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Crypto rant

Disclaimer: I'm no one to call me, and I don't understand anything at all. You are reading the text from a random person on the Internet.

Why crypto

After reading some texts and watching some videos (and making some transactions), I can suggest the following use cases for cryptocurrencies:

1) Scams, gambling and currency speculation

I think this is pretty clear. You are either one who wants easy money and actually loses money, or you are a big fish who know what they are doing and take money from the first one.

2) Illegal activities

Child porn, extortion, u name it. Condemn.

3) Transboundary money transfers

A better use case and crypto (mostly stablecoins) have already helped a lot of individuals (e.g. - after the full-scale war in Ukraine had started).

For businesses, I'm not sure how actually good it is. They still have to pay taxes (which is not that straightforward in most of such cases), and it lacks of regulation, thus again opening the door for illegal activities like bypassing international sanctions.

4) Immutable decentralized database, decentralized calculations, etc.

You probably don't need blockchain for your app. In fact, there are a lot of alternatives. Blockchain is good for very narrow scope of problems.

Using NFTs as a "key pass" or a "club card" is an interesting idea, though.

5) Privacy-respecting operations

, when people take back their privacy and financial freedom, no matter if it is transboundary transfers, as mentioned earlier, buying dildos in sex shop or activism against an unfair regime, which is impossible in the current banking system (unless you use cash).

I don't support the idea of "Let's make every transaction open, so we can prevent child abuse." It does not work that way.

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Anything else? I can express support only in the last scenario, and, unfortunately, such transactions do not seem to have any significant share of all operations.

It seems that I am coming to the conclusion that centralization is actually not that bad until it works. Cryptocurrencies might be a viable tool until they don't. The only thing is that...

Crypto mostly does not solve problems, but creates them

Almost all cryptocurrencies are even worse than traditional money and less privacy-respecting as all transactions are open, traceable and immutable. Oh, yeah, join our Twitter and Discord...
We are already pretty much centralized by KYC/AML, and it will only get worse.
Amount of energy needed to power all these technologies is insane.
None of these currencies are actually good as currencies. Have you ever heard about "marked" coins? Made mistake and clicked the wrong button? Sorry not sorry. At the end of the day, no inflation.

Bitcoin was created, then people understood that it was a really great concept but actually sucked as a final product and created forks that are a bit better but also sucked; then Vitalik created Ethereum that sucked even more but also provoked global "WEB3" hype, and now we are stuck trying to solve the "cryptocurrency trilemma" by creating different consensus algorithms, trying to improve transactions throughput, decentralization and "tokenomics", building bridges and creating layers around layers and that all does not make any sense. Ah, yeah, we also sometimes scam people in a meanwhile.

Cryptocurrencies do not solve any problem for a regular person. Do you really suffer because payments system does not process X hundreds of thousands of transactions per second? Or because you have nowhere to invest? Search engine returns nothing for "casino online"?

IMO, decentralization (freedom backed by math) is the only good reason to use (some) cryptocurrencies. Everything else is (probably) noise and trash to make money.

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This text is distributed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

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