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My understanding of blockchain technology is that it is a ledger that anybody can edit but nobody can tamper with. I agree with blockchain enthusiasts that this seems like a technology that SHOULD have exciting prospects. Nothing like that has ever existed before. There must be something revolutionary we can do with it.

However as a currency, the only advantage I could see to crypto would be if governments collapsed and you still needed a global exchange to facilitate trade. Unfortunately, exactly the inefficiencies you mention make it impossible to sustain in such a chaotic environment.

It seems like the primary function may well be to facilitate crime. If I understand how it works correctly, then the mafia could, for the first time ever, keep 100% accurate books without risking that they could be turned into evidence. Don Bruno can keep track of exactly how much his cousin Eddy is skimming from the brothel business.

But that application ceases to be valuable if there are no governments enforcing a centralized currency that you can ultimately convert your bitcoins into.

No need to prove you wrong. You are correct. Crypto is only used for money laundering, ponzi schemes and pump and dump schemes. I have yet to find a single other use case over the last 5 years

Frakly I'd love to see it used for something useful like citing information but because the business sector has it's hook so deep i seriously doubt it will ever happen.

So, essentially the optimal use case is a scenario where the national government collapsed taking its currency with it, but leaving the electric grid intact.

Even then it seems like you'd rather use your remaining tech for anything that couldn't be replicated by other means.

Basically it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Whatever application ends up being game changing will probably be to a problem we don't even perceive and can't predict (though of course the whole point of this thread is to try so I'm not poo pooping anybody's fun).

In my opinion, Crypto currency is a scam. I would rather bury gold bars in my backyard. Blockchain however, is interesting as a security protocol.. It has more potential for a multitude of applications in the future.

Blockchain will be the future for video game companies to only sell digital games/assets and keep making money when someone else tries to the said digital thing.

Why can't they just have their own micro transaction store and allow users to sell their items? That would accomplish the exact same thing and doesn't require the Blockchain at all....

It's beany babies again, only this time you don't get a toy you get nothing. Speculative markets are only really good for ripping people off.

It does (or did) have one special usage. The silk road, used to be you could spend crypto on extremely cheap drugs. Not a good use but still a use. The silk road got shut down tho so I don't know how safe it is anymore. No such thing as untraceable, not for long.

Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, is not necessarily slow.

There are implementations which are extremely fast and light on resources.

That technology is the golden nugget.

Crypto so far has been scam after scam.

The wild part to me is that exchanges seem to be the easiest way to launder money. It's easy to track money in wallets until it hits an exchange and if that exchange is outside your jurisdiction...

Isn't that wild. That the formal trading place is easiest way to launder?

Also the 2nd largest exchange ftx was basically breaking all the finance laws we have, I think it's fair to say it's an industry wide problem.

Personally I wouldn't mind a huge government crackdown. People could still use distributed ledger technology but the whole crypto as money thing is just scams, fraud and illegal activity and doesn't seem to be serving society.

IMHO Blockchain as a currency is much like the idea of using physical objects as a currency. We have used many different objects, seashells, gold, paper, coins, etc. All of these objects are analogous to different implementations of Blockchain, there are pros and cons to all of these and there many different ways to implement them. So it's very unfair to lump all cryptos together.

That all being said, anyone who says it's all a scam or anyone who says crypto is the most amazing thing ever are idiots.

At the very least, I 100% see banking institutions implementing Blockchain behind the scenes that they use to keep track of transactions. But, I think, eventually, any entity that wants to accurately account for all transactions and prevent tampering will use some implementation of Blockchain.

Getting an implementation of Blockchain that works for the entire world is going to be HARD. There will be growing pains, but the technology allows for change, so it's not like everyone is locked into a certain implementation.

I've used bitcoin to transfer to/receive payouts from my offshore sportsbook. Other options were more expensive or slower (like waiting for them to mail me a check).

Basically it works as a way to transfer value electronically where there aren't established frameworks or middle-men. Though as online services continue to mature - those edge cases where crypto makes sense will be fewer and fewer.

