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0 pointsK0balt1y ago0 comments

For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

That seems like something we would want, the ability to freely transfer payment from one individual to another, internationally, contractually, and transparently.

The only interests that I would think would want that gone are those that profit from the many choke points in our financial systems. Sure, speculators and opportunists have leveraged benefits, and they are the ones you always hear about… you don’t hear about the millions of people quietly managing their private and legal financial affairs, because when you use it for that, it just works -exactly as designed.

FWIW I think you can much more easily associate cash with all kinds of shady and socially caustic uses, but for whatever reason not very many cryptocurrency critics are out to abolish cash, which I would think would be the poster child for seedy, shady, toxic commerce.

But, sure, crypto bad and whatever.

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Scarblac1y ago

> For all the various ills it is sometimes associated with, cryptocurrency remains the only frictionless, 100% transparent, publicly accessible international monetary and payment system.

Its insane energy use, slow speed, high transaction costs, and structural inability to have any legal oversight (for eg reversing fraudulent payments) amount to a huge amount of friction.

And the existence of unknown entities with huge wallets that could pump or crash the price of a coin on a whim also means its not 100% transparent.

Is it money? I would say no, but opinions on that can differ.

K0baltOP1y ago

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that do not suffer from insane energy use, slow transactions, or lack of oversight… and governments have not historically been very good about crashing currency valuations, if not on a whim than with a catastrophic plan. There are stablecoins that are verifiably and transparently backed, which is more than I can say for any extant government issued currency.

But sure, there are lousy performers in the space, just as the banking system is a poor performer in energy use and speed for many kinds of transactions.

For example, If you stack up the energy use of financial institutions, many SOTA cryptocurrency systems compare extremely favourably on a per transaction basis.

I think people easily forget that the space is not at all homogeneous, and there are vast differences between different blockchains and tokenisation systems.

Lumping them all together is like saying that all government backed currencies are total crap just because so many currencies have seen catastrophic inflation and counterfeiting in the last century.

Many countries debt backed currency projects are actually fairly stable and well managed.

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