SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'
(qz.com)
from tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world on 31 Jul 2025 23:40
https://pawb.social/post/28996796
from tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world on 31 Jul 2025 23:40
https://pawb.social/post/28996796
In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
threaded - newest
So to match the fraudulent government, the USA is going to have an entirely fraudulent market and soon after an entirely fraudulent currency.
I would argue that the market has been fraudulent for some time now, but otherwise yes
Got even worse after the Terra blockchain collapsed. Pretty much popped the first bubble in a day.
Oh no, I meant the regular market. So both markets basically.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/73a39334-6891-4d0f-a42b-0f503b40143b.gif">
Fair enough. xD
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/09fa22af-5a1b-4223-8b5f-6aa540194684.gif">
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
soon? it always has been. Does no one remember the whole CDO shit? buying insurance on bullshit loans or packaged loans/debts of quite literally shit? no one knew what the fuck was in those things, literally no one. The rating agencies would rate these things and have no fucking clue what the hell they were. They handed loans out like halloween candy to Americans just to get more shit into these things.
the US Market has been fraudulent for decades.
Will this mean that I won’t need to report every single transaction on my tax returns?
It would be real useful to use crypto for international money transfers.
I like where your head is at
hopefuly not, the IRS needs some way to track income based on the fluctuating value of crypto. yall gotta pay taxes like the rest of us.
It’s not about avoiding taxes, it’s having to submit every single transaction you make in crypto on your tax forms. One year I had to manually compile hundreds of transactions. Only for the irs forms to show their of a net loss and no taxes needed to be paid.
I wasn’t using it as an investment, so I didn’t care about the loss, which was under $10 anyway.
When you change btc into eth the IRS considers it realizing your capital gains. Even though you don’t have USD to pay extra taxes with.
RIP climate targets
Well the head of the EPA called climate change “a religion” so that ship has sailed for the US.
Funny that actual religion is being embraced by all the Republicans
It's funny that they use it in a derogative way, but it's not like they've ever been bothered with hypocrisy.
Wouldn’t it be funny if it got special protections because it was declared a religion?
Shit, lets fucking do it. What is J.R. “Bob” Dobbs’ stance on the issue?
Religion [Evil Islamic] not Religion [Glorious Christian]
modernproblemsmodernsolutionsmeme.jpg
Wouldn’t it be funny if conservatives actually gave a shit about being blatant hypocrites?
Certainly less depressing at least.
Only if Bitcoin remains predominant. The rest of the ecosystem largely moved on to proof-of-stake validation years ago, which doesn't require significant amounts of energy expenditure.
Eh. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.7% of 2024 global CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of that mining happening in US and Canada. 130.50 Mt is nothing to sneeze at.
Far too little and too late.
I literally just said:
Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That's because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.
Sure. But they’re relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There’s no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.
We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.
If that’s not obsolete, I’m not holding my breath on Bitcoin.
Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn't count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It's been running since 2013. If you call that a "boutique coin" based on "pump-and-dump" then clearly you've either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.
There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren't patched out before they become exploitable, as in it's at zero value and will never recover. That's not something that can happen to gold.
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
.
To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs…
But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.
But Etherium didn’t invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It’s like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls… But you don’t blame the people that created the pencil and paper.
Going to have to agree to disagree.
It was always vaporware. A bunch of empty promises that predicted a digital monoculture. Feel like I have to carve “Ready Player One was a Dystopia!” on a baseball bat and hit people with it.
So I’m hearing that perhaps the idea I talked about in my example didn’t sound cool to you. But it was cool to a lot of people, and your opinion doesn’t speak for everyone. And it does work, like today.
So were pogs
So you really think the ability to trade digital keys is useless? That’s honestly weird.
I mean there are so many instances of people actively using digital keys right now, so clearly that part of the functionality has value. Surely there are situations where one might want to sell access to something, and the ability to transfer a digital key with a single transaction would be useful.
I think you’re being overly dismissive based on preconceived notions.
When the keys cost several hundred dollars to generate? I’d say the price vastly outstrips the reward.
Bailey: “Cryptocurrency is useful.”
Moot: “Oh, so you think cryptography is useless?!”
That’s fine. I don’t really value your opinion.
It does not necessarily have to cost that much… But even if it did, the key to my Honda cost a couple hundred dollars to copy, so that’s not really different.
I don’t expect to change your mind, but it seems worth pointing out that the things you’re saying are pretty dumb.