Remittances are often touted as a use case for crypto as sending cash across borders and different financial systems (especially when one of those happens to be in the third world) is not straightforward. Traditional options, like western union are slow and expensive. However centralized services are also trying to make that remittances faster and cheaper and it's hard to imagine most people aren't going to prefer a service with a support number you can call over a system where you're basically on your own when significant amounts of money are involved.

What if technology which is incredibly inefficient (energy wise) is paired with future technology which unleashes zero point energy (say, near unlimited)

Would block chain then be a futuristic sustainable technology?

Backing up, something more likely; ex: Dyson sphere around some other sun, and being able to compute on premise and send results far away.

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Simply, the greatest use of crypto is just being able to transfer large sums of money to someone else without the use of an intermediary. I can send you 1 millions USD (or BTC) right now and you'll get it within minutes. We don't need to get an banks involved and we pay a lot less in fees if we did wire-transfer. But that's crypto 101 stuff, most people on here prob already know that.

So pretty much its just making money transfer more efficient. For that reason, I dont see it going away anytime ever. Our world is getting faster and faster by the day, so why would money be any different?

Frankly I feel like all the white papers miss one crucial aspect as well. As long as coins are being mined, the network is bolstered by all of the processing power of the miners. The second the last coin is mined on a network, it will become more profitable to turn that processing power to breaking the network. That means the security curve will invert and the “most stable money ever” will become unstable.

This is lazy thinking though. Ponzi Schemes need to obfuscate transactions from both investors and regulators in order for the scam to work, which is the exact opposite of how blockchain functions. These issues alone prove that Bitcoin cannot be a Ponzi Scheme. Blockchain generally speaking is new to most folks and they just don't get it, which explains why I always see a lot of these comments. I'll say though that a lot of crypto, say 99 percent or so of it is in fact garbage, some of which could very much be called scams but not all. BTC though doesn't have a ceo or a board to control it, its truly decentralized, a computer science breakthrough to a large degree imo and can serve multiple functions. I can find numerous examples of cash being used in money laundering also.

He who has also never googled.. ignorance is bliss

Yeah pay 5% transaction fees and wait 3 bank days lol

Everything is traceable on the blockchain, unless you're using Monero. The world can see every single transaction that's ever been done.

"Predict a 50/50 outcome and tell me why mine is wrong"

This is how science tests theories. Crowdsourcing 50/50s on social media...

your post is cringe

It's literally all a scam, or useless.

Offshore sportsbook and remittances?

The value add (for me at least) with my sportsbook was that it's cheaper than other options (credit card has a 9.75% fee, echeck has a 4.5% fee) and faster than the only other free option for payouts - waiting for a check. Bitcoin has no fee other than a network transaction fee and goes through in 10 - 30 minutes.

For remittances - It's faster and cheaper than maybe a traditional service like Western Union, but definitely not some of the newer services, like the one I linked.

The lack of knowledge and refusal to learn the other side of an opinion in this thread is mind blowing

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Yeah a public ledger validated by mathematical algorithms is the same as beanie babies

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>Offshore sportsbook

It uhhh....sounds like you are trying to justify money laundering. Why are you using an offshore sportsbook that makes it overly complicated to deposit USD?

>For remittances - It's faster and cheaper than maybe a traditional service like Western Union, but definitely not some of the newer services, like the one I linked.

The alternative is just sending them fiat currency. If they are able to set up a crypto wallet they are able to set up an online bank account and accept payment. I'd argue this would be cheaper than paying gas fees and it only takes 1 day to transfer fiat currencies.

Exactly.. money laundering, drug purchases, illegal activity never happens in fiat dollars lol

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What would those be?

You are fortunate enough to never have to wire money. A top 10%-er globally

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It also fails as a decentralised system of trust. Despite the proponents claims of a 51% attack being incredibly unlikely, it’s already happened multiple times, even to the largest blockchain networks.

