Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship.
If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means.
Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance. I'm sure other commentators can chime in with more. Calling blockchains a solution to nothing is pretty offensive to the those who rely on it to pay their expenses without another realistic option.
Not to mention, anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero protect both the recipient -and- the sender from financial censorship. I wouldn't want to end up on a public list or have my bank account closed for donating to a controversial person or organization.
And Monero could not provide the excellent privacy that it does without a distributed ledger authenticated by proof of work. When a Monero user spends money, he randomly samples the blockchain until ten dummy transactions can be found and combined with his real transaction in a construct called a ring signature used to obscure the true sender. This only works because the user can secure his own copy of the blockchain. If he had to ask someone else for those dummy transactions, that someone else could use process of elimination to identify the authentic transaction in the user's ring signature.
I would say this its biggest advantage. It doesn't have to be a controversial or fraudulent transaction. Regular digital money ownership and exchange, especially across countries, is severely policed and most of the time impossible for a huge portion of the population, not because they're criminals, but because they happen to be living in or coming from a place where these freedoms are just not there. Cryptocurrencies take away these and numerous other problems that are caused by ordinary financial institutions and the way societies are structured.
Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.
Exchanges are not a part of Bitcoin, and should not exist. Not your keys, not your money.
KYC is an invention by financial systems that have nothing to do with Bitcoin and it's intended use. Nobody holds custody over Bitcoin but the privatekey owner. KYC/AML are scams. They do not exist within Bitcoin. This is simply speculators adhering to a financial system that does not control them. There is absolutely no need at all to ever adhere to KYC/AML as they exist in traditional banking, and not in Bitcoin.
Folks that don't understand how to use Bitcoin outside of that traditional system for some reason are constantly pining for regulation. This is anti-Bitcoin.
KYC and AML exist for a reason - investigating and stopping massive amounts of financial crime.
People want to convert between fiat currency and BTC, that’s why they end up interacting with these regulations.
You can’t currently live only using BTC, but even if you could, the public ledger of every transaction would make it pretty easy to figure out your scheme and come after you anyway whenever you tried to convert the money to actually do anything.
BTC is a poor candidate for day to day transactions. I'm not sure it can ever reach that level of adoption under the current conditions. Lightning network has been a Rube Goldberg machine of complications.
There are other altcoins like NANO which are a better fit for actual transactions.
Agree that there's no way to reach a 100% homogeneous cryptocurrency economy and that exchanges are necessary. As an example, taxes are always paid/priced in the state's currency. Even if we could reach that point, I doubt it could be done by an entire economy switching their billing over to BTC overnight. Exchanges facilitate adoption.
> Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance
Kiwi Farms:
"Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows". The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users."[1]
Backpage:
"Backpage was a classified advertising website that had become the largest marketplace for buying and selling sex by the time that federal law enforcement agencies seized it in April 2018. [...]
Backpage's adult services sections became the subject of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [...and other agencies] over accusations that the website knowingly allowed and encouraged users to post ads related to prostitution and human trafficking, particularly involving minors, and took steps to intentionally obfuscate the activities."[2]
Bitchute:
"BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists."[3]
American Renaissance:
"American Renaissance (AR or AmRen) is a monthly white supremacist online publication founded and edited by Jared Taylor. It is published by the New Century Foundation, which describes itself as a "race-realist, white advocacy organization"."[4]
That's all a little more than "controversial" - most of this stuff is plainly illegal and has led to real-life harm. There were good reasons why those sites were "censored".
As far as I'm aware, only Backpage could be described as "illegal" instead of just "distasteful" or "unacceptable", and there's some controversy over whether Backpage was actually in the wrong there. (Supposedly they were very cooperative with the feds to track down sex traffickers and underage prostitutes)
"Its CEO, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering, acknowledging that "the great majority” of the adult advertisements on Backpage were actually advertisements for prostitution."
So there seems to be admission that the site's main purpose was prostitution and money laundering, whether or not the other accusations are true.
As for the other sites, I don't know the intricacies of US law, but "it's technically not illegal" is usually a bad way to make a case. Those are communities dedicated to cyberbullying, extreme-right wing views and white supremacy. All those things are documented to have cost lives and in many countries are either already illegal or close to becoming that.
In any case, those are not the noble dissidents in authoritarian countries that Blockchain advocates usually argue with.
Sex work between consenting independent adults is something (while illegal) many do not find unethical. The main issue with backpage was they were supposedly not taking down or helping with trafficked people and children (at least this is vaguely what I recall when they got shut down).
(As an aside, the legality and ubiquitous acceptance of pornography and the illegality of sex work is a weird inconsistency in modern culture that I really don’t understand.)
Free speech protections in the US are pretty strong, but I’d suspect the harassment from that farms site is probably illegal.