And yet that’s the selling point behind proof-of-work cryptocurrency models. The whole reason they have value is the raw material cost to fabricate a new key.
Absent that cost, it’s not cryptocurrency. It’s just cryptography.
Hey, good luck out there.
I think it’s early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.
So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there’s etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?
Its technology is obsolete. That doesn't mean it can't still dominate the market share.
For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete. There are still plenty of coal power plants on the grid. Windows 8 is obsolete, but you'll find plenty of computers still running it. And so forth. There's inertia in these things.
And Bitcoin's current "dominance" is 60%. That's not exactly an overwhelming position.
You answered your own question.
Ethereum's not just one token, mind you. There's an ecosystem on Ethereum with a lot of innovation that's not directly rooted in Ethereum's advances. That's the benefit of supporting smart contracts, it's a general purpose computer that other stuff can be run on. There are a lot of layer-2 blockchains running on Ethereum, for example Aztec which has Monero-like privacy built into it.
Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can’t replace Bitcoin. It’s too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can’t hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn’t do the others’ job.
So yeah, I don’t see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.
As of this writing, Ethereum is handling 21.1 transactions per second. Bitcoin is handling 4.9 transactions per second. So purely in layer-1 transactions per second Ethereum's got 4.3 times the capacity of Bitcoin.
Some of those Ethereum transactions are for running layer-2s, as you mention that greatly expands Ethereum's capacity. Ethereum is specifically designed to be able to handle layer-2s well, it has features that were added to make them easier to scale. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was never designed for layer-2s and what it does have are hacked-together bodges like Lightning that are going nowhere.
What "job" does Bitcoin do that Ethereum can't? And before you say "digital gold", there are literal gold-backed stabletokens on Ethereum if that's what suits your fancy.
A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
The comment you're responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.
Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.
Real terms being 2022 dollar value
No it hasn't. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it's been stagnant for many years.
Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin's foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don't expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that's specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There's $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.
If bitcoin is worth more, you need to move fewer bitcoins to achieve the same result. If there USD value moved in lightning never increases then I would agree it’s a failure
I was specifically speaking in USD terms, take a look at the page I linked above. It has graphs with both USD and Bitcoin on them. In Bitcoin terms Lightning's capacity peaked in early 2023. In dollar terms it was December 2024. The line is squiggly and has a general long-term upward trend overall on the net dollar capacity, but it really doesn't look very impressive compared to Ethereum's layer-2 architecture. And that's the only line where I see a long-term rise, the rest have been stagnant or declining for years.
I stand by my overall view that Bitcoin's technology is simply obsolete. It doesn't do anything, it just sits there being valuable because it's valuable. I don't think that's going to endure forever.
Proof of work is inherently ecologically flawed, but proof of stake is inherently socially flawed. It’s literally “the people with the most money get to make the rules”. While it’s undeniably better for the environment, it doesn’t seem like an improvement to me. If anything, it undermines crypto’s greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.
No, it's not. Ether is not a governance token, Ether holders have no influence over the rules of the blockchain. This is a very common misconception and I can understand why it's easy to fall into, but consider it this way; when someone puts up a stake they are not buying "influence" over the blockchain, they are giving the blockchain a hostage. They're putting their money under the control of a contract that will destroy their money if they do anything that contravenes the rules of the blockchain.
So who gets to decide what rules the blockchain runs under? Everyone who uses it. They're the ones who are generating transactions, and those transactions are cryptographically signed to work on the particular version of the blockchain that they want to use. If they collectively decide to switch to a different version of the blockchain then they collectively change what version of the blockchain their transactions are going to. If the stakers don't go along with that transition then they're left holding Ether on a blockchain that nobody is using, which means that Ether is valueless.
This isn't hypothetical. Ethereum undergoes routine hard forks to upgrade the network, adding new features. Proof-of-stake itself was one such upgrade. There have been subsequent upgrades that did things to the network that the stakers probably weren't happy with - notably the one that added EIP-1559, a change that causes transaction fees to be burned rather than giving them to the stakers. It was a change that literally took money out of the hands of the stakers. But they went along with it because they had to. They were not in charge.
How easily can you get into Bitcoin mining right now? Regular computer hardware doesn't cut it, hasn't cut it for a long time. You need a purpose-built ASIC, a piece of specialist hardware that is only manufactured by a handful of computer hardware companies. You'll also need extremely cheap electricity, which you won't be getting out of the wall of your house. You'll need an industrial power feed, probably located somewhere near a power plant with excess capacity where you can get it particularly cheap.
