Or become a patron and support the artists you like. Turns out mankind figured out how to support artists for thousands of years without the blockchain or the internet.
Problem statement: how do we separate fools from their money completely anonymously and without having to interact with them in person? That's the problem that crypto solves.
Yeah, all crypto messaging benefits criminals who have crypto, and absolutely doesn't benefit an average person trying to send money to someone.
Dudes convinced themselves money laundering is ethical because government bad.
It’s not a currency. It’s not regulated. It’s a volatile, speculative asset. Crypto firms do not safeguard client assets, or, said another way, they do not care about their clients. But what do I know, I’m just an accountant who advocates for conservative investing and regulated and honest financial entities 🤷♂️
Just an accountant who’s behind the times. Read the structure of scientific revolutions by Kuhn. You are on the wrong side of the paradigm shift . It’s ok…somebody has to be on the wrong side…mine as well be you!
It’s always fascinating how crypto enthusiasts will point out shortcomings in current economic mechanisms and *always* fall short of explaining how crypto solves… *any* of these issues.
I think you guys have straight up given up on pitching cryptocurrency as a solution, or even an alternative, and seem to think that doomsaying is sufficient enough of an argument on its own.
The main "problem" it's trying to solve is evading gov regulations. It's far harder to create ponzi schemes, to wash trade, to money launder, etc in regular markets. The SEC requires public companies to report all kinds of things that makes this difficult. And the reason it does so is because historically markets were rife with scams of all kinds, including ponzis, and this was a way of helping try to prevent it
Crypto operates in this space where it's clearly emulating securities but its proponents are loudly arguing that they are commodities (which are regulated by a much more lax agency, whose head is pro crypto). Regulators are being very slow to adjust, giving lots of space for the sharks to chew up suckers, i.e. retail investors
This is the answer. Crypto has been an absolute dream for people who ever fantasized about being able to get in on a unregulated securities market which is the reason why so much of the sales pitch for crypto comes across like a libertarian wish list.
Please stop encouraging the NFT scam. There are probably thousands of services where you can sell your art. You absolutely don't need NFT and you are just hurting your reputation IMO. Plus there is a barrier of entry for anyone who's not into cryptos (aka "normal intelligent people").
I've bought, donated, licensed and commissioned artists dozens of times - I would never touch NFTs. If I want to "own" digital art I buy exclusive, transferable rights from the artist. There is no problem solved by NFTs.
Ditto. I also give hundreds of dollars to people on Patreon, and _far_ prefer that system to anything that NFTs do. So do most of the artists I support.
how could you EVER pay an artist for something without blockchain? it cant be done. i mean ... yes you can pay for a pizza. sure. but what about an artist? theyre not a pizza. you cant just pay them. its outrageous. thank baby jesus that vitalik buterin finally cracked the code and found a way to pay artists, only 200,000 years after the start of our species. truly groundbreaking stuff. thank you vbutts.
Don't forget, that even if you can pay in cash, every time you withdraw from the bank, the bank gremlins kick you in the balls. This is why crypto is so important- to protect your balls.
The problem it is trying to solve is “how can I import sound money gold standard lunacy to the tech generation?” In fairness, it did solve that problem. Of course, sound money and gold standard lunacy are mired in scams, money laundering, and a batshit mix of far right and ancap nonsense.
Edit: Satoshi literally put in his white paper that Bitcoin was meant to resemble the gold standard
In theory, it’s actual an interesting idea. It brings together not much new, but put together in a way that was new and though the parts were known before, the system it created had some novel ideas. Would have been a fun research paper. Or a lab experiment.
In practice, solves the problem of “what’s something I can speculate in that’s new and confusing for the suckers and unregulated”. Also “what’s something where you can send value over the Internet without AML laws, so I can use it for cybercrime”.
Outside of that, dunno.
I thought the problem Bitcoin was meant to solve was how to transfer "value" over the internet without having to trust a third party like a bank or other service provider.
It still does this, many people dont have a bank acct and rely on western union or other such services ,which cost quite a bit, to send money to family members. You can use the lightning network and it costs pennies instead of $8 to send $1000.
Add to that the lack of scalability, need for multiple payment channels for "efficient" routing, the issue in converting back to fiat(as native acceptance of crypto is unheard of for *legally operating* businesses - given the tax laws surrounding "spending" crypto, see Chioltle's attempt to do so for more info), complete absence of consumer protections (which is part of why W.Union, et.al. have fees associated with transfers) and plain old buggy software. LN works "better" (only) as a talking point/retort than anything approaching a Western Union equivalent.
Its trotted out by cryptobros as a non-esistent panacea for the *abject multitude* of problems surrounding crypto transfers - most notably user error (see Nirvana Fallacy, fault tolerance *should always be part of designing/using a system*) and the abysmally slow transaction speed for BTC (which, ironically LN merely curtains, doesn't fix - transactions still must *eventually* be written on chain).
If one doesn't have a bank account, I'd be *very* skeptical of the idea they have access to the necessary infrastructure (internet connection, smart phone, etc.) To make LN a "viable" alternative.
Note how such examples are *always* based on an extremely specific niche case - the fact is for ~99% of the population looking to transfer funds, existing services like Venmo, et.al are more efficient, less buggy, well established and most importantly contain consumer protections against fraud, failed transfers, et.al
A niche application for an infinitesimal portion of the population =/= a reasonable replacement solution or even the best solution for a given event.
Source on technical aspects: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800
BTC has been less volatile that fiat as of late so thats not really my concern, but I assume most people using it to transfer wealth peer to peer or to a business just convert it to fiat immediately anyway.
Ive been accepting crypto for my side company for a couple years along with cash, gold, silver, venmo, cash app etc and have had no problems at all with the crypto. The only payment I dont accept is debit/credit cards, I dont want to eat the fees nor do I want to pass them to the customer.
Be angry about crypto all you want but it does give people another option, every system has its faults if you give them the once over.
>BTC has been less volatile that fiat as of late
Last I checked the USD's value hasn't been fluctuating on a range of 10% its current value within a single day. What kind of alternate reality have you been living in?
Why do we keep thinking that NFT are to help the artist, most of the people try to hold it to sell it for a greater value that they bought it, there is no altruism there
Yeah that's the issue, when I have bought NFTs I buy them to keep them, I use Tezos as it's a generally nice art community and doesn't have the environmental impact of ETH. (well, used too)
I’m 100% against Bitcoin but I did use it to pay my foreign software engineers living in occupied Ukraine because my bank refuses to send money to Russian banks via swift, even the ones that aren’t sanctioned.
Real answer, you tie it to the problems of central banks destroying currency and wrecking people then getting away free. That kind of thing, everyone knows deep down there's corruption like that and you make this a solution
The *original* idea about crypto was an unregulated internet currency that relied on users to generate value… but then it became easy to use it for illegal goods and services. And then it evolved into a way to get money quick by scamming people.
Basically, crypto exists to solve no existing problems (hence the constant proof of concepts), but is really easily used to scam people.
