Bitcoin used to be anonymous. Then AI came along and fucked that all up.
Most of the other chains are not anonymous. A public ledger is still way better than the current private banking system that’s not secure, not anonymous, and you basically don’t control or own your own money. You literally can’t even access or spend your own money on the weekend or after hours with the current banking system.
There’s plenty of secure and private crypto projects like Monero and PirateChain. If you want anonymous transactions free from government with low to no transaction fees then those are the two places to put your money right now.
DeFi is also going to be huge. The ability to stake and loan your own crypto to others in exchange for a reward or interest is going to allow us to make money off our money again the same way our parents did in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s like the equivalent of opening a savings account with a high interest rate.
Has AI, corruption, gambling, and world governments influenced and fucked up Bitcoins original purpose and intention? Absolutely.
Is it still better than the US dollar and banking system? Absolutely.
Are there scams and shady shit? Absolutely, but not much worse than the predatory loans and credit cards found in the traditional banking system.
Yes but you can swap your Monero on a DEX with no kyc. They can’t stop you or track you for doing this because the exchange itself is decentralized. Once atomic swaps are a I available and DEX bridges take off the powers that be won’t have any control over this.
Granted if the crypto you swap it for is tracked, then yes you’re being tracked from that point on.
As for Bitcoin, technically you’re correct and we agree. Where it was, vs. where is is today is not anonymous.
You have the pieces, but you're playing the game on their chessboard.
Best summary around.
As a short term get-rich-quick pump and dump scheme, it's great for people who play it smart. Unethical usury, but it works and people get rich, or make a few hundred us dollars and become a true believer overnight.
As a "replacement" for the banks? Get real people. Show me how to convert labor into bitcoin and back again, without using the banking system, and without leaving a neon paper trail permanently etched into the cybersphere, and I might take people more seriously.
Usually they end up trying to push some Max Headroom ideological "utopia" future where everyone in the world is using a single privacy coin and transferring them through usb drives without the man knowing, and somehow the world banks all just rolled over and went bankrupt when it happened. It's bullshit.
It's very very clear that the banks are going to roll out their own on a global scale and then every government in the world will crack down on non-official coins like hard drugs, and the whole system will crash overnight.
As a "replacement" for the banks? Get real people. Show me how to convert labor into bitcoin and back again, without using the banking system,
You don’t need to use the banking system. If someone pays you in Bitcoin, they just send it to your address. People only use the exchanges because they want fiat. If fiat was not necessary or desirable, you would deal in pure crypto sent directly to each other.
and without leaving a neon paper trail permanently etched into the cybersphere, and I might take people more seriously.
Having a “paper trail” is mandatory, because that’s where the security comes from.
Your wallet doesn’t need to be connected to your identity though. If I know Bitcoin has been sent from wallet X to wallet Y to wallet Z, I don’t know if it has left your possession at all. You could own all three wallets. That information is not encoded in the blockchain.
So a simple privacy measure is to make a new wallet for every transaction, which can be done automatically by software.
That is a lot of what the privacy focused coins do, in addition to off chain or mixing of inputs.
The weakness of cryptocurrency in a privacy sense is the exchanges, and everyone’s need to convert back to fiat. That’s where they will get your identity from.
You need to do more reading and less writing. I know 13 year olds with a better understanding of cryptocurrency than you have.
Bitcoin is compromised by bankers. They control development and refuse to increase the blocksize. This means only 500k people can use it, so it cannot compete with national currencies.
Ethereum is far more scalable than Bitcoin, but it's mostly owned by banks now, and is moving to proof of stake.
Bitcoin Cash is the closest thing to the original project of Bitcoin. It's constantly attacked.
Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin SV are attacks on Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash respectively, to fragment the communities and network effects.
Monero and other privacy coins are not liked by regulators, but don't scale well, so their threat is limited.
XRP is a full on bank token. It's one step away from a central bank digital currency.
Tether is a state sanctioned ponzi scheme.
If you don't know what these things are, how they work, and their history, then you don't know what you are talking about.
As I have started to trade stocks more, I have started to really appreciate the blockchain's rapid settlement of transactions. Banking and brokerage account transactions take days to settle, and if you move money at the wrong time you get a "Good Faith Violation", which is basically just legalese for "double-spend protection", and it happens much more quickly and efficiently with a blockchain. You can't pretend that there is no utility in the distributed ledger technology, because there obviously is.
Plus it is permanent. I know that some people may not like that, but it means that you know for certain if money was transferred to you that it cannot be undone.
