>* Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.
I don't see how this is any different than the bog standard "encryption lets criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.". Should money/txns be fundamentally track-able/examinable/un-encrypted but your private data/messages not?
Surely this contention is something you also consider -- care to expand?
>* Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they don't know and a technology they can't explain
I am surprised. My initial viewpoint was why would scammers bother to fish for bitcoin when bank transfers/gift cards are a lower barrier -- but seems you are right [1], the cat and mouse chase continues...
> I don't see how this is any different than the bog standard "encryption lets criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously."
The obvious difference is that encryption has many, many actually useful and productive applications.
>encryption has many, many actually useful and productive applications
So does crypto but likewise opponents of encryption disregard the positives and focus on the negatives to align with their preformed ideas. The only way out of this trap is to have an open mind and internalize the fact that all technologies can be used for good and evil and thus are relatively neutral overall. Humanity must take the good and bad and see where the path goes in order to advance as a species.
I don't have much invested in crypto, and I find PoW hideous. I think crypto is most useful for illegal things and tradecraft, but illegal doesn't mean immoral, and useful to criminals is still useful.
* Buying VPN relays anonymously, for connecting to through Tor, VPSes etc.
* Buying drugs.
* Donating to causes sanctioned by your country.
* Paying informants.
* Allowing you to prove you're the author of something, or knew a secret, later on.
* "Dead hand" schemes which release information if your wallet activity stops for more than a couple weeks. This keeps people from killing you to keep something from getting out.
* Online gambling.
* Evading financial controls to send money to your family abroad.
Some of this doesn't require any trust (e.g. proving you knew something before some date), most of the rest requires trust, but what makes crypto useful for these cases isn't lack of trust but auditability, anonymity and/or lack of control by authorities.
I have worked in (used personally or done professionally) pre-crypto versions of these, excluding the dead hand scheme- and although some were a little complex and had some risk, I would argue that the new version has the same complexity and risk, only it seems to be hidden by crypto buzz-words.
Also reminds me why I don't do those things any more.
Alibaba ran a Foreign Exchange service on top of crypto. I don't know if it is still running or not. It functioned like Western Union. Customers sent local currency to Alibaba, Alibaba bought crypto with that local currency and in another country sold that crypto for foreign currency and then deposited it into the foreign currency account.
The crypto part adds nothing to this process. There are already very efficient systems for exchanging one fiat currency for another without going through crypto.
Alibaba could already avoid that need for individual transactions by just holding balances in the different currencies, like e.g. Wise and many other retail forex providers do. They only need to deal with correspondent banks for balancing out those accounts in case more money flows in one direction than the other, and those transactions are large so the costs are not as much of a concern.
In any case, your argument presumes some desire to get rid of the correspondent banks. Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes — like criminals, avoiding sanctions, avoiding capital controls, etc — which is why crypto stays on those fringes.
>>Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes
Yes, it is for the fringes. One day Alibaba could find itself on the fringes, as collateral damage in some geopolitical dispute that locks it out of the centralized global financial system, as a result of which country it is based in.
I have no idea if this concern motivated Alibaba's reliance on crypto though.
I didn't realize you suggested gold. I thought you meant "runescape gold". Yes gold is durable.
I suspect cryptocurrency will be a store of value far further into the future than gold. Gold becomes plentiful once extracting resources from asteroids becomes economically viable.
This article is basically an ad for Parity, and doesn't contain any details on how those savings were actually achieved, any way to verify that the number is genuine, or any way to know whether the same savings could have been achieved with improved processes with or without blockchain (which is very likely).
* Evacuating money from war or authocratic leadership in a brain wallet, without running into the risk of getting it stolen at checkpoints. Of course that works best for those who already have crypto before that door closes.
* Paying for VPN anonymously with Monero.
* Sending money for living to relatives that reside in countries that are sanctioned. What's more important? Knowing that your family is not hungry or following your government's doctrine?
* Hide money from abusive relatives.
