I can easily get on the hate train, and view cryptocurrency as a pointless waste of resources. What am I missing? To name a few problems they <i>might</i> solve:<p>International transfer of value
Protection from monetary policies
Money laundering (real for some)
- The currency of my country is collapsing, I need to buy something which has a value unconnected to my country.<p>- My country imposes export
controls on foreign currency. I want to move my money out of my country.<p>- I am unbanked and want to buy a good or service on the internet.<p>- I do not trust the counterparty that I am dealing with on the internet. Using cryptocurrency means that my maximum loss is the vavlu of the transaction (I don't have to give credit card or banking info)<p>- My government wants to seize my assets, I want to make it difficult.<p>- I want to send money back home to my family. Currently the only option is Western Union which is charging 20% commission. Cryptocurrency results in less than 1% commission.<p>- I've lost my phone and wallet, I can still get cash from a bitoin ATM using the crypto I'm storing in my brain.
Early(ish) adopter here(circa 2013): initially it was a way for nerds who didn’t have street connections to buy drugs. Then it morphed into the biggest, most decentralized multi-level marketing speculative asset class in the history of the world.<p>The narrative behind crypto reminds me a lot of gold bugs who rave on and on and on about how defective the existing fiat monetary system is , in hopes to push up the fiat prices of their asset.<p>Every speculative asset needs to have a narrative tied to it to help newcomers rationalize buying in their fomo. (Look at GME, louisiana bonds etc etc etc).
That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good tool to make a quick buck if your timing is right.
Scott Alexander recently ran a grants program (<a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants" rel="nofollow">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-m...</a>) and wrote this about the experience:<p>> Then you have to actually give people money.
>
> You know how, whenever there’s a debate about cryptocurrency, some crypto fanboy gushes about how it makes sending money so much easier? And if you’re like me, you think “yes, but right now you can just enter a number into Paypal, that already seems pretty easy to me”?
>
> I take it all back. The crypto future can’t come soon enough. Sending money is terrible.
>
> Paypal charges 2-3% fees. If you’re sending $50K, that’s a thousand dollars. Your bank might do wire transfers for you, but they have caps on how much you can send, and that cap may be smaller than your grant. Wires can involve anything from sending in a snail mail form, to going to the bank in person, to getting something called a “Medallion Signature Guarantee” which I still have not fully figured out. Sometimes a recipient would tell me their bank account details, and my bank would say “no, that account does not exist”, and then we would be at an impasse. If you have double (or God forbid, triple) digit numbers of recipients, it all adds up.
I live in a third-world country, but I work remotely for some foreign firms. Crypto lets me get payments swiftly, easily. Of course, I also use traditional payment platforms like Payoneer, Skrill, etc, but getting payments in crypto (stable coins only) is far easier, and I can immediately convert to fiat.<p>A brief comparison between getting paid on Payoneer and a crypto exchange.<p>Payoneer - Sends invoice, client pays. Payment takes 1 or 2 days to hit my Payoneer account, and withdrawal takes another 1 day to hit my local bank account. If you withdraw on a Friday when the banks have closed, you'll have to wait till Monday to get your money.<p>Crypto - Sends invoice, client pays. Money hits my account immediately, and I can convert to fiat in less than 30 mins.<p>Now, I'm not even a fan of crypto because I think the field is spoiled with fraud, shysters, snakes, and all that...but crypto solves a good problem for me of getting instant payments. Notably, I only use stablecoins and abhor speculation.<p>Edit: Just to add, some mainstream payment platforms like PayPal and TransferWise are blocked in my country, and I've lost a significant number of jobs for this reason because clients refuse to use other payment options.<p>I think people in the first-world may not have much of a use case for crypto, but people in underdeveloped, unstable countries like mine have an important use case.
I've been very skeptical, but recently come around on my position. There are a lot of abstract ideas on why crypto is a good thing (permissionless, decentralized, censorship resistant, anonymity etc etc), but I personally wouldn't bet against it for the sole reason that it massively increases developer and innovation velocity. It is financial infrastructure where innovation can happen at a fast and almost uninhibited pace. It's the path of least resistance for engineers that want to build financial products. Moving "value" at the *core* layer of infrastructure has never been this easy.<p>Whether you like it or not, financial infrastructure powers our world (chicken nuggets wouldn't be possible without hedge funds, all large corporations eventually pivot into financial services etc), so having a network where innovation of this infrastructure and the products built on top can happen at a faster pace is incredibly compelling. It's a matter of time before most of the new and compelling products and services show up in crypto before TradFi (because easier they're easier to build there), which will in turn onboard more users into the ecosystem.
