Not a rhetorical question, despite the flippant phrasing. I'd absolutely love to see crypto succeed, but it doesn't look like it's gonna be useful for white and grey market transactions any time soon. For those not familiar, the white market is the documented, above-ground economy, the grey market is the informal/unlicensed economy, and the black market consists of goods and services that are outright criminalized.
Using crypto for white market transactions would arguably defeat the purpose, but on the grey market cash continues to be king, even though this is exactly where you'd expect crypto to be useful. Gold and silver intuitively seem like a good option for grey market transactions, but they're way too traceable, and while the grey market is usually left alone, when the piggies do get sicced on a given grey market you're up shit creek.
It's also good for driving up the price of graphics cards.
If you can't hold it, you don't own it.
Stack.
Most likely not because governments can kill it at any time by either:
A) adopting it. Thus defeating the purpose and making it gay.
B) outlawing it. Just because they can't physically stop it, doesn't mean it's not going to kill it. Cocaine is not a currency because it is illegal. It is a wonderful investment because it satisfies all the criteria for valuable things. But a brick of cocaine is a poor choice because criminals will kill you for it and you can't exactly go to the police about it. Bitcoin will end up the same way.
All of the theoretical reasons for Bitcoin that enthusiasts like to state are still all true, but the government gets a vote in the matter too. That seems to have been forgotten.
A brick of cocaine is a physical object that can be taken by force, whereas crypto owners can be anonymous. It would be all but impossible for a black market bank to provide proof that they have real bricks of cocaine without giving incriminating evidence to police and giving other criminals plenty to go on in order to track them down. Whereas ownership of crypto can be proven without giving away who you actually are, and very few criminals have the skills to de-anonymize crypto owners.
Sure, plenty of crypto merchants get busted by doing something incredibly stupid, but it's almost always feds who unmask them. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a criminal could simply track you down using the same methods and force you at gunpoint to transfer your crypto to the robber's crypto wallet, but to my knowledge that's yet to happen.
If the government banned it that would arguably make it more useful, since if it can be used to buy drugs, it can be used to buy grey market products too. Which would then make crypto valuable enough in real terms to use in under-the-table IRL transactions. But that all hinges on there being a sufficiently large consumer base that knows how to navigate the darkweb, and on darkweb sites being able to keep out scammers and glowies. Ultimately you have to find a darkweb product somewhere IRL, and that's the Achilles Heel that glowies can use. But banning it would at least stop the speculating, and the speculation is what makes it so damn unstable.
Until people's first instinct when they have a bunch of valuable crypto isn't to convert it all to USD and disappear into the night, it will continue to be gambling. Need to get over that major hurdle first.
It's too complicated for grandma and grandpa to use easily and securely, so no. It's a pyramid scheme for nerds.
I recently heard about a friend of a friend who decided to retire from IT and trade crypto instead. He had six figures worth of crypto stolen (don't know the details of how) and is despondent.
90% of crypto follows the activity of bitcoin. That alone.. is concerning. I can tell how a dozen crypto is doing based on what bitcoin is doing.
Crypto was fun when its just individuals.. but large funds and even government is involved in buying and selling.
I'm Gen X, not a boomer, and have been working in tech for 30 years from software development to IT strategist. Of course crypto is a scam, or least it's a scam the way most people want to see it, as an investment.
Why is crypto valuable?
Because other people want to buy it.
Why do other people want to buy it?
Because it's valuable.
That's a pyramid scheme, and the value depends entirely on the greater fool.
I'm sure you'll try to claim the same of gold, but that's just false equivalence. Metals are physical and limited by reality, crypto can be forked infinitely. Metals have industrial value, crypto has no value other than trading for other currencies. At best, crypto is just another currency. And a bad one at that. Because for crypto to have the feature that everyone loves about it - increasing in value - that means it is by definition deflationary, and will never be useful as a currency for purchasing.
To be generous, the best case description of crypto is that it's a cryptographic ledger system for currency swaps.
The value proposition of crypto is the ability to do a permissionless digital transaction. This was made clear to me in 2021-2 with the trucker protests in Canada. Their bank accounts were locked down, but they could still receive crypto.
They could still receive crypto, but for what purpose? The Canuckistanian dictator banned the banks and crypto exchanges from interacting with certain wallets. So while private transactions might still work, those crypto wallets were cut off from the system, in which case you might as well be dealing in bullion. Without the ability to convert crypto to CAD or make trades through the exchanges, it lost most of the benefits of crypto.
That's true. It's why I personally advocate for silver and Monero. Silver because it's good for daily transactions, Monero because a wallet can't be blacklisted.
I have heard good things about Monero from a privacy perspective. I'm still highly negative on crypto, but that one at least sounds like it's more secure than others.
Wallets are not identified in a Bitcoin transaction. What they tried to freeze were Bitcoin addresses. It is a simple matter to just move Bitcoin from a flagged so called frozen address to another and that was done. They looked on in horror as that Bitcoin simply disappeared from those addresses.
But you're not wrong about its usability being awful for day-to-day purchases. Though I will say that most disallow a centralized entity from printing however much they feel like for "stimulus" and fucking everyone.
But everyone treating it like a security has effectively already given up on it as a currency. No one stashes USD under their mattress waiting for it to increase in value. Deflation encourages hoarding which decreases utility as a currency. Plus transactions getting more and more difficult as time goes on.