In summary: Doing transactions without having to ask your principal for permission or having to reveal them.
Seems quite empowering to me, but apparently not everyone thinks that being empowered is valuable.
All my examples are defensive. Defending the freedoms that are guaranteed by the underlying social contracts (but commonly ignored by those in power, even in the most democratic societies that exist) is not antisocial at all. Unlike violence, crypto specifically is not empowerment above others, but personal empowerment for everyone. Everyone can be empowered at the same time.
Actually we didn't. None of us chose to be here. None of us has a choice over when or where we're born. We all arrive and grow up in societies structured and governed in ways that we've had no say over, and over which very few of us will have meaningful influence during our lifetimes. Some of this is OK, some of it isn't. Some places are more or less OK than others. But don't act like we should all simply accept everything about systems we've had no agency in building purely because we might live in a democracy.
But did you do so in order to enjoy different political systems, or more because of unrelated things like work, family, studies, ..., while the political system was something that just was in place and acceptable enough for you? I think that is what GP is aiming at.
What if you cannot find an existing system that is open for you and acceptable enough?
> Not strictly. Especially not if you switch four times.
It's splitting hairs now. Your original claim was, and I quote, "did you do so in order to enjoy different political systems, or more because of unrelated things like work, family, studies"
- Work is a spectrum between "you're forced to work at the collective farm and you don't even have documents to travel anywhere" (e.g., USSR, until about 1960s) and "move to whatever place you want and start your own company" (most of the modern world).
- Family is a spectrum between "divorce is fully forbidden, punishable, or fined" (most countries with heavy religious influences, even today) to "you're free people, do what you want". And not to mention things like child care and support, rigths of husbands and wives, rights of children etc. etc. etc.
- Studies is a spectrum between "women and/or non-believers and/or non-priviledged classes have no access to education" (really most countries until modern times, some countries even now) to "yeah, go ahead and study whatever you want" (most of the modern world).
And so on. To pretend that major things in life are not affected by politics is disingenuous at best. There's literally, right now, a huge ongoing debate in the US about healthcare (affects family) and student debt (affects studies).
I don't disagree with any of that and you are right with that it is not "unrelated" as I worded it, but my initial point was that moving is not necessarily motivated by political preferences.
Many people move, because they are following opportunities (and of course these are also affected by politics). Some people move from A to B and back to A. Sometimes from democracies to dictatorships. It does not automatically mean that they do so, because they prefer one or the other system. Some people accept a political downgrade when they move.
> moving is not necessarily motivated by political preferences.
"I'm moving to A because my kids can go to school there without incurring heavy debt" is influenced by politics even if it's not explicitly acknowledged. Or even if the person doesn't think it's influenced by politics.
> Some people accept a political downgrade when they move.
Yes, they do. Because the reasons may be [1] "I don't want my kids to be subjected to gay propaganda, I'm going back to the country that upholds traditional values", and this is again is influenced by politics even if it's not explicitly stated and the person doesn't understand that.
[1] I know of some people who moved back to Russia for this stated reason.
>> Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?
> The other poster is probably very confident because gay.com redirects to https://lalgbtcenter.org, which is an LGBT advocacy group in Los Angeles.
I doubt they knew that. It's inconsistent with their thought of "buying a subscription to gay.com," and it raises the question of why someone in Syria would even be interested in a LA-focused advocacy group. Plus in their reply indicated they thought of it as a porn site. What kind of advocacy group has a paywall that someone would want to see behind?
You need to spend more time thinking about this. You’ll end up realising that the value lies in self sovereign, permissionless money. Tech like Monero. The debt ceiling grows every day.
> You need to spend more time thinking about this. You’ll end up realising that the value lies in self sovereign, permissionless money. Tech like Monero.
I have. However you illustrate an important point about cryptocurrency: it's an exercise in political ideology without practicality.
> The debt ceiling grows every day.
If you're that worried about inflation, shiny gold seems like a better option.
