I wasted years of my life in crypto

Me too. Honestly I still live off crypto but after 6 years of being a blockchain dev I refuse to work in the industry anymore.

There are a lot of selling points around freedom, but in practice its just gambling and its impossible to build real products in the space. In-fact there is no demand for anything other than gambling.

Some of them are, when the country you're in is oppressive. But having something that can do that is good.

And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels.

It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.

>"I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler."

There's a lot more on the line for first-world nations, financially and functionally. Also, you'll notice I conceded that point in the last sentence in that same paragraph: "And that's one of the less intuitive methods for bypassing current election systems."

>"Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web."

I'm not actually that concerned about midterms, I'm concerned about the macro implications of the existing electoral process (and theory, but that's a separate discussion) when we have better tooling for decentralized transparency/accountability and leverage - both for an individual and the collective - than we did during its ratification. I'm concerned its ripe for abuse with a passionate actor in general (that may or may not include individuals within our current administration), and your dismissal isn't too assuring.

>"its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)"

A lot of initiatives are trying to fix deterministic identification in digital formats now, some with good intentions and others with not.

>"transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal."

This isn’t actually true; transparency always rests on some power structure that both has access to the relevant information and can punish non-disclosure. That power doesn’t have to be a single superior authority, though. You can design systems where transparency is enforced laterally - a network of entities with roughly symmetric power, each able to observe and sanction the others, so that the tension between them produces real transparency and accountability.

This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.

I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.

Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.

Lightning isn't Bitcoin. It's an L2. It helps implement actual practical payments for Bitcoin, and doesn't (afaiu) manage account balances. In other words, you cannot seriously compare it to Mastercard; you've gotta include Bitcoin itself.