> Bitcoin has died 450 times. If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $96,489,717 today.
I think this would be more interesting if the same sequence of $100 infusions were also applied to various popular stocks, comparing those hypothetical returns. If we're going to have survivorship bias, we might as well at least compare multiple survivors.
Yes. It allows criminals to move significant amounts of money without much effort, intervention or tracking. The current ransomware issue is a direct consequence of the attackers being able to utilize a relatively safe and cheap payment channel. Without it, the endeavor makes no economic sense.
Remote uses Stripe's Tempo chain [1] to offer USDC payments to remote workers. Revolut seems to use Stablecoins also in their Fintech products [2], though I'm not sure exactly where or how. Western Union launched [3] their own stablecoin.
One I am familiar with is Polymarket, a big prediction market, who uses USDC on Polygon [4] to denominate their bets and to post bids and asks.
These are all real uses, but also they are purely a regulatory arbitrage. Firms that are not allowed to deal with dollars instead deal Pokémon cards worth a dollar.
I'm not dissing it, fine, it's a real business, and maybe honest too. And indeed crypto is easier to send internationally, though overall presents more friction to the average user with access to high quality banking as an alternative.
I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. It's all fine if they are all honest, prudent, and don't take excess risks, and no one pulls their money. If either of those goes away, it's going to be a disaster.
> Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks.
They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA. That's why interest in stablecoins is growing. The Genius Act mandates 1:1 backing of coins to treasuries or cash so the stablecoin custodians make money from treasuries and enjoy a risk free yield.
> I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance. I've come to the conclusion that HN may have liked finance when it was populated by more startup folks but now that it's another tech forum, the average reader here doesn't really care for finance.
Prediction Markets are a big cryptocurrency usecase. There's also novel financial instruments like perpetual futures (patio11 is gonna write a Bits about Money post about them if you're curious.) From the sovereign currency perspective of Bitcoin, to the privacy of ZCash and Monero, to the subdivisibility of assets on programmable chains like ETH, the novelty is in the finance. If you're not into fintech then yeah you'll find the usecases all boring.
If you're curious about the tech there is a lot of interesting stuff around iterated consensus though.
> > I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
> I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance.
As it happens I do like finance. And all the use cases I know of are basically regulatory arbitrage.
There's nothing about prediction markets that makes them benefit from crypto. It's betting. Sports betting exists without crypto just fine. But the intersection of betting, real world events and US dollars is murky waters. So instead they work on crypto.
Monero is perhaps the one novel case, of untraceable payments. But is that the best crypto can do?
I agree the mechanisms are novel, it's just a shame to me that they didnt create a novel use case too. But I'd love to hear more tangible cases too.
Existing rails are slow and expensive due to anti money laundering laws and taxes. Enterprise customers want to move funds without those pesky laws and paying taxes.
Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.
> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]
And $9T in annual payment volume[2].
As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.
I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.
I had a look at the second source. It goes to crypto investor A16Z's report, where they are looking at all crypto trading volumes. $46 trillion transaction volume but once they remove bots $9 trillion per year.
Note that forbes seriously misquotes. A16Z is counting transactions, not payments.
They compare it to visa which seems like a rubbish comparison. People use visa to buy things. Crypto trades are much more like forex, and A16Z seems to be measuring crypto for crypto purchases.
Global forex volume is about $9 trillion per day. But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
Crypto is largely traded to trade crypto.
As for payments, supposing we take $136 billion cumulative lifetime payments as accurate. Mckinsey reports that global annual payments are $2 quadrillion dollars per year.
The crypto industry LOVES to throw big numbers around and tell tales of use cases just around the corner but the majority of actual use cases still seem to be skirting regulations.
>But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
No, most of this volume (>99%) is institutional speculation. If people actually do something with this money you would see payments of over 9T a day, which is not happening.
Then you're doing it wrong? Solana has low fees. Lighting on Bitcoin has low fees. L2s on Ethereum have low fees. Curious when you did these transactions on what chain?
Goldman did a gold <---> painting swap via ETH like 12 years ago. The ship has sailed. It's okay, you don't have to like the calculator code as a DLL to use the calculator
It is by far the easiest way to pay people who are in another country. Trying to use a bank account for that always seems to get thwarted by a bunch of "fraud alert" false alarms.