Blockchain is an interesting concept on paper, but the primary advantage of decentralised control has been proven to be unreliable.

There are simply no problems solved by blockchain that can’t be solved more efficiently and effectively by other alternatives.

I actually have wired money in the past. The fee is a flat $20 at Chase.

I just spent 3 weeks trying to wire money to my wife, and my bank held my money the whole time saying "we are trying to verify identity/purpose of transaction", all the while earning interest with my money. I had no way of cancelling the wire transfer while they were investigating.

If I had sent a transfer via BTC or a stablecoin like USDC, the transaction would've taken at most 1 hour, and there's no middleman to freeze my funds.

Self custody and blockchain are here to stay because fuck the banks for being overbearing middlemen. As soon as people realize how much freedom they have with crypto, it's game over for banks.

Lol $20 when a Bitcoin transaction costs 20 cents

Tell me you don't know what money laundering is

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My understanding is that blockchain isn't really useful "behind the scenes." It's value is that it can be exposed to the public without being messed with or traced. Banks want everything to be traceable and secret, so they are better off keeping private ledgers. The only reason it is appealing to the mob is because they have to worry about getting exposed, so you can't have a private ledger with a list of all your crimes in a safe in your office the way a bank can.

Totally different. He’s just avoiding taxes and fees. /s

How is using a sportsbook that happens to be in another country anything like money laundering?

There also aren't US based online sportsbooks available in my state and there certainly weren't 10 years ago when I first started betting with this sportsbook.

>I'd argue this would be cheaper than paying gas fees and it only takes 1 day to transfer fiat currencies.

Have you ever sent a bank wire? They take a day to several days to clear. International takes longer.

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>How is using a sportsbook that happens to be in another country anything like money laundering?

Because it is illegal in the state you are in and you are trying to avoid the regulations?

>There also aren't US based online sportsbooks available in my state and there certainly weren't 10 years ago when I first started betting with this sportsbook.

See above

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Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source.

It's a result of people reading headlines and not doing actually research into the technology.

And how long would the whole process for that wire transfer take? Are you sure it would only be $20 for 1M? You're cutting out the middle man using crypto

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It took so little time for the crypto cultists to infect the thread. What a sad joke...

BTC is about $2. International wire will cost you more than 20, and may take several days to arrive. There are instant options to send USD, but their fees are exorbitant.

You miss the point of bey able to transfer 1M between people. No taxes. No transfers. No records. View it how you will.

>You miss the point of bey able to transfer 1M between people. No taxes. No transfers. No records. View it how you will.

I am not missing anything. That literally falls under the definition of money laundering. That's literally the first use case I listed in my original post

If it’s not available in your state it’s also illegal to do offshore

Post the link let’s see. I’ve never spent more than 50 cents on over 100+ transactions across multiple years

Edit: 50 cents per transaction as a max

Its much too complicated and seeminghly rife with corruption so i agree

It just seems like another way for people to get over on average working stiffs.

And a belief that illegal activity like money laundering doesn’t happen in fiat dollars lmao

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With the coming of cbdc’s and the phase out of cash you will find out why it has value

oh because regular fiat doesn't get involved in any of that lol

*and also untraceable.

Hmmm....who would really need to do this? Who could it be?

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Currency conversion 20 basis points lol The fees on this site are outrageous

when you buy gold, you only own the digital transaction, you dont own any gold bars to bury...

Rule 9 - Avoid posting content that is a duplicate of content posted within the last 7 days.

I work at a US Government agency that deals with Crypto-crime. Yeah, we're as busy as you might suspect.

Blockchain is a distributed database. That's it. That's ALL it is. Distributed databases have been around for decades.

Now, the problem with crypto's particular implementation of a distributed db (aside from the energy requirements even with PoS systems) is that it handles concurrency LIKE. TOTAL. SHIT.

