‘I know about lying, I do it for a living’: Ben McKenzie as crypto critic (opens in new tab)

It's not a bubble it's a set of scams whose primary value is in allowing bad actors be they oppressive governments or criminal groups to move money around bypassing embargoes and bans. On top of that we also get a new scam bubble every little bit so that we can point and say "see that one isn't a scam" until it turns out it is, or its being used to send money to north Korea or Iran or whatever.

It's not one scam it's a series of scams. It's not useless it also allows large scale financial crimes. It's amazing!

More importantly, the vast majority of anonymous transactions occur via ownership secrecy havens. Quadrillions are held and transferred in offshore havens like Nevis, which has beneficiary and ownership secrecy baked into their constitution. Monero democratizes transaction secrecy, allowing the middle class to have the same level of financial privacy that criminal organizations attain regularly by incorporating in an offshore haven and hiring the appropriate lawyers. If transaction secrecy were a legitimate concern of yours, you would be eliminating it where it actually happens and facilitates crime first.

I'm sincerely asking. That appears to me the endpoint of the argument you make here. I might be wrong in my interpretation or conclusion, so please do correct any inaccuracies or leaps you find in my post.

I am not a fan of cryptocurrency, because I think it is stupid. But I am a fan of (actually) anonymous and privacy preserving currencies. So I can continue to not harm or victimize others, but acquire the molecules that make me the most functional.

This is certainly an ideal that libertarians hold, though I do not claim myself or my views as being particularly libertarian.

I don't think so. The amount of fraud in crypto is nothing compared to what has been exposed in the FinCEN leaks [0], which the fraud is even worse with the banks allowing the laundering of trillions of dollars for criminals, drug-lords and gangsters. The same is true with the Zelle payments platform also rife with rampant fraud. [1]

> Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.

Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain will be caught as soon as the money hits the exchange or frozen once swapped into stablecoins.

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...

Thank you for enlightening the dirty masses. Maybe you have other insights, for example should one invest into banks or wait for the "crash". In any case I think your opinion is worth nothing and should be prefaced with "IMHO", rather than stating something we all know is logically impossible to have something and it to be useless. Here is a logical exercise, if something exists it is useful by the fact that it has a name for example which groups loose entities into a whole. I got more of this ...

It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.

There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.

I have had colleagues who were cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The casino enthusiasts did not say "we're going to replace the international financial system with casinos! Poker chips are better than dollars!" No-one stumbled wide-eyed up of the casino at dawn, up $1K, insisting that this was the future of the economy for everyone. After I said that I wasn't interested in poker or roulette, none of them tried to preach the value of poker or roulette to me.

Because they knew it was a game. An adult game with real money at stake; but all the same, just for play. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not have that same level of awareness.

Some others are more altruistic than bitcoin (having a pure linear emission which prevents the current generation from hoarding most of the supply). What do you mean by non-anonymous nature?

There is really no good reason to use crypto. If there was a true political want an better working international currency or system could be made relatively fast.

I am pretty solidly dug in against crypto now. I have not seen it used for anything besides scamming. I believe, due to the incentives at play, people championing a cryptocurrency future can not be trusted anymore than a degenerate gambler asking you to invest it all in his patented gambling strategy.

Other people, the degenerate gamblers in question, are solidly dug in for the matter of their own profits- necessarily at the expense of others. This is the side championing cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are doomed to forever be damaged by their own wreckless stupidity. They will be damaged every time they receive a hard and necessary lesson about why our financial systems have certain properties and structures. Then they will demand the cost of that lesson be externalized onto the lesser-enfranchised.