Here’s another interesting idea: retailers and bankers in general require a lot of information about you for the sole reason that they can prove it is really you making the transaction.
If using Bitcoin though, who cares? As long as the money is sent, it does not matter because there is nothing to dispute.
So for a service, just send the crypto and use whatever email account as an identifier. If you are buying a physical object, why should you provide anything other than an address to ship to?
Of course it isn’t that simple because the government “must” know all this information for its own purposes, but it could be that simple, which is amazing.
Sure "The Man" doesn't control your coins, but he seems to control every other bottleneck.
And??? The government is involved in everything, and you are going to dump on the one thing that gives you the ability to store and transfer your wealth without their permission?
This is stupid. It’s like saying guns are a scam because the government can restrict where you use or carry them, or who can buy them.
With Bitcoin I can
•be anonymous
•hold my own money without relying on a bank
•not worry about being robbed of my gold
•not let anybody else dictate where I spend my money
•not let anyone else know how much money I have
•backed up by math, instead of literally nothing (USD)
•controlled rate of inflation with a hard cap on the amount of money that will ever exist
Sure, there’s price volatility but to ignore the useful functions of crypto is to be a Luddite and being such, is irresponsible and being irresponsible is dangerous.
Sure, you could trade precious metals but where will you store them? What about civil asset forfeiture?
If you’re not willing to read up on these things, you’ll think that the only gateways to crypto are through shit places like Coinbase or other places that make you link your name to a wallet.
It’s actually easy as fuck to hold NON-anonymous coins like Bitcoin in an anonymous way. Or you could just use Monero.
I’m a programmer whose done decently well with Bitcoin since 2012, I’m ALWAYS concerned with the continuing problems of government overreach, and I enjoy crypto NOT because I’ve made slight financial gains, but because it lets me be responsible for my own money.
There are a few possibilities in terms of attack vectors that fuel people’s skepticism of crypto, which, I understand being skeptical of every single aspect of everything in the world.
Quantum computers destroying the hashrate:
Coins would either develop quantum asic-resistant hard forks, or people would simply shift to another coin
SHA-256 being developed by the NSA:
It’s open sourced, so that’s no worry
Intel and AMD having back doors in every computer CPU made since 2009:
These can be disabled, even though it’s a pain in the ass.
Nobody knows who invented Bitcoin:
The name “Satoshi Nakamoto” screams “purposeful misdirection” to me. Probably not China or the US government.
The blockchain is permanent:
Yes, and you should assume that all cash that trades hands holds fingerprints on it for at least a year. It wouldn’t be hard for a programmer to create a system with all fingerprints on cash and cross reference each against each other to figure out exactly where each physical dollar has been and with who
Whose gonna be responsible if I get hacked?
Your goddamn self. Your money, YOUR responsibility. Learn to fucking use a computer safely. Say an FDIC bank gets hacked and someone steals a bunch of money. The government is just gonna print up new, Fake money to cover that. That devalues the money that responsible people have that was never hacked.
“If the electric grid goes down, your Bitcoin will be worthless”
Yeah so will your credit card, I’m not saying don’t diversify, but make sure you buy some bullets too.
You could get phished or be the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack. So learn how to spot these attacks before they happen to you.
I value my own responsibility, that’s why I like Bitcoin, Monero and open source software
If crypto helps a bunch of normal folks who normally wouldn't have the opportunity to build wealth, I'm not sure I see the problem.
The only reason my net worth is positive, is because of crypto. You have to ignore a lot of folks like me to push the "CrYpTo Is A sCaM" agenda at this point.
It has elevated people who could not be elevated by the previous system. What's not to like about that?
It's literally IOUs backed by technology. Wow, what a psy-op!
The stuff just reeks of controlled opposition to banking.
Researchers: "Children have less than a tiny fraction of a percentage risk of Covid fatality"
Normies: "But it's not the same as zero! Please think of the children! NO risk is acceptable!!!"
Bitcoin used to be anonymous. Then AI came along and fucked that all up.
Most of the other chains are not anonymous. A public ledger is still way better than the current private banking system that’s not secure, not anonymous, and you basically don’t control or own your own money. You literally can’t even access or spend your own money on the weekend or after hours with the current banking system.
There’s plenty of secure and private crypto projects like Monero and PirateChain. If you want anonymous transactions free from government with low to no transaction fees then those are the two places to put your money right now.
