totally agree re bitcoin, and also am very sceptical of crypto as a mass-adopted currency in general
however there are plenty of networks that don’t use proof of work to validate their chains, and they aren’t bad for the environment to nearly the same degree
No bank or goverment can control it. It is the benefit of being able to send money to anyone around the world while maintaining ownership of your money as if it were cash in hand.
Banks or governments as opposed to who though? There’s a reason we usually want those publicly owned and regulated institutions to handle our transactions. Obviously, it depends what country you live in, and what currency you’re talking about. But I don’t think Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency actually solves the problem it purports to.
Ideally, no one controls it. It’s just exists as a medium for exchange.
There are both good and bad points to currency have value that can be adjusted by gov’ts; crypto currency solves one set of problems, but has it’s own, inherent issues.
And therefore no recourse if you are robbed, scammed, etc. Try going to your local, or even federal authorities and explain to them that you lost the digital equivalent of $10000 and they won’t do a thing.
That is exactly the problem. It has no real value as the entire thing is propped up by chaos. It could be worth a trillion dollars one day and then nothing the next.
i do think they hold some value for things like bank to bank, where each party is kiiiiind of untrusted and unrelated (not on a public chain - it’s just a private consensus between collaborating parties)
it also undeniably provides payment outside of standard card networks and the finance sector (people have been using crypto to buy drugs for decades now), so can be used to circumvent things like this mastercard/visa morality police garbage… i think in that, it’d be useful to have a strongish cryptocurrency somewhere at least to be able to provide uncensorable competition (the alternative to that being some global EU network that everyone accepted in the same manner)
but i think the value in blockchain in general is minimally about currency: that was just the first implementation… it’s a distributed, trustworthy log between untrusted individual entities. the benefits of that are honestly pretty niche, but i think it does solve some valuable problems… just most people should never even know that blockchain was involved
totally agree re bitcoin, and also am very sceptical of crypto as a mass-adopted currency in general
however there are plenty of networks that don’t use proof of work to validate their chains, and they aren’t bad for the environment to nearly the same degree
Why use them and not… normal fiat currency?
No bank or goverment can control it. It is the benefit of being able to send money to anyone around the world while maintaining ownership of your money as if it were cash in hand.
To an extent cryptos only value is it can be turned into currency.
Banks or governments as opposed to who though? There’s a reason we usually want those publicly owned and regulated institutions to handle our transactions. Obviously, it depends what country you live in, and what currency you’re talking about. But I don’t think Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency actually solves the problem it purports to.
Ideally, no one controls it. It’s just exists as a medium for exchange.
There are both good and bad points to currency have value that can be adjusted by gov’ts; crypto currency solves one set of problems, but has it’s own, inherent issues.
And therefore no recourse if you are robbed, scammed, etc. Try going to your local, or even federal authorities and explain to them that you lost the digital equivalent of $10000 and they won’t do a thing.
That is exactly the problem. It has no real value as the entire thing is propped up by chaos. It could be worth a trillion dollars one day and then nothing the next.
i do think they hold some value for things like bank to bank, where each party is kiiiiind of untrusted and unrelated (not on a public chain - it’s just a private consensus between collaborating parties)
it also undeniably provides payment outside of standard card networks and the finance sector (people have been using crypto to buy drugs for decades now), so can be used to circumvent things like this mastercard/visa morality police garbage… i think in that, it’d be useful to have a strongish cryptocurrency somewhere at least to be able to provide uncensorable competition (the alternative to that being some global EU network that everyone accepted in the same manner)
but i think the value in blockchain in general is minimally about currency: that was just the first implementation… it’s a distributed, trustworthy log between untrusted individual entities. the benefits of that are honestly pretty niche, but i think it does solve some valuable problems… just most people should never even know that blockchain was involved
They are still very unstable and rely on some sort of consensus. It is flat out a bad design. It would be safer to pay with stocks.
consensus is basically what all modern databases rely on… it’s not unstable; it has properties that need to be well known and accounted for
The problem is using that for something world wide with no backing by anything material.
It is unstable by nature