Credit card processors are within their right to refuse to support white supremacy content (which I think is reasonable). BTC enabling these people isn’t great, but it also enables people in situations where it’s the government that’s objectionable (someone taking money for a blog about banned topics in China or Saudi for example).
In many hostile countries just getting your money out without it being taken by bad actors can be hard.
This resilience is a strength of BTC which can be used for good or evil. It’s also clearly an existing use case of the blockchain.
Is this not literally the “market“ deciding that it doesn’t want to support those businesses? That is, the very thing proponents of free-market capitalism talk about being so great?
I'll tell you something else monero does, is hide the miners. You can't tell who mined the coin. This sounds like a good thing until your AWS access key gets stolen and a thug steals hundreds of thousands of dollars of compute time on your account in hopes of mining a tenth of that in monero coin.
You are talking about cryptocurrency, which is only one use of the blockchain concept. So far there does not seem to be any other use of blockchain except for cryptocurrency, despite so many organizations trying to figure out something else to use it for.
I'm skeptical that blockchain cryptocurrencies can ever be politically acceptable if they were to provide real anonymity, but anonymity in online financial transactions is about the only problem they have a hope of solving.
> Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship.
Cash is still better
This argument comes up everytime blockchain are discussed, but I don't believe it is true
I could theoretically pay 4chan using crypto money,but I argue this is not a solution
First of all, it's not the straightforward, very few people on average can do that on their own
It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous I understand it, but it's still a very hard requirement
But most of all, what do I do with the crypto if the baker doesn't accept them?
I have to change them into a fiat currency valid in my country and I have to do it in my name (or the company name) because it's illegal to do it in some other people name it's also illegal in many countries if you are a company use a third party to shelter the origin of the money (you pay X who then donates to WikiLeaks)
Don't get me wrong. Cash is great. But how do I quickly and securely do a long distance transaction in cash? Do you except people to wait for the postal service to deliver an envelope before they receive whatever they've payed for?
>It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous I understand it, but it's still a very hard requirement
In your example you are paying 4chan. You already have a computer with an internet connection.
>But most of all, what do I do with the crypto if the baker doesn't accept them?
You could sell the cryptocurrency for cash using localbitcoins. Or you could sell it for a gift card. Or you could anonymize the funds and give them to a trusted party to sell at a KYC exchange. Then the cash is withdrawn from the bank and delivered to your organization. As far as I'm aware, there isn't anything illegal about this.
And of course, you could just spend the cryptocurrency as is if the merchant accepts it.
Definitely false. If you're using bitcoin and want to be uber-safe, then you should wait for six 10-minute confirmations. That's an extreme example though. In practice you can spend right after the first confirmation, which can be seconds to minutes for other cryptocurrencies.
Your point is that the lack of adoption makes it an incomplete solution, right?
It's a valid point, but it's like saying e-mail in the 90's was not a good replacement for mail because if you want to forward it to your aunt you still need to print it out and mail it. If adoption improves those problems go away.
Bank to bank this can take 3-5 business days (agreed, western union can be faster, but less convenient) and, depending on your payment processor, can easily cost 15% on the transferred value.
So I argue that, similarly like with the mail to email example, money to emoney is faster, cheaper and safer.
They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them.
International money transfer follow international regulations, you can make them speedier by breaking rules, which is usually not what you want if you receive or send money abroad legally (imagine a mom receiving money from her son having to explain why she received it from unofficial crypto channels)
International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever.
International money transfer it's a highly regulated market users have the rights to be informed of the cost of the operation before starting it, costs also include exchange rates (the operator does the operation for you, you send X and the receiver receive dollars or pound or euros directly, crypto don't include that), taxes collected upfront (crypto skips that) and of course service fees.
International money transfer also pass through IRS (or the equivalent agency there is in other countries) for amount higher than a certain threshold, to avoid money laundering.
Crypto skips that.
etc. etc. etc.
That's why it costs more.
But it is also more secure and less suspicious for the authorities.
> They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them.
Just like a Bitcoin transaction (unless you're excluding it from "real money" because of it's low adoption, but that's not a technical limitation).
> International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever.
Is it insured against your own mistake when selecting the receiver or amount? I doubt it, and that's the only way you'll lose crypto during a transfer.
> International money transfer it's a highly regulated market users have the rights to be informed of the cost of the operation before starting it, costs also include exchange rates (the operator does the operation for you, you send X and the receiver receive dollars or pound or euros directly, crypto don't include that), taxes collected upfront (crypto skips that) and of course service fees.
Actually crypto can do all that (minus the taxes) and it's actually the standard, assuming you're exchanging between different crypto-currencies and not Bitcoin -> Euro. As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address.
> E-mail had no such downsides.
E-mail definitely also skips lots of steps of snail-mail:
- It can't send any physical items
- There's no government agency monitoring your mail for tariffs evasion or other unlawful activities.
