Honest question, is there any cryptocurrency that provides actual value to people? The blockchain can be trivially deanonymized from my understanding. It's difficult to get coins without at any point revealing your identity. So, if you're not in a circle of people who will physically trade coin for cash (or vis-versa) there seems to be no privacy argument.
I just fail to see crypto as anything but a scam - period. It's like physical gold and silver but worse at everything they do. How can one even derive value from a coin like bitcoin where the swings are often worse than the bolivar.
Hopefully that opens some discussion/thought points that we can focus on.
Update: thinking a bit further on your points. My personal concern isn't privacy, my concern is more with decentralization. I don't agree with other people telling me what I can and cannot do with my own funds. It is relatively simple things... If I travel to another country, being limited to carrying $10k cash on a plane, is absurd (why would I need to carry cash anyway?). If I'm in another country, getting access to my funds is often extremely difficult. These are the things that I'd like to see people work on.
I spent 4 years living in Vietnam (and Laos / Cambodia). Never once found an ATM that worked with my card (Chase bank) and everyone I know said that they were limited to about 2m vnd in Vietnam, which is about $85. Never mind having to pay fees on every transaction.
It is absurd to have to get some special card or bank account. It is absurd to be limited to a tiny amount of money, I certainly wouldn't have been able to pay rent that way.
> is there any cryptocurrency that provides actual value to people?
It allows people to bypass laws and regulations around currency exchange. This can be a good thing -- bypassing repressive regimes, making it easier to send funds over national borders, etc. It can also be a bad thing -- evading consumer protections, reducing the ability of nations to manage their economies, etc.
When I was using darknet markets there were people you could mail cash to and then they would send you crypto.
My understanding is Monero is private. So you could also just buy it from a regular exchange. Maybe it has replaced the whole mail people cash thing. Never looked in to it or used it though.
Monero has not be deanonymized from my understanding. Most coins are shitcoins, yes, including Bitcoin, but Monero is at least decent (assuming you actually own your crypto via a hardware wallet).
I've been told I can use USD to buy drugs too. In fact, USD is the number one currency on the planet for nefarious purposes, by an absurd amount.
Monero has a 24h buy/sell volume of only $110m. What do you think the global volume is for drug/nefarious trade?
Using crypto for "bad things" is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Given that Mastercard just stopped allowing debit card usage at Cannabis stores (which makes sense, it is a source of fraud with cashbacks), it seems like there should be a way that people can buy things without having to take on risk by carrying cash into a store.
> Using crypto for "bad things" is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
I never said drugs were "bad things". Some of them are, but some of them aren't. I was genuinely pointing out that getting access to certain unfairly prohibited drugs was a positive benefit that some people get from cryptocurrency.
> Given that Mastercard just stopped allowing debit card usage at Cannabis stores (which makes sense, it is a source of fraud with cashbacks), it seems like there should be a way that people can buy things without having to take on risk by carrying cash into a store.
See, there's another illegal drug you might be able to buy with cryptocurrency! My point exactly.
Buying or selling cannabis anywhere in the United States is a federal crime. I’m not sure what the White House has to do with this, unless you’re making a topical joke but that was cocaine.
I just fail to see crypto as anything but a scam - period. It's like physical gold and silver but worse at everything they do. How can one even derive value from a coin like bitcoin where the swings are often worse than the bolivar.