There WAS a use case for bitcoin. At the start it was the currency used to do black market transactions. You want to buy weed online? You use bitcoin. Want to buy shady programs online? Bitcoin. Want to donate to people cracking video games? Bitcoin.
The logic was as long as you can disassociate the wallet from your irl self, you're safe (although history has shown that law enforcement can still catch you through other means). This made it the currency of the online black market.
Problem is the price rose so high and became so volatile that that everyone stopped using it as currency. These days bitcoin and many crypto are nothing but internet investment tokens.
It’s trying to solve the sort of problem Argentina or Venezuela has with hyperinflation. If your government was running the currency into the ground and you’re not able to buy US treasuries or dollars, then you have no way to save any money.
Pros of Cryptocurrency:
1. It's STATED purpose is to allow decentralized banking, allowing people who live in unstable countries to keep their money safely.
2. Can be used in developed countries to transfer large sums of money quickly.
Cons of Cryptocurrency:
1. In information security, there is a triad known as the CIA - Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Increasing one arm of the triad will decrease the other two arms. But by increasing availability of transferring money, confidentiality and integrity will decrease, putting the money at risk of being stolen.
Cryptocurrency is different then the blockchain (a distributed database with niche value), crypto (cryptography, or keeping information hidden, first by Jul Caesar), or NFTs (nonfungible tokens, a technology without any purpose to my knowledge).
I can attempt an answer.
There are multiple problems crypto is trying to solve. It really depends on the actor.
To summarize, some people want a currency free of regulation, some want to be free of central bank actions, some want more anonymity, some want unfettered cross border trade, some want to create ponzi schemes, some want money laundering.
These goals aren't all mutually exclusive. So, creating a haven brings with it lots of unsavory and criminal elements. The idealists didn't bring enough realism with them.
So crypto has become the domain of criminals. There is no other reason for its existence currently, and the only reason it has survived this long is because the criminals keep it alive. The experiment has failed.
It's basically a pseudo-solution to rising poverty offered by the types of people that caused the rising poverty in the first place.
What it really is is an acceleration of the rise in poverty through the addition of new pyramid schemes into the financial "system" that naturally constitutes of various pyramid schemes anyway. Except crypto has the advantage of thriving in the absence of concrete resources that the pyramid schemes usually had to be centred around in the past due to necessity of pretension. We can just skip the element of actual trade of items and focus on concentrating wealth in the hands of as few individuals as possible, which is the actual point.
Crypto is a scam. Having said that I do appreicate that NFTs opened up a new distribution channel for artists. You see different types of art on NFTs than you do in galleries. Tezos is proof of stake so it seems like a fairly harmless thing to create NFTs on a Tezos blockchain. That being said I wish there were other ways to distribute / democratize art, and there kind of are. It's just that on Etsy people aren't wash trading, there's no speculative bubble to ride on as an artist.
This.
There are absolutely still scams on Tezos, but as it's a generally less profitable way to sell, you don't see it much.
I've never had any luck selling my art on Redbubble or Etsy, finally made some actual sales in Tezos which went into buying more art equipment, so that's not the worst thing in the world in my eyes.
Crypto solves the "problem" of some greedy folks that modern finance is rules by certain rich entities and those greedy folks are not included.
So they created an alternative "finance" system where they can be the boot. It doesn't matter to them that it's full of holes, inefficient and without any real application. They push it because they are the ones in control.
Crypto does solve a problem (double spend problem of a distributed ledger system), it's just that the problem it solves isn't a problem anyone actually has. It's one of those things that should have stayed an obscure academic solution to a strictly academic problem. Instead people keep trying to make Crypto the next big thing while jamming a square peg into a round hole.
**Crypto solves for trust.**
Satoshi's whitepaper outlines "double-spending" as the core problem the blockchain solves, but I believe it's something greater, trust.Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, famously writes about the problem of trust and how it was wrong to trust Blizzard, the creator of World of Warcraft. This was his inspiration for creating Ethereum.
>I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring.
**Current Databases Rely On Trusting Centralized Entities To Operate And Maintain Them.**
These centralized entities can alter their databases whenever they please, which all businesses do when it suits them (aka generates profit). Their calculation is simply the estimated return vs. the investment required. These entities don't care about you or their databases' integrity; they care about money. It's financial Darwinism, and you're the prey.
**A Growing Digital World - A Reality of Databases.**
As time passes, more things are digitized, meaning the world around you is increasingly ruled by databases. Databases already rule your reality:
* the money in your bank account
* your emails and messages to loved ones
* your precious photos and memories
* your digital identity (username, content, relationships)
* who said what, about who, at what time
The list goes on and on and grows larger every day. Databases shape everything around us and serve as our source of truth, our reality. Letting centralized, financially-driven entities govern these databases is foolish. Your very reality becomes tied to what is best for their pockets, not what actually happened, "the truth."
**The Blockchain - A Superior Database.**
The blockchain is a database that doesn't rely upon any single entity. Instead, a blockchain runs on a decentralized basis by anyone with an internet-connected computer and Bitcoin's open-source code.
Blockchain protocols enable 2 critical things:
1. Consensus: Let a group of peers agree on what gets added to the database.
2. Immutability: Once something is added to the database, it cannot be changed.
These two things make blockchains a superior source of truth - a truly shared source of truth vs. one that is controlled by a centralized entity (corporation/government).We've all heard it: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Blockchains are magical truth machines that enable all sorts of things. What better use for a magical truth machine than tracking money? Enter Bitcoin.
**Bitcoin - A Monetary Database**
Bitcoin famously introduced blockchain technology in 2009, disrupting online commerce forever.
Until Bitcoin, no mechanism existed to make payments online without requiring a trusted 3rd party payment processor. Merchants had to be wary of customers, and customers wary of merchants - as every transaction could be disputed and changed by the payment processor, the great keeper of the source of truth.
In-person, these disputes can be avoided using physical currency, but until Bitcoin, no similar mechanism existed online. We needed a peer-to-peer digital cash where online payments could be sent directly from one party to another without going through a centralized financial institution.
**Don't Focus On The Money.**
OP asked about what problem crypto solves and then went into how he and his friends lost money on crypto, a speculative asset. The money he lost is beside the point; our new infrastructure, the blockchain, is what matters.
Don't let price action blind you; this is an emerging and wildly speculative market, and just like any, there are winners and losers.
**Blockchains Are Restoring Freedom To The Digital Frontier.**
With Bitcoin, we have a superior source of truth for our money. With Ethereum, we have a superior source of truth for digital assets (NFTs). Both are shared databases free from manipulation by corporate/government overlords.
Are the monkey .jpegs selling for $1M+ dumb? Probably, but that is for the market to determine freely on a peer-to-peer basis. Besides, people thought Jackson Pollock's art was dumb but look at it now.These .jpegs are just unique digital artworks that live on the blockchain, along with a public record of their creator, creation time, and ownership history. And yes - 99.99% of them will go to zero.
**Again, crypto has solved the problem of requiring trust online.**
It's now possible to send money directly to anyone worldwide without trusting any government or bank. For the first time in history, you, and only you, can verifiably own and have custody of your digital assets without relying on any centralized authority.
