Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
It’s an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources
Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
Apart from privacy coins like Monero, it’s all traceable
Good luck tracing coins that I bought for cash from John Shadyman who can’t give half a shit about KYC.
Spend some time looking into how the FBI traces wallets. It’s pretty easy, and it’s that at some point, John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you. The entire Privacy community considers cash better than every crypto other than Monero.
Also btw.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people
If I visit Shadyman twice and see that I’m getting coins from the same wallet, I’m gonna find another guy. That’s a pretty obvious thing to do.
Any pointers other than “go read some internet”? That’s a rather broad reference.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you
What “people tied to you”? I use the coins to pay some 1337Cr1m3L0rd, with neither of us ever catching a remote semblance of knowing who the other one is. Or, move them to Pierre LeCrook, who’s again giving out cash without asking questions. Shadyman and LeCrook are actually the closest links to me, but again good luck proving that I went to their house and received coins for cash or vice versa.
The pointers are that a lot of people track crypto wallets, it’s not hard to do, and that any wallet ever tied to an ID is directly identified. So any other wallet that touches those wallets gets pulled into a network cluster. Network analysis tools are decades old. Patterns get established. So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled? You trust them to be invincible?
Just use Monero or cash.
https://thecoinomist.com/learn/crypto-osint-how-crypto-and-iowners-are-tracked/
https://www.acfcs.org/acfcs-contributor-report-bitcoin-tracking-for-law-enforcement
So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled?
What you wrote right there is “Once a drug dealer is busted, it’s immediately known who ever bought drugs from them with cash”. Do you seriously not realize that it’s a loony thing to say?
Using monero or tumblers after buying the coins is of course a good advice in case the seller is a plant. But it doesn’t mean that his coins are somehow magically retroactively connected to me when he’s not a plant.
I really don’t think you understand how deep KYC goes, and how patterns get established based on wallets. This is not “loony” stuff- OSINT people do this in their spare time. Your wallet is tracked and known and connected to your dealer already by people. But hey, you do you. Just remember that you have been warned three times.
First off, read the Privacy Guides recommendations for crypto: Monero only as it provides privacy by default. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
Second, have you done KYC anywhere else? That CAN get connected indirectly to your wallet. How do you GET cash to pay Johnny Shadyshit? Did you pull out enough to also match that cash in the amounts paid by Shadyshit to a wallet within the same general time frame? Feds have this records, and if they roll Johnny, that’s classic data they use to build a case. Did someone stupid that your dealer sells to have their girlfriend deposit money from Coinbase and send the exact same amount to their boyfriend who send the same amount to the dealer? They’re connected to you, too. People you’ve never MET are making nodes on the network mapping. https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/my-journey-without-kyc/36366
Edit: And hey, I get it. Back in the day, my guy told no one to bring cash by their place ever again because he knew local PD were likely sitting across the street. So he made everyone pay him with PayPal. Park a couple blocks away, pay with what was, at the time, " less traceable" because it wasn’t a break-in robbery risk for him, and cash on hand is also something cops will get you for.
My guy, you might as well keep going with what you’re doing. Fighting with anyone about it is straight up foolish in the face of everything I’ve showing you. But remember, you’re taking a risk to maybe/maybe not be yet another example of someone ignoring all the warnings.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/bitcoin-worth-35-million-tied-213110010.html https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-historic-336-billion-cryptocurrency-seizure-and-conviction https://www.crimeworld.com/ireland/how-30m-bitcoin-seizure-from-dublin-drug-dealer-could-lead-to-360m-jackpot-for-state/a/144477652.html https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-dealer-amassed-287k-in-crypto-selling-drugs-on-the-dark-web-meth-fentanyl-dealing-guns-weapons-handgun-rifle-ak-explosion-shot-crime-investigation-homeland-security-seattle-washington-money-thousands
Not quite.
Look, ask any serious privacy community, they’ll give you the same answer. It’s kind of a known standard.
It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
If you were famous it was also good for scamming your audience :3
It still is
briefly
Yeah, that went away and has never happened again since.
Crime, mostly.
I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)
IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds and Monero shills care about the difference)
As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.
Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.
So it is digital cash without the backing of a government and no stability.
You mean the same governments that manipulate their currency’s value?
