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I tried to Google this and all I was able to learn is it's backed by big banks and it lets you transact without disclosing information to your competitors. Still can't quite understand if there's anything to it beyond hype and FOMO.
Good example is Contour (formerly Voltron), a DLT based system for trade finance. https://contour.network/
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all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you…
That has nothing to do with bitcoin specifically though. What you're describing is either someone using another currency or using some kind of digital payment system. It doesn't have to be cryptos.
Holding physical cash is just asking to have your life savings stolen in places that are poor enough to not have bank access.
It would be nice to read an article on blockchain projects that are actually used in the real world and have real impact on human life. Assuming such projects exist. By now, most people have a healthy skepticism of blockchain projects. All that said, kudos to the author for spending a good amount of time looking into these projects.
> and have real impact on human life Oh? Like a story about all the various cryptocurrency scams that cost so many people their life savings? Or a story about the massive overuse of energy causing brownouts for unfortunate towns that happen to be too close to a mining datacenter? Or a story about the bright-eyed college graduates sucke(re)d into working for cryptocurrency startups that then either quickly go belly-up…
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That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
They can absolutely prevent you from using it to buy milk at your local grocery store. In practice having bitcoin is no help if you can't convert it into something else. The regulation won't happen at on the blockchain. It will happen at the grocery store, car lot, or any other place you do business. That is plenty enough regulation to make it a nightmare to use in practice.
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That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
>>There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. I feel that's a geek dream far outside of reality we live in. Making it illegal to adopt or trade Crypto is possible and feasible. If your employer doesn't pay you in crypto,your landlord and bank and grocery store and public transport and health services don't take Crypto, then you're basically limited to the black market. Which tends to work well enough witho…
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That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
> That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. This is a common marketing claim which doesn't hold up if you think about it even a little. It's like saying that no entity can prevent you from saying something because you define “prevent” as whether there's a cop following you around ready to punch you if you open your mouth — almost all real-world censorship happens after…
Even then they cannot seize it, and a transaction script is already in place to send to a trusted address if no spend within a certain time.
I don't give a fuck about living lavishly. I will be living free or dead.
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Okay, now think about this a bit further. Bitcoin is banned in your country and it's extremely risky to make a network connection to either the Bitcoin network, the client applications (better hope you disabled automatic updates and telemetry…), or industry sites. How are you paying for that sat-phone? That's expensive, so you need real money and amounts of it which are beyond, say, the average North Korean. If you h…
I was just responding to the specific question I quoted. More broadly I agree with you that it's a risky idea to immortalize your criminal activity on a public, immutable ledger.
Tell me the last 5 lightning transactions I made.
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That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
Enforcing it is trivial for a sovereign nation that issues it's own currency and collects taxes in that currency. Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto. If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.
You give evil too much credit.
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That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it. Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
Unless you already had some BTC or onramp set up somewhere outside the country, they can make it hard to onramp(buying BTC ). You could also buy direct from someone but that is impractical. And then you have off-ramp to deal with once you need the cash
I do not need to buy cash since I buy what I can with lightning, which is in no way impractical for me.
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If both sides are just repeating the same points, then there's no diff, and if there's no diff then it's off topic for this site. Diffs are what's interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Then ban positive promotion of crypto, as a whole. You can't, because you want a site that values free speech. But any site that values free speech is going to have to repeatedly answer the same basic questions on Crypto and Communism. It's going to have to repeatedly say "No, we're not trying to censor you because of chosen group X that claims to be innate , we're banning you because of actual crimes you have commit…
I really cant spot a reason to treat “crypto” differently
The similarity being that there is just other aspects of these projects and technology to focus on, that can be interesting