In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
Genuine question, is crypto good for anything other than gambling at the moment? I don’t ever hear of anyone buying anything with crypto, only exchanging it out for USD. NFTs are basically a punchline now… what is it actually good for?
It’s a good way to launder money. They used to sell coke to fund off-the-books CIA operations, now they can just give them shitcoins.
It’s not untraceable, but it’s way more anonymous for routine purchases than CC. Also with all the nonsense the CC companies are pulling lately, it’s a nice example of why de-centralized, unbanked fiat has real value. Personally I use it for search engine subscriptions and paying VPN fees with at least a layer of “hey, you can’t sell my demographic data or send me junk mail” privacy. Also if you want to send money to someone without using venmo type garbage, it’s super easy and flexible even if you don’t have the same type of crypto as the person you are sending to. It’s huge for sending money internationally as there are big fees associated with international money brokers when involving traditional fiat.
The mantra of crypto as a scam is wrong. It’s just seriously overvalued and has been turned into scam as an investment commodity. The technology itself, at least modern scalable versions that don’t require AI level nuclear power plants to scale, is not flawed. The fact that the archiac unscalable bitcoin prototype is still the most valued is a great example of the mismatch between real world value and the fucked up crypto marketplace.
The fact that scams persist on blockchain is an unfortunate side effect of the whole uncensorable thing…
Monero absolutely is untraceable
So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.
I’d use ethereum with a USDC token for anything that didn’t need to be ethereum specifically. Then you’re not subject to the volatility of the crypto itself, but still gain the ability to pay for things or transfer money globally. Unless you actually want the crypto exposure of course.
If you wanted stronger privacy, you could put the ethereum/usdc through Tornado Cash first. The SEC tried to sanction it and lost in court.
Also staying in USDC is easier for tax purposes.
It’s a really good way to bribe politicians and public figures.
It’s traceable and immutable. It’s a bad way to do anything illegal.
That’s just layer zero on some blockchains.
Maybe if you want to buy something visa, Mastercard, and Christian nut jobs don’t want you to have. Otherwise it’s a total scam.
Assuming you can find a buyer who will process that crypto, without touching either of those payment processors. All the crypto evangelists seem to forget the major crypto payment platforms are in use because you can actually rapidly exchange your crypto for that thing you can actually pay your rent with - but those function largely on the backbone of big payment platforms to trade that crypto into cash for the merchant.
I could be wrong, but I believe most exchanges use ACH to directly deposit into a person’s bank account.
I’m no expert, but I believe ACH is separate from your Visas and MasterCards
If things go as they do, then it’ll be your only option soon to pay for porn.
It’s easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It’s a nightmare
Also easy to transfer with IBAN and relatively cheap … so I guess other countries that do not rely on IBAN?
It’s easy if you want to pay $50 for a wire for your $20 transfer
It was supposed to be the very thing that Paypal become (probably why Elon hedged his bet on it after getting kicked) but it became so inefficient with expensive transaction fees that everyone turned it down. As a consequence, it became a worse version of the stock market.
Mind you, this was before we even before we knew about the environmental damage.
Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.
Where tf do you order an assassin online? It’s an FBI agent on the other end for sure.
https://wondery.com/shows/kill-list/
Not really. Just a bunch of volunteers trying to get the police all over the world to do their job.
I used to buy a lot of pizza and burgers with bitcoin when I did night shifts. Still use it to buy electronics at least once a month.
It’s also the best way to donate to nonprofit projects. I can just send ~ $10 of value, one time. No need to risk accidentally signing up for a monthly subscription or being bombarded by spam.
If you don’t keep 100% of your monthly budget in BTC, you don’t really care about the volatility either, because long term it always goes up.
None of your examples are examples of what it is good for, since they can all be done by other means.
Just because you can do something in another way doesn’t make every other way bad
Didn’t Newegg have some kind of crypto payment option? Do they still have it?
I funded my entire gaming pc with bitcoin, I believe they still accept it
Sui specifically is a unique horse in this race, as they are trying to really push for zero knowledge/trust models as well as what is known in cryptography spaces as multi party computation.
What this all effectively means long term is several things
The problem with all of this of course is it is very new tech, and it’s hard to break into a space that’s littered with scammers running pyramid schemes or just pulling the rug out from under people and running with the money.
The tech is there to eliminate a lot of unnecessary middle men in the financial world, but like all shiny new things, it is still lacking mass adoption and formal govt rules around it. This greatly limits the utility of this for the common man to just sending money to friends who have an exchange to cash them out or just paying for things visa won’t let you, like Pornhub or something.
Yes. There are a few legitimate non gambling non crime uses. But those are typically very minor transactions. The problem is that it is somewhat anonymous and not refundable. It turns out that we really do want those features for almost all medium-high price purchases. Otherwise the thieves and scam artists will jack our shit.