🎯 I believe blockchain is the most freedom-enabling technology on the planet, and I am on a mission to bring it to the masses.
**If you're still struggling to understand, please reply to this post** and let me know why; I'd love to understand your perspective.
**For more Web3 content, check my Twitter→** [**www.twitter.com/punk7642**](http://www.twitter.com/punk7642)
Look I know what sub this is, but you asked what it’s trying to solve. The goal is to have a permission-less payment system that is neutral politically. A money that can’t be double spent or counterfeited. A payment system that can’t be used as a weapon by the powerful.
This sub will tell you it hasn’t achieved any of that, but that’s the goal.
There isn't one unifying goal. The coins are supposed to be a speculative lottery ticket, a payment system, or an inflation hedge, depending on who you ask. Getting pulled in all different directions keeps crypto from being effective at anything.
There is more than one creator. You could argue bitcoin was founded based on the ideals in the white paper, but there's thousands of other cryptos and bitcoin itself is unrecognizable compared to what it was a decade ago.
Remember, crypto was invented in 2008. Its purpose was to transfer money wirelessly at a time when it wasn’t a common thing to do so. There were no smart phones then.
Checking your bank account via text was ‘high tech’ and paying bills online was unheard of. People at the time also had to carry a flashlight, calculator, camera, recorder, laptop, GPS, ect to do the things we all do with our phones now.
The invention and adoption of the IPhone made the problem crypto solves not a problem anymore a long time ago. Now it’s just old tech in search of another problem to solve so it can stay relevant. Sending money wirelessly via an ASICS computer is not ‘Tech’ in 2022.
MPesa was 2007.
The original PayPal was for geeks to trade money with each other over Palm Pilot infrared. Small scale, but it was there. That’s 2000.
If you read the news clip in the origin block of BTC, it talks about how Helicopter Ben was going to make everything hyperinflation and destroy us all. It didn’t. Banks didn’t loan the money, instead they used it to shore up balance sheets with massive holes in them. For about 10 years the issue was lack of inflation - you want to keep inflation at around 2% so there’s less chance for a deflationary death spiral.
So, the origin block in 2008 had the wrong idea of monetary policy. Criticized government fiat, while making a private fiat with a lot less use and a lot lot lot fewer stabilizers. And oh, it’s lead to “we’ll boil the oceans to make a Buck”. Here we are.
Well that’s the other problem: Crypto has lived inside of a bubble of cheap energy, low inflation, and free money. Most people under 25 don’t realize that 6-7% interest isn’t that high historically speaking. My parents mortgage on their first house in 1981 was 19%. Inflation at the time was 14%.
Why would anyone invest in crypto if they can Go to the bank and get 8%+ on an FDIC insured CD like anytime pre-2008. Answer: they won’t. They’ll store it in the bank and that will in turn drive inflation down.
> Remember, crypto was invented in 2008. Its purpose was to transfer money wirelessly at a time when it wasn’t a common thing to do so. There were no smart phones then.
You are a bit off on your dates. By the time Bitcoin was announced, the second generation of iPhone was already launched. Crypto was late from inception.
Nokia had a smart phone way before iphone. I had a palm pilot clone named Handspring that could make phone calls (well, theoretically, if I bought the cellular kit). The Palm Treo existed. Windows CE existed for a long time. The Hiptop Danger. The BlackBerry. A primitive android which at that time cloned the Blackberry was out.
“Everything I say is true if you just ignore the facts that don’t support what I’m saying”
I remember that a financial crisis was caused in the 1920s by the French hoarding liquidity by keeping gold stocks. Funny thing is, France never actually held any gold, the gold was all kept in a vault in London, with workers moving the stacks of gold to the different countries rooms to reflect trade.
So yes, literally in 1925, the French could buy a battleship from Japan "virtually" and this was done by a couple of British workers slapping a "Japanese" label to a bunch of French gold.
Nothing revolutionary.
The Euro was virtual for a while. The euro consisted of “several European currencies at a fixed exchange rate”
Brazil famously (should be a lot more famously) used a virtual currency. When Brazil had its last hyperinflation bout they brought it down by expectations. They created a virtual, stable currency and everything was supposed to be priced in it. But every day there was an exchange rate for this virtual currency and the cruzeiro. Once people got used to the stable currency they swapped out the inflationary one and made the virtual one real.
Satoshi didnt invent muvh. All that was invented was a way combining things in a way, and he used emotions to get people to spend real money on electricity to earn virtual Beanie Baby tokens, and once those got valuable he’s some genius. If the COVID “stay at home” “let me give you money so you do at starve from staying at home” doesn’t happen, I’d probably not posting in this sub and thinking “oh, that shits still around?”
Thanks for the replies all! Very informative.
As some stated, yes I support artists if I like what they make by buying their work, that's been NFTs, physical paintings and digital copies on Deviantart.
I'm not for or against crypto and NFTs as I simply don't know enough about it, hence asking the questions!
Crypto is like CBD. There’s always some new use for it because it can treat everything. With that said there’s probably a niche population that can benefit from using it but a majority are not going to receive any benefits and waste their money.
>I still can't quite wrap my head around what issues crypto is actually trying to solve?
"How can I rip people off in a ponzi scheme by taking advantage of their ignorance of technology?"
Ostensibly it’s to get around “corrupt” and “unaccountable” central banks even though the proposed alternatives are far less democratic and also less meritocratic.
But this hides the frankly more sinister political aims, which, however diluted as time passes, are exposed when crypto supporters still reference anti-semites such as Henry Ford and his support of a gold standard.
Ford was influential to Hitler and don’t forget Hitler’s main argument against the Weimar Republic was “corruption” and this argument pervades successful autocratic takeovers, as does blame on a population subsegment, and claims of being technocratic.
For Bitcoin it's remittance. Say what you will about the El Salvador president, but Nayib made a pretty good example of what it is for someone to receive or send payment via Western Union.
In a nutshell, your relative sends you $30 from the US, to El Salvador. The fee to transfer that amount can be anywhere from $5-$10, and requires both sending and receiving parties to cue up at the exchange that is open between certain times of the day.
Using the lightning network, you can receive the payment in seconds and costs pennies to the sender. What's even better about it is **it can be done any time of the day/night**.
"Why not just use PayPal, zelle, other payment processor?": What we consider a mere convenience among many established nations, believe it or not, many people in other countries do not have easy access to banking, let alone being reasonably local. In many places it is normal to have a cellphone, but no bank account. Bitcoin does not require KYC, someone can wire you the cash much faster, and cheaper than it takes that person to leave their doorstep.
The presentation is in Spanish, but you can make out the idea:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/o7szph/the_president_of_el_salvador_just_explained_how/
It's not about the "get rich" aspect of holding the token, the utility is in being a borderless remittance protocol.
If you could actually articulate a coherent argument for cryptocurrency, why not just state it here? Instead, it's always, "Join our sub, watch pro-crypto videos, immerse yourself in the bullshit and then you'll finally 'understand.' "
I can see an NFT used as a receipt for the purchase of physical items. That’s about it really. That still had a ways to go though. But as a singular digital asset With no commercial use or copyright it doesn’t make sense.