If you want to set up a solo Ethereum validator, all you need to do is buy ~$120,000 worth of Ether and make a transaction to stake it. You can do that anywhere. No special hardware is needed, no ongoing significant power cost. You do need a reasonably stable internet connection, but it doesn't have to be a high-speed one. You could probably do it from a cabin in the woods over Starlink. Nobody can stop you. Nobody will even know who you are.
If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it's still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm) and you don't mind a little bit of reliance on third parties, you could buy some liquid staking tokens. Spend as little as you want, they subdivide. Or wait a little while, Ethereum's devs are mulling a proposal to reduce the minimum stake from 32 Ether to 1 Ether. That'll reduce the price for setting up a solo validator to $3,683 at today's price.
This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I’d leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.
I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn’t really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that’s basically the low end for a single machine.
Personally, that’s about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.
No problem. It's past my bedtime too, but I'm really pleased that I'm able to discuss this stuff and I'm not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It's always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat. :)
Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there's no way you'd be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn't rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone "follows the rules", by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn't consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.
I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a "share" of a single validator's stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator's rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.
That’s not true if your home electricity cost is low. You will be still making a profit. Last I checked hardware pays for itself after a year if your electricity is very cheap. Then it’s very slow profit and then it gets too old to make a profit.
With very cheap electricity you can expect 2x return after a few years and then it becomes garbage when the difficulty is too high
You can easily mine from home in a country like China that has $0.08 per kwh energy cost. Not everyone lives in California
You say that now, but wait for the US economy to completely shit itself.
COVID and the Great Recession were both spectacular for reducing emissions.
I mean, global economy really. Crypto has the potential and already fucked a few banks when it shit itself which could’ve led to awful bank runs.
If/when it destabilizes the American banking system the entire global economy will follow its lead down, at least a bit.
Like I don’t think people understand how devastating letting a scam like this into proper finance can be. Finance itself already has way more latitude than it should- wait until this just splits everything wide open.
One of the nice things Trump has been doing has been decoupling the US domestic market from the global chain. If we can keep ourselves propped up for another couple of years, the collapse will remain contained to ourselves and our immediate allies. I mean, case in point, Russians and Iranians and N. Koreans and Cubans are so sanctioned to shit that they don’t really care if the dollar takes a tumble.
2008 was the hard lesson. Too Big To Fail means the scammers are the only ones who walk away from the mess.
Yeah I had arguments with my late brother about this, but 2008 could have been the perfect time to let banks fail or be completely federalized, and directly bail out home dwellers and implement universal basic income at the same time to make the “payment systems and retirement funds will vanish” argument invalid.
For some, that is the point.
To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.
This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.
Well this is obviously going to go swimmingly.
The only surprising thing is they didn't also whisper, "We're gonna get so stinking rich off this!" at the same time.
Crypto should want more regulation and they should want the public educated on why this makes crypto safe.
Crypto is already largely seen as a scam, one that many privately mess with, but this won’t help that perception.
Edit: Dude, I never implied it wasn’t a scam. That goes without saying. I was merely stating what I sense public perception is.
It’s more than seen as a scam.
It is known
lol it is a scam
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
Fuck the haters—you don’t have to pander to them. I like crypto too, and I don’t give a flying fuck how many times I get downvoted for saying that.
Investing in BTC and ETH has made me thousands over these past 3 years or so (I can send screenshots as proof to any naysayers). All because I ignore the haters and keep stacking sats. So why the fuck would I listen to anyone who calls it a “sCaM”? But I digress; it’s not my fault that people are stupid.
What could go wrong?
Oh… y’know
Deregulate? Because there's oh so many regulations already?
yep just like all the AI regulations they’re deregulating.
I hate how words don’t mean anything to these people, and their shitbrained followers eat it up.
I feel like there was a time when we messed around with unregulated banking before.
I don’t remember what happened though…
Huh. Oh well.
Hey, yaknow what’s a funny word? “Contagion”. Hehe. What a weird word.
What was I saying? Eh, it’ll be fine.
now we get to see what happens with AI running wall street too!
…what was the point of the crypto bill the right wing just pushed through, then?
Genuine question, is crypto good for anything other than gambling at the moment? I don’t ever hear of anyone buying anything with crypto, only exchanging it out for USD. NFTs are basically a punchline now… what is it actually good for?
Maybe if you want to buy something visa, Mastercard, and Christian nut jobs don’t want you to have. Otherwise it’s a total scam.