Illicit cryptocurrency transactions experienced a notable decline, representing approximately 0.4 percent of the total transaction volume. … Scams accounted for 24% of total illicit activity.
It was great to trade and move value around. You could send to other countries, or do work for it. But Bitcoin fucked it all by basically being a ponzi scheme. People below will talk about it and how it holds or increases in value. Thats because most people are still buying in and hording it. Making it terrible as a currency.
I never bought crypto, I only traded, bartered, worked for it. I never put it on an exchange or used another company. Another sink of value and a stupid place to keep it. But that is the vast majority of people now.
So it is not good for anything anymore. Except speculation and hoping your are not the last holding the bag.
Bitcoin specifically was never meant as a currency. There is a reason why people call it “digital gold”. I do find myself hesitant to buy it since people buy it with the goal of getting rich, it ruins the entire point.
In theory I actually love the idea of Bitcoin, something independent of resources. I know that sounds weird, but the moment asteroid mining gets big, traditional money storage will get rocked, hard. While something like Bitcoin, in theory, would be safe.
I see deregulation as generally a bad thing if you want any of this to be taken seriously and not be manipulated. At least, for most of them. In theory you could have a crypto that is very resilient to manipulation, I just don’t know if that exists right now.
Sure it was, look at the name of Satoshi’s paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Um ackchually by electronic cash they mean like bearer bonds, irreversible but not necessarily usable at all.
I’m going to go ahead and not worry about asteroid mining
You can anonymously buy things on the dark web with monero. I’ve been looking to buy gift cards so I can purchase things anonymously. I believe you can even pay for Mullvad with monero
You can
Yep and you get a 10% discount too if you pay with monero
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/we-now-accept-monero
Monero is good for completely private and secure transactions. People often use it to buy drugs online… From what I’ve heard.
Don’t a lot of platforms online not let you buy Monero because of this? Like how do people buy Monero through a reputable source?
Buy a reputable cryptocurrency then swap that for whatever you want.
godex.io
Crypto (ETH and the like) is useful for it’s protocol, you can build projects on it.
Bitcoin is a good store of value, and with lightning payments starting to be accepted it could be a good way to pay for goods and services. The third world is currently using lightning to circumvent inflationary currency swings.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth owning really. All the pump and dumps/rugpulls you hear about are about “shitcoins”.
Plus word is Square and PayPal will start to implement bitcoin payments to their services very soon
Its good for evading the law.
Bitcoin has become a reserve currency like gold, without the heavy weight
Currency has stable and usable value.
Bitcoin has neither of those.
You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up
It rebounding and crashing by hundreds in value like a meth head on caffeinated cocaine laced with LSD is what doesn’t make it a currency.
No one wants a shit currency where one day a donut costs 1000 and the next 2000 and on the weekend it’s either 599 or 3999.
That’s why it’s at best a speculative asset, except it’s dumber than that because it’s intangible. It’s like the long term stupidity of fiat mixed with insane instability, all while using way more resources.
Same thing happened to the Argentine peso, let’s not pretend if you make a government currency it’s magically stable
The Argentine peso crashed and then stayed down. That’s actually a sign of stability, because it’s remaining at a constant, not jumping up and down wildly.
It didn’t crash only to go back to original value to the decrease by half and undulate like a wave, like Bitcoin and other crypto does.
What are you talking about? It crashed, then crashed again, then crashed again. How is that stable?
You mean all crashes then? The 3 that have happened in over ONE HUNDRED YEARS?
You can’t be fucking serious to compare that fluctuation with Bitcoin’s
Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.
Now it’s thousands of dollars.
It’s also lost thousands of dollars in value.
It hasn’t even been 2 decades.
There’s never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.
Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.
While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.
And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.
They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.
So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.
Yeah, and we have that…
It’s called fiat currency 🙄
Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.
Yeah, because the last time humans tried decentralized money it also caused a ton of problems.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency isn’t inventing anything new, it’s just doing the same old localized bank notes system again, but with computers™
Even if crypto had any actual physical value, and solved the stability problems, lack of inflation, etc, it would still end up having control issues, because those already wealthy in a lot of it could manipulate the value easily by simply exchanging it or dumping it.
So basically you’d just end up with the problems of current currencies + all the problems crypto has, which were the same problems localized notes had 200 or so years as well.
The reason for volatility is that any such concept at scale is subject to just the messiest lump of evolving opinions on everything. It will deflate, inflate, deflate wildly because it’s utterly subject to the whims of the people without any mechanism to counter a lack of mass consensus on what ‘value’ is.
We started noticing as things scaled up, there needed to be some regulatory management to counter the whimsical populace. Hard to fight mass inflation or deflation when you can’t do anything to manage the “money supply” to offset panic.
Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.