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Centralised payment systems are much more efficient. Yes, corporate capture can make them suck (visa/MasterCard duopoly). To ensure security, financial infrastructure tends to be super capital intensive. This leads to an oligopoly in a best case scenario and a monopoly in the worst case scenario.
Being a natural monopoly, I would highly highly be in support of state owned financial "stuff". Cooperativize operations as much as possible, but let the state raise capital for this. Good for national security too.
Certain types of crypto can be very good if you want transactions to be anonymous (Monero being the best example). Wanna purchase drugs from an illegal ecommerce platform? Monero is untraceable. Wanna buy weapons, launder money, etc? Monero works. Otherwise, it's pretty much useless in the face of existing non crypto services.
BTC sucks for transactions. But its value proposition is kinda different. It's kinda like gold (kinda).
Humans throughout history have based currencies based on items that can be easily verified to be real, and are scarce. Gold is an example. Gold can be mined, yes. But it's pretty scarce. It's easy to tell gold from "not gold".
Hence, in a world where financial systems weren't exactly integrated and digitized, assets and market info was hard to track, trust in other countries and their institutions was super low, gold worked.
But we abandoned the gold standard for a reason. Hence, do we really want a digital gold equivalent (in terms of verifiability and scarcity)? What even is the point? That's why BTC doesn't make sense (for me)
Weapons? Money laundering? What I want untraceable transactions for is furry porn.
Like, there are other reasons to want privacy in what you're paying for, too. Maybe Monero or something could come in handy for that.
How do they handle the traceability aspect? Like, if it's a blockchain, that makes transactions public by definition right? I'm sure there's ways to keep stuff private, I'm just curious how it works.
-- Frost
The argument for privacy in monetary transactions is much more nuanced than the one for simple text messages. Reducing privacy in text messages only punishes the "good guys", as bad guys can still use e2ee communication media very easily.
For monetary transactions, things get more complicated. Tax evasion, money laundering, human trafficking, purchase of weapons can be done using super private payment systems. If adoption of this becomes widespread, then liquidity of these currencies increase. For example, if I'm selling illegal weapons, then the Monero that I receive from that purchase needs to be somehow converted into real money so that I can buy a house, groceries and so on. If Monero becomes widespread, then I don't even need to this.
Imagine Bezos, musk and all the other crooks just getting way way more of powerful.
Not quite. They use something called "ring signatures".
I mean, if you're selling illegal weapons, you can probably just take cash for 'em. Can't exactly do that when you're paying an artist on a different continent to draw some art for you.
Ring signatures look neat!