DeFi is also going to be huge. The ability to stake and loan your own crypto to others in exchange for a reward or interest is going to allow us to make money off our money again the same way our parents did in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s like the equivalent of opening a savings account with a high interest rate.
Has AI, corruption, gambling, and world governments influenced and fucked up Bitcoins original purpose and intention? Absolutely.
Is it still better than the US dollar and banking system? Absolutely.
Are there scams and shady shit? Absolutely, but not much worse than the predatory loans and credit cards found in the traditional banking system.
Yes but you can swap your Monero on a DEX with no kyc. They can’t stop you or track you for doing this because the exchange itself is decentralized. Once atomic swaps are a I available and DEX bridges take off the powers that be won’t have any control over this.
Granted if the crypto you swap it for is tracked, then yes you’re being tracked from that point on.
As for Bitcoin, technically you’re correct and we agree. Where it was, vs. where is is today is not anonymous.
You need to do more reading. Some cryptos are scams or controlled opposition, some are not and are viciously attacked.
Best summary around.
As a short term get-rich-quick pump and dump scheme, it's great for people who play it smart. Unethical usury, but it works and people get rich, or make a few hundred us dollars and become a true believer overnight.
As a "replacement" for the banks? Get real people. Show me how to convert labor into bitcoin and back again, without using the banking system, and without leaving a neon paper trail permanently etched into the cybersphere, and I might take people more seriously.
Usually they end up trying to push some Max Headroom ideological "utopia" future where everyone in the world is using a single privacy coin and transferring them through usb drives without the man knowing, and somehow the world banks all just rolled over and went bankrupt when it happened. It's bullshit.
It's very very clear that the banks are going to roll out their own on a global scale and then every government in the world will crack down on non-official coins like hard drugs, and the whole system will crash overnight.
That's why I have gold and silver too tbh
No it’s not a legit worry. Do you realize that if they can break the encryption that protects Bitcoin, they can break ANY encryption?
So goodbye online commerce, banking, etc. It’s never going to happen.
You don’t need to use the banking system. If someone pays you in Bitcoin, they just send it to your address. People only use the exchanges because they want fiat. If fiat was not necessary or desirable, you would deal in pure crypto sent directly to each other.
Having a “paper trail” is mandatory, because that’s where the security comes from.
Your wallet doesn’t need to be connected to your identity though. If I know Bitcoin has been sent from wallet X to wallet Y to wallet Z, I don’t know if it has left your possession at all. You could own all three wallets. That information is not encoded in the blockchain.
So a simple privacy measure is to make a new wallet for every transaction, which can be done automatically by software.
That is a lot of what the privacy focused coins do, in addition to off chain or mixing of inputs.
The weakness of cryptocurrency in a privacy sense is the exchanges, and everyone’s need to convert back to fiat. That’s where they will get your identity from.
It's a "hustle". lol
You really don't know what you are talking about.
Prove me wrong. What is the difference between proof of work and proof of stake?
You need to do more reading and less writing. I know 13 year olds with a better understanding of cryptocurrency than you have.
Bitcoin is compromised by bankers. They control development and refuse to increase the blocksize. This means only 500k people can use it, so it cannot compete with national currencies.
Ethereum is far more scalable than Bitcoin, but it's mostly owned by banks now, and is moving to proof of stake.
Bitcoin Cash is the closest thing to the original project of Bitcoin. It's constantly attacked.
Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin SV are attacks on Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash respectively, to fragment the communities and network effects.
Monero and other privacy coins are not liked by regulators, but don't scale well, so their threat is limited.
XRP is a full on bank token. It's one step away from a central bank digital currency.
Tether is a state sanctioned ponzi scheme.
If you don't know what these things are, how they work, and their history, then you don't know what you are talking about.
Any thoughts on ADA ?
Mainly looking at these things on a short-term lens;
From what you're saying, xrp might be a good move there.
Fiat is an imaginary digital currency and that doesn’t stop you from using it.
Because Fiat is accepted by 99% of the sellers who have stuff you might want to buy.
XRP is accepted by ...?
NICE.. now do Fiat!!... Oh wait...
Been buying gold...Silver.. palladium since the early 2000's.
I'm no fan of Crypto... But I am a fan of make easy $$$ from Crypto.
Do you buy gold? Yeah you said so up above. So it’s pretty hilarious for you to talk about utility. I’m guessing you don’t have much of it.
How would you move it if you ever needed to? How do you secure it? How would you transport it across borders?
None of those are a problem for Bitcoin.