So does literally everything other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a first draft that decided to freeze development in beta. There are much better technologies out there.
What alternatives actually scale to the level that they could seriously replace fiat currency?
I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info.
Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale
and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
Absolutely agree, but most know nothing other than the almighty BTC.
I want 3 things from crypto:
* throughput that _could_ scale to something like visa. 50k/second christmas.
* privacy by default for everyone - "public ledger" for a currency replacement is INSANE
* reasonable transaction completion time ( < 1 minute)
A good currency is stable. Bitcoin has gone up over 5x in the last 5 years. This is not a good currency, though it’s certainly been a good speculative bet.
What is BTC inflation? How much BTC was printed by government in recent years? And of course - how much it grew in value?
In other words:
* deflationary nature
* independence of any government
* speculation
Governments will keep printing money. Stock market is only good in US (check Japan and China). Bitcoin is good alternative investment in places where options primarily limited to property.
Crypto values are arbitrary decree of crypto holders
We're just creating techno religious sects preaching from their pulpit
The only thing unique about anyone is their biology. Same old gibberish coming out their mouth, keyboards; not their values! My values! My line go up! Not their line!
Ooh yeah "fiat money" you mean. An arbitrary decree to constrain the definition. Infinitely endless arbitrary rhetoric. Incompleteness theory of primate language.
"For a speculative asset-one which produces no income and relies solely on hopes for future capital gains-the absence of a fresh bullish narrative to justify further price rises is a challenge."
No income, but significant expenses. Miners have to sell Bitcoin to pay their electricity bills. Miners also increase absolute supply, causing downward price pressure.
I think crypto is finally maturing. Consumers directly using it is just not going to happen. But institutions using it as a settlement layer seems to have traction. I'm curious to see what Stripe does with Tempo.
For all the crap that is in the crypto ecosystem I do think a lot of people underestimate its potential. Defi can replace entire institutions like banking. Combine it with regulated local stablecoins and governments dont seem too unhappy with it either.
economic value is distinct from social value. the former can be used to describe small groups (e.g. criminals who benefit from a crime), while the latter can be used to describe the negative sum relationship between criminals and their victims.
so, "positive [economic] value [for some]" and "negative [social] value on net" are not mutually exclusive.
That's interesting, I'd say that it's no business of my government who I decide to transact with. If I'm buying or selling something illegal, charge me with a crime.
I think the bigger problem is not people selling naughty things. It's the absolutely reckless approach governments (and one government in particular) have taken when we give them the lever and dials that control the financial system. The modern fiat financial system is designed to transfer wealth from the least powerful to the most powerful, nothing more and nothing less.
The sane answer to monopolists abusing the system is not "we should just throw out all regulations and standards". It's "we should insist the government enforce the antitrust laws already on the books against these behemoths, rather than giving them deference".
One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime. The other does not, and currently is headed in the opposite direction. If things ever get fixed it will be my great great grandchildren that see the results.
I don’t know if crypto is the solution, but watching even supposedly technologically literate places like HN largely cheer for cashless societies where every transaction is monitored and gatekept, while limits continue to be dialed downwards is all anyone needs to see to realize working within the system is a plan for failure.
Transacting money is not a crime, it’s simply a lazy way to fight it. It enables enforcement of trivial policies and more or less removes a key pillar of human freedom.
> One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime.
One of those things actually works, period.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not going to lead to a better system overall. It may fix a few of the specific problems with the current system, but it introduces enough other problems that it becomes, at best, a wash.
And in practice, it's abundantly clear that cryptocurrency does not work. People don't want it. The only reason it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity now is because Trump, under the influence of various cryptocurrency scammers (note: this is not me saying "all cryptocurrency is a scam"; this is me saying "the specific people influencing Trump on this are scammers"), has been promoting it in order to feed their scams.
Some of us can recognize that the fascist takeover of our specific government doesn't change the fundamental truths about how governments function.
Yes, antitrust enforcement in the US is a joke right now. It was actually ramping up to be pretty darn good under Biden. Now it's not, and we have several other problems to solve before we're going to be able to get to it.