That’s an excellent question. I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot. Here’s some problems I think a good cryptocurrency solves:<p>- Trust: you don’t need to trust any authority or money emitter when using a cryptocurrency.<p>- Anti-inflation: It’s not possible to print e.g. bitcoin so you are not hit by the “inflation tax”<p>- Nowadays, governments and other institutions can easily block a bank account with very little reasons and then you need to go through a long process of proving your innocence. Crypto won’t be blocked. It’s like modern swiss bank hiding place<p>- A real property: it is one of the things that nobody, especially a government, can take away from you<p>- A war, blackout hedge: it’s hard to travel with gold when you can easily run away from a hot place to a better one keeping your whole fortune<p>- Probably way more use cases like easily transferring money around the globe etc<p>I also believe that crypto are in very early stage of their existence so some of the points may not fully apply yet but they are valid in a long run.
For me the big deal in 2013 was currency devaluation of CHF on 1 day (I thought Swiss Frank is safe from it because it's a direct democracy), and the banks taking the pensioners money in Cyprus. That's when I started understanding that the money that I have in the bank is not mine, I'm just a creditor.<p>Bitcoin solves both of these problems, the code really does what the whitepaper says, I can read it and understand a big part of it (there are a few difficult parts for me).
The mining process for money used to be digging <i>$Symbol</i> out the ground: gold, silver, oil.<p>Towards the end of the last millennium we ditched that standard and let central banks juggle the pools from which money is derived.<p>I always liked how Bitcoin went back to the mining principle: a scarce resource that is hard to produce being used as an intermediary for the exchange of goods.<p>The ultimate reduction of this, for me, is to base mining purely off of time. Every citizen is given a certain number of tokens per day — the same for everyone — because in the end, time is all we have in the mortal world.<p>I don’t know how to square that off with cryptocurrency in its current form (the rich get richer — those with lots of electricity run the mines.) Maybe there’s a future for my <i>proof of life</i> coin?<p>It’s abstract, but the usefulness in the current cryptocurrency whirl is in making me even think this might be possible. If Bitcoin is Perl 4, then what instruments will be the equivalent of Go?
Bitcoin, specifically, has the following advantages:<p>1. "store of value" - no single entity (US Fed, Chinese dictators, De Beers etc) controls its issuance. Supply is fixed and cannot be monkeyed around.<p>2. ease of transfer - we can transfer $10 or $1B worth of Bitcoin easily in 10min for a relatively little cost. While Gold also satisfies #1, it is not easy to transfer.<p>3. programmability - bitcoin can be wrapped and opens up a lot of possibilities (lending, collateral etc) on other chains like Ethereum.<p>4. other people believe in it too - I can trivially fork and create my own ShitCoin. But a harder step is getting other people to adopt it. Bitcoin adoptees, on the other hand, range from gen-Z WSB-ers to staid institutions. The later bucket - US senators, S&P500 companies (MSTR), countries (El Salvador), hedge funds, HNWI's - in particular is providing critical momentum.
Bitcoin today is mainly seen by its investors as a store of value. The closest real-world asset would be gold, which is arguably even less ecologically friendly.
As Trudeau has demonstrated [0], cryptocurrencies can ensure an uninterrupted access to freedom of speech [1], despite the governments' attempts at silencing their opposition. [2]<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/A651oDZvb0E?t=266" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/A651oDZvb0E?t=266</a><p>[1] <a href="https://tallyco.in/s/lzxccm/" rel="nofollow">https://tallyco.in/s/lzxccm/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/freedom-convoy-2022-donations-frozen-give-send-go-1.6347345" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/freedom-convoy-2022-d...</a>
The criminalisation of gambling in Asia and the United States (in both cases widely but not entirely).<p>People have always found alternatives, for example in South Korea index option trading was historically popular. In the United States it was originally illegal online poker, now single stock options are popular. In Europe trading FX was once popular.<p>Many of these outlets that either replace or augment gambling have now been supplanted by crypto trading. In many markets you can actually see how declining activity in one aligns with increasing activity in crypto.