The addition of cryptocurrency to the process adds no value (and in this case adds unnecessary risk). You might as well suggest using cryptocurrency to buy a Big Mac at McDonalds. Here's how you do it:
1. Deposit your money in a bank. Wire it to Binance. Buy Bitcoin.
2. Go to a McDonald's.
3. Hire a gig worker through an app, pay them in cryptocurrency to buy a Big Mac with fiat and give it to you.
4. Eat your $55 Big Mac, and wonder at the amazing real-world utility of cryptocurrency.
If the person has VPN access them there are better options available. The crypto transaction makes information available to attackers that wouldn't be available by any other method.
Haha, ok well you got me there. :) when i get right down to it, I've only paid for my porn out of a sense of patronage, not necessity. Shame about that dampening factor, but its also allowed me to appreciate more niche and interesting erotica, akin to adults who can eat interesting food dishes compared to kids who prefer hamburgers and macaroni.
> I'll give you a bitcoin wallet address can you tell me who owns it?
It depends on the address. But assuming the person is using the same address for multiple transactions then the attacker only has to be able to correlate one address with a person (or a person's device if they have access to it).
This could be a completely innocuous transaction, including something as seemingly innocent as signing into a Dapp.
Compare that to a non-blockchain transaction, where if the attacker hacked an random ecommerce site (say a supermarket) that doesn't automatically allow them to tie all records to transactions on the site that is a problem.
> Worse than a credit card? How?
If I buy something at my supermarket with my credit card, even with home delivery AND even if the supermarket kept the credit card number there is nothing tying that transaction to gay.com.
- not having a central payment processor know everything about you
- buying drugs/porn/VPNs/etc in a country that has a backwards stance on them
- anonymous donations
- purchasing services (eg commissioned art) without revealing your identity
- sending money to friends and family during hyperinflation/freedom from government (mis)management of currencies
Freedom of speech (eg cryptography) is not worth much without the ability to actually use said freedom to drive a change (e.g. requiring work, thus requiring money.)
I believe in string encryption. The difference is usefulness. I’ve seen others express this in this post’s comments.
Encryption is EXTREMELY useful, as history has proved. It has a great many beneficial uses, or at least benign. Yes it can be used by criminals, but that’s hardly its only use.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t seem to provide anything but something to speculate on, a way to sell hardware, and an unfathomable waste of resources. When people point out things it’s “better” at they always seem kind of sketchy, of require you to old the same values (independence from central government above all else). I see no inherent good after 14 years, just massive problems.
So no, I don’t think they’re comparable myself. I don’t find them similar at all for the purposes of the point I’m trying to make.
You don't find crypto useful or worthwhile because you're privileged enough to:
- Be banked;
- Live in a country with a somewhat stable currency, in which exchanging to another currency is legal;
- Live under a regime that does not impose authoritarian censorship on whom you can exchange value with;
- Use payment processors that only abuse your privacy when you aren't looking.
These conditions are not the case for everyone, everywhere. Is it so difficult for you to imagine that:
- Crypto, once matured, could enable the ~2 billion people that are unbanked to own their own money?
- Someone living in a country with a hyperinflationary currency, that bans currency conversions and precious metals, would like to use crypto to preserve their life's savings?
- Someone might want to donate to an entity opposing an authoritarian, human-rights abusing government, without painting a target on their back? (And no, we both know lawyers are not viable for this.)
Throughout human history, there has not been a single government that has not egregiously failed its people or abused/destroyed the wealth of its citizens.
You seem to think that we have arrived at some special time where this will never happen again. That is not the case. Encryption protects your speech, and cryptocurrency protects your wealth, from governments that will inevitably fail you as surely as the sun will rise.
> . My initial viewpoint was why would scammers bother to fish for bitcoin when bank transfers/gift cards are a lower barrier
Because bank transfers at least are inherently traceable. It just requires a sufficiently motivated government agency or prosecutor to go after them. On Gift cards, there's a lot publicity regarding scams and stores are increasingly flagging scams.