Assuming you can find a buyer who will process that crypto, without touching either of those payment processors. All the crypto evangelists seem to forget the major crypto payment platforms are in use because you can actually rapidly exchange your crypto for that thing you can actually pay your rent with - but those function largely on the backbone of big payment platforms to trade that crypto into cash for the merchant.
I could be wrong, but I believe most exchanges use ACH to directly deposit into a person’s bank account.
I’m no expert, but I believe ACH is separate from your Visas and MasterCards
It was supposed to be the very thing that Paypal become (probably why Elon hedged his bet on it after getting kicked) but it became so inefficient with expensive transaction fees that everyone turned it down. As a consequence, it became a worse version of the stock market.
Mind you, this was before we even before we knew about the environmental damage.
It’s not untraceable, but it’s way more anonymous for routine purchases than CC. Also with all the nonsense the CC companies are pulling lately, it’s a nice example of why de-centralized, unbanked fiat has real value. Personally I use it for search engine subscriptions and paying VPN fees with at least a layer of “hey, you can’t sell my demographic data or send me junk mail” privacy. Also if you want to send money to someone without using venmo type garbage, it’s super easy and flexible even if you don’t have the same type of crypto as the person you are sending to. It’s huge for sending money internationally as there are big fees associated with international money brokers when involving traditional fiat.
The mantra of crypto as a scam is wrong. It’s just seriously overvalued and has been turned into scam as an investment commodity. The technology itself, at least modern scalable versions that don’t require AI level nuclear power plants to scale, is not flawed. The fact that the archiac unscalable bitcoin prototype is still the most valued is a great example of the mismatch between real world value and the fucked up crypto marketplace.
The fact that scams persist on blockchain is an unfortunate side effect of the whole uncensorable thing…
So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.
I’d use ethereum with a USDC token for anything that didn’t need to be ethereum specifically. Then you’re not subject to the volatility of the crypto itself, but still gain the ability to pay for things or transfer money globally. Unless you actually want the crypto exposure of course.
If you wanted stronger privacy, you could put the ethereum/usdc through Tornado Cash first. The SEC tried to sanction it and lost in court.
Also staying in USDC is easier for tax purposes.
Monero absolutely is untraceable
Sui specifically is a unique horse in this race, as they are trying to really push for zero knowledge/trust models as well as what is known in cryptography spaces as multi party computation.
What this all effectively means long term is several things
The problem with all of this of course is it is very new tech, and it’s hard to break into a space that’s littered with scammers running pyramid schemes or just pulling the rug out from under people and running with the money.
The tech is there to eliminate a lot of unnecessary middle men in the financial world, but like all shiny new things, it is still lacking mass adoption and formal govt rules around it. This greatly limits the utility of this for the common man to just sending money to friends who have an exchange to cash them out or just paying for things visa won’t let you, like Pornhub or something.
You can anonymously buy things on the dark web with monero. I’ve been looking to buy gift cards so I can purchase things anonymously. I believe you can even pay for Mullvad with monero
You can
Yep and you get a 10% discount too if you pay with monero
mullvad.net/en/blog/we-now-accept-monero
Didn’t Newegg have some kind of crypto payment option? Do they still have it?
I funded my entire gaming pc with bitcoin, I believe they still accept it
It’s a really good way to bribe politicians and public figures.
It’s traceable and immutable. It’s a bad way to do anything illegal.
That’s just layer zero on some blockchains.
It’s a good way to launder money. They used to sell coke to fund off-the-books CIA operations, now they can just give them shitcoins.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth owning really. All the pump and dumps/rugpulls you hear about are about “shitcoins”.
Plus word is Square and PayPal will start to implement bitcoin payments to their services very soon
Bitcoin has become a reserve currency like gold, without the heavy weight
Currency has stable and usable value.
Bitcoin has neither of those.
Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.
Now it’s thousands of dollars.
It’s also lost thousands of dollars in value.
It hasn’t even been 2 decades.
There’s never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.
Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.
While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.
And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.
They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.
So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.
Yeah, and we have that…
It’s called fiat currency 🙄
Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.
Yeah, because the last time humans tried decentralized money it also caused a ton of problems.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency isn’t inventing anything new, it’s just doing the same old localized bank notes system again, but with computers™
Even if crypto had any actual physical value, and solved the stability problems, lack of inflation, etc, it would still end up having control issues, because those already wealthy in a lot of it could manipulate the value easily by simply exchanging it or dumping it.