A real distributed financial DB, say for an institution with locations in LA and NY, has entire clusters of extremely beefy servers in both locations and a fiber line dedicated just and only to it (multiple, actually). The servers are clocked to within millionths of a second or better, and take into account things like elevation and the mass underneath (basically, just like GPS satellites take those things into account), so that they go out of sync by one second per longer than the human race has been or will be around.

They do this so that if two transactions hit the same account on opposite sides of the country, there's very little chance of a timing collision.

Now, take that database, put it on a typical virus-infested home PC, where it's perfectly happy being five entire minutes out of sync with everything else, the owner loves playing LoL or Dota2, leaving precious few cycles available for anything else and do the following:

1. Figure out what time a transaction was actually posted, and
2. Actually, just load a few hundred million heavily encrypted transactions and try not to turn that PC into a smoking hole in the linoleum.

It'll "work" as long as volume is low. As volume goes up, computing requirements go WAY UP, concurrency becomes a huge problem - we're not talking about your personal bank account anymore, but something on the order of Capital One's accounts, with thousands of transactions per second. You want Crypto to replace Wall St.? With a bunch of SETI@home PCs?

BWAHAHAHAH, no. It can't handle that sort of volume without imploding LONG before you approach even a meaningful percentage of what the Street handles.

Sovereign identity is one function- you can attach identity to data on the ledger and claim IP rights as well as track and “own” rights to data files as they are iterated or updated. It also has a digital signature function that allows you to legally sign data as a contract.

Money laundering is specifically trying to obfuscate the source of money. So not at all the scenario here.

According to state law it's illegal to operate games of chance in my state, so I'm placing bets outside of my state.

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Its been like this forever, its a garbage sub

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Hahahhahaha did you really just say the massive spike was the average. Omg dude

Anyone reading this please go read this then click the link to see how he created this narrative

Yes all we need to do is just ignore the basic laws of thermodynamics that guide the universe and the tech will be usable. Seems like an empty proposition.

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Id like to see my countries budget and funds on a block chain. That way all the funds and where they go could be monitored by the public.

So you are literally admitting that you are breaking the law, trying to get around the regulations by using cryptocurrency and then trying to argue its not money laundering?

Bro....this isn't the type of stuff you should publicly admit to online.....

It’s not untraceable, if anything it’s more traceable than the fiat system. You can literally go look at every single transaction right now that’s ever been done on the blockchain. There’s exceptions like Monero, but most ledgers are available to the public.

Argument was about efficiency but go on…

You forgot about ransomware payments! That's another use case.

Lmao! I classify that as money laundering but yeah that is one

It’s not untraceable. It’s the opposite. Blockchain is 100% transparent. All transactions are public.

It absolutely will not be a thing outside of a very small niche. The vast majority of gamers and developers want nothing to do with it and rightfully so.

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Currently it’s a way to transfer money without the need for a middleman for better or worse.

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> So immediately we can say that no (serious) government will ever
(seriously) move toward its wide adoption.

People who care about crypto usually don't care about governments at all. We are (hopefully) on the path to ultimate globalism and I except society to be restructured into a bunch of small states, "governments" of which should have little authority over personal business of its citizens. Including the financial sector of course.

> It can only be a people-powered change.

Every great change in society is ultimately people-powered. Governments represent interests of the people, not otherwise (well, at least on paper).

> The question therefore becomes, why would people want it?

Once your bank account gets frozen for something you posted on twitter, you'll understand why.

I think you’re referring to crypto exchanges. And those that failed were fully centralized entities brought down by bankruptcy.

That was a result of China cracking down on mining which lowered the hash rate

Those mines have sense rebounded

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I'm clearly admitting to avoiding state gambling regulations. That doesn't make it money laundering. At no point is the source of money hidden.

If I ever actually won enough to report it in my taxes - I would report it in my taxes just like if I had gone to vegas and won. If I really win big and bring home $10k+ my bank will report the deposit anyway.

