> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
Using privacy coins I can donate money to causes I believe in (eg WikiLeaks) without fear of reprisal and with the knowledge that the funds will reach their recipient. If you have a better way, please let me know.
Private or not, which country are you in that would penalise you if you donated to Wikileaks?
Ultimately though, there's a decent argument for /not/ allowing completely anonymous money transfers as the list of organisations that you'd be penalised for donating to probably has a pretty strong overlap with the list of organisations that society as a whole, through it's government, has decided we don't want to receive money.
Crypto /might/ allow you to make an end-run around this system, but do we want it to, and even if we do, is it worth an entire country's electricity usage?
> Private or not, which country are you in that would penalise you if you donated to Wikileaks?
Didnt US companies stop payments to Wikileaks because they exposed the US govt, atleast with crypto Wikileaks and others can bypass US payments systems.
Wasn't this because the US government blacklisted it? Being a tool for evading laws that we don't find convenient doesn't seem like a great reason for existing.
This is a good use case for crypto, but it’s ruined by all the speculation and boom/bust.
I don’t need $30,000k Bitcoin to support Wikileaks and my blogger. $10 Bitcoin works perfectly for this.
But people hype and fraud coins to heights they shouldn’t be and make it useless for actual use.
I think Eth is a good idea. I like smart contracts. But Etherium doesn’t need to be $3k and transactions shouldn’t be $10. $1 Eth and $.01 transactions is still perfectly fine for a sustainable system. But that doesn’t make people millions and billions by milking idiots.
I think if we had regulators preventing wash and pump and dump then we can just pick dogecoin or whatever and move on to digital cash. Until then, it’s not going to be possible with dogecoin going up 10x and down .1x along with everything else.
The reason they're priced so high is because most of the supply has gone to early adopters (and its creators in case of the 70% premined Ethereum) leaving late adopters in fear of missing out and fighting over crumbs.
> we can just pick dogecoin
Dogecoin admittedly has higher inflation, but still had early miners getting 50x more reward than current ones. If you want to deter speculation, it makes more sense to just have a fixed reward, i.e. a pure linear emission, that maintains a high inflation for the first few decades.
I understand and agree with you, but it's pretty difficult to avoid early adopters holding large swaths of value when something goes from not popular to extremely popular.
1) Crypto is easily traceable. Far more than any other means of funds transfer if you exercise even modest efforts to hide the source of funds. And to the extent crypto provides a modicum of privacy it’s because it’s too small for governments to have put any restrictions on it.
2) There is absolutely no guarantee the money will reach Wikileaks. At best, the money will reach the holder of Wikileaks’s private key holder. As we found out with Coinbase, for the vast majority of crypto wallets, that’s not gonna be your intended recipient.
3) Even “The money” it’s a term
Is debatable. If you sent them that crypto 1 month ago and they tried to withdraw it today, at best they would have got half the value you sent them.
There is nothing unique about crypto in terms of privacy other than the fact that most governments haven’t bothered with it. In fact, crypto is so easily traceable I’ve always harbored half a theory that it was created by the CIA specifically to chart out and bust drug and terrorist rings.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason the government isn’t taking down/regulating crypto is because the intelligence agencies are just so thrilled with the awesome network information they’re getting about criminals through their crypto transfers.
You are answering like it’s 2015 and all you know about is how Bitcoin works. All 3 problems that you mention are solved with 1. zero knowledge proofs 2. multisigs 3. stablecoins.
Ah yes, stablecoins that are very well known to keep their values stable over a long period. It's not like one of the top five stablecoins is just going to evaporate into thin air over a week, right?
You are saying dollars are so stable, how come the Zimbabwe dollar crashed!
That’s just wordplay, algorithmic stablecoins have been problematic and crashing since the beginning and a big one just crashed. Call me when USDC or DAI crashes - specifically not Tether because it’s arguably also undercollateralized.
Dai is an algorithmic stablecoin, same as Terra/UST, their supply is determined by an algorithm.
USDT is a centralized stablecoin, same as USDC.
So in your argument that comes quite close to "No true Scottsman" fallacy, what is the exact criteria that you are using to separate out the "stable" stablecoins from the "unstable" stablecoins?
Using privacy coins I can donate money to causes I believe in (eg WikiLeaks) without fear of reprisal and with the knowledge that the funds will reach their recipient. If you have a better way, please let me know.