> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the highest inflation rates, but which of those countries actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign currency? I assume you have a verifiable example?
Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
(I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet doesn't raise at the same rate.
If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it, you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to inflation.
You can't hold value in land since there's no credit, cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50 DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as valuable as it was when you bought it.
A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even less every month.
Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to keep up.
This short documentary about Bitcoin in Africa makes it easier to understand why Bitcoin is important in developing (or authoritarian) countries. It'll answer some of those questions.
Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones to starvation?
Social media has downsides but that doesn’t mean it’s useless or has never been useful. It did connect people. There was a time when you lose touch with your high school friends pretty much forever when you move for college and then a different city.
There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
Sure it does. I think there’s a fairly solid argument to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity. It’s “good” for the small group of people who make a lot of money but for most people it’s not a positive. It maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders.
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
I was talking about using products, not investing in some coin. So the bag holder argument doesn’t apply here, these are people directly getting services.
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
Screw other drugs. I want to get some antibiotics without having to hear a lecture from 3 different doctors on why they won’t help me, even when they do.
Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.
That may be true, but that's already a widely established industry that doesn't accept any other coin. I'm not offering any value judgements, just a statement of fact.
I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).
Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.
That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.
Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it
It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01.
USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.
Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).