None of that makes cryptocurrency a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency with proper antitrust controls. Frankly, it's not even a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency without proper antitrust controls.
Without incriminating myself too much, uh, let's just say I've seen considerable volumes of illegal business conducted with physical fiat cash, to a degree that likely would have been more difficult with crypto
Crypto has uniquely allowed the huge uptick in ransomware.
Before they had to figure out some way to get paid using the banking system without getting caught. These days maybe they would be asking for $50 million in iTunes gift cards, I don’t know. But it was a hurdle.
Once Cryptocurrencies started to get well known ransomware embraced it incredibly strongly. A far far more anonymous payment method that any random company or person could pay through?
That is such a fallacious argument that crypto bros love to trot out. If you look at the ratio of crime to total transaction, then crime makes up a tiny portion of what is happening in real money. Meanwhile, the situation in crypto is the other way around: Actually useful transactions are almost negligible, while >99% of what is happening is speculation, gambling, and crime. If you could shut down the entire crypto ecosystem, literally nothing of value would be lost.
I think you underestimate how much speculation, gambling and crime happens in the fiat ecosystem. The forex, just to name one thing, is $7.5T exchanged a day.
In comparison, it’s estimated that Americans spend about $10T per year. I don’t have the numbers worldwide but America is a big piece of the cake.
So, speculation is vastly higher than regular spending, even for “regular money”.
Do you really not understand that the forex market has several real use cases and serves an actual purpose. Unlike crypto, it doesn't primarily or solely exist to facility crime and speculation. If you somehow shut down the forex trade, the global economy would experience severe disruptions. If you shut down crypto, nobody in the real economy would even notice.
crypto is a kind of live estimate of the frustration with government restrictions on using one’s own property. that in itself seems to have some social value.
in the US, banks will question you if you try to withdraw your own cash from your own bank account past a certain limit set decades ago and never adjusted while the dollar continues to lose value.
https://archive.ph/PmStK
https://bitcoindeaths.com/
From the name I expected it to be a list of dead companies and investor losses, kind of like https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
> Bitcoin has died 450 times. If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $96,489,717 today.
I think this would be more interesting if the same sequence of $100 infusions were also applied to various popular stocks, comparing those hypothetical returns. If we're going to have survivorship bias, we might as well at least compare multiple survivors.
> https://bitcoindeaths.com/
Great store of value you have there.
This article is written at this stage of every cycle. It’s getting old.
In a few weeks it will pump again and people will write that crypto is the future.
Sinking in value. Expanding nearly exponentially in breadth and depth of financial system integration.
Sinking in legal value. Expanding nearly exponentially in breadth and depth of illegal financial system abuse and law avoidance.
Does it do anything useful yet?
Yes. It allows criminals to move significant amounts of money without much effort, intervention or tracking. The current ransomware issue is a direct consequence of the attackers being able to utilize a relatively safe and cheap payment channel. Without it, the endeavor makes no economic sense.
Remote uses Stripe's Tempo chain [1] to offer USDC payments to remote workers. Revolut seems to use Stablecoins also in their Fintech products [2], though I'm not sure exactly where or how. Western Union launched [3] their own stablecoin.
One I am familiar with is Polymarket, a big prediction market, who uses USDC on Polygon [4] to denominate their bets and to post bids and asks.
[1]: https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/remote-and-stripe...
[2]: https://www.bastion.com/blog/the-state-of-stablecoins-March-...
[3]: https://ir.westernunion.com/news/archived-press-releases/pre...
[4]: https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/get-started/how...
These are all real uses, but also they are purely a regulatory arbitrage. Firms that are not allowed to deal with dollars instead deal Pokémon cards worth a dollar.
I'm not dissing it, fine, it's a real business, and maybe honest too. And indeed crypto is easier to send internationally, though overall presents more friction to the average user with access to high quality banking as an alternative.
I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. It's all fine if they are all honest, prudent, and don't take excess risks, and no one pulls their money. If either of those goes away, it's going to be a disaster.
> Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks.
They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA. That's why interest in stablecoins is growing. The Genius Act mandates 1:1 backing of coins to treasuries or cash so the stablecoin custodians make money from treasuries and enjoy a risk free yield.