Or in the case of the USA, a government that is spending so much that they’re basically insolvent?
Correct response
You’re not wrong, but why is not having the backing of a government a bad thing?
A currency backed by a government has a very high chance of being able to be used at any time with a mostly stable value. Sure, if the government collapses it can become worthless, but on a worldwide scale that is far, far less likely and you will most likely know if it is headed that way ahead of time.
Governments add a bit of stability for currency used as currency and not as speculation.
Tether is an interesting experiment here. They are traded as smart contract tokens on top of various blockchains. They don’t really have any intrinsic value, other than Tether LTD saying “every Tether is 100% backed by currency reserves”, and releasing unsatisfactory “audits” now and then. It’s main utility is that it provides foreign exchanges with a way to trade in something that is like Dollars without opening them up to the regulation that comes with trading actual dollars. It’s market cap is currently in excess of $180 B.
But, USDT has been around, in one form or another, since 2015. And while other “innovative” crypto products have crashed and burned, Tether has been able to keep its peg and has never failed to meet redemptions. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be a scam. It’s whole point is to always be worth one currency unit, so all they have to do is invest that currency in safe conventional investments and they can literally make billions of dollars with very little overhead. The most obvious answer is that they are not a scam.
I still don’t really trust them, but I have used them on exchanges, always making sure to trade through Tether to something I can redeem on a US exchange for actual dollars. But, I have to acknowledge they have lasted longer than most crypto entities. I wish they would get a complete audit together, but at some point their reputation for having lasted so long needs to be worth something?
Madoff’s scheme lasted for 30 years or more, surely that means it’s worth something?
He managed to keep it up until all of a sudden he couldn’t. Madoff was undone when he had to produce 440 million that he didn’t have.
Meanwhile, Tether was able to meet billions on withdrawals, several times. After Terra collapsed, I seem to recall they saw $15B in redemptions, but I can’t find any reputable links on that. If Tether was a scam, shouldn’t it have failed a long time ago?
People outside of crypto don’t realize how massive Tether is, and how much money it has under management. As much as the crypto bros dislike Central Banks, Tether has turned into one. If Tether were to ever implode, it would take most Crypto businesses with it.
Not necessarily. They can fail whenever and it seems they’re piling into more unstable assets like bitcoin vs treasury assets.
I wouldn’t trust it personally but that’s just me.
Because a currency without a stable backing is completely volatile. Sure the value of normal currencies fluctuate, but apart from a few hyperinflation edge cases that’s at most a few percent each month.
Small cryptocurrencies fluctuate sometimes hundreds of percent each month and even the big coins can swing ±20% every few weeks. The only somewhat stable coins are the ones directly tied to real world currencies.
Having a currency that fluctuates this heavily in value creates the exact same problems as the ever changing US tarrifs did. There simply is no wax to reliably price goods and services for more than a few days. You essentially have to barter each trade.
There’s a bunch of different cryptocurrencies and a bunch of different government-backed fiat currencies, all with different ranges of stability. Even stuff like gold isn’t actually “stable”, the price varies. Pick whichever range of stability suits your needs. You could use a stabletoken that’s pegged to something else - US dollars are popular.
In short it enables strangers to make transactions without trust or the otherwise needed trusted middleman.
the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments.
I think a lot of people, including myself, expected a more user-friendly experience. And what many of us realized is that a peer-to-peer payment system is a lot of work and risk for the user. Everything looks unpolished and sketchy. You don’t know if you’ve installed the right software. There’s no FDIC insuring the money, and the FBI is going to laugh if you say that you accidentally sent your life savings to the wrong crypto address.
I guess what I’m saying is that I started to realize all the labor involved in secure fiat monetary systems. For me, as someone without a lot of money or any real reason to transfer my money electronically beyond paying bills, the effort just didn’t seem worth it.
So, yeah, that’s the reason I just parked my cash in Coinbase and let it grow. The risk and the hassle of actually utilizing a peer-to-peer system didn’t seem to have much of a reward.
I was on a forum in 2009-2010 when another member posted asking whether they should get into bitcoin. I found a video pitching it, can’t remember if the poster linked it or I googled bitcoin after reading their post. I said it sounded sketchy and advised against it.