A couple bucks

Well that's what you get for using Binance instead your own wallet. Actual fees for transferring on the chain are less than $2. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee

An attempt: Traditional banking rails, governments, central banks, etc, are controlled by humans. Politics, corruption, greed, incompetence is hard to correct for. They are slow, and use countless middlemen making them expensive and incredibly inefficient. They have gone mostly unchanged since the 70s. Crypto, and specifically BTC is fundamentally different and its current and perceived inefficiencies are well on their way to being solved using a 2nd layer like Lightning.

BTC’s blockchain is slow, but Layer 2 solutions solve for this. People aren’t going to giving up their fiat anytime soon, but it won’t matter because everything will still be fiat on top while it’s using blockchain and real crypto (btc) behind the scenes.

You don’t think much about what is actually going on behind the scenes today, but it is wildly inefficient (days to send money and sometimes as much as 10-20% in fees when sending across borders).

Companies will be HIGHLY incentivized to get this to work because there is such a huge cost savings. Spending 2-3% every time companies need to accept or send payment doesn’t make sense. There are systems in development today that will reduce this to near instant and fractions of a percent in fees. They will pass this on to you to save you both money.

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Bitcoin uses as much energy as a small country, but the second-biggest chain, Ethereum, recently migrated to a system that's about 99.99% more efficient. It uses about as much energy as a hundred average American households.

What are you looking at? I don't use Binance but it looks like they charge a flat withdrawal fee of 0.0002 BTC ~ $3.33 for BTC withdrawals (sending on the bitcoin network).

https://www.binance.com/en/fee/cryptoFee

No, that’s not what I’m referring to.

One example of the kind of situation I’m referring to is the ghash.io incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHash.io

I see, and that'd be useful as a global system as well right? I know each country has an implementation of these things like e-signatures etc. If I'm understanding correctly;;

Crypto and blockchain remind me of NoSQL. When NoSQL hit the developer sphere, you couldn't be blamed for getting the sense that NoSQL was going to replace RDBMSs. They didn't, of course. RDBMSs like MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and MS SQL are still far more popular, but NoSQL has still exploded in popularity.

Instead of displacing relational databases, document-oriented databases augmented developers' toolsets. That's the future I see for blockchain as well. It becomes just another tool for solving problems.

Crypto currency is the first major implementation of blockchain technology, and because we — as a society — place so much emphasis on monetary success, crypto exploded. It's quite possible that all crypto currencies are ultimately revealed as nothing more than speculative casinos. I'm not entirely predisposed to that idea, but I do acknowledge that it's possible. The 2022 crypto crash lends a lot of credibility to that viewpoint. Nothing can erase the potential utility of crypto currencies, but their practical utility has yet to be demonstrated. The longer we go without a success in that regard, the less likely it seems to become truth.

Blockchain technology, however, is very fundamental. It's a brilliant idea, and a building block that could underpin any number of solutions. The question is whether or not there are any problems which demand said solution.

Looking at blockchain through a business lens, I see only one major benefit: the distributed nature of blockchain means you can run a massive database with no direct cost. I think of this like peer-to-peer multiplayer gaming technology. While the dedicated server model is still pervasive, the P2P model enables smaller publishers to create multiplayer games without the expense of massive centralized server infrastructure. P2P is "distributed" multiplayer gaming.

So how can this distributed nature of blockchain enable business? Since blockchain is a database, the possibilities are endless. Right now, the technology has been largely pigeonholed to keeping ledgers for currency, but NFTs and smart contracts are earnest attempts at expanding the horizon. IMO, NTFs aren't a great business though, and smart contracts are more of a protocol than a business. It's likely that these sorts of protocols will layer on top of blockchain technologies to create something meaningful, but it's difficult to see what that will be today. That doesn't mean it's more or less likely; just that it's difficult to see the future.

That shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. The future is difficult to see. Even people who we consider very good at it tend to get it wrong much of the time. I do think that blockchain is too novel an innovation to whither into complete obscurity though. I'm absolutely confident that it has a role to play in the future. I just think the corruption of its utilization at the start has soured public perception of it, which may extend its incubation period a bit.

