And too right the critics like Molly are about crypto.
There is no need to kid ourselves here anymore to even entertain crypto.
Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody.
I only wish crypto died sooner and that nobody uses it.
We have other systems that are more robust than crypto that is used in the order of hundreds of millions such as UPI, PIX, Wise, Mpesa, Sendwave, etc that has time and time again proved to be better than crypto.
FedNow is coming in a months time so it should hasten crypto’s inevitable downfall faster.
Slightly off-topic rant: it seems (at least in hn circles) all the crypto buzz generation has found a new target in AI. Whereas prior to GPT-3 _every_ problem's solution according to a certain crowd was a hefty dose of web3/crypto, it seems now the consensus among a comparably sized crowd is that AI is actually the answer to all of humanity's pressing issues.
I'm not sure what fraction of HN is between 15 and 35 years old, but it's probably pretty high. Lots of people want to get a career in the new and exciting thing.
(I jest, but I do think there's some truth at the core here)
Time to trot out my pet theory that explains this and the last few decades of politics: By some combination of evolution and culture, many young men feel a strong compulsion to seek out high-risk, high-reward endeavors. Our culture encourages this with ideas like "making a name for yourself": is if you don't even exist until you've done something of significant value to the community.
There's a drive to pioneer, seek thrills, find adventure, take risk, and compete. If a culture has healthy outlets for that drive, then it can lead to incredible innovation, discovery, and harnessing new resources. How many new islands, foods, tools, drugs, etc. were found by someone who just said "fuck it" and went for it?
But when that drive has no healthy outlet, what you instead see is risk-taking turned to destructive ends. We've mapped the whole Earth, space is too expensive, most of the dangerous blue collar jobs have (rightly!) been made safer or automated, and the US's past several decades of forever wars have clearly become less and less morally justified.
So what we see is many young men striving to satisfy that desire any way they can. Things like:
* Treating crypto as a new unexplored frontier where they might get rich.
* Likewise now generative AI.
* Escaping into gaming where they can at least experience a simulation of the kind of risk, thrill-seeking, and glory they crave. Then GamerGate happened where some men lashed out at women who they felt were threatening that space where they could virtually experience that side of themselves.
* Young Trump voters who voted for him specifically as destructive wildcard to break down institutions. Because a world that is more chaotic and dangerous is a world better suited to their desires.
* Further, the fascination and trend around doomsday preppers, apocalyptic media, militias, etc. A segment of the population are obsessed with the world falling apart because maybe in the resulting chaos they can (re)build something.
This is a generalization, obviously, but I tend to think of young single men like this as the TNT of society: incredibly powerful and useful when applied well, but destructive otherwise.
> Time to trot out my pet theory that explains this and the last few decades of politics: By some combination of evolution and culture, many young men feel a strong compulsion to seek out high-risk, high-reward endeavors.
> ...
> This is a generalization, obviously, but I tend to think of young single men like this as the TNT of society: incredibly powerful and useful when applied well, but destructive otherwise.
---
(Bare branches refers to branches of the family tree where there's an unmarried male in a society where the male/female ratio is significantly distorted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Gun )
> Missing Women and Bare Branches: Gender Balance and Conflict
> We must also examine the reaction of the government. Historically, we have found that as governments become aware of the negative consequences of a growing number of bare branches, most governments are motivated to do something. In the past, “doing something” meant thinning the numbers of bare branches, whether through fighting, sponsoring the construction of large public works necessitating dangerous manual labor, exporting them to less populated areas, or co-opting them into the military or police. One 16th century Portuguese monarch sent his army, composed primarily of noble and non-noble bare branches, on one of the later crusades to avoid a crisis of governance; more than 25 percent of that army never returned, and many others were seriously wounded (Boone, 1983, 1986).
> We find that the need to control the rising instability created by the increasing numbers of bare branches has led governments to favor more authoritarian approaches to internal governance and less benign international presences. In many ways, a society’s prospects for democracy and peace are diminished in step with the devaluation of daughters.
> Because a world that is more chaotic and dangerous is a world better suited to their desires.
I would amend this to say "Because they believe a world..."