To be fair there’s a lot of crypto currency that was/still is a scam. Also I’d argue that BTC, and crypto in general, still is being treated as a security that’s backed by thin air. Ie: it’s a speculative asset that doesn’t actually have any value.
There’s nothing really stopping BTC from crashing hard. It’s so wild to me how people treat it.
I could have bought bitcoin too when it was worth pennies but there was no way to know which crypto the whales were going to bet on for the pump and dump. It’s a missed opportunity but rest assured there’s plenty of universes where Bitcoin amounted to nothing.
Oh I’m not losing sleep over it.
And BTC went from approximately zero to approximately $100K over that time. What else are you advising against at this time? To be honest, I had read an article on cryptocurrency somewhere around '09, and thought, “wow, this is where currency is headed!” I asked a friend who was a nerdy computer programmer type, and he said it was like tulip mania in The Netherlands, so I didn’t invest. Sigh.
From Investopedia: (https://www.investopedia.com/what-can-you-buy-with-bitcoin-5179592) - since I don’t know everything, and nobody else has said this…
*Bitcoin launched in 2009, enabling transactions via crypto debit cards linked to Mastercard and Visa
*Bitcoin can purchase products like electronics, luxury watches, and cars.
*The SEC approved the first U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024.
*PayPal lets users buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency in their accounts.
*Cryptocurrency debit cards offer an easy way to use Bitcoin for purchases.
he said it was like tulip mania in The Netherlands
He’s not wrong.
You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that’s the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy
+1 for Monero for sure. I wouldn’t even say its just good for buying drugs like some others suggested.
https://monerica.com/ is made for you to find stuff to buy with monero. You can find almost anything there including phsical wares like clothes, food, and also lots of online services lile hosting providers for example. I even saw an accounting firm there.
Wouldn’t cash work the same here?
If you’re able to use cash, then that works too. Unfortunately, you can’t insert cash into your computer though, lol
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren’t doing so fully entirely technically legally.
In the distant past I used to pay for my phone bill with Bitcoin that I earned through various side jobs. That ended up being convenient because my VOIP company was based in a different country as were the side jobs. But later the transaction costs for Bitcoin rose and it didn’t make sense.
You wrote that money is money because everyone agrees it’s valuable. But if I go to a pizza place in New York City and try to pay in Thai baht, they probably won’t take it. Therefore, it’s not money… But of course it’s money. It’s just not the right kind of money for that place.
It’s great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.
Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it’s useful, not whether it’s useful with no caveats 😋
Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.
You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn’t not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.
Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren’t anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.
So if you really know what you’re doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that’s pretty much it’s only real world application.
Also, from what I understand (I’m no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.
It lets people buy illegal stuff (like drugs or HRT), which can be good and bad.
It’s possible to buy gift cards for different services with it.The first real-world transaction with bitcoin was a pizza funnily enough.
A pizza for 10,000 bitcoins no less, must be the most expensive pizza in the world lmao
Ah, but would Bitcoin ever be worth more than a dollar if it wasn’t for that purchase?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: deep breath NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooo
Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.
And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming
Bitcoin burns so much energy because it’s developers are stubborn. It’s really that simple. Ethereum transitioned to a different algorithm that uses a fraction of that energy and only a few dorks care.
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy, I think all normal payment systems combined use less energy than it.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy because it’s proof of work based which to my understanding is basically a bunch of computers churning out answers competing to be “first and correct” in order to print coins.
I like the idea of decentralized currency but the current execution of cryptocurrency leaves much to be desired.
The current execution of *bitcoin*, there’s plenty of non pow cryptocurrencies
I stand by my statement. I am aware of non pow crypto.
Sorry, I was typing fast, I agree that the current inplementations are not good enough, but I do think that a cryptocurrency could easily be better than any current fiat
Bitcoin in specific doesn’t scale, but other things like Bitcoin Cash scale without increasing the energy usage, because the energy cost of PoW Blockchains comes from their security, not from the scale, so doing 1 or thousands of transactions costs the same.
Plus, things like Ethereum have migrated to PoS which uses very small amount of energy comparable and also scales without increasing energy costs.
Perhaps, but it’s no more silly than comparing something’s energy usage to Norway.