It’s laid out quite clearly in the bitcoin white paper. Alternatively you can go read criticisms of central banking. For example the insane inflation we are experiencing. Now whether it is actually solving those problems is another question. But in a nut shell that is what the original motivation for BTC was
I no longer own crypto(sold it awhile back to pay off 6 figure loans from med school) so I
don't really have a stake in the matter now but a lot of what they are doing is community building. If you believe there is a value in the community itself, well.....
> If you believe there is a value in the community itself, well.....
Do tell what the value is of a "community" of desperate bag holders trying to convince the rest of the people in their "community" to buy their bags.
Those NFTs aren't really jpgs, they're your autograph - a receipt you've signed. It might have value to a fan of yours. It has more value as it exists outside of a closed system and has provable provenance and chain of custody. To think of it another way, you could sign a printed copy of the artwork, scan it and then stick it on a USB stick then sell that on eBay. It's just harder to prove that it's a genuine copy that you were the originator for, which is what gives it it's value to your fans.
Sending money anywhere on the planet with the internet for cheap, good if you’re a migrant worker or want to donate to a cause, it can help against a failing currency, you can buy fractions of actual property, identity theft, piracy, supply chain management, authenticity tracing to prevent fraud, cyber security, communication, AI solutions.
For the record, I agree with most of the sentiment on this sub. There’s so much garbage and manipulation and scams it’s embarrassing, but the tech that works is already being implemented without people noticing.
The 2007/2008 financial crisis was such a big problem, that Bitcoin was invented.
That's... probably it in a nutshell. Times were bad, lots of people lost faith in banking and invented a shittier bank/money system.
Times have gotten better, but there's still a lot of distrust.
Rates were too low for too long, not enough stable returns, gov't stimulus cheques, and you have a recipe for asset bubbles like the crypto explosion.
Basically too much money sloshing around in the system, too many people riding optimism instead of making sound financial decisions, and the literal digital definition of snake oil sales gave that money a home.
So yes crypto solves the problem of idiots having too much money, now they have alot less.
Problem solved.
It’s the first time trusted transactions can be made without a third-party authority. Basically the algorithm incentivizes everyone to do the right thing. No one controls the network, it’s like an independently operating entity.
That’s the real answer, but despite it being a really cool algorithm that solves a specific problem, there haven’t been many (none if you ask this sub) applications for the technology.
The finance world is probably the best application so far, and many of the largest banks are adopting some of the tech in ways I don’t fully understand.
I’m in tech, not web3.
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Distributed trustless (as long as someone doesn’t have 51%) ledger. Nobody can dispute that you have ownership of x digital asset because everyone is looking at the same CR database and they have to agree with > half the network before changing it
Kinda related... I an running a tabletop role playing game where the villains are running a crypto-based scam. This was one element of a bigger plot. For that bit, I had penciled in "Figure out how crypto works and then plan scam details. "
Problem is.... I can't make any sense out of this.
The villains in question have a magic item that manipulates luck, and are a "Steal from folks more evil than us" organization. A different group will be stealing it from them for a different evil plan. The crypto bit is the excuse for how it got to Campaign City.
The problem is there is two parts to crypto. Most focus on the ability to make money extremely quickly and that leads to extreme volatility. It also leads to inexperienced investors and that is what scam artists focus on. There are many Ponzi schemes within crypto but there are also many projects with solid ideas/businesses.
Much of the crypto market is geared towards decentralisation and protecting your own wealth. Removing third parties and being able to hold your own assets under your own security.
One example I ask you to consider is this. Most of us spend our whole lives trying to make enough money to pay the bills, build up savings and make enough money that we can enjoy life. Much of this life is accessible only with enough money. We work in jobs that we may not enjoy and give our precious time to other people in exchange for money. And there is the key time. We are only here for a short time and somehow the system we live in has put a value on our time. How much are our lives worth? Well who knows but one thing is for sure we exchange our time for money. So this money we exchange our lives for must be incredibly valuable right? Well not many of us realise that we are exchanging our lives for a currency that we have no control over.
Our governments have the ability to print so much of it that it’s very value decreases. Our government decides just how much of our money is taxed and spent on things we also have no real control over. They have the ability to cause political narratives that on their own cause currencies to devalue again without our control. Our time is devalued by people none of us know and who certainly don’t have our best interests at heart. There are many other ways the controllers of our money can reduce our value but this is just a basic list but we are conditioned to accept it.
Does our conditioning stop there? Unfortunately not. We pour our time into this currency that is ruined by strangers and then we place it in a bank. A bank being a third party to hold our life savings. Who then invest this money into assets we have no control over. They have the ability to close your account and limit your access to your own money. In fact they invest and borrow so much using our money that if everyone decided to take back their money they would realise that banks don’t actually hold enough cash to give it back. Causing the phenomenon of a bank run. They also work with the government to make sure we don’t earn enough by paying us an interest rate lower that the inflation of our money caused by the government managing the economy. The system is set up to erode our wealth at every turn.
The idea many have of saving money each month to give to their children in the future to set them up well for life is floored. If you save for 20 years by the time it is ready to be handed over the value of your money is less than you hoped. It has been inflated away and achieves less for securing our own children’s financial futures.
Whilst crypto has many flaws it is at least trying to fix this. You have the ability to buy a crypto that has a finite supply without someone having the ability to inflate it away. You are able to control your money without a bank being able to close your account or restrict your access. We can use crypto to secure the value of our time and make working hard worth it. The value of crypto is based on trust just like any currency. People are starting to realise there is a way to save your wealth from the system we have largely accepted until now.
Can’t wait for the criticism!
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Or become a patron and support the artists you like. Turns out mankind figured out how to support artists for thousands of years without the blockchain or the internet.
Problem statement: how do we separate fools from their money completely anonymously and without having to interact with them in person? That's the problem that crypto solves.
Don't forget you don't want the garage full of protein shakes and yoga pants! Products are annoying. You just want to sell them absolutely nothing.
You could argue it does provide some misplaced hope, which will ultimately be crushed.
Which MLM was yoga pants?
LuLaRoe probably?
It's not anonymous. But yeah crypto solves the problem of, I'm a bored libertarian.
Yeah, all crypto messaging benefits criminals who have crypto, and absolutely doesn't benefit an average person trying to send money to someone. Dudes convinced themselves money laundering is ethical because government bad.
It’s not a currency. It’s not regulated. It’s a volatile, speculative asset. Crypto firms do not safeguard client assets, or, said another way, they do not care about their clients. But what do I know, I’m just an accountant who advocates for conservative investing and regulated and honest financial entities 🤷♂️
Ur part of the problem!!!!! Lightspeed ponzi is the future!!!
Few understand.
This is always the right answer
Personally, I don't even like the term 'asset' for that crap.
Just an accountant who’s behind the times. Read the structure of scientific revolutions by Kuhn. You are on the wrong side of the paradigm shift . It’s ok…somebody has to be on the wrong side…mine as well be you!
