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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.

They protect against tracking and provide anonimity. That might be valuable.

It might be valuable for a minority of people, but it is an active detriment for most. I want to know where my money is going, and I want my bank to be able to get it back in case of theft or fraud.

at same time you don't wanna to ask bank for permission to spend your money every time:

"Can I buy some milk today? No!, let's visit our branch first and give some papers which will require significant time/effort to get for you."

Most just not experiencing things like this but once that happen it is hard to ignore this possibility.

I do want permission from my bank, actually. Of course not for milk, but for a car or house, for sure.

For 0.001% of the population.

To be fair, you don't know when you might need this. Crypto's useful in authoritarian countries as a means of financing activities the dictator doesn't want you to partake in, like independent media funding, or to move savings to another country in case of a "sudden" foreign currency operation restrictions.

It's even more useful to destabilize a country's economy, finance covert operations and straight out launder money!

Yes, and they are not exclusively, but largely, criminals.

A major point of crypto is based on tracking as the ledger (blockchain) is completely public.

The identity of the user is secret. Others will just see a public key.

Only in theory right? The moment you use it with a service that requires credentials or an email or a physical address to mail to, it's not, unless you somehow wash it through an anonymous pool somehow

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