111–120 of 230 posts
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People have been saying "crypto is useless" for wayyy longer than the time since NFTs were first popularized (which didn't become a mainstream term until 2020/2021).
sure, but there are many other things in that list i made, right?
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When most people say "crypto is useless", that is rarely about BTC being used as a currency, and is more about everything else in crypto (NFTs, web3, smart contracts, decentralized apps, ICOs, etc). The idea of a currency which has value because people give it value makes sense, regardless of how speculative it is.
It's not the feature set people react to, it's the speculative bubble and the hordes of grifters.
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The phrase "ponzi scheme" has been thrown around liberally in regards to cryptocurrency, especially on this forum, but I've never heard a convincing argument that it actually fits the definition.
Lyn Alden addresses this characterisation: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-ponzi-scheme/ "Bitcoin doesn’t really meet this broader definition of a Ponzi scheme any more than the gold market, the global fiat banking system, or less liquid markets like fine art, fine wine, collectable cars, or beachfront property. In other words, if your definition of something is so broad that it includes every non-cashflow store of…
Fiat has value because it's legally recognized by governments that issue it: it extinguishes tax and debt obligations in those jurisdictions. This makes it markedly different to any other of the commodity items listed: my government will only ever tax me fiat currency, which is sufficient to extinguish those taxes and fulfill debts. I can't be ordered to pay them in gold, or bitcoin.
For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.
The main crypto exchanges blocked the accounts of sanctioned individuals, does that hamper their ability to use their crypto assets constructively?
For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.
For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.
This seems rather naïve. If you can't leave a country because your government requires you to fight a war rather than leave, how do you get yourself, or any physical property, out? If you're in jail, justified or not, how does crypto help you move your property? Or the government you live under simply doesn't allow exiting? What if all international airports refuse to allow flights originating in your country to land, and trains and roads and ships are far beyond capacity? Even your intangible crypto wealth can't be moved across borders, if you yourself aren't able to cross a border.
If I am a high net work person with a hundred-million property in the UK, I'm going to find a way to let my friend use it, even if the british legal system refuses to let me receive money for it. In some future date, what goes around comes around, and he lets me use his yacht.
If you rip too many people off, then one of the discount to values is "services rendered" and you can imagine what these services might be.
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If your only goal is to send digital value across the planet why would anyone use Ethereum or Bitcoin? There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.
What services are the best for transferring large sums of money cheaply, safely, and quickly? In my experience, you can only choose one. I would prefer to chose two: cheaply and safely. I am not as worried about time. Recommendations?
Not saying it is better than the other options presented (and definitely not recommending it as an investment) but BCH does work quite well for transacting.
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None of these factors, other than inflation, point to instability. With respect to inflation, that’s being directly addressed. Compared to every other currency, historical and extant, the major trading currencies of the day are highly stable across multiples of even the longest transaction time frames. They aren’t good long-term stores of value because that’s not what they’re built for.
> With respect to inflation, that’s being directly addressed. Please explain. I don’t understand how that’s true. In last night’s SOTU President Biden said inflation was mostly due to car prices or something equally silly. I don’t see any nation seriously addressing inflation which is officially 7.5% but I believe to be much higher for most.
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Why does settling in dollars make any difference? Like he said, if the SWIFT secure messaging service goes down, someone at a bank in Japan has the phone number of someone at a bank in New York and can "wire" money with a phone call instead of sending a SWIFT message. Wires will be orders of magnitude slower, but money is not frozen. And the real effect is that someone in Mumbai receiving a phone call from a Russian…
Because every single transaction in USD must result in a credit and debit to an account at the US Federal Reserve (except for transactions entirely in paper money -- this is the reason drug dealers like paper money.) For a transaction denominated Yuan(Renminbi) that transaction must eventually result in a debit and credit entry at the People's Bank of China (the central bank of China). In the latter case no US entity…