> The killer app is decentralized, permissionless, open source, and censorship resistant network.
Yes, but what can I do with that other than toot/tweet/twit at other people and buy LSD tabs?
Yes, but what can I do with that other than toot/tweet/twit at other people and buy LSD tabs?
https://www.nucypher.com https://filecoin.io https://alice.si https://www.augur.net
Whatever Wikileaks originally was, it is now a Russian propaganda tool. Go ahead and try to post leaks critical of Russia on Wikileaks, or for that matter, of Donald Trump. Why would I want to donate to a website that is openly seeking the destruction of my country?
With IPFS you can host and access files that can't be censored. (same level of censorship resistance as torrents)
With Monero you can transact free from surveillance.
The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.
Can the government seize Bitcoin directly? No.
Can the government seize your bank account directly? Yes.
Can they threaten you with jail if you don't hand over your Bitcoin? Yes
Yes, it can. The U.S. government has in fact seized Bitcoin directly and sold it at auction several times. It is arguably the single largest non-exchange seller of Bitcoin in Bitcoin's history.
1) Seed phrases are discovered (ie. plaintext document or physical artifact).
2) Seed phrases are handed over by willing party.
If #1 doesn't exist, then #2 is the only option.
Money can only be seized if the safe is found. And the combination is handed over by a willing party.
The difference is that money is actually more secure because you don't have a public ledger telling you that it exists and who owns it and how much of it they own as you do with the public cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Crypto is magnitudes more accessible. I can travel to any country in the world with an encrypted usb drive of my seed words, and no one is wiser. OR even upload a file to the internet and forego carrying anything at all. A government can try to censor transactions belonging to an address, but we don't have good precedent to see how the network will behave. Miners in other jurisdictions have no reason to follow someone else's censorship.
A government could seize miners, and given that ~50% of the world's Bitcoin mining capacity appears to be located in one country, that might give them considerable leeway to rewrite the blockchain to their liking.
Forks can and have been used to deal with isolated malicious incidents, but do you think they can be successful against an actor in extended control of a substantial part of the hash rate?
Private keys can be confiscated like anything else. They won't do you much good if you're thrown in prison for not turning them over if legally compelled. Sure you can try to hide your ownership, but my point is that actual cryptocurrencies are only one layer of very deep opsec you need to resist state actors. For the common illegal goods consumer it's unlikely to do much more than provide a false sense of security due to other opsec failures (use of phones, use of cookies, use of mailing addresses, use of non-e2e chat, using a hosted wallet, lack of anonymous vpn, etc etc etc).
> The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.
Interesting use of "dollars." How much is actually Tether? How much is manipulated market cap (through wash trading or more convoluted defi mechanisms)? How much is actually liquid USD?
Your exactly correct that nobody can help you recover your money if you lose your keys.
So the killer app for bitcoin is owning bitcoin?