Digital signatures and electronic signatures are somewhat different from each other. An electronic signature can be an image or a check mark or even a recorded sound whereas a digital signature is tied to a certification authority attesting to the validity of the signer (or something like that). Standards for digital signatures vary by country but my understanding is that updates are underway to cover blockchain signatures (NIST in the US and EIDAS in the EU)

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Yes, but this is about crypto and blockchain. Cryptocurrency is a singular use case of blockchain. In a world economy built on ledgers and supply chains of both goods and information blockchain technology has legitimate applications. Moreover, the move to proof of stake rather than proof of work cuts energy costs to the equivalent of refreshing a web page 3 or 4 times (in the case of Ethereum 2)

>For each withdrawal, a flat fee is paid by users to cover the transaction costs of moving the cryptocurrency out of their Binance account.

It says a flat fee not a percentage. If you look at another chain ADA, for example, the fee is 0.8. I seriously doubt Binance is charging 80% of the value to make and ADA transaction. No one would use Binance if that was the case.

I use coinbase and that only charges the network transactions fee. They also wrap multiple outputs into a single transaction so if you're sending from coinbase you're splitting the network fee with many other senders.

No, it absolutely is useful behind the scenes, because even if someone wanted to, they couldn't fudge the numbers at all. The current system relies, to some extent, on trust, even within the system.

Blockchain allows anyone, in your org, for example, to access the system and not having to trust them. If they make a transaction it will be seen. This would be amazing for accountants and forensics because they can KNOW all transactions are accounted for

I figured youd go with that. So apparently you did you not read the third paragraph ("something more likely")? How does a Dyson sphere ignore the basic laws of thermo?

> Empty proposition.

Nah but your comment is simply frivolous / empty

They can. Each can pay the associated development and maintenance costs... & Apple, Google, steam etc demand their very reasonable 30% cut of each transaction. Credit card companies can charge their 4%.

The devs can even force users to keep all of the proceeds in their proprietary market and issue what are basically digital credit notes instead of real currency. Users only own their digital property in name only and can have their accounts closed, for numerous reasons, causing them to lose access to their digital purchases.

Do you think that is the optimal situation for both developers and users? If you can't see any room for improvement then you're probably right..... The current set up doesn't need blockchain.

Open to being proven wrong – title says it.

I’d guess that my understanding of the tech is several times better than most people who are pro-crypto. At least for me, the opinion in the title has not been arrived at quickly.

Freedom is another one of those abstract advantages that will never trump the real advantage of safety. Yes you are free and that’s a principle you can enjoy. Zero recourse when something goes wrong: that’s a reality people will detest. Which will be the more powerful force? I argue that the freedom you mention will never trump the safety of centralised fiat (and other related benefits) for the average person.

A Dyson Sphere is even more science fiction than fusion power. Like, so science fiction it will almost certainly never happen. Dyson Swarm, just maybe, in the year 25,000. Also, you would never locate it around a distant sun to power applications here on earth. Now you’ve got the astronomical distance to transmit the energy over, and general relativity to contend with.

As I said, if some future tech grants us essentially unlimited energy and we access essentially unlimited resources then the arguments of inefficiency cease to be about why we CAN’T but still remain about why we WOULD.

Except it sort of isn’t, as given the actual facts, you need to go via exchanges etc and the BTC network is dominated by some key players.

You figured I would lean towards physical reality so you came up with another highly improbable proposition to move the goal posts to. Gotcha!

Safety to lose 10% of your buying power per year due to the constant devaluation of the currency by the issuer

You know its possible to buy physical bars of gold, right?

Very, most people have no idea that they are investing in paper gold.

Inflation is inherent to the economic world order it’s nothing to do with whether we are using crypto or fiat. Crypto inflates and deflates like crazy bananas anyway, so don’t really see your point there!

It doesn't violate laws of thermo was my point. Science fiction is what things are called before they are technically possible (in some cases.) We all know this vision is hypothetical.

So does it violate current laws of thermo or not?

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