So basically you’d just end up with the problems of current currencies + all the problems crypto has, which were the same problems localized notes had 200 or so years as well.
Yes, I’ve remembered my old idea of something like an automated digital barter connected to storage space and computation provided on demand for tokens (every provider an issuer), or something else confirmed by escrow or whatever, after learning that in China 200 years ago people used non-uniform money, that is, all kinds of coins, some literally ancient still in circulation, and somehow that worked.
That wouldn’t be as convenient as uniform money as a universal equivalent, but wouldn’t have that particular kind of problem, which value manipulation via such globally meaningful action. Simply because there’d be no single variable to manipulate.
I’m talking about valuation pegged paper money, not hard value currency. This old strawman is getting old too.
The coins worked because they were still tangible material with assigned value (ie metals value by weight or marking).
The local bank paper money was different, and pegged to hard value materials (gold standard).
Cryptocurrency works like the second because, like the paper money, crypto doesn’t have inherent tangible value (technically even less than paper since it’s completely intangible).
It doesn’t work like the fucking Chinese coins (which, btw, still relied on a very centralized government existing anyway) because you can’t hold or do anything with 0s and 1s, nor can you physically keep it around.
That’s wrong, “owning a number” is tangible value. That’s also why there are no (working) offline cryptocurrencies, double spending is a problem.
If by “works like the second” you mean that it doesn’t have physical form, then yeah, that’s in the name.
A few of them, different ones, each making their own coins. So no.
Yeah, that’s a problem, but “fucking Chinese coins” in their value also were worth more than the metals they were made from. Sometimes those metals were not very meaningful for Europeans.
And using a mix of non-uniform coins for transactions was a thing for much of history in Europe too.
In any case, in absolutes of course nothing is like any other thing. If your argument fits under that, then don’t bother, it’s boring and useless.
In relatives - you can have a “half-offline” cryptocurrency, where you don’t need all the network (or good enough majority of it) to be accessible, just one partition (or even just portion) of it, to make a transaction. In theory. This can even seem like a “partitioned blockchain”, LOL. A tree of blockchains.
There are so many cryptocurrencies so honestly I don’t know if such has been made, but it would be useful.
The reason for volatility is that any such concept at scale is subject to just the messiest lump of evolving opinions on everything. It will deflate, inflate, deflate wildly because it’s utterly subject to the whims of the people without any mechanism to counter a lack of mass consensus on what ‘value’ is.
We started noticing as things scaled up, there needed to be some regulatory management to counter the whimsical populace. Hard to fight mass inflation or deflation when you can’t do anything to manage the “money supply” to offset panic.
Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.
You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up
It rebounding and crashing by hundreds in value like a meth head on caffeinated cocaine laced with LSD is what doesn’t make it a currency.
No one wants a shit currency where one day a donut costs 1000 and the next 2000 and on the weekend it’s either 599 or 3999.
That’s why it’s at best a speculative asset, except it’s dumber than that because it’s intangible. It’s like the long term stupidity of fiat mixed with insane instability, all while using way more resources.
Same thing happened to the Argentine peso, let’s not pretend if you make a government currency it’s magically stable
The Argentine peso crashed and then stayed down. That’s actually a sign of stability, because it’s remaining at a constant, not jumping up and down wildly.
It didn’t crash only to go back to original value to the decrease by half and undulate like a wave, like Bitcoin and other crypto does.
What are you talking about? It crashed, then crashed again, then crashed again. How is that stable?
You mean all crashes then? The 3 that have happened in over ONE HUNDRED YEARS?
You can’t be fucking serious to compare that fluctuation with Bitcoin’s
It crashed ten times since 1975
No, it didn’t
…wikipedia.org/…/Historical_exchange_rates_of_Arg…
You can even see through exchange rates that it’s otherwise been relatively stable too:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/660d903d-8eb2-4b48-8d76-0acac05e2e7d.png">
(Pictured: not even a crash apparently, just a change to the currency type by pegging it to the dollar).
You see in 1948 where it’s 4.5 and jumps to 9 a year later? That’s a 50% crash in a year
Next year it’s 15. In 1952 it’s already 28. In 1956 it’s 40, up from 28 a year earlier. Crashed again in 58, 62, 64, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 02, 03, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23
My previous 10 times comment was taking consecutive years as a single crash
If things go as they do, then it’ll be your only option soon to pay for porn.