> I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance. I've come to the conclusion that HN may have liked finance when it was populated by more startup folks but now that it's another tech forum, the average reader here doesn't really care for finance.
Prediction Markets are a big cryptocurrency usecase. There's also novel financial instruments like perpetual futures (patio11 is gonna write a Bits about Money post about them if you're curious.) From the sovereign currency perspective of Bitcoin, to the privacy of ZCash and Monero, to the subdivisibility of assets on programmable chains like ETH, the novelty is in the finance. If you're not into fintech then yeah you'll find the usecases all boring.
If you're curious about the tech there is a lot of interesting stuff around iterated consensus though.
> > I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
> I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance.
As it happens I do like finance. And all the use cases I know of are basically regulatory arbitrage.
There's nothing about prediction markets that makes them benefit from crypto. It's betting. Sports betting exists without crypto just fine. But the intersection of betting, real world events and US dollars is murky waters. So instead they work on crypto.
Monero is perhaps the one novel case, of untraceable payments. But is that the best crypto can do?
I agree the mechanisms are novel, it's just a shame to me that they didnt create a novel use case too. But I'd love to hear more tangible cases too.
> They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA.
Great, more shadow banking entities dealing in a money-like substance without any FDIC protection—because that turned out so well the last time.
Real answer: yes. Enterprise customers need to move funds between countries and using existing rails is slow and very expensive (fx, fees, etc).
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-colle...
Existing rails are slow and expensive due to anti money laundering laws and taxes. Enterprise customers want to move funds without those pesky laws and paying taxes.
Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.
> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]
And $9T in annual payment volume[2].
As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.
I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.
[1] https://beincrypto.com/stablecoin-payments-surge-real-world-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2025/11/16/stablecoin...
I had a look at the second source. It goes to crypto investor A16Z's report, where they are looking at all crypto trading volumes. $46 trillion transaction volume but once they remove bots $9 trillion per year.
Note that forbes seriously misquotes. A16Z is counting transactions, not payments.
They compare it to visa which seems like a rubbish comparison. People use visa to buy things. Crypto trades are much more like forex, and A16Z seems to be measuring crypto for crypto purchases.
Global forex volume is about $9 trillion per day. But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
Crypto is largely traded to trade crypto.
As for payments, supposing we take $136 billion cumulative lifetime payments as accurate. Mckinsey reports that global annual payments are $2 quadrillion dollars per year.
The crypto industry LOVES to throw big numbers around and tell tales of use cases just around the corner but the majority of actual use cases still seem to be skirting regulations.
So is $6B monthly B2B volume fake news too?
>But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
No, most of this volume (>99%) is institutional speculation. If people actually do something with this money you would see payments of over 9T a day, which is not happening.
I have never had crypto transactions which weren't eaten up by both gas fees and exchange fees.
Then you're doing it wrong? Solana has low fees. Lighting on Bitcoin has low fees. L2s on Ethereum have low fees. Curious when you did these transactions on what chain?
Goldman did a gold <---> painting swap via ETH like 12 years ago. The ship has sailed. It's okay, you don't have to like the calculator code as a DLL to use the calculator
Square just rolled out lightning l2 payments so that seems useful
I buy stuff with it all the time.
It is by far the easiest way to pay people who are in another country. Trying to use a bank account for that always seems to get thwarted by a bunch of "fraud alert" false alarms.
The hardest part of paying people who are in another country is taxes, IMO. Which I don't think crypto fixes.
If you don't intent to comply, it solves the problem of taxes.
Is it? I pay people in other countries with normal credit cards all the time.
You're assuming they have a visa/mastercard merchant account. Have you ever seen what it takes to get one? Definitely not easy. Or cheap (fees).
True but that also protects me if something goes wrong.
So what "it does" might be "points out how terrible banking regulations have become."
Makes sense, as fraud is the default for crypto transactions.
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Does fiat? Is a means of exchange, it doesn't have to produce value, there's T-bills for that
Fiat does better than 7 transactions per second.
So does literally everything other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a first draft that decided to freeze development in beta. There are much better technologies out there.
What alternatives actually scale to the level that they could seriously replace fiat currency?
I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info.
Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
Absolutely agree, but most know nothing other than the almighty BTC.
I want 3 things from crypto:
So what makes a bitcoin worth $100k if it’s such a shit currency?
Speculation.
A good currency is stable. Bitcoin has gone up over 5x in the last 5 years. This is not a good currency, though it’s certainly been a good speculative bet.
> So what makes a bitcoin worth $100k if it’s such a shit currency?
What makes mint condition Babe Ruth baseball cards worth what they're listed at?
* https://www.sportscardspro.com/search-products?q=babe+ruth&t...
Something is "worth" whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
What is BTC inflation? How much BTC was printed by government in recent years? And of course - how much it grew in value?
In other words: * deflationary nature * independence of any government * speculation
Governments will keep printing money. Stock market is only good in US (check Japan and China). Bitcoin is good alternative investment in places where options primarily limited to property.
Used by wealthy Chinese to get more than $50k into the country at a time, bypassing Chinese law.
You think each unit being $100k and fluctuating wildly is the mark of a GOOD currency?
Drug cartels, sanctioned Russian oligarchs, international arms dealers.
Fiat: an arbitrary order or decree
Crypto values are arbitrary decree of crypto holders
We're just creating techno religious sects preaching from their pulpit
The only thing unique about anyone is their biology. Same old gibberish coming out their mouth, keyboards; not their values! My values! My line go up! Not their line!
Ooh yeah "fiat money" you mean. An arbitrary decree to constrain the definition. Infinitely endless arbitrary rhetoric. Incompleteness theory of primate language.
T-bills produce yield.
"For a speculative asset-one which produces no income and relies solely on hopes for future capital gains-the absence of a fresh bullish narrative to justify further price rises is a challenge."
No income. No worries. Number go up
No income, but significant expenses. Miners have to sell Bitcoin to pay their electricity bills. Miners also increase absolute supply, causing downward price pressure.
Double whammy, there.
crypto got nothing it wanted. People wanted it to be a currency
I think crypto is finally maturing. Consumers directly using it is just not going to happen. But institutions using it as a settlement layer seems to have traction. I'm curious to see what Stripe does with Tempo.
For all the crap that is in the crypto ecosystem I do think a lot of people underestimate its potential. Defi can replace entire institutions like banking. Combine it with regulated local stablecoins and governments dont seem too unhappy with it either.
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>It’s sole value proposition is a means to facilitate criminal activity
I used to feel this way until visa/master pulled that project-2025-mandated stunt on nsfw games.
Forgot about that. Had to search.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/03/mastercard-denies-pressuri...
To be honest, that probably means the value isn’t zero.
True, it's a negative value.
economic value is distinct from social value. the former can be used to describe small groups (e.g. criminals who benefit from a crime), while the latter can be used to describe the negative sum relationship between criminals and their victims.
so, "positive [economic] value [for some]" and "negative [social] value on net" are not mutually exclusive.
That's interesting, I'd say that it's no business of my government who I decide to transact with. If I'm buying or selling something illegal, charge me with a crime.
I think the bigger problem is not people selling naughty things. It's the absolutely reckless approach governments (and one government in particular) have taken when we give them the lever and dials that control the financial system. The modern fiat financial system is designed to transfer wealth from the least powerful to the most powerful, nothing more and nothing less.
And crypto will solve this how? It’s still a means to transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
Meanwhile you have the credit card processors, and traditional banks.
These will often refuse or vastly over charge perfectly legal business that they have a "moral" objection to. This is by design.
Dammed if you do, and dammed if you dont.
The sane answer to monopolists abusing the system is not "we should just throw out all regulations and standards". It's "we should insist the government enforce the antitrust laws already on the books against these behemoths, rather than giving them deference".
One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime. The other does not, and currently is headed in the opposite direction. If things ever get fixed it will be my great great grandchildren that see the results.
I don’t know if crypto is the solution, but watching even supposedly technologically literate places like HN largely cheer for cashless societies where every transaction is monitored and gatekept, while limits continue to be dialed downwards is all anyone needs to see to realize working within the system is a plan for failure.
Transacting money is not a crime, it’s simply a lazy way to fight it. It enables enforcement of trivial policies and more or less removes a key pillar of human freedom.
