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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Turns out the one thing Blockchain is good at, building out decentralized strings of commonly agreed upon immutable transactions, is actually not that useful. For small items we need an "undo" button because people make sloppy mistakes or get scammed, for large items we want the government to act as enforcer of the property (house, dollars, car) in question so it doesn't actually help us to decentralize.
I was originally interested in crypto because I wanted to know how it managed to make truly decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions possible. After I learned about how it did all that, I also learned three things:
decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.
permissionless transactions are useless when governments are ultimately in control of payments, and have the right to restrict certain payments regardless of how they are made.
peer-to-peer transactions are useless when the currency is in so much investment demand that the price spikes, and nobody wants to spend it because it's a StOrE oF vAlUe (and because of the tax implications)
So the crypto movement demonstrated it is possible to make a platform to transact on that is free of any reliance on any intermediary, but in practice so much of our existing commerce relies on intermediaries that removing all of them causes more problems.
The way I view it is that to eliminate that one con, you have to willingly give up on all the pros. Which is a ridiculous proposition in any scenario.
I honestly think that if the price of Crypto weren't so darn high, a better ecosystem would have developed around it and it would at least still be useful for payments. But since it is so high, anyone who has any crypto would be nuts to spend it.
Some people hold up the pizzas bought with 10000 BTC as some sort of cautionary tale, because if the guy had held on to the BTC he would have hundreds of millions of dollars right now. But not only was 10000 BTC only worth the price of two pizzas then, nobody back then really knew where the project was going. Certainly no one thought one BTC would ever be worth even $1000 unless BTC transaction adoption really took off. But here we are.
(Plus, I doubt the guy spent his only Bitcoin on pizza for someone else. Someone who had 10K BTC to spare in 2010 likely had a lot more, too. He is probably not eating instant ramen unless he wants to.)
To be fair, there are some services you can get with crypto (I have used those myself), and people (especially Monero community) are promoting a sorta-circular economy with it.
Monero has the additional draw for people who want their transactions really private, not just pseudonymously private. And the fact that some of those private uses may be unseemly I think keeps the VC money out of it. Which is a good thing.
You are much more likely to spend Monero because nobody expects it to get to $1000 or higher unless all of crypto goes up as well. So it is much more likely to get a robust transaction infrastructure.