A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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The community is rightfully distrustful and dismissive toward a technology that is mostly used for scams and grifting.
The Folding Ideas video on crypto has yet to be adequately refuted.
If someone was earnestly looking for a way to privately transact, the best option I’ve seen is GNU taler, which doesn’t require any crypto or blockchains to accomplish its goal extremely well, it just needs wider adoption.
Putting aside all other arguments, just comparing Monero vs Taler for a earnest private way to transact. Can you explain to me how Taler is the better option from the perspective of the sender and the receiver lets say someone was buying a month of VPN access for $5?
For a XMR/Monero Transaction (S - seller, R - Receiver, X - XMR Chain)
for a Taler transaction (S, R, T- Taler)
Am I missing something? XMR has a longer wait period, but Taler has far less privacy aspects overall.
“Crypto” is full of scams, you’re right about that. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years. You can use it to send money to anybody on planet earth with a phone in under a second (with lightning) for pennies in fees. It has a transparent, auditable supply. It has done this function without a single bank holiday, hack, or hour of downtime since the 2008 financial crisis, through a pandemic, wars, and attempted bans by nation states. No country controls it, there is no CEO and no board, it runs according to an open source protocol.
Bitcoin has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP, currently around a trillion USD which places it in the top 20 countries by GDP. On average, every year it grows no matter whether you are measuring market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, volume of money moved, whatever. It processes millions of transactions and moves billions of dollars of value a year. On nostr alone it has processed 2.9 million transactions over the past two months.
Bitcoin works. It’s been working. People all over the globe use it as a currency, as an asset, and as a payment method.
GNU Taler is worse for privacy than cash in many ways and intermediaries all your transactions. It’s funded by major banks and the EU, the same EU that wants Chat Control. The money in it “expires”. It’s a backdoor for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which is some dystopian shit that will enable total financial surveillance and control. https://lemmy.ml/post/17733761
Gotta love to use a currency with that fluctuating value. /s
When I pay for a coffee and the shop says that I paid the equivalent of 5 cents. Then, I pay the rest and all of a sudden: I paid the equivalent of 100€.
Don’t forget the dire environmental impact of pretty much every cryptocurrency!
Bitcoin uses <1% of global electrical usage, mostly from renewables since miners must chase the cheapest electricity and renewables at off-peak times are it. They turn off during times of peak demand since they can’t afford higher-priced electricity. How do you think that compares to banks? Remittance services? All the infrastructure used to move money from point A to point B? It takes energy and even more valuable: human capital to move value around.
For reasons why Bitcoin isn’t a huge waste of energy and why it actually helps stabilize grids, increase efficiency, decrease electrical costs, and subsidizes the provision of new renewable infrastructure, see https://endthefud.org/
Considering how much of a nieche Bitcoin still is: 0.5% of global energy usage is one hell of a lot of energy!
In what universe is proof-of-work more efficient than conventional banking systems?
Let’s talk about banks.
Let’s talk about all the vaults and their maintenance, the security guards, the Brinks armored cars, all the tellers, wire transaction-handling, and so on and so on.
No, gee, hmm, they’ve never calculated how much a vast, global expense all of this is per second.
Maybe they want you to keep believing that it’s more efficient.
deleted by creator
Thats not true.
Sauce
Bitcoin != most cryptocurrencies
So your “argument” is purely semantic. Good to know.
How has your USD or EUR held up the last 5 years? Buys fewer eggs than it used to huh? Bitcoin has held up pretty damned well. Its price has gotten more stable with time, it is more stable than most national currencies already. Stability is a reflection of scale. Need perfect stability? You can use Bitcoin for payments while receiving and sending in USD or your currency of choice, just use Bitcoin as the settlement layer. Strike already does this in like 20+ countries with instant settlement times thanks to lightning. And no fees.
Fiat currency is guaranteed to lose value over time. Central banks set a target inflation rate of 2-3% per year. Bitcoin may gain or lose value over time. Choosing between a guaranteed loss of value or a potential loss/gain in value, the choice is clear for me. For 15 years in a row, holding BTC has been a better investment than holding USD.
Yeah. But it has been way more stable in the timespan of a few minutes.
Please read up a bit on economics. You’re embarrassing yourself with your austrian brainworm.