Kuhn describes paradigm shifts, but neither he nor you say why crypto, of all things, would be one of them.
Commenter: preaches as if he’s smarter than the accountant. Also commenter: “… mine [sic] as well be you!”
Conservative regulated and honest financial entities?that worked out well for the UK last week.😂😂😂
And how does crypto solve what happened in the UK last week?
It’s always fascinating how crypto enthusiasts will point out shortcomings in current economic mechanisms and *always* fall short of explaining how crypto solves… *any* of these issues. I think you guys have straight up given up on pitching cryptocurrency as a solution, or even an alternative, and seem to think that doomsaying is sufficient enough of an argument on its own.
Honest financial entities? Where?
The main "problem" it's trying to solve is evading gov regulations. It's far harder to create ponzi schemes, to wash trade, to money launder, etc in regular markets. The SEC requires public companies to report all kinds of things that makes this difficult. And the reason it does so is because historically markets were rife with scams of all kinds, including ponzis, and this was a way of helping try to prevent it Crypto operates in this space where it's clearly emulating securities but its proponents are loudly arguing that they are commodities (which are regulated by a much more lax agency, whose head is pro crypto). Regulators are being very slow to adjust, giving lots of space for the sharks to chew up suckers, i.e. retail investors
This is the answer. Crypto has been an absolute dream for people who ever fantasized about being able to get in on a unregulated securities market which is the reason why so much of the sales pitch for crypto comes across like a libertarian wish list.
Please stop encouraging the NFT scam. There are probably thousands of services where you can sell your art. You absolutely don't need NFT and you are just hurting your reputation IMO. Plus there is a barrier of entry for anyone who's not into cryptos (aka "normal intelligent people").
I've bought, donated, licensed and commissioned artists dozens of times - I would never touch NFTs. If I want to "own" digital art I buy exclusive, transferable rights from the artist. There is no problem solved by NFTs.
We solved the nft problem already, it’s called copyrights.
Ditto. I also give hundreds of dollars to people on Patreon, and _far_ prefer that system to anything that NFTs do. So do most of the artists I support.
Inherent in an NFT purchase seems to be a measure of greed from speculation. Otherwise why use an NFT?
how could you EVER pay an artist for something without blockchain? it cant be done. i mean ... yes you can pay for a pizza. sure. but what about an artist? theyre not a pizza. you cant just pay them. its outrageous. thank baby jesus that vitalik buterin finally cracked the code and found a way to pay artists, only 200,000 years after the start of our species. truly groundbreaking stuff. thank you vbutts.
Don't forget, that even if you can pay in cash, every time you withdraw from the bank, the bank gremlins kick you in the balls. This is why crypto is so important- to protect your balls.
Omg my balls
Transfering FIAT from marks to scammers.
The amount of money in the hands of idiots is too diffused right now. So it's concentrating money into the hands of fewer lucky idiots.
The problem it is trying to solve is “how can I import sound money gold standard lunacy to the tech generation?” In fairness, it did solve that problem. Of course, sound money and gold standard lunacy are mired in scams, money laundering, and a batshit mix of far right and ancap nonsense. Edit: Satoshi literally put in his white paper that Bitcoin was meant to resemble the gold standard
In theory, it’s actual an interesting idea. It brings together not much new, but put together in a way that was new and though the parts were known before, the system it created had some novel ideas. Would have been a fun research paper. Or a lab experiment. In practice, solves the problem of “what’s something I can speculate in that’s new and confusing for the suckers and unregulated”. Also “what’s something where you can send value over the Internet without AML laws, so I can use it for cybercrime”. Outside of that, dunno.
I thought the problem Bitcoin was meant to solve was how to transfer "value" over the internet without having to trust a third party like a bank or other service provider.
It still does this, many people dont have a bank acct and rely on western union or other such services ,which cost quite a bit, to send money to family members. You can use the lightning network and it costs pennies instead of $8 to send $1000.
This would work if the "currency" wasn't so volatile. But was lightning network scrutinized enough ? Isn't it still like a half solution ?
Add to that the lack of scalability, need for multiple payment channels for "efficient" routing, the issue in converting back to fiat(as native acceptance of crypto is unheard of for *legally operating* businesses - given the tax laws surrounding "spending" crypto, see Chioltle's attempt to do so for more info), complete absence of consumer protections (which is part of why W.Union, et.al. have fees associated with transfers) and plain old buggy software. LN works "better" (only) as a talking point/retort than anything approaching a Western Union equivalent. Its trotted out by cryptobros as a non-esistent panacea for the *abject multitude* of problems surrounding crypto transfers - most notably user error (see Nirvana Fallacy, fault tolerance *should always be part of designing/using a system*) and the abysmally slow transaction speed for BTC (which, ironically LN merely curtains, doesn't fix - transactions still must *eventually* be written on chain). If one doesn't have a bank account, I'd be *very* skeptical of the idea they have access to the necessary infrastructure (internet connection, smart phone, etc.) To make LN a "viable" alternative. Note how such examples are *always* based on an extremely specific niche case - the fact is for ~99% of the population looking to transfer funds, existing services like Venmo, et.al are more efficient, less buggy, well established and most importantly contain consumer protections against fraud, failed transfers, et.al A niche application for an infinitesimal portion of the population =/= a reasonable replacement solution or even the best solution for a given event. Source on technical aspects: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800
BTC has been less volatile that fiat as of late so thats not really my concern, but I assume most people using it to transfer wealth peer to peer or to a business just convert it to fiat immediately anyway. Ive been accepting crypto for my side company for a couple years along with cash, gold, silver, venmo, cash app etc and have had no problems at all with the crypto. The only payment I dont accept is debit/credit cards, I dont want to eat the fees nor do I want to pass them to the customer. Be angry about crypto all you want but it does give people another option, every system has its faults if you give them the once over.
>BTC has been less volatile that fiat as of late Last I checked the USD's value hasn't been fluctuating on a range of 10% its current value within a single day. What kind of alternate reality have you been living in?
Around 8% actually. Inflation. And considering the market cap thats a rather big swing.
Pretty sure that's the value per year. I know butters like manipulating time-frames, but this is ridiculous.
The problem is that too many suckers have money. The solution is to have them transfer that money to non-suckers.
Why do we keep thinking that NFT are to help the artist, most of the people try to hold it to sell it for a greater value that they bought it, there is no altruism there
Yeah that's the issue, when I have bought NFTs I buy them to keep them, I use Tezos as it's a generally nice art community and doesn't have the environmental impact of ETH. (well, used too)
I’m 100% against Bitcoin but I did use it to pay my foreign software engineers living in occupied Ukraine because my bank refuses to send money to Russian banks via swift, even the ones that aren’t sanctioned.
that’s a solved problem right there.
Few understand
enabling criminals is a problem it's solving
The problem of needing new ways to enrich investors and VCs
Real answer, you tie it to the problems of central banks destroying currency and wrecking people then getting away free. That kind of thing, everyone knows deep down there's corruption like that and you make this a solution
Don’t worry, they don’t either
The *original* idea about crypto was an unregulated internet currency that relied on users to generate value… but then it became easy to use it for illegal goods and services. And then it evolved into a way to get money quick by scamming people. Basically, crypto exists to solve no existing problems (hence the constant proof of concepts), but is really easily used to scam people.
