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> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless. I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to
by jnovek 23d ago
> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.
I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors.
All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?
- lrvick 23d agoI did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out. Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC. I do not trade, and have no interest in trading. Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.