Crypto for now at least is far safer from a scmer POV as it requires far higher level of investment and expertise to trace and unmask, so only the ultra big fish seem to get chased
The difference is crypto(graphy) is "old" and established, while crypto(currencies) and blockchain are new and trendy. It's like what happened with the JS frameworks, which have stabilized now a bit. Everyone wanted to create a new amazing project, everyone was lured into using X or Y framework because Z. But not many know a lot about them. Same with crypto, people see it's trendy and go in even if they lack all the technical knowledge around it. Thus, scams and hacks are everywhere.
Having access to basic finance and the ability of storing money safely, should be a right.
There are place in the world where these things don't exist because society doesn't get along.
Should decentralized and anonymous communication, like TOR tries to be, exist? Should a decentralized currency exist? Should and open, free and decentralized internet exist?
For some of us the answer is clear but complex. Between black and white there are many shades of grey
> In the late 1980s, criminals were already holding encrypted files hostage in exchange for cash sent via the postal service. One of the first ransomware attacks ever documented was the AIDS trojan (PC Cyborg Virus) that was released via floppy disk in 1989. Victims needed to send $189 to a P.O. box in Panama to restore access to their systems, even though it was a simple virus that utilized symmetric cryptography.
Sounds like you should here to China, where the CCP controls all the money and every action is logged and checked by the CCP. Wanna play games? You need that cleared by the CCP first and you are only allowed a quota. All your problems are solved over there. As for me in HK, its time to get out.
Pretty sure the orignal post is a joke, but I think crypto is a bit like a VPN in this way. Sure your bank can see the initial spend. But after that it's harder to see where the money goes. And you have some of the benefits of normal banking systems. Much harder to buy things from far away with cash.
I refer the learned gentleman to, er, the global economy. How much more scaled up would you like?
Meanwhile crypto transactions have to go through a single common blockchain with pitiful throughput. Even the enhancements like lightning are laughably slow compared to the global banking system.
Escobar sold drugs. The margins on that stuff are rather large, allowing for a few inefficiencies.
But I should have really said: cash doesn’t scale down. Escobar can put people with briefcase on planes to pay his suppliers on all continents. But any smaller outfit would struggle with those logistics.
More importantly, private citizens have essentially no need to use end to end encryption. Nor has society a reason to allow its citizens to hide data on encrypted devices from the state.
Here we go again. While these things have been enabled by cryptocurrency, especially ransomware, all these human activities predate it. For those of us old enough to remember the drama of the crypto wars, it all sounds eerily familiar.
> In fact, it's the proponents of widespread unbreakable encryption who want to create a brave new world, one in which all of us – crooks included – have a guarantee that the government can't tap our phones. Yet these proponents have done nothing to show us that the new world they seek will really be a better one.
> In fact, even a civil libertarian might prefer a world where wiretaps are possible. If we want to catch and convict the leaders of criminal organizations, there are usually only two good ways to do it. We can "turn" a gang member – get him to testify against his leaders. Or we can wiretap the leaders as they plan the crime.
> ...
> If unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this. We can't afford as a society to protect pedophiles and criminals today just to keep alive the far-fetched notion that some future tyrant will be brought down by guerrillas wearing bandoleers and pocket protectors and sending PGP-encrypted messages to each other across cyberspace.
> ...
> As encryption technology gets cheaper and more common, though, we face the real prospect that the federal government's own research, its own standards, its own purchases will help create the future I described earlier – one in which criminals use ubiquitous encryption to hide their activities. How can anyone expect the standard-setting arms of government to use their power to destroy the capabilities of law enforcement – especially at a time when the threat of crime and terror seems to be rising dramatically?
My take on it as an outsider is that these are bridging technologies that will probably die off once the rest of the world moves to a secure private digital currency system analogous to cash, since we will no longer need these "wildcat cryptocurrencies" any longer. Like how modern banking progressively evolved from distributed roots.
> Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.
Plenty of scams happen right there in the open. With all the traceability that fiat currencies provide, gift card, advance-fee and other scams are still plentiful and the victims are very unlikely to ever see their money back. In the UK, even when reported by the financial institution to the National Crime Agency, they often do nothing and the institution is forced to return the money even in cases where it's very obvious it is part of a scam. A lot of people I know are still getting constant scam calls trying to get them to send fiat money to them under various excuses so clearly these people are able to launder that money and evade the law just fine, and I doubt they're using crypto for that.
> criminals
The other problem with considering every "criminal" as bad is that the definition of "crime" depends on who's currently in power. Beyond the obvious violent crimes that the majority of people will agree are bad and should be prevented/punished, there's also a huge "grey area" - Russians who disagree with the war (or even call it a war instead of a "special military operation" as is the official party line) are now considered "criminals" by their government. Do you agree with their assessment that those people are bad and should be punished?
> Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program
> Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people
I disagree with punishing average people and making their life hell because their government, over which they have no power over is doing something stupid. The vast majority of these people don't intend to hurt anyone and were just unlucky to be born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. If your solution to stupid governments is to make the life of their citizens impossible, may as well just nuke said country and be done with it?
I'm no crypto fanatic. I don't believe in Web3 and call BS on whatever new crypto project comes out (and so far I have been right the vast majority of the time - every time as far as I know, but leaving the benefit of the doubt). I don't want crypto to take over the world because it's inefficient compared to competing solutions. But cryptocurrencies are a useful tool in certain situations just like end-to-end-encrypted messaging or anonymity tools such as Tor, and their benefits outweigh the cons even if they can be used to facilitate "bad" things.
Beyond the state's fundraising efforts, many in Ukraine were only able to take their wealth with them when they fled the country because they had it in the form of crypto.
>>* Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.
And encrypted chat applications give criminals and scammers the ability to coordinate their scams anonymously.
Centralization via mass-surveillance (Total Information Awareness) is not a solution to social problems. It's putting all of society's eggs in one basket, and hoping the basket doesn't fall into corruption.
>>* Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people
And according to this pro-centralization philosophy, a million people dying in Iraq due to sanctions is "worth it".
So are all the people who "starve" due to this philosophy's AML mass-surveillance laws:
As always with crypto, this “use case” falls apart on even the tiniest inspection.
Ukraine was not cut off from the global financial system and had no issue receiving donations in fiat currency—I myself sent them some fiat. It was quick and it was easy and the Ukrainians lost a hell of a lot less of my donation to transaction fees than they did of the ETH.
Donating to Ukraine in ETH is a higher-fee way to do something you can already do (this is typical of purported blockchain “use cases”). If you actually care about the recipient of the donation, you should want as little of the donation to be siphoned off as transaction fees as possible.
There is an advantage to Ukraine though: This might get them more donations from the crowd that has fully bought into all the crypto junk and will happily throw money at everything with the right buzzwords.
I suppose you can consider the transaction fees marketing budget.
>>Ukraine was not cut off from the global financial system and had no issue receiving donations in fiat currency—I myself sent them some fiat.
It is far easier to donate from your browser, using your MetaMask wallet, than by visiting your bank branch to effect an international wire transfer. It can potentially also be safer, in letting you not have your identity recorded anywhere in association with a donation to a party to a conflict.
Who said anything about a bank branch? I did it on the Central Bank of Ukraine’s website in about 30 seconds. I don’t know how much I can emphasize what a solved problem this is.
That's a fair point about the existence of payment options that are more convenient than wire transfer, but not every one has a credit card or lives in a country where international e-wallets like PayPal operate.
And the problem of identity being linked to payments, and the risks this can engender, is not a solved problem in traditional finance.
* Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.
* Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program
* Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people
* Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they don't know and a technology they can't explain
* It's the future!!
EDIT: Couple more
* Transactions are so energy intensive that the currency eclipses the carbon footprint of many countries
* Those transactions are also incredibly slow!
* Matt Damon!
I think there is a use for blockchain, but as a technology for everything from buying groceries to countries using it as a currency, no.