You kind of hit on it with your statements about doomsday preppers.
All of which I find hilarious. Apocalypse proponents, doomsday preppers, accelerationists, anarcho-anything, etc.
People are trying to prepare for an event that by its very definition is unimaginably catastrophic. We don't even know what that event will be. Or if survival is possible or even desirable.
People think that because they want a thing, that they're in a better position to exploit that thing. Sorry, Littlefingers, chaos is not a ladder. It's just chaos.
In recent years I have worked quite hard to rid myself of such thinking, in favor of a more positive outlook, even if it's slightly forced.
As a result, I've found myself much more at peace with the world, and generally in a better mood. I'd like to think I'm a better version of myself sans cynicism but maintain a healthy dose of skepticism. I'm not sure I bought in at first, but I've slowly come to realize the benefit of actively acknowledging goodness. +1 for "fake it til ya make it."
That said, there's certainly a significant part of my psyche with which the sentiment of the law resonates.
“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sensitive to a Sybil attack. For every technology, if you ask “What problem does it solve?” and take into account what limits it has, you can backtrack where it’s useful.
Something autonomous, expensive, rugged? Talk to the Army. Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system.
Crypto makes sense for people who are doing something the government doesn't like, but that isn’t something three-letter agencies are willing to spend billions to fix. So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime. It’s not useless, but it’s not big money, as far as I can tell.
I have friends who got in trouble with their government (the spicy kind of ecologists). They have an interesting project around Crypto: communication to evade surveillance. I’m not sure there are many others legitimate uses. But it’s not zero.
> Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system.
Craigslist--when you go to like, sell your old TV--actively tells people not to accept online payments from people because they can be reversed. Why? Because the risk to someone who has a single TV to sell is very different from the risk to someone selling hundreds of TVs, and so the person you need to protect is the seller, not the buyer.
Also, you can totally build a system on top of crypto platforms that supports reversing transactions: it is, at the end of the day, fully programmable money. It's main claim to fame is that it is decentralized and transparent in implementation, and I'd have thought those would be universally good things, right?
But like, frankly, your position here just sounds like some naive form of how we should refuse to give anyone autonomy (which almost all of these systems provide) or privacy (which the better systems provide) because good people have nothing to hide :(.
Everyone deserves end-to-end encrypted permissionless communication, and the same everyone deserves zero-knowledge protocol permissionless payments.
I tried wise some time ago. I wanted to send Euros to them, convert it to USD and then send it from my wise account to an American Bank account.
To my dismay, I found that wise doesn't do Swift transactions in USD to bank accounts in the USA. I actually thought that was the whole idea behind wise, but apparently not?
The other option was to pay my bank an additional 40€+ fee for each Swift transaction, which is too much if you need to wire money every month to the states. USDC was the cheapest option in the end (Coinbase doesn't charge for SEPA -> Coinbase and the EUR/USDC exchange rate is closely tracking EUR/USD).
I would agree that >99% of the tokens and cryptocurrencies are garbage. But I would be sad to see Bitcoin and Monero dying.
German Bank -€-> Wise - convert Euro to USD -$-> US Bank.
German Bank to Wise is a SEPA transfer. That worked fine. But it didn’t allow me to send USD to a US bank (only Euros/other currencies). ACH is only available from within the US on wise(?).
Yeah, I don’t know why you’d want to use Swift, as that’s more an international rail. ACH or Wire are the standards inside the US, along with some of the newer proprietary stuff like Zelle.
I get something like that if I'm trying to send Euros from my Wise account (and there's an "Inside Europe"/"Outside Europe" toggle). Are you able to exchange your EUR to USD within Wise first?
The USD lost 98% of its value before bitcoin ever existed. The idea that sophisticated investors have been putting their money into USD and need crypto people to explain inflation to them is ridiculous.
It is equally ridiculous that crypto people think that having a fixed supply of something makes it valuable. Oceanfront property in Miami is also limited, but crypto people are not pumping that because they are not invested in Miami oceanfront property.