Really? I thought it was totally tracked by the government.
As I have started to trade stocks more, I have started to really appreciate the blockchain's rapid settlement of transactions. Banking and brokerage account transactions take days to settle, and if you move money at the wrong time you get a "Good Faith Violation", which is basically just legalese for "double-spend protection", and it happens much more quickly and efficiently with a blockchain. You can't pretend that there is no utility in the distributed ledger technology, because there obviously is.
Plus it is permanent. I know that some people may not like that, but it means that you know for certain if money was transferred to you that it cannot be undone.
Here’s another interesting idea: retailers and bankers in general require a lot of information about you for the sole reason that they can prove it is really you making the transaction.
If using Bitcoin though, who cares? As long as the money is sent, it does not matter because there is nothing to dispute.
So for a service, just send the crypto and use whatever email account as an identifier. If you are buying a physical object, why should you provide anything other than an address to ship to?
Of course it isn’t that simple because the government “must” know all this information for its own purposes, but it could be that simple, which is amazing.
Go into the crypt and attach yourself to the block and chain...all the cool kids do it.
there is no need for doomer boomers to hold crypto. for your convenience, i'll take it off your hands free of charge.
And??? The government is involved in everything, and you are going to dump on the one thing that gives you the ability to store and transfer your wealth without their permission?
This is stupid. It’s like saying guns are a scam because the government can restrict where you use or carry them, or who can buy them.
Does it make the gun bad for self-defense? Nope.
Did you somehow lose your crypto because you lost the internet or power? Nope.
With Bitcoin I can •be anonymous •hold my own money without relying on a bank •not worry about being robbed of my gold •not let anybody else dictate where I spend my money •not let anyone else know how much money I have •backed up by math, instead of literally nothing (USD) •controlled rate of inflation with a hard cap on the amount of money that will ever exist
Sure, there’s price volatility but to ignore the useful functions of crypto is to be a Luddite and being such, is irresponsible and being irresponsible is dangerous.
Sure, you could trade precious metals but where will you store them? What about civil asset forfeiture?
If you’re not willing to read up on these things, you’ll think that the only gateways to crypto are through shit places like Coinbase or other places that make you link your name to a wallet.
It’s actually easy as fuck to hold NON-anonymous coins like Bitcoin in an anonymous way. Or you could just use Monero.
I’m a programmer whose done decently well with Bitcoin since 2012, I’m ALWAYS concerned with the continuing problems of government overreach, and I enjoy crypto NOT because I’ve made slight financial gains, but because it lets me be responsible for my own money.
There are a few possibilities in terms of attack vectors that fuel people’s skepticism of crypto, which, I understand being skeptical of every single aspect of everything in the world.
Quantum computers destroying the hashrate: Coins would either develop quantum asic-resistant hard forks, or people would simply shift to another coin
SHA-256 being developed by the NSA: It’s open sourced, so that’s no worry
Intel and AMD having back doors in every computer CPU made since 2009:
These can be disabled, even though it’s a pain in the ass.
Nobody knows who invented Bitcoin: The name “Satoshi Nakamoto” screams “purposeful misdirection” to me. Probably not China or the US government.
The blockchain is permanent: Yes, and you should assume that all cash that trades hands holds fingerprints on it for at least a year. It wouldn’t be hard for a programmer to create a system with all fingerprints on cash and cross reference each against each other to figure out exactly where each physical dollar has been and with who
Whose gonna be responsible if I get hacked?
Your goddamn self. Your money, YOUR responsibility. Learn to fucking use a computer safely. Say an FDIC bank gets hacked and someone steals a bunch of money. The government is just gonna print up new, Fake money to cover that. That devalues the money that responsible people have that was never hacked.
“If the electric grid goes down, your Bitcoin will be worthless”
Yeah so will your credit card, I’m not saying don’t diversify, but make sure you buy some bullets too.
You could get phished or be the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack. So learn how to spot these attacks before they happen to you.
I value my own responsibility, that’s why I like Bitcoin, Monero and open source software
If crypto helps a bunch of normal folks who normally wouldn't have the opportunity to build wealth, I'm not sure I see the problem.
The only reason my net worth is positive, is because of crypto. You have to ignore a lot of folks like me to push the "CrYpTo Is A sCaM" agenda at this point.
It has elevated people who could not be elevated by the previous system. What's not to like about that?
It's literally IOUs backed by technology. Wow, what a psy-op!
Hey man you can send me all your crypto if you want, I'll take that devil money off your hands