this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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It does have a utility though, buying drugs, moving money past capital controls, and creating fake revenue/losses for laundering money and tax evasion.
The dollar is the favourite currency for that stuff. Cryptocurrencies are meant to take power away from banks and give it to the people. Sure, the vast majority of the people use them for spsculation, but that doesn't make the technology useless. It's just that people are mostly interested in making as much money as they can. That's a society problem, not cryptocurrency's.
Sigh... It's like the currency still has issues or something
The main appeal is the ability to make transactions without intermediaries. The problem is that most people have as the only interest to get richer and richer and there will be always other people happy to sell them that dream.. For a fee. These are the vastmajorituy of the people in cryptocurrencies, but that doesn't disreguard the power and utility of the technology. It's easy to shit on the tool, but the real problem is the greed-driven society we live in.
If people paid rent or bought groceries with crypto currency? Sure. It's not like thousands of people without bank access are using coins.
I've been living on cryptocurrencies only for the last >6 years. Buying groceries, travels and whatever else i need. So yes, people do that. You don't hear about it because people are too busy talking about speculators and price movements.
Cryptocurrencies are seeing high adoptions in country where banking is limited, in the rich country is 99% speculation.
Doesn't the see saw of speculation kind of screw this up for you? Or do you only engage in business with other crypto people?
Speculation makes it harder because it causes price volatility, which is good and bad. There are services like bitrefill, travala and coincards that make very easy to buy almostanything using crypto. Of course if somebody accepts crypto directly i prefer them.
I disagree that cryptocurrency in itself is a scam. It can have legitimate utility, for example I want to exchange money for international services without a credit card or mailing an envelope of cash/cheque. Bitcoin and some others are mainstream enough that I can do this.
That said, investing in them is absolutely a scam, using it as a marketing buzzhype is a scam, and most of them are founded as scams.
Well, my transaction went through, so yes.
I agree that it is wasteful and overall a bad thing... now that I think about it could be somewhat excusable if they adopted a PoW algrothim that actually solves socially-useful expensive problems like protein-folding, through distributed computing.
But that doesn't make it a scam. There's not really any trickery. It's just bad.
I'm not claiming that. It would still be environmentally ruinous (insofar as the energy production where miners live remains ruinous, which I guess is the foreseeable future) but at least the PoW would be actually contributing to tasks we wanted to do anyway that require large amounts of work. Hence the heavy emphasis on 'somewhat'. I'm not saying it would be justified, but it would be far far far more useful to society.
Incidentally, why characterise non-profit medical research as "for Science!(tm))"? I hope we can both agree that understanding the human body is valuable to society and curing disease.
There are cryptographic requirements for securely conveying the necessary information for that application, an application that requires extremely limited identity and trust and centralization. I can't think of an alternative covering those requirements that is plausible right now and not pure what-if (there is a big jump in feasibility between 'change the proof of work algorithm' and 'invent an alternative to cryptocurrency'). If we can find an alternative to expensive PoW, wonderful!
Yes, if those requirements are relaxed, there are alternatives. If you're fine with PayPal storing your personal and financial details and those of the recipient and exploiting you a little bit, then it's an alternative. If your recipient is fine giving personal information, speed isn't an option and you live in a country where sending cash in mail is legal and won't get stolen, that's an option. Of course, this all goes to shit if you're trading with someone in a sanctioned country.
Alright, what about Bitcoin is fraudulent? We agree it's bad, but that doesn't make it fraudulent (i.e. a scam)
Agreeing with the parts re: net negative. No, I don't invest in cryptocurrency; like I said, investing in them is a scam.
Fraud is done with basically anything considered to have value. Cash, credit, signatures, votes, wine, wires, mail, licenses, taxes, recorded age. Fraud is the scam! And cryptocurrency is especially useful for scamming (has the anonymity of cash without the physical restrictions). But that's not it's purpose or main use. That's not spiting hairs, it's calling the hat the head. Your example of encrypting ransomware used to be done with the postal service, floppy discs and cash in the 90s. One example from 1989
edit: this of course is an advantage of non-transferable labour vouchers!
That's not what sea-lioning is. Someone asked us to name some scams, you said cryptocurrency, I disagreed that it qualified as a scam, you replied that you doubted my disagreement and I asked for clarification. If either of us wants to stop, we stop. Sea-lioning is stalking across the site like a debate pervert, it's not replying to replies.
