Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
Apart from privacy coins like Monero, it’s all traceable
Good luck tracing coins that I bought for cash from John Shadyman who can’t give half a shit about KYC.
Spend some time looking into how the FBI traces wallets. It’s pretty easy, and it’s that at some point, John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you. The entire Privacy community considers cash better than every crypto other than Monero.
Any pointers other than “go read some internet”? That’s a rather broad reference.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you
What “people tied to you”? I use the coins to pay some 1337Cr1m3L0rd, with neither of us ever catching a remote semblance of knowing who the other one is. Or, move them to Pierre LeCrook, who’s again giving out cash without asking questions. Shadyman and LeCrook are actually the closest links to me, but again good luck proving that I went to their house and received coins for cash or vice versa.
The pointers are that a lot of people track crypto wallets, it’s not hard to do, and that any wallet ever tied to an ID is directly identified. So any other wallet that touches those wallets gets pulled into a network cluster. Network analysis tools are decades old. Patterns get established. So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled? You trust them to be invincible?
Just use Monero or cash.
https://thecoinomist.com/learn/crypto-osint-how-crypto-and-iowners-are-tracked/
https://www.acfcs.org/acfcs-contributor-report-bitcoin-tracking-for-law-enforcement
So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled?
What you wrote right there is “Once a drug dealer is busted, it’s immediately known who ever bought drugs from them with cash”. Do you seriously not realize that it’s a loony thing to say?
Using monero or tumblers after buying the coins is of course a good advice in case the seller is a plant. But it doesn’t mean that his coins are somehow magically retroactively connected to me when he’s not a plant.
Not quite.
Look, ask any serious privacy community, they’ll give you the same answer. It’s kind of a known standard.
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.
And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy, I think all normal payment systems combined use less energy than it.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy because it’s proof of work based which to my understanding is basically a bunch of computers churning out answers competing to be “first and correct” in order to print coins.
I like the idea of decentralized currency but the current execution of cryptocurrency leaves much to be desired.
The current execution of *bitcoin*, there’s plenty of non pow cryptocurrencies
I stand by my statement. I am aware of non pow crypto.
It’s good for losing a bunch of money.