It's called a "currency" but really it's a stock like as in the stock market.
You could trade a stock directly to somebody, pay 1 share of nVidia for 1 cattle, but primarily you add one step of selling it for cash and trading with cash. Same thing with bitcoin. The 10 transactions per second harkens back to when the stock market had a trading floor and people shouting orders.
OP saying it's a pyramid scheme is like calling the stock market a pyramid scheme. In a sense, but stocks are also a way to preserve wealth since it tracks inflation (when a currency devalues the amount you can get for selling your stock increases).
Only with bitcoin you don't have to bet on the performance of a company. You're betting on the continuation of a 'bitcoin economy'. If there's a disruption of a global economy, networks, or trust in bitcoin you could lose your investment, but probably those things are less likely than the CEO being arrested for a crime and tanking a stock.
Exactly. The USD is also worthless. The difference is that crypto doesn't have a trillion dollar per year military enforcing it's usage.
another difference is that i don't have to waste gigawatts of energy handing anyone a paper bill.
The funny part is you just valued the military in worthless dollars :)
It's a hard habit to shake.
That is how they're valued though. The government taxes and spends in USD. I wonder if the IRS accepts tax payment in crypto... LOL
There's a possibility that a cryptocurrency will come along which fixes those problems, preventing anyone from being able to hoard it or mine it with brute force processing power, and preventing it from being used for speculation. But that's probably just wishful thinking.
30 YEARS !!!
So you are a beginner, in the early learning stage of the area of your expertise. That explains alot
Crypto has a number of valuable features for instance you can send a payment to the other side of the world and have it processed in seconds.
And if you ever are in a country that you want to get your gold out of, there is a good chance it will be confiscated and stolen at the border, meanwhile you can just walk out and access your crypto anywhere.
Bitcoin has been forked a number of times but each fork creates something different and the forks tend to fade away and become irrelevant until they are abandoned like Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic.
Crypto is a much better currency because you do not have to go thru a controlled third party like a bank to ok checks. You can send it directly peer to peer like cash, but much better because you do not have to meet someone in a dark alley physically to do that.
I use my crypto backed debit card just about every day to buy groceries and other things.
It is one of a number available and they claim to be able to be used anywhere Visa or Mastercard is used in over 66 million locations globally. I have never run across a situation to dispute this.
In the case of bitcoin there is a hard fixed limit to the amount that will be created. So it is neither inflationary nor deflationary. The big increase in price is when you compare it to the US Dollar, This fluctuation is just a characteristic of a new currency that is being used by a larger and larger percentage of the population as it approaches 100 percent then the price of bitcoin will stabilize at The money supply and debt of the US Dollar divided by the number of Bitcoins.
What I find funny is that the crypto currency application is just a tiny portion of the revolution that is happening, whole new computer languages like Solidity, Simplicity, Vyper, Motoko and others have been created to facilitate things like Smart Contracts and DEFI Decentralized Finance). All this is happening and there are people oblivious to it walking around saying that Crypto is Fake, A Scam.
LMAO, you don't have a crypto credit card. You have a credit card that exchanges crypto for USD in the background.
And imagine thinking that crypto doesn't rely on a controlled third party when the whole thing is dependent on third parties running servers to process transactions.
You can have your crypto, I'll have my bullion in the safe downstairs. I guess we'll see who was right. 🤷
LMAO - I said Crypto Backed DEBIT Card
You should change your name to DyslexiaFett
And yes, you finally got something right, Crypto is exchanged for USD in the background.
I also have a Gold Backed Debit Card. That is the only way I have been able to use my gold to buy things. I have not been able to find any merchants to accept my gold directly even the ones who accept crypto directly.
I Alternate using them depending on whether Bitcoin or Gold is on a better uptrend in value.
If not I also have a regular USD backed Debit Card. The problem with that is I regularly have to keep increasing the amount I have on it to cover the cost of a full bag of groceries, something I never have to do with the other cards.
When you do a direct crypto transaction with a merchant it can be peer to peer without a controlled third party.
When you do a crypto backed DEBIT card transaction with a merchant who wants USD Cash then there are two transactions the first is a direct crypto transaction with the company that services the card, then they do a USD transaction with the merchant using of course, a third party controlled bank.
Don't ever become a mechanic.
They have a number of different tools for different things and use what is appropriate.
Its not "I have this hammer" and I am going to use it to do everything.
Crypto is the next fiat scam.
It would be already if more people were using it for their normal daily transactions.
I'm getting this dreadful feeling now that by the time most people wise up and do mass adopt crypto, the governments will raise income taxes to stupid levels like 50%+ to scare people back into fiat by threat of tax evasion punishments, and probably a lot of people will go along with it and revert
Blockchain itself is kind of cool for immutable record keeping applications.
And I think there's some potential in the decentralization aspects.
But I still don't it becoming a day-to-day currency without some huge improvements in usability. At which point it will be "regulated" out of existence.
I put a little toward crypto. Not much but I invest a little with the “you never know” mindset
Monero gave me freedom from massacard's plantation. I am never going back.
Hopefully, but that's the optimist in me. DeFi could be great for businesses and assett transfer, but my favorite is monero. Monero would be awesome for grey market shopping.
No. It is a financial institution that attempts to maximize friction.
crypto is gay controlled nonsense one pair of pliers away from being a noose around all our necks.
bitcoin is not.
What is bitcoin if not a type of "crypto currency"?