It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.
I’m not so sure I buy that. Do nondecreasing counts of NFTs and meme coins account for the psychological source of inflation?
Can’t say for the memecoins and NFTs — but when it goes from just bitcoin to hundreds of different competitive legit coins, that does seem like inflation of money supply.
If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative. Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation. While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.
It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.
That is a perverse use of "inflation" unless a holder of BTC or ETH were somehow forced to spend some of his BTC or ETH on every new cryptocurrency -- or it happened automatically, and for the holder to prevent it from happening was risky or tedious.
> It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges. Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control ov…
>In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. In practice neither exchanges or Tether have made any attempts at refusing to allow payments to legal businesses as far as I'm aware. So in practice it does.
Whether they abuse their power is completely orthogonal to centralization. It’s also false. Just look at the amount of customer complaints in the Coinbase subreddit where they’ve blocked legitimate customer access.
Speculation is a legitimate use case. There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.
Speculation is as much valuable use case as my nails are to be chewed. Sure, it works, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
An alternative to an inflated, state controlled currency is another use case. The last few years should have made that plenty clear.
Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.
You can buy drugs and defraud rubes with USD too.
Crypto has many different useful applications. One of the main ones: limited supply (I am aware not all crypto has a cap).
Who should regulate it? Due to its nature it is inherently extremely hard to regulate.
The technology is hard to regulate, but the exchanges where the overwhelming majority of fiat-crypto trades happen are regular old businesses which can be regulated or sanctioned just like anything else. Blockchain magic wouldn't stop the feds from seizing Coinbase's assets and hauling Brian Armstrong off to prison if they wanted to.
Yes, the fiat input and output are the only points that can be controlled, but even then they can only be controlled by the local governments. And as you can see all of them are late to the party.
I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems. Yes, a lot…
I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.
The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure wh…
Ideological capture is something that any system inevitably faces once it becomes large enough. But the point is to evolve and grow, not stagnate on a fixed concept.
Personally, I think Solana does the best at balancing the original cypherpunk ethos while ultimately driving towards the future with crypto being the rails for natively programmatic global commerce.
Speculation is a legitimate use case. There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.
Speculation is as much valuable use case as my nails are to be chewed. Sure, it works, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Casinos, Financial Markets of all denominations, Horse Racing are also examples of pure play speculation. Speculation is often just a form of entertainment.