Are most cryptocurrencies a scam? Maybe. All? Probably not but let's assume so. That they have no use? Definitely not the case.
I have a very hard time believing they have a sound argument for why CBDCs aren't a use case.
Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy. Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
I don't think so. The amount of fraud in crypto is nothing compared to what has been exposed in the FinCEN leaks [0], which the fraud is even worse with the banks allowing the laundering of trillions of dollars for criminals, drug-lords and gangsters. The same is true with the Zelle payments platform also rife with rampant fraud. [1]
> Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain will be caught as soon as the money hits the exchange or frozen once swapped into stablecoins.
[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...
Remember the NFT craze? Use dirty money to pump the price of some flavor of NFT. Then use clean money to speculate on a sure thing and take out the profit. Money got laundered but nothing shows up on any chain that links the dirty money to the clean speculation profits. You have to be a little clever, but blockchains absolutely don't prevent money laundering.
Thank you for enlightening the dirty masses. Maybe you have other insights, for example should one invest into banks or wait for the "crash". In any case I think your opinion is worth nothing and should be prefaced with "IMHO", rather than stating something we all know is logically impossible to have something and it to be useless. Here is a logical exercise, if something exists it is useful by the fact that it has a name for example which groups loose entities into a whole. I got more of this ...
It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.
There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.
Similarly, it doesn't have any need to invent Lightning networks to overcome the crippling limitations some blockchains impose on transaction throughput (and it's not like you need blockchains to implement payment layers and eventual consistency of records where that's seen as preferable to instant settlement) and if central banks want people to be able to write 'contracts' to automate interactions with its money to a greater extent than is already possible through third party institutions, it's perfectly capable of providing a permissioned read/write API to its records without implementing itself on the Ethereum blockchain.
Yes, but one of the core premise of crypto is "trustlessness". Once you drop that requirement far simpler distributed consensus algorithms dominate the field.
Entertainment? Okay, Bitcoin is entertaining.
I have had colleagues who were cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The casino enthusiasts did not say "we're going to replace the international financial system with casinos! Poker chips are better than dollars!" No-one stumbled wide-eyed up of the casino at dawn, up $1K, insisting that this was the future of the economy for everyone. After I said that I wasn't interested in poker or roulette, none of them tried to preach the value of poker or roulette to me.
Because they knew it was a game. An adult game with real money at stake; but all the same, just for play. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not have that same level of awareness.
For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature, it's much harder to make a similar case. I tend to be on the side to not trust it.
[1] The idea is described in the paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Some others are more altruistic than bitcoin (having a pure linear emission which prevents the current generation from hoarding most of the supply). What do you mean by non-anonymous nature?
There is really no good reason to use crypto. If there was a true political want an better working international currency or system could be made relatively fast.