Nice tech surrounded by scams.

I like crypto specially because I’m paid by crypto transactions and at the same time I have investments in crypto and I’m making good money 👍👍.

Multiple governments want to have their own cryptocurrencies and bitcoin was recently accepted in ETFs (for investment) which is why its value it skyrocketing right now.

Stablecoins might become actually viable methods of payment or cryptocurrencies created by governments. But stuff like bitcoin, ethereum, and all the ethereum tokens, will probably never become used by a large section of the population for payments. The value just fluctuates too much.

What interests me most is the blockchain being used for voting. Wouldn’t surprise me if that happened.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The initial idea and the aspect of “fuck the banks” intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.

It’s really useful for committing crimes on the Internet but as a daily cash replacement I remain unconvinced mostly do to the woeful speed of confirming transactions in most currencies I’m aware of.

i think it’s really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don’t use crypto personally, but it’s important that something like it exists.

cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it’s obviously not going to replace “normal” money any time soon.

i feel like it’s kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you’re trading lots of electricity for “not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations”. obviously it has it’s flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.

edit: oh yeah, i didn’t mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it’s private and it’s an esperanto word :P)

I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life

I’m for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin

But, sadly, I’m against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn’t been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA’s https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn’t even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d’etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.

So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I’ve became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.

I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.

PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I’m using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that’s where the value literally is today. I’d also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they’d be technically viable.

I think a lot of us first heard about bitcoin when Paypal shut down donations to Occupy Wall Street and later WikiLeaks.

Both of them turned to bitcoin to accept permissionless donations.

Bitcoin was just the first majorly successful coin. I think most orgs should accept Monero these days, for Privacy reasons.

Amazing but transaction fees are still too high for normal daily use.

deleted by creator

I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don’t have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).

Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the “crypto world”, but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:

• Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money’s value is not diluted by supply inflation.
• You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
• It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
• At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can’t say the same for most other coins.
• And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other “stranded” supply. Pretty powerful stuff.

Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.

Its awesome if you have some, its basically all time high price these days 😉

No as it pretty much a scam

I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn’t the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.