- You can't just say you don't want to receive ads by e-mail and then sue the companies that don't comply
- There's no registered mail
- Etc, we could probably come up with other limitations
> As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address.
We'll see if that's true the day all the "minor" limitations are solved.
Today bitcoins cannot be spent, due to technical limitations and psychological ones (high fluctuations make it impossible to know how much you are really spending)
Bitcoins can be stolen by simply hacking (or losing) a device, your money can't, unless it's cash.
But you usually don't keep all your money in cash in the same place, as you do with bitcoins.
> Bitcoins can be stolen by simply hacking (or losing) a device, your money can't, unless it's cash.
Hacking/phishing/social engineering into private bank accounts is quite common, probably more than into cryptocurrency wallets.
It's easy and highly encouraged by every cryptocurrency wallet to backup your wallet seed, so losing a device is not a problem unless you ignore that advice.
> But you usually don't keep all your money in cash in the same place, as you do with bitcoins.
I don't, I have them split into multiple wallets, sort of like my fiat money.
I carry a small amount on my phone but most of the BTC I own in on a cold/hardware wallet. That stays home just like the debit card for my main bank account.
> They are not common and you don't lose any money, if they are stolen from banks.
if someone obtains access to your bank account and withdraws your money, then YOU have to prove that it wasn't you.
> You debit card cannot easily be used to steal money from you even if someone steals it physically
right, because especially since covid-19 you are less and less asked for your PIN when purchasing with debit / credit card
> if someone obtains access to your bank account and withdraws your money, then YOU have to prove that it wasn't you.
Yes
And it's quite easy
And that's why it's more secure than any crypto currency out there
> Any statistics to backup your claim?
Crypto currencies are used by a small minority of the population and a small minority of them have gone further than trading them
So if you have some stats to backup your claim that "it's easy to have many wallets and backup your seeds" for the general population, I will gladly look at them
Cards are insured, if someone uses your card and it's not you, you simply call and block the card and the amount is refunded
You have up to 180 days
My bank sends me an SMS everytimey the card is used and they call me everytime I use my card in anomalous ways (for example when I'm away from home, it's a red flag for them and they call to ask if it's me using it in another place, of course they must have some kind of model for that, they don't call when I'm away for work)
This comment reminds me so much of the 90s video that was posted some time ago about how the internet was useless and online commerce was not going to work. Including the stupid idea of selling books.
If you were in tech before ethernet and TCp/ip (ipx/spx, netware, ring networks, etc) you wouldnt believe hos far we will get.
That's my view of blockchain. Naysayers are just people not knowing better or people with interests.
Blockchain as a current tech may suck (shit... bitcoin is so inefficient...) but there's people doing R&D on this TCP to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
> w the internet was useless and online commerce was not going to work.
Except I had my first internet connection in 1994, have worked all my life to help companies transition to digital economy and I believed internet and e-commerce were going to work because they solved a problem
Bitcoin doesn't
> but there's people doing R&D on this TCP to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
10 years after the only killer app for crypto is avoiding taxation and buying drugs online (if we exclude paying for ransomware, which I don't consider a killer app)
10 years after internet was born (some say it's 1983, some say it's 1990 when TBL release the first version of an HTTP server) had already changed the world and had many killer apps (email, FTP, NNTP, DNS, gopher among the more popular)
P.s. my first experience with networking was in high school, a 1mb token ring local net in the computer science lab filled with IBM pcs with 4MB of RAM running OS/2
P.p.s. my first programs were written in Rexx and C
Don't combine money laundering with denying services to people who do things that are distasteful certain other groups. Legally free speech, pornography and weed payments are also banned on platforms that go through the normal payment processing routes. The weed issue is because of federal laws but I don't know the full reason behind the other bans.
One quick example: Patreon vs Sargon or Patreon vs artists that produce works with nudity. In these cases, things users were banned for did not happen directly on their platform and weren't even mentioned on their platform. I list them because they're easy to google but there are others.
Do you consider those situations to be something other than censorship?
If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means.
Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance. I'm sure other commentators can chime in with more. Calling blockchains a solution to nothing is pretty offensive to the those who rely on it to pay their expenses without another realistic option.
Not to mention, anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero protect both the recipient -and- the sender from financial censorship. I wouldn't want to end up on a public list or have my bank account closed for donating to a controversial person or organization.
And Monero could not provide the excellent privacy that it does without a distributed ledger authenticated by proof of work. When a Monero user spends money, he randomly samples the blockchain until ten dummy transactions can be found and combined with his real transaction in a construct called a ring signature used to obscure the true sender. This only works because the user can secure his own copy of the blockchain. If he had to ask someone else for those dummy transactions, that someone else could use process of elimination to identify the authentic transaction in the user's ring signature.