect belief that all blockchains and cryptographic protocols are exactly the same as Bitcoin. I can’t make the case for using zk-SNARKs for digital identity if your understanding is limited to store-of-value vs. medium-of-exchange arguments on a proof-of-work blockchain.
i really gotta dive into that material more but it is actually pretty fascinating, and yea the math here has almost nothing to do with BTC or any kind of cryptocurrency in general - cryptocurrency is just one application of cryptography in general.
I’m bearish on crypto currency (as a long long bet) but very bullish on crypto applications in general, given how many unsolved and unexplored problems lie in that space that have incredibly useful applications.
it’s a real shame this space has been so infested by fraudsters. I consider BS a friend but I doubt even I could open his mind a tiny little bit about this, given the amount of outright fraud he’s probably seen in this space (I have too).
there are tremendous applications to cryptography that exist in the real world. for instance our encryption protocols right now are a ticking time bomb that we are only just barely outpacing the increasingly powerful compute we have at our disposal. Someday we will lose this battle. stuff like @zikzak is talking about would be incredibly useful for this.
i’m actually bearish on this problem overall, given the clear problems I see with quantum computing ever becoming a real thing in my lifetime. but someday - if the theorists are correct - the kind of encryption we use now will be rendered completely worthless and it’s pretty much been the backbone of any kind of secure communication on the web since the very beginning almost.