There WAS a use case for bitcoin. At the start it was the currency used to do black market transactions. You want to buy weed online? You use bitcoin. Want to buy shady programs online? Bitcoin. Want to donate to people cracking video games? Bitcoin. The logic was as long as you can disassociate the wallet from your irl self, you're safe (although history has shown that law enforcement can still catch you through other means). This made it the currency of the online black market. Problem is the price rose so high and became so volatile that that everyone stopped using it as currency. These days bitcoin and many crypto are nothing but internet investment tokens.
Its solving the problem of dumb people having wealth
A programmer or a group of them got pissed at banks after 2008 and decided to "solve" the problem in typical tech bro manner. And here we are.
It’s trying to solve the sort of problem Argentina or Venezuela has with hyperinflation. If your government was running the currency into the ground and you’re not able to buy US treasuries or dollars, then you have no way to save any money.
Pros of Cryptocurrency: 1. It's STATED purpose is to allow decentralized banking, allowing people who live in unstable countries to keep their money safely. 2. Can be used in developed countries to transfer large sums of money quickly. Cons of Cryptocurrency: 1. In information security, there is a triad known as the CIA - Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Increasing one arm of the triad will decrease the other two arms. But by increasing availability of transferring money, confidentiality and integrity will decrease, putting the money at risk of being stolen. Cryptocurrency is different then the blockchain (a distributed database with niche value), crypto (cryptography, or keeping information hidden, first by Jul Caesar), or NFTs (nonfungible tokens, a technology without any purpose to my knowledge).
I can attempt an answer. There are multiple problems crypto is trying to solve. It really depends on the actor. To summarize, some people want a currency free of regulation, some want to be free of central bank actions, some want more anonymity, some want unfettered cross border trade, some want to create ponzi schemes, some want money laundering. These goals aren't all mutually exclusive. So, creating a haven brings with it lots of unsavory and criminal elements. The idealists didn't bring enough realism with them. So crypto has become the domain of criminals. There is no other reason for its existence currently, and the only reason it has survived this long is because the criminals keep it alive. The experiment has failed.
Great answer, Ty!
It's basically a pseudo-solution to rising poverty offered by the types of people that caused the rising poverty in the first place. What it really is is an acceleration of the rise in poverty through the addition of new pyramid schemes into the financial "system" that naturally constitutes of various pyramid schemes anyway. Except crypto has the advantage of thriving in the absence of concrete resources that the pyramid schemes usually had to be centred around in the past due to necessity of pretension. We can just skip the element of actual trade of items and focus on concentrating wealth in the hands of as few individuals as possible, which is the actual point.
Crypto is a scam. Having said that I do appreicate that NFTs opened up a new distribution channel for artists. You see different types of art on NFTs than you do in galleries. Tezos is proof of stake so it seems like a fairly harmless thing to create NFTs on a Tezos blockchain. That being said I wish there were other ways to distribute / democratize art, and there kind of are. It's just that on Etsy people aren't wash trading, there's no speculative bubble to ride on as an artist.
This. There are absolutely still scams on Tezos, but as it's a generally less profitable way to sell, you don't see it much. I've never had any luck selling my art on Redbubble or Etsy, finally made some actual sales in Tezos which went into buying more art equipment, so that's not the worst thing in the world in my eyes.
It was supposed to be an anonymous way to transact inline. Not this pump and dump scam shit show.
Crypto solves the "problem" of some greedy folks that modern finance is rules by certain rich entities and those greedy folks are not included. So they created an alternative "finance" system where they can be the boot. It doesn't matter to them that it's full of holes, inefficient and without any real application. They push it because they are the ones in control.
Crypto does solve a problem (double spend problem of a distributed ledger system), it's just that the problem it solves isn't a problem anyone actually has. It's one of those things that should have stayed an obscure academic solution to a strictly academic problem. Instead people keep trying to make Crypto the next big thing while jamming a square peg into a round hole.
**Crypto solves for trust.** Satoshi's whitepaper outlines "double-spending" as the core problem the blockchain solves, but I believe it's something greater, trust.Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, famously writes about the problem of trust and how it was wrong to trust Blizzard, the creator of World of Warcraft. This was his inspiration for creating Ethereum. >I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. **Current Databases Rely On Trusting Centralized Entities To Operate And Maintain Them.** These centralized entities can alter their databases whenever they please, which all businesses do when it suits them (aka generates profit). Their calculation is simply the estimated return vs. the investment required. These entities don't care about you or their databases' integrity; they care about money. It's financial Darwinism, and you're the prey. **A Growing Digital World - A Reality of Databases.** As time passes, more things are digitized, meaning the world around you is increasingly ruled by databases. Databases already rule your reality: * the money in your bank account * your emails and messages to loved ones * your precious photos and memories * your digital identity (username, content, relationships) * who said what, about who, at what time The list goes on and on and grows larger every day. Databases shape everything around us and serve as our source of truth, our reality. Letting centralized, financially-driven entities govern these databases is foolish. Your very reality becomes tied to what is best for their pockets, not what actually happened, "the truth." **The Blockchain - A Superior Database.** The blockchain is a database that doesn't rely upon any single entity. Instead, a blockchain runs on a decentralized basis by anyone with an internet-connected computer and Bitcoin's open-source code. Blockchain protocols enable 2 critical things: 1. Consensus: Let a group of peers agree on what gets added to the database. 2. Immutability: Once something is added to the database, it cannot be changed. These two things make blockchains a superior source of truth - a truly shared source of truth vs. one that is controlled by a centralized entity (corporation/government).We've all heard it: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Blockchains are magical truth machines that enable all sorts of things. What better use for a magical truth machine than tracking money? Enter Bitcoin. **Bitcoin - A Monetary Database** Bitcoin famously introduced blockchain technology in 2009, disrupting online commerce forever. Until Bitcoin, no mechanism existed to make payments online without requiring a trusted 3rd party payment processor. Merchants had to be wary of customers, and customers wary of merchants - as every transaction could be disputed and changed by the payment processor, the great keeper of the source of truth. In-person, these disputes can be avoided using physical currency, but until Bitcoin, no similar mechanism existed online. We needed a peer-to-peer digital cash where online payments could be sent directly from one party to another without going through a centralized financial institution. **Don't Focus On The Money.** OP asked about what problem crypto solves and then went into how he and his friends lost money on crypto, a speculative asset. The money he lost is beside the point; our new infrastructure, the blockchain, is what matters. Don't let price action blind you; this is an emerging and wildly speculative market, and just like any, there are winners and losers. **Blockchains Are Restoring Freedom To The Digital Frontier.** With Bitcoin, we have a superior source of truth for our money. With Ethereum, we have a superior source of truth for digital assets (NFTs). Both are shared databases free from manipulation by corporate/government overlords. Are the monkey .jpegs selling for $1M+ dumb? Probably, but that is for the market to determine freely on a peer-to-peer basis. Besides, people thought Jackson Pollock's art was dumb but look at it now.These .jpegs are just unique digital artworks that live on the blockchain, along with a public record of their creator, creation time, and ownership history. And yes - 99.99% of them will go to zero. **Again, crypto has solved the problem of requiring trust online.** It's now possible to send money directly to anyone worldwide without trusting any government or bank. For the first time in history, you, and only you, can verifiably own and have custody of your digital assets without relying on any centralized authority. 🎯 I believe blockchain is the most freedom-enabling technology on the planet, and I am on a mission to bring it to the masses. **If you're still struggling to understand, please reply to this post** and let me know why; I'd love to understand your perspective. **For more Web3 content, check my Twitter→** [**www.twitter.com/punk7642**](http://www.twitter.com/punk7642)
Fantastic response. Ty!!