A decentralized ledger that does not require government input.<p>No government can mint more crypto due to awful monetary policy.<p>Also, no, money laundering is not possible on most chains since all transactions are public.
I'm from India and I get paid in crypto for my dev work through USDC. I never speculate in other currencies.<p>1. I don't know of any other way send and receive USD(USDC) anywhere in the world with instant settlement for < $0.00025. Previously used Payoneer and Paypal which has much higher % fees (also USDC trades at ~6% premium in my country :D).<p>2. Good ways to earn yield on USDC on exchanges and smart contracts.
Speculative coins aside, stablecoins solve a problem that has been there forever - they allow you to actually own your money.<p>Without them the only way to keep your money not in cash is give them to 3rd party (banks/investment funds etc) which is just absurd.<p>And if you are not in top country, those third parties can collapse/be blocked in a blink of an eye (and they always and often do).
Today: crypto is a much superior way of sending money across international borders – cheaper, faster, more “user-friendly” (not for everyone, but definitely for my user persona).<p>More generally, crypto can do most things that a bank can do. It’s not the best at many of those things yet. But it’s evolving much faster than banks do.<p>Here’s Yanis Varoufakis on disintermediation from banks:<p>“ Today, you use digital money (phone apps or plastic cards) to buy a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks. But, to do so, you first need an account with a commercial bank. In other words, to grant you access to digital fiat money, the state forces you to fall into the embrace of the commercial banks.<p>So, today, the state guarantees a monopoly over payments to commercial banks. And that is only one gift to the oligarchy. A second, even greater gift, is that only commercial banks are allowed to have an account with the central bank.” [<a href="https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/" rel="nofollow">https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-f...</a>]<p>(He’s very critical of crypto in the rest of the interview - great read.)<p>Even more generally, with smart contracts, the blockchain becomes a platform not only for finance and trade, but also law. Every country has laws written in their own language. Smart contracts are our laws, written in code. So, anything done by authorities which involves record-keeping is a candidate for disruption by the blockchain.<p>The trouble is that many of the best use cases for crypto (land deeds, electric car charging, scientific publishing and citations) are public goods – beneficial for the society as a whole, but not profitable for any individual to build. Once we get over baseball cards and apes, it will be exciting to see public goods flourish on the blockchain.
In Latin America the currency isn't trusted so they hoard USD, in the US inflation plus low bond yields are driving the financialization of housing (ie. turning the world into renters). Maybe bitcoin will fix these. At any rate, USD is going to zero, so you have to pick a financial life-raft one way or the other.
Cryptocurrency, along with mixnets, end to end encryption, the internet itself, and a scattering of other technologies together make it possible to create a (or more likely several) virtual electronic realms outside the control of existing sociopolitical power structures and unbounded by geography.<p>They eventually should make it possible to do this unstoppably.<p>Whether or not these systems, communities, and economies solve any problems <i>for you</i> primarily depends on two things:<p>1. How accepted they become by the rest of the world (they are more likely to be useful if they can become part of, and enhance, our lives - for example by cutting out exploitative middlemen from some types of transaction or providing for cheap, frictionless, ubiquitous micropayments)<p>2. How abusive and/or broken our meatspace societies become (you might feel differently about bitcoin, Tor and the rest in an authoritarian fascist regime with hyperinflation than you do in today’s America, for example)<p>In a few cases we have solved real problems that <i>require</i> this new digital realm to solve, but there’s certainly more to do (as is evident if you try using current iterations of the tech, or better, ask a non technical friend to!).<p>Some examples:<p>- The problem of slow innovation in finance. DeFi might be a toy that’s currently learning everything we already know but it’s doing so rapidly and already creating a few innovations on the edges<p>- The problem of rebellion and civil disobedience — which are important democratic acts that have shaped much of the world we live in today — in an age of ubiquitous information and financial surveillance and control<p>- the problem of moving US dollars (or somethings close enough for many uses) around if you, your organisation, or even your country is locked out of the US correspondent banking system, because like it or not, dollars are the world’s reserve currency at this point in time<p>- etc.
