161–170 of 203 posts
It would be an interesting experiment if commenting on all crypto related articles required you to disclose how many dollars(/euros/whatever) you have invested in crypto.
- Disclosure: I own crypto
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Adoption as what? To do anything useful with Crypto you still need to change it to a real currency on a bank account.
I just bought 3 plane tickets with Bitcoin yesterday on cheapair.com. Just because it's not used by everybody, it can be useful for some people. Bitcoin has never failed me while travelling.
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Miners are securing the only censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money we have. The only people who don't see any practical value in this either don't understand Bitcoin or hate freedom.
Or realize Bitcoin just can't be used as money, by design. It couldn't even handle the volume of transactions of a small town, because the miners and developers are not interested in that, and have chosen to keep block sizes small for their own interests.
This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill.
Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly instantly transfer small amounts of Bitcoin for extremely low fees.
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Miners are securing the only censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money we have. The only people who don't see any practical value in this either don't understand Bitcoin or hate freedom.
There are many different cryptos that offer the same attributes without the energy cost. If Bitcoin was created today, no one would even bother to look at it.
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I do think there is at least one problem that crypto currencies solve better than the status-quo: sending money internationally. It has less regulation than the official channels. Can have better privacy. Can be cheaper. Can be faster. Compared to Western Union, international wire transfers and the likes, sending money home for foreign workers (remittance), seems to be much better with Stellar, or other low-fee crypt…
The reason it's "better" for international transfers is because it has decided to ditch all legal and financial safeguards that have been introduced, often with good reason, in regular banking. From a technical standpoint, crypto adds nothing to the process that a centralized system can't provide cheaper, faster and safer. Additionally, a hedge is only as good as its performance in case of a worst-case scenario. If t…
When Greece was freezing / slowing bank withdrawals during its financial crisis in 2015, BTC price climbed.
IIRC BTC also jumped when Russia was getting involved in Ukraine in 2014.
It's not a perfect hedge, but I do believe bitcoin could be valuable if the world/governments go (partly) to shit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012–2013_Cypriot_financial_cr...
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/in...
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In democratic societies, in theory and largely in practice, crime is what society as a whole decided is a crime. Bitcoin is indeed permissionless, which means you can use it for things society might find nefarious: tax evasion, drug trade, uncontrolled arms trade, human trafficking, money laundering, etc etc. You might not value that, but society as a whole does.
Bitcoin is probably one of the worst asset to use for crimes, since all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain, with no privacy.
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Or realize Bitcoin just can't be used as money, by design. It couldn't even handle the volume of transactions of a small town, because the miners and developers are not interested in that, and have chosen to keep block sizes small for their own interests.
Miners and exchanges were proponents of big blocks, since that would have centralized power in their hands and reduced decentralization. Bitmain, Coinbase, many others. This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill. Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly…
It also can't scale the way it's usually promised, in part due to Bitcoin's horribly low transaction rate (you can't open LN channels fast enough, given Bitcoin's transaction rate), in part because of limits on the number of transactions in a live channel.
And in practice, it seems it's highly centralized [0].
0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
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I do think there is at least one problem that crypto currencies solve better than the status-quo: sending money internationally. It has less regulation than the official channels. Can have better privacy. Can be cheaper. Can be faster. Compared to Western Union, international wire transfers and the likes, sending money home for foreign workers (remittance), seems to be much better with Stellar, or other low-fee crypt…
> sending money internationally. The volatility of cryptocurrency prices alone makes them a pretty bad fit for any transaction whose value needs to be agreed upon within reasonable limits. For stuff like blackmail, where profit margins are high and payments are highly negotiable, the benefits of anonymity outweigh this drawback, but for most honest business, it matters to a recipient whether they get $100k or $75k. >…
The (tiny) investment I keep in crypto is a hedge when economies tank, or governments/central banks intervene. Eg, when bank withdrawals were frozen/slowed in Greece 2015, or when bank balances over 100K were seized in Cyprus 2013.
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I just bought 3 plane tickets with Bitcoin yesterday on cheapair.com. Just because it's not used by everybody, it can be useful for some people. Bitcoin has never failed me while travelling.
I don't doubt that you can pay in Crypto by exchanging BTC against USD. But prices are still denominated in USD and the reciever most likely has to hedge against potential losses due to quickly fluctuating exchange rates.
Let me guess, you're from US.
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I do think there is at least one problem that crypto currencies solve better than the status-quo: sending money internationally. It has less regulation than the official channels. Can have better privacy. Can be cheaper. Can be faster. Compared to Western Union, international wire transfers and the likes, sending money home for foreign workers (remittance), seems to be much better with Stellar, or other low-fee crypt…
>I bought some crypto early on as a hedge against global politics going to shit (US, Russia or China going into proxy wars) or economics taking a dive (and governments/central banks deciding to devaluate, ...). Genuinely asking as a newbie to this kind of thing, what's the advantage of using crypto over assets more traditionally used for this purpose such as gold?
I don't own any gold because I'd be worried about securing it. While I do have some valuables in my house, most of it is easily replaceable.