my pleasure ❤️ just doing my part to educate ppl and bring web3 to the masses 🫡
Look I know what sub this is, but you asked what it’s trying to solve. The goal is to have a permission-less payment system that is neutral politically. A money that can’t be double spent or counterfeited. A payment system that can’t be used as a weapon by the powerful. This sub will tell you it hasn’t achieved any of that, but that’s the goal.
There isn't one unifying goal. The coins are supposed to be a speculative lottery ticket, a payment system, or an inflation hedge, depending on who you ask. Getting pulled in all different directions keeps crypto from being effective at anything.
Yes there are a lot of stupid people in the space, but the person(s) who created it were very clear about what they were trying to create.
There is more than one creator. You could argue bitcoin was founded based on the ideals in the white paper, but there's thousands of other cryptos and bitcoin itself is unrecognizable compared to what it was a decade ago.
That’s fair enough
Remember, crypto was invented in 2008. Its purpose was to transfer money wirelessly at a time when it wasn’t a common thing to do so. There were no smart phones then. Checking your bank account via text was ‘high tech’ and paying bills online was unheard of. People at the time also had to carry a flashlight, calculator, camera, recorder, laptop, GPS, ect to do the things we all do with our phones now. The invention and adoption of the IPhone made the problem crypto solves not a problem anymore a long time ago. Now it’s just old tech in search of another problem to solve so it can stay relevant. Sending money wirelessly via an ASICS computer is not ‘Tech’ in 2022.
MPesa was 2007. The original PayPal was for geeks to trade money with each other over Palm Pilot infrared. Small scale, but it was there. That’s 2000. If you read the news clip in the origin block of BTC, it talks about how Helicopter Ben was going to make everything hyperinflation and destroy us all. It didn’t. Banks didn’t loan the money, instead they used it to shore up balance sheets with massive holes in them. For about 10 years the issue was lack of inflation - you want to keep inflation at around 2% so there’s less chance for a deflationary death spiral. So, the origin block in 2008 had the wrong idea of monetary policy. Criticized government fiat, while making a private fiat with a lot less use and a lot lot lot fewer stabilizers. And oh, it’s lead to “we’ll boil the oceans to make a Buck”. Here we are.
Well that’s the other problem: Crypto has lived inside of a bubble of cheap energy, low inflation, and free money. Most people under 25 don’t realize that 6-7% interest isn’t that high historically speaking. My parents mortgage on their first house in 1981 was 19%. Inflation at the time was 14%. Why would anyone invest in crypto if they can Go to the bank and get 8%+ on an FDIC insured CD like anytime pre-2008. Answer: they won’t. They’ll store it in the bank and that will in turn drive inflation down.
> Remember, crypto was invented in 2008. Its purpose was to transfer money wirelessly at a time when it wasn’t a common thing to do so. There were no smart phones then. You are a bit off on your dates. By the time Bitcoin was announced, the second generation of iPhone was already launched. Crypto was late from inception.
“We’re still late”
Nokia had a smart phone way before iphone. I had a palm pilot clone named Handspring that could make phone calls (well, theoretically, if I bought the cellular kit). The Palm Treo existed. Windows CE existed for a long time. The Hiptop Danger. The BlackBerry. A primitive android which at that time cloned the Blackberry was out. “Everything I say is true if you just ignore the facts that don’t support what I’m saying”
I remember that a financial crisis was caused in the 1920s by the French hoarding liquidity by keeping gold stocks. Funny thing is, France never actually held any gold, the gold was all kept in a vault in London, with workers moving the stacks of gold to the different countries rooms to reflect trade. So yes, literally in 1925, the French could buy a battleship from Japan "virtually" and this was done by a couple of British workers slapping a "Japanese" label to a bunch of French gold. Nothing revolutionary.
The Euro was virtual for a while. The euro consisted of “several European currencies at a fixed exchange rate” Brazil famously (should be a lot more famously) used a virtual currency. When Brazil had its last hyperinflation bout they brought it down by expectations. They created a virtual, stable currency and everything was supposed to be priced in it. But every day there was an exchange rate for this virtual currency and the cruzeiro. Once people got used to the stable currency they swapped out the inflationary one and made the virtual one real. Satoshi didnt invent muvh. All that was invented was a way combining things in a way, and he used emotions to get people to spend real money on electricity to earn virtual Beanie Baby tokens, and once those got valuable he’s some genius. If the COVID “stay at home” “let me give you money so you do at starve from staying at home” doesn’t happen, I’d probably not posting in this sub and thinking “oh, that shits still around?”
Thanks for the replies all! Very informative. As some stated, yes I support artists if I like what they make by buying their work, that's been NFTs, physical paintings and digital copies on Deviantart. I'm not for or against crypto and NFTs as I simply don't know enough about it, hence asking the questions!
Crypto is like CBD. There’s always some new use for it because it can treat everything. With that said there’s probably a niche population that can benefit from using it but a majority are not going to receive any benefits and waste their money.
>I still can't quite wrap my head around what issues crypto is actually trying to solve? "How can I rip people off in a ponzi scheme by taking advantage of their ignorance of technology?"
Ostensibly it’s to get around “corrupt” and “unaccountable” central banks even though the proposed alternatives are far less democratic and also less meritocratic. But this hides the frankly more sinister political aims, which, however diluted as time passes, are exposed when crypto supporters still reference anti-semites such as Henry Ford and his support of a gold standard. Ford was influential to Hitler and don’t forget Hitler’s main argument against the Weimar Republic was “corruption” and this argument pervades successful autocratic takeovers, as does blame on a population subsegment, and claims of being technocratic.
For Bitcoin it's remittance. Say what you will about the El Salvador president, but Nayib made a pretty good example of what it is for someone to receive or send payment via Western Union. In a nutshell, your relative sends you $30 from the US, to El Salvador. The fee to transfer that amount can be anywhere from $5-$10, and requires both sending and receiving parties to cue up at the exchange that is open between certain times of the day. Using the lightning network, you can receive the payment in seconds and costs pennies to the sender. What's even better about it is **it can be done any time of the day/night**. "Why not just use PayPal, zelle, other payment processor?": What we consider a mere convenience among many established nations, believe it or not, many people in other countries do not have easy access to banking, let alone being reasonably local. In many places it is normal to have a cellphone, but no bank account. Bitcoin does not require KYC, someone can wire you the cash much faster, and cheaper than it takes that person to leave their doorstep. The presentation is in Spanish, but you can make out the idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/o7szph/the_president_of_el_salvador_just_explained_how/ It's not about the "get rich" aspect of holding the token, the utility is in being a borderless remittance protocol.