US laborers suffer from the Triffin dilemma[1] by way of the US dollar acting as both a global reserve currency and a national currency. Should US workers have access to an alternate currency, there is a possibility that the trade deficit wich began in the 1970s could be addressed. Though this would put the US government in the position of controlling the world's reserve currency, but not exerting control over domestic monetary policy which I really don't see happening.<p>1. <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1011/how-the-triffin-dilemma-affects-currencies.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1011/how-the-tri...</a>
Well, gold mines basically turn diesel into gold - diesel is the primary recurrent input once you have the reserve.<p>Crypto, with mining, allows conversion of other energy sources, eg hydro or unwanted flare gas, into currency.<p>Not saying it's good or bad, just making an observation.
Cryptocurrencies should address the better distribution of money around the world and contribute to financial independence for people around the world. Unfortunately, there were many scams in the Crypto world, but this will be regulated more and more in the next period, although from the very beginning it should have been more regulated and more human rights activists involved, because the crypto world is a great opportunity for the wider good.
The best dollar bills are printed in North Korea. Forgery (but not fraut) becomes the default with crypto. You can create money without a government charter. However, it is to expensive for the forger to make a profit.<p>With fiat book money any payment processor (banks, CC, paypal) can create dept and thus money. We have to hold a gun against their heads and never look away to make sure that they don't cheat. Crypto solves that problem.<p>Please note, that you asked for solution. Crypto is creating way more problems then it solves. The VISA Network is processing 2G transactions per day. With crypto you can be happy if you get beyond 100k per day. There is better reasons to burn fossil fuel, etc. pp.
I think the NIST flowchart helps explain the use cases well<p><a href="https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1049047164117078016" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1049047164117078016</a><p>IMO the main use case is a decentralized currency that isn't centralized by any specific government (but may be, given enough power). Also things like escrow in a 0 trust system are possible.<p>That being said, like everything, there are _massive_ tradeoffs to this. Almost nobody actually needs this. IMO buying and selling drugs on the internet was one of few actual use cases, whther "right" or not.
With inflation at 7.5%, you lose half your money in 9 years.<p>The only way to outperform that consistently, that I have found, is to Dollar Coast Average: to buy small amounts of Bitcoin per day/week/month.<p>For example: if You start on 01/01/2019 and put in $10 every week, then by now you would have put $1630 into bitcoin.
But there is the thing: the value of that stash of bitcoins today is .... $6,330.56<p>See how this fights inflation?<p>You can make your own calculations easily here: <a href="https://www.bitcoindollarcostaverage.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitcoindollarcostaverage.com</a>
Have you ever been through a contentious divorce?<p>Specifically one where the other party is laying claim to assets <i>you</i> earned?<p>In these type situations, an asset that:<p><pre><code> 1) no one knows you own
2) even if people know you own them, can't be seized short of torturing you to regurgitate the password
3) can be transferred to any person of your choosing and in any jurisdiction of your choosing in a matter of minutes.
</code></pre>
seems pretty darn useful.
Andreas Antonopoulos has a great channel where he answers this and other things.<p>A sample:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghyaFr7ikEY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghyaFr7ikEY</a>
Crypto projects will solve the slow obsolete methods of investing because with cryptocurrencies many around the world have the opportunity to invest with both small and large money.
A wise man told me that ANY change to the tax code to help the "average" guy always results in his paying increased taxes. The adoption of cryptocurrency to help the "average" guy is governed by the same principle.
A few years ago, I was watching a Ukrainian Twitch streamer. PayPal was not allowed, so there were two options for donations: Entering your credit card number and CVC in some weird Russian site’s form, or using Cryptocurrencies.
Banks were closed during the early days of the pandemic.<p>Can't have a bank run with closed banks! (Taps forehead).<p>So, crypto is a bank always open. It's better money than actual money.
Sending money to people when banks refuse to provide the service.<p>A few years ago I had a client in Indonesia, who couldn't pay me via banks, because Indonesia banks just said 'no' to transfers to Russia, and Paypal/WesterUnion fees were exorbitant. We tried bitcoin and were blown away: the whole operation (buying btc for Indonesian currency, sending it, selling it for Russian currency) transaction did cost far less than just converting USD to RUB in a bank.<p>One acquaintance of mine lives in Turkey and Turkish banks refuse to open an account for him. So he receives his payments via Bitcoin and converts them to local cash currency via a local trader.<p>Also, Bitcoin is the last available way to fund anti-Putin opposition in Russia, our authoritarian government has blocked all other ways to do it.