> One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime.
One of those things actually works, period.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not going to lead to a better system overall. It may fix a few of the specific problems with the current system, but it introduces enough other problems that it becomes, at best, a wash.
And in practice, it's abundantly clear that cryptocurrency does not work. People don't want it. The only reason it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity now is because Trump, under the influence of various cryptocurrency scammers (note: this is not me saying "all cryptocurrency is a scam"; this is me saying "the specific people influencing Trump on this are scammers"), has been promoting it in order to feed their scams.
O yeah because that’s been working so well lol. Antitrust enforcement is a joke.
Some of us can recognize that the fascist takeover of our specific government doesn't change the fundamental truths about how governments function.
Yes, antitrust enforcement in the US is a joke right now. It was actually ramping up to be pretty darn good under Biden. Now it's not, and we have several other problems to solve before we're going to be able to get to it.
None of that makes cryptocurrency a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency with proper antitrust controls. Frankly, it's not even a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency without proper antitrust controls.
Most crime is conducted in fiat money.
Doesn't change the fact stated by GP tho.
Fiat money, unlike crypto, have lots of non-criminal uses.
Crypto has all the same use cases it's just that fiat is better at everything so long as the thing is blessed by the government
Given a government reflecting the will of the people, anything you need crypto for is de facto antisocial behavior
i think it's nice to have a plan B for when the governments idea of criminal doesn't line up with my own so much
> i think it's nice to have a plan B for when the governments idea of criminal doesn't line up with my own
You don’t think they’ll declare crypto illegal? Or owning it? Or using it?
Without incriminating myself too much, uh, let's just say I've seen considerable volumes of illegal business conducted with physical fiat cash, to a degree that likely would have been more difficult with crypto
> i think it's nice to have a plan B for when the governments idea of criminal doesn't line up with my own so much
... like now?
…or ‘08 capital controls and being prevented from withdrawing your own funds from your own bank account as happened in Greece back then.
So? Are you suggesting banning all money?
Crypto has uniquely allowed the huge uptick in ransomware.
Before they had to figure out some way to get paid using the banking system without getting caught. These days maybe they would be asking for $50 million in iTunes gift cards, I don’t know. But it was a hurdle.
Once Cryptocurrencies started to get well known ransomware embraced it incredibly strongly. A far far more anonymous payment method that any random company or person could pay through?
Seriously. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9e72ec_52b812bb082b4fdebd...
You think that’s just a coincidence? Crypto is a huge driver for the ransomware industry.
How does your chart show it increasing with crypto? Bitcoin came out in 2009 and ethereum in 2015, and adoption was far before 2020.
Seems I forgot the other chart.
https://jdsupra-html-images.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/85dd2...
BC was very esoteric in 2010 or 2012. I imagine it would have been impossible for average businesses to actually get the crypto to pay with.
By ~2016 that was far easier for your average joe.
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Most legitimate business is conducted via fiat money.
That is such a fallacious argument that crypto bros love to trot out. If you look at the ratio of crime to total transaction, then crime makes up a tiny portion of what is happening in real money. Meanwhile, the situation in crypto is the other way around: Actually useful transactions are almost negligible, while >99% of what is happening is speculation, gambling, and crime. If you could shut down the entire crypto ecosystem, literally nothing of value would be lost.
I think you underestimate how much speculation, gambling and crime happens in the fiat ecosystem. The forex, just to name one thing, is $7.5T exchanged a day.
In comparison, it’s estimated that Americans spend about $10T per year. I don’t have the numbers worldwide but America is a big piece of the cake.
So, speculation is vastly higher than regular spending, even for “regular money”.
Do you really not understand that the forex market has several real use cases and serves an actual purpose. Unlike crypto, it doesn't primarily or solely exist to facility crime and speculation. If you somehow shut down the forex trade, the global economy would experience severe disruptions. If you shut down crypto, nobody in the real economy would even notice.
crypto is a kind of live estimate of the frustration with government restrictions on using one’s own property. that in itself seems to have some social value.
in the US, banks will question you if you try to withdraw your own cash from your own bank account past a certain limit set decades ago and never adjusted while the dollar continues to lose value.