Yes. There are a few legitimate non gambling non crime uses. But those are typically very minor transactions. The problem is that it is somewhat anonymous and not refundable. It turns out that we really do want those features for almost all medium-high price purchases. Otherwise the thieves and scam artists will jack our shit.
[Illicit cryptocurrency transactions experienced a notable decline, representing approximately 0.4 percent of the total transaction volume. … Scams accounted for 24% of total illicit activity. …ampproject.org/…/insights-from-trm-labs-2025-cry…)
Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.
Where tf do you order an assassin online? It’s an FBI agent on the other end for sure.
wondery.com/shows/kill-list/
Not really. Just a bunch of volunteers trying to get the police all over the world to do their job.
It’s easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It’s a nightmare
Also easy to transfer with IBAN and relatively cheap … so I guess other countries that do not rely on IBAN?
It’s easy if you want to pay $50 for a wire for your $20 transfer
Monero is good for completely private and secure transactions. People often use it to buy drugs online… From what I’ve heard.
Don’t a lot of platforms online not let you buy Monero because of this? Like how do people buy Monero through a reputable source?
godex.io
Buy a reputable cryptocurrency then swap that for whatever you want.
Crypto (ETH and the like) is useful for it’s protocol, you can build projects on it.
Bitcoin is a good store of value, and with lightning payments starting to be accepted it could be a good way to pay for goods and services. The third world is currently using lightning to circumvent inflationary currency swings.
I used to buy a lot of pizza and burgers with bitcoin when I did night shifts. Still use it to buy electronics at least once a month.
It’s also the best way to donate to nonprofit projects. I can just send ~ $10 of value, one time. No need to risk accidentally signing up for a monthly subscription or being bombarded by spam.
If you don’t keep 100% of your monthly budget in BTC, you don’t really care about the volatility either, because long term it always goes up.
None of your examples are examples of what it is good for, since they can all be done by other means.
Just because you can do something in another way doesn’t make every other way bad
It was great to trade and move value around. You could send to other countries, or do work for it. But Bitcoin fucked it all by basically being a ponzi scheme. People below will talk about it and how it holds or increases in value. Thats because most people are still buying in and hording it. Making it terrible as a currency.
I never bought crypto, I only traded, bartered, worked for it. I never put it on an exchange or used another company. Another sink of value and a stupid place to keep it. But that is the vast majority of people now.
So it is not good for anything anymore. Except speculation and hoping your are not the last holding the bag.
Bitcoin specifically was never meant as a currency. There is a reason why people call it “digital gold”. I do find myself hesitant to buy it since people buy it with the goal of getting rich, it ruins the entire point.
In theory I actually love the idea of Bitcoin, something independent of resources. I know that sounds weird, but the moment asteroid mining gets big, traditional money storage will get rocked, hard. While something like Bitcoin, in theory, would be safe.
I see deregulation as generally a bad thing if you want any of this to be taken seriously and not be manipulated. At least, for most of them. In theory you could have a crypto that is very resilient to manipulation, I just don’t know if that exists right now.
Sure it was, look at the name of Satoshi’s paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Um ackchually by electronic cash they mean like bearer bonds, irreversible but not necessarily usable at all.
I’m going to go ahead and not worry about asteroid mining
Its good for evading the law.
Suckas bouta get took.
Finally, some good fucking news.
I don’t care how much you hate it, start stocking up on BTC and ETH now. $1,000,000 BTC, here we come! :D
Fuck that buy xmr.
Not because you should invest, but because you’ll need a way to pay for mullvad and diy E, considering everything else.
This isn’t good news for the crypto market. MAYBE in the short term.
But if you want it to actually grow, then you should want reasonable regulation.
Sounds like another pump and dump scheme to inflate prices of popular crypto, which trump and his buddies already bought cheap, sell high, and then reverse the process after profits have been made. All this guy knows is money. It’s not even the value, just getting a payday is his high.
Ready for another crash.
Unregulated capitalism is tool of fascists
Sure, because of all the things that we could loosen regulations on, CRYPTO should be at the top of the list. After all, we have only people with the most unquestionable integrity involved. /S
speedrunning the destruction of the us economy and the fall of the us. you love to see it.
I see we’re putting the crypto in cryptofascist.
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Something something Venn diagram is a circle something.
Crypto makes it easier to launder dirty money
Those greedfuck assholes. Never fucking learning anything.
Whoohoo Viva Ponzi baby!
Edit: But also very little is being said here.
Oh Boy, it’s Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo!