> What is crypto mining if not a textbook Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did lots of killing and razing and destroying?
Are you serious? You complain about the 2008 crisis and capitalism and yet completely neglect the true purpose of crypto? No wonder you drank the Google kool-aid
Fraud is a tiny sliver and it would be unfair to judge crypto on that alone. There's also ransomware, extortion, payments for drugs and theft by North Korea hackers.
You missed arms dealing, human trafficking and sanctions avoidance, but then there seems to be a lot of cryptobros who would think those are features not bugs.
As if the banking system is any better. How can any legitimate payment system which has no cryptographic operations, is highly centralized, where the money can be printed out of thin air and way too many other reasons, be taken seriously?
Because it works, and we've developed massive institutions (the federal reserve, FDIC, SWIFT, credit rating agencies, and other financial market utilities) to keep it working in a way that benefits the vast majority of people that use money
It seems like Crypto can be taken away by the government. If the government orders you to give up your crypto they will just throw you in a cell until you comply. Or as it happening more and more often, a guy with a wrench persuades you to give it up.
They can't actually do that at a mass scale - they don't reliably know how much crypto any given person owns.
Ditto, if someone beats me with a wrench and I give them a password accessing $500 of crypto, what % of my stash have they just claimed? Do they stop or continue with the wrenching? What is the stopping condition here?
> On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant of ZHONG’s Gainesville, Georgia, house, law enforcement seized approximately 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion. This seizure was then the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice and today remains the Department’s second largest financial seizure ever.
Having you physically within their jurisdiction (and/or drone strike reach) permits quite a bit of leverage. As the XKCD comic notes… https://xkcd.com/538/
It does seem slightly silly that a through-line of the article is disgust at societal power dynamics and surveillance, and then not recognize that Bitcoin and other proto-cryptocurrencies were invented by anarchist cypherpunks as a solution to the same thing in the monetary system.
The author of this article is not slamming the authors of the protocol. They're criticizing what it became and what it's used for now. There's a difference.
You can not seriously claim that this modern incarnation of Bitcoin is what was originally intended. That would be ridiculous.
Not for you. Come to think of it, a monetary system which is designed on cryptographic operations would never be truly understood by people who love being oppressed and thrive under the mass surveillance of the banking system. You are just a stupid pawn
Are you serious? You complain about the 2008 crisis and capitalism and yet completely neglect the true purpose of crypto? No wonder you drank the Google kool-aid