I'm not just running my mouth here, I'm evaluating my understanding of cryptocurrency and finding disagreements to make me question them. And also seeing if I'm able to have a constructive conversation - it's good practice for real labour conversations in the workplace.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/sealioning-internet-trolling
Your source agrees too. No-one is perusing anyone. You're willingly replying to me and I'm willingly replying back within a thread. That's called a conversation.
[re: https://hexbear.net/comment/3697897 ]
No.
I explicitly said it wasn't ok, multiple times. Nor did I suggest either of those would make it ok. Nor is there anything 'technically' about the concept of a scam, and why that's different to a wrongdoing.
If you're a leftist in any form, stop making bullshit assumptions and listen to what people actually say instead of projecting some irrelevant ridiculous strawman stuffed full of shit-no-one-said. If you want to pull this nonsense online here then whatever, but if this is how you behave in person then it's actively harmful to the socialist movement, and that's everyone's business. We have a world to take, comrade, and this kind of false-premise ranting isn't how we do it.
Alright, here it is without any of the bloat. My argument, and then more importantly, why calling out incorrect terminology even matters:
[click to expand]
A scam is a fraudulent scheme. (That's not some obscure technicality, that's what OP meant, and what business articles and English dictionaries generally define it as.)
Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, isn't fraudulent (it acts as consumers expect it to: a valuable item capable of digital anonymous exchange).
None of this is defending cryptocurrency. I am not defending it, and I keep saying that I agree it's bad. I am saying it is not a scam, people use it and they aren't being swindled.
.
The reason why making this kind of distinction matters is that critique of anything should be relevant. That's a bit abstract, so I'll illustrate with a much more extreme example that I've seen from other people.
If someone ignorantly supports Joe Biden, labeling them a literal neo-Nazi has zero rhetorical value there, but also zero analytical value. Anyone with a basic knowledge of what Nazis are will understand this is inaccurate and either an ignorant accusation or bad faith name-calling, and will probably dismiss their further points. But also, someone who actually believes Biden is a neo-Nazi will not be as effective in combating Biden's regime (this will be explained later).
Pointing out that Biden is a racist, nationalist, fascism-enabler and the head of a genocidal regime, and therefore supporting them is harmful, on the other hand, is much more realistic. It still conveys that Biden is disgusting and deserves a bullet. It still conveys most of the same ideas. But this time, the critique makes a more accurate and therefore convincing and sturdy claim.
Having a more accurate understanding of Biden will allow us to better predict how they will act, and how to prepare. Biden isn't going to say "Death to the Jews, let's put the trans in camps". Biden is going to slip out shit like "you ain't Black", make laws that hurt the disadvantaged in more subtle ways, and will fail to act to defend trans people. Biden is going to be more subtle than any neo-Nazi. A neoliberal and a neo-Nazi will do different acts and require different approaches to get mainstream people to realize how horrific they are.
Maybe Biden is a strange example for prediction, but another case would be DeSantis and Trump. Yes they're both horrible, horrible fuckers who deserve the same ending. But, how will they both act differently? Will one be more concerned with corruption, self-image and self-gain than enacting ideological goals? Will one be more effective in implementing their goals than the other? That can be the difference between life and death for many, many people.
It's not just a trivial technicality, using appropriate crits is the difference between being credible and being ridiculous, and applying the right classifications can be the difference between understanding something and misinterpreting it. And that will have serious consequences.
And the forks!
It does it infinitely more inefficient, slower and insecure than all other existing alternatives that can do this (and there are a lot of alternatives which doesn't involve blockchain). Which is also why people doesn't use it for this.
I was into Bitcoin before it even had value. Cryptocurrency is a cool concept and not a scam by default, but it was never meant to be some mainstream thing that was going to replace the dollar as you hear parroted annoyingly everywhere.
When non tech people started getting interested is when the scams started (also didn't help that governments were lending money at 0% interest rates for like the last two decades)...
Drug dealers also like getting paid in crypto, but they never hold on to it. The few that use it like a currency are ok, but the vast majority use it like a commodity.
Back in the early days (early 2010s was when I first heard of it) when Bitcoin was worth pennies on the dollar that was exactly the kind of thing it was good for, and it was marketed as an international currency not beholden to governments. It is a shame that it got taken from that for the sake of "Bitcoin being valuable because you can profit off owning Bitcoin."
It clearly has lower utility than being able to buy drugs legally
I don't remember what my og argument was
Seconding crypto.