>I can easily get on the hate train, and view cryptocurrency as a pointless waste of resources. What am I missing? To name a few problems they might solve:<p>When the world went off the gold standard they changed how their currency functions. The thing is, forex basically kept them in balance with each other. So instead of a gold standard it became a forex standard.<p>Countries still couldn't just print money, but they did.<p>Countries like Denmark, Germany, Finland, UAE, and some others who didn't... their inflation is under control. The relative wealth of their people is going to be that much higher.<p>Hungary is a great research point. <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/central-bank-balance-sheet" rel="nofollow">https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/central-bank-balance-sh...</a><p>They did print money in 2009 and didnt pay it back, now they did it again in 2020. Comparatively it's not as bad as other countries but opps 7.9%<p><a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/inflation-cpi" rel="nofollow">https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/inflation-cpi</a><p>and who did this? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz</a> A right-wing party who opposes globalization and I believe is fiscally conservative.<p>The polticians don't matter. The fundamentals of the currency matters post-gold standard. The politicians can and will1 print money but they cant get away with it for free.<p>That's where crypto comes in. It's not unlike buying Picassos or Hypercars. You are actively hedging your money against the politicians ability to print money and abuses by the financial system.<p>There's also a very obvious threat here. When countries can effectively no longer print money. Socialism dies again. Hence why communist countries effectively have crypto banned. China and Vietnam have explicit bans. Cuba and Best Korea don't have free access to the internet.
I have been noodling on this for a bit and this is just trying to get some thoughts out:<p>The base fundamental use case is this: We (humanity) need a digital native currency. If I can web / email / interact with pretty much any human on the planet, over a commonly owned and shared infrastructure using openly developed protocols and software, why can't I send / receive money from them too?<p>Pretty much every other use case I have heard is a subset of this<p>- my government stops me from doing X
(X being reasonable from our nice Western point of view like
avoiding currency controls, or unreasonable like buying heroin from the supplier)
- I am unbanked (similar to government stops me ...)
- Why should the world pay a Visa tax?<p>1. there is a difference between "permissioned" and "permissionless" crypto. Roughly speaking permissioned crypto is where some trusted third party (Bank of England, ECB, the Fed) gets involved in creating the crypto-currency and being the validation point to prevent double spending.<p>The double spending thing is the issue - it is the core of what makes all this difficult. If A spends with B and tries to double spend with C you need some <i>public ledger</i> that says A has already spent with B so C is out of luck. The easy way is A and B post the transaction on the Fed's website and the Fed just takes whoever comes in first. The hard way is to say we don't trust the Fed and have a clever way of agreeing what posts are "true" - blockchain, mining etc etc.<p>2. Ok - so we now just invent a working permissioned crypto-dollar. Surely this is all good? Well maybe - the basic use case is really important - we want to spend money as easily as sending email - but :<p>a. Deposits are a big thing. if I can hold crypto-dollars on my phone and send them to Jeff Bezos with no marginal cost or intermediary then why do I have a bank account? Why deposit my salary into my bank? And if I do not deposit my salary into my bank then the wikipedia article on fractional reserve banking goes all funny.<p>If deposits go out the window, all sorts of second and third order consequences hit.<p>- If no deposits, then no lending via the banks. and so no monetary supply expansion. Monetary supply expansion in fact needs to be explicit at the permissioned base.<p>- we could try having banks produce their own currency "under" the Fed but the history of that is total disaster<p>(it's worth nothing that the history of bitcoin is roughly a fast forwarding of 200+ years of bank failures and fraud that lead to the current state of regulation. Crypto is a wild west that needs a marshal.)<p>- Yes we can "trick" everyone into holding their currency in a wallet that routes through a bank account, but most banks will fuck that up in the initial implementation and even so people are stupid, especially for bank accounts that charge - and will simply leave quickly .<p>These sort of consequences of a working crypto-currency were what was being talked about in 2009/10/11 - the downfall of fiat currency etc. Before lots of people found that the number just go up - and speculation (and money laundering / currency control avoidance) became the basis of bitcoin.<p>References:
<a href="https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=1</a>