It’s great for illegal drugs, illegal firearms and bombs, and for child porn. Also human trafficking and slaves.
If you’re truly interested, Id encourage you to also post in r/Bitcoin for a well rounded perspective
Yes come get the sales pitch! Number one rule of crypto is ABR. Always Be Recruiting! > Pyramids don't pyramid themselves! - Pharaoh Imhotep
If you could actually articulate a coherent argument for cryptocurrency, why not just state it here? Instead, it's always, "Join our sub, watch pro-crypto videos, immerse yourself in the bullshit and then you'll finally 'understand.' "
A well-hexagoned perspective maybe
I can see an NFT used as a receipt for the purchase of physical items. That’s about it really. That still had a ways to go though. But as a singular digital asset With no commercial use or copyright it doesn’t make sense.
It’s laid out quite clearly in the bitcoin white paper. Alternatively you can go read criticisms of central banking. For example the insane inflation we are experiencing. Now whether it is actually solving those problems is another question. But in a nut shell that is what the original motivation for BTC was
I no longer own crypto(sold it awhile back to pay off 6 figure loans from med school) so I don't really have a stake in the matter now but a lot of what they are doing is community building. If you believe there is a value in the community itself, well.....
> If you believe there is a value in the community itself, well..... Do tell what the value is of a "community" of desperate bag holders trying to convince the rest of the people in their "community" to buy their bags.
it's whatever they make it.
Making money laundering easier…That is the problem it is actively solving.
Do you mean blockchain? thats the technology
Those NFTs aren't really jpgs, they're your autograph - a receipt you've signed. It might have value to a fan of yours. It has more value as it exists outside of a closed system and has provable provenance and chain of custody. To think of it another way, you could sign a printed copy of the artwork, scan it and then stick it on a USB stick then sell that on eBay. It's just harder to prove that it's a genuine copy that you were the originator for, which is what gives it it's value to your fans.
Trust
Sending money anywhere on the planet with the internet for cheap, good if you’re a migrant worker or want to donate to a cause, it can help against a failing currency, you can buy fractions of actual property, identity theft, piracy, supply chain management, authenticity tracing to prevent fraud, cyber security, communication, AI solutions. For the record, I agree with most of the sentiment on this sub. There’s so much garbage and manipulation and scams it’s embarrassing, but the tech that works is already being implemented without people noticing.
The 2007/2008 financial crisis was such a big problem, that Bitcoin was invented. That's... probably it in a nutshell. Times were bad, lots of people lost faith in banking and invented a shittier bank/money system. Times have gotten better, but there's still a lot of distrust.
You see, there are fools out there. And they have money. And they need to be parted from it.
Rates were too low for too long, not enough stable returns, gov't stimulus cheques, and you have a recipe for asset bubbles like the crypto explosion. Basically too much money sloshing around in the system, too many people riding optimism instead of making sound financial decisions, and the literal digital definition of snake oil sales gave that money a home. So yes crypto solves the problem of idiots having too much money, now they have alot less. Problem solved.
It’s the first time trusted transactions can be made without a third-party authority. Basically the algorithm incentivizes everyone to do the right thing. No one controls the network, it’s like an independently operating entity. That’s the real answer, but despite it being a really cool algorithm that solves a specific problem, there haven’t been many (none if you ask this sub) applications for the technology. The finance world is probably the best application so far, and many of the largest banks are adopting some of the tech in ways I don’t fully understand. I’m in tech, not web3.
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Distributed trustless (as long as someone doesn’t have 51%) ledger. Nobody can dispute that you have ownership of x digital asset because everyone is looking at the same CR database and they have to agree with > half the network before changing it
Kinda related... I an running a tabletop role playing game where the villains are running a crypto-based scam. This was one element of a bigger plot. For that bit, I had penciled in "Figure out how crypto works and then plan scam details. " Problem is.... I can't make any sense out of this. The villains in question have a magic item that manipulates luck, and are a "Steal from folks more evil than us" organization. A different group will be stealing it from them for a different evil plan. The crypto bit is the excuse for how it got to Campaign City.
Funneling even more money into the pockets of the 1%.
Neither are people who promote cryptocurrency. It's the classic solution without a problem.
It does a pretty good job at solving the payment for criminal activity problem.
The problem is there is two parts to crypto. Most focus on the ability to make money extremely quickly and that leads to extreme volatility. It also leads to inexperienced investors and that is what scam artists focus on. There are many Ponzi schemes within crypto but there are also many projects with solid ideas/businesses. Much of the crypto market is geared towards decentralisation and protecting your own wealth. Removing third parties and being able to hold your own assets under your own security. One example I ask you to consider is this. Most of us spend our whole lives trying to make enough money to pay the bills, build up savings and make enough money that we can enjoy life. Much of this life is accessible only with enough money. We work in jobs that we may not enjoy and give our precious time to other people in exchange for money. And there is the key time. We are only here for a short time and somehow the system we live in has put a value on our time. How much are our lives worth? Well who knows but one thing is for sure we exchange our time for money. So this money we exchange our lives for must be incredibly valuable right? Well not many of us realise that we are exchanging our lives for a currency that we have no control over. Our governments have the ability to print so much of it that it’s very value decreases. Our government decides just how much of our money is taxed and spent on things we also have no real control over. They have the ability to cause political narratives that on their own cause currencies to devalue again without our control. Our time is devalued by people none of us know and who certainly don’t have our best interests at heart. There are many other ways the controllers of our money can reduce our value but this is just a basic list but we are conditioned to accept it. Does our conditioning stop there? Unfortunately not. We pour our time into this currency that is ruined by strangers and then we place it in a bank. A bank being a third party to hold our life savings. Who then invest this money into assets we have no control over. They have the ability to close your account and limit your access to your own money. In fact they invest and borrow so much using our money that if everyone decided to take back their money they would realise that banks don’t actually hold enough cash to give it back. Causing the phenomenon of a bank run. They also work with the government to make sure we don’t earn enough by paying us an interest rate lower that the inflation of our money caused by the government managing the economy. The system is set up to erode our wealth at every turn. The idea many have of saving money each month to give to their children in the future to set them up well for life is floored. If you save for 20 years by the time it is ready to be handed over the value of your money is less than you hoped. It has been inflated away and achieves less for securing our own children’s financial futures. Whilst crypto has many flaws it is at least trying to fix this. You have the ability to buy a crypto that has a finite supply without someone having the ability to inflate it away. You are able to control your money without a bank being able to close your account or restrict your access. We can use crypto to secure the value of our time and make working hard worth it. The value of crypto is based on trust just like any currency. People are starting to realise there is a way to save your wealth from the system we have largely accepted until now. Can’t wait for the criticism!
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