Technology

That depends entirely on the currency.

Ethereum l2 has way lower (less than a tenth) transaction fees than credit cards and barely has an impact at all on the environment because there is no mining.

And cryptocurrencies do have consumer protection services but no one ever uses them.

More importantly, however, Visa and mastercard collude and boycott japanese anime and manga websites because they think anime and manga promote gender stereotypes, so credit cards can fuck right off.

Don't forget how easy it is to launder money with cryptocurrency.

All of those points are true for some crypto projects, and untrue for others. There are some projects with their own Blockchain that have ultra-low fees, others with quick transactions, and others whose algorithms are much more environmentally friendly. (There are other projects and tokens they are full-on scams with no redeeming value whatsoever).

And consumer protections are something that can be added to crypto, but out of necessity they involve trusting some entity to arbitrate when protection is required. Cryptocurrency is designed to be trustless, so any protections need to be added on top, like the escrow someone else talked about.

The worst thing that ever happened to crypto was for it's price to balloon. Because improving all those other aspects that make it usable as a currency took a back seat to "wen moon?". OG Bitcoin explicitly rejects improving its energy footprint and fee structure because it sees itself as a Store of Value.

If ur using shitcoins and memecoins sure. If ur using monero then u have significantly lower transaction fees, zero surveillance, zero advertiser tracking, and u cant be debanked or have ur funds frozen.

U still have consumer protections when ur using it as a currency (like intended) cos its not like someone selling something for monero is suddenly above the law just means that if u send ur money to a Nigerian prince u aint getting it back, ohh and u can still use crytpo through a traditional exchange with all of said consumer protections.

Monero transactions are mined every minute and can be verified instantly. To fool this u would either need to make multiple transactions within the span of 1 minute (perfectly timed to the unpredictable timings of the blockchain) or collude with the entire network to delay mining a particular transaction.

The environmental impact of monero is extremely minimal compared to other coins due to it using an algorithm limmited by cpu cache not compute like most currancies. Also crypto is playing a significant role in providing a way to instantly shed load from the grid in responce to the unpredictable nature of renewable energy (most cryto mining operations make more money from selling energy to the minute by minute power grid than they do from mining crypto).

That's a good way to put it. Indicator of accelerated social decay. It truly is.

Your anger should be directed toward the Citizens United ruling, which makes these insane contributions possible in the first place.

FWIW, Elon Musk personally donated more than double that $129M to the Trump campaign—more than double the amount that the entire crypto industry has donated in three election cycles, despite there being a $6.6k campaign contribution limit for individuals per candidate per cycle. That limit shouldn't be trivial to bypass, and it should be probably be lower. Or, in some fantasy land where America is something like a democracy, elections would be publicly funded with an equal amount given to each candidate.

Crypto is an unsecured investment vehicle, not a currency, because the set of goods and services it can be directly, legally exchanged for is small.

And it makes me sad. I really want cryptocurrencies to be useful for actual transactions, because it solves a lot of annoying problems, such as:

• international cash transfers - e.g. send a cash gift to a friend in another country
• person-to-person ad-hoc transactions - cash works, but cryptocurrencies can protect personal banking info for cashless transactions
• avoids network fees - credit/debit card companies charge fees to merchants, and businesses pass that on to customers; cryptocurrencies sidestep that entire system

But yes, the primary use right now of cryptocurrencies is speculation, which is incredibly annoying because that causes fluctuations, which discourages its use as a currency.

I don't really see the appeal of currency anarchy in general. Do the proponents of that really think that the power in that space wouldn't be held by what essentially amounts to digital currency warlords (anyone with a lever to apply power and the matching lack of morals to do so)? Not to mention that some regulation of finances are a good thing, it is not as if every currency intervention by central banks is done for bad reasons.

...and the hate is strong.

Wait what?

No, dictators fucking love central banks and fiat currency.

They like it even better than anything, because a dictator almost always controls the central bank. Plus, the dictator and his buddies almost always own everything, and when you own property you need fiat currency to stay in power. Fiat currency inevitably leads to hyperinflation. With hyperinflation, you get way wealthier owning property than having cash. At that point they don't need the central bank that they control.