Having a fixed supply does make something more valuable compared to a non-fixed supply. This has kind of been the story of the housing crisis in much of the Western world where NIMBYism and restrictive zoning have reduced the supply of housing in many desireable markets well below demand for housing. Canada has it much worse than the US as Canada has something like close to 50% of it's population in the GVA and the GTA which are both in the top 100 most unaffordable cities in the world on most lists (although on some lists Vancouver is only 103rd). Toronto prices will hopefully come down a little with EHON which seems to be an extremely good piece of legislation to allow gentle density.
Having a fixed supply doesn't make something intrinsically valuable. But restricting the supply absolutely does increase price when demand exists.
> The idea that sophisticated investors have been putting their money into USD and need crypto people to explain inflation to them is ridiculous.
"Sophisticated investors" never had access to an asset whose supply was predictable (resistant to debasement), but also decentralized and permissionless to participate in. "Sophisticated investors" should probably know their monetary history, including why gold evolved as a world standard until Bretton Woods. And the types of money societies used before that.
> It is equally ridiculous that crypto people think that having a fixed supply of something makes it valuable. Oceanfront property in Miami is also limited, but crypto people are not pumping that because they are not invested in Miami oceanfront property.
Not sure what you mean, the lead up to 2008 was a pretty interesting time for real estate developers, why would crypto people be talking about condos?
Sophisticated investors generally do not want "decentralized and permissionless" assets. They want government and legal protections.
Maybe you thing they are wrong for wanting that, because maybe you think the government is a threat to their wealth, and that is fine to have that opinion but the market for "decentralized and permissionless" isn't very big, which is why you don't see much money going into crypto anymore.
No, I understand why investors want legal guarantees. Actually, the endorsement and legal guidelines by the government for crypto would send its price soaring.
Being decentralized means no single party controls it, and thusly no single party can debase it or prevent its distribution. You need to understand why gold is still used as a store of value, and the role of government bonds as safe havens in the modern economy.
You have trust in a system because it works (for you) now, but you're not looking far enough into the future, and you're not weighting risk appropriately.
Crypto isn't just about sending money or making money. This is a completely new "thing", and part of the way its used is redefining what money actually is, based on programmatic protocols, consensus algorithms, etc.
This is exactly what I was talking about earlier in the thread. Crypto people bring up gold out of no where. I have never invested in gold. You are projecting the idea that I don't understand why USD and Gold are bad investments.
Yes some people like to buy gold because it seems like it may hold its value to those people. That is not a new concept that crypto invented. People bought Baseball Cards and Bennie Babies long before crypto in the hopes that those items would hold up in value.
So, I think you understand computers really well. I think you probably have a good enough understanding of investing, economics.
What I think you're missing the understanding of what money is, and the history of money. This is why gold gets brought up.
In the last some thousand years gold evolved as a world standard for trade. Why? It had some good properties; physically tough and lasting, common enough for people to find / rare enough to be difficult to debase (holds value), you can melt it and shape it (divisible), etc. Gold permeated all societies because it was the "winner" of precious metal monies, and good technology tends to spread, giving it network effects.
Your US dollars were originally just paper notes promising redemption for gold at your bank. We traded those notes around because we had enough trust in a system now for it to be convenient for us.
At some point, governments decided it wanted to they wanted more control over money/economy, and essentially forced a fiat standard on the population. This is the great monetary experiment we are living now.
If you can contextualize what money is, the history of money dating back thousands of years, then you can start to see how crypto has a lot of advantages over metal money, as well as fiat money.
The most important money throughout history and still today is debt. "Debt the first 5000 years" is a good book on the topic. A shorter form explanation that is pretty good is "The DEBT Cycle Explained By Ray Dalio" on YouTube
Again I'm still not sure why you are trying to convince me that USD is a bad investment. I already said it was at the beginning of this thread.
Its true, any specific open source project will have a limited and influential contributor base. But the fact that its open source code also allows it to be fluid and dynamic; ie. you and anyone who has different ideas about the direction of said project can build their own forks. You can convince people to support your network.
And then your network will compete with all the other open networks and protocols. And may the better ones win.
Moderate inflation is actually helpful. It improves the situation of debtors, and encourages people to use their money rather than hoard it. It's bad if it gets too high, of course. But a lot of boomers are very comfortable because they managed to buy a house and pay it off with cheaper and cheaper money. If your income keeps up with inflation isn't not much of a problem.
Deflation can send an economy into a death spiral.
Honest question are you legitimately excited for FedNow? What problem will it solve?
What does FedNow have to do with cryptos downfall? Does FedNow fix our 120% debt to gdp ratio? Estimates of inflation required to get our debt to gdp back to 50% is 4-5 years of 12-20% inflation.
You don't want inflation? Well then I guess the US is going to default on our loans. 98% of countries in the last 120 years that had a debt to gdp of 130% has either defaulted or had massive inflation (only exception is Japan which is still in progress, currently holding off because its positive NIIP, US has negative NIIP).
For the US it's either default, print, or hope for a miracle.
> 98% of countries in the last 120 years that had a debt to gdp of 130% has either defaulted or had massive inflation
Sounds impressive, but this stat relies heavily on a) developed world nations and b) nations back when we had the inflexible gold standard. The US also benefits dramatically from being able to issue debt in USD, which it controls.
From Jan 2019 to now we've had 17.4% inflation. Your purchasing power of the money in your bank account has been reduced. How have other assets faired in that time?
> Objection, Your Honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Okay longer timeline, if you held dollars in your savings account from Jan 2009 to now (during ZIRP) you've lost 30.5% of your purchasing power. How has the SP500 or houses fared in that time (even ignoring crypto)?
If losing 30% of your purchasing power is no consequence to you, please let me have a not much of consequence portion of your salary, thanks.
> if you held dollars in your savings account from Jan 2009 to now...
... I would be a doofus. That's where my emergency fund goes, but that's it.
> From Jan 2019 to now we've had 17.4% inflation. Your purchasing power of the money in your bank account has been reduced. How have other assets faired in that time?
My home value has tripled, and the S&P500 has gone dramatically up. Series I savings bonds are also a useful option if I'm really all that worried about the stuff in savings, as their interest rate is pegged to inflation numbers.
If we're going to carefully pick dates to make our arguments ("Jan 2019 to now" having had some... outlier stuff going on, after all) I'm gonna ask how hedging with crypto starting in April or October of 2021 would've gone. Remind me the purchasing power of a $64k Bitcoin today?
Well sorry but you confused me as my main issue was with USD and I believed you thought that USD had "not all that much of consequence" happening to its value. But it seems we are mostly in agreement.
I'm happy you have a home and own some SP500 to offset USD destruction. Not everyone is so fortunate to have access to those markets. I would suggest you look into crypto as part of your hedge against bad USG behavior because it has some nice properties that could uncorrelate it with those assets if things get nasty (90% tax rates, etc).
> if you held dollars in your savings account from Jan 2009 to now (during ZIRP) you've lost 30.5% of your purchasing power
One, obviously a policy failure. Two, don’t do this. Bank deposit dollars are optimised for transacting, not long-term value transport. For that, use Treasuries (including inflation-protected ones). It’s not the Falcon 9’s fault that it makes for a bad hammer.
Well I mean the recent bank failures showed the issue with treasuries, but sure it seems we agree more than disagree. You agree that holding USD is failure for long term value or even short term (3 year) value transport.
My argument is that assets and crypto is needed to hedge the potential incoming USD destruction. And that because crypto has some nice properties that houses and the SP500 don't, it has a legitimate reason to be a part (even if small) of your hedge.
I don't buy the "Crypto is a complete scam" argument at all.
> I mean the recent bank failures showed the issue with treasuries
No depositors lost money. And like, yeah, Treasuries go up and down in price; it's dumb our regulations pretended otherwise. Particularly given the problem was fixed by Basel III.
> assets and crypto is needed to hedge the potential incoming USD destruction
This is gold buggery. Which means gold does a fine enough job.
> don't buy the "Crypto is a complete scam" argument at all
I don't, at least not with certainty. But there is certainty around the prevalence of fraud. That needs to be regulated, which means crypto needs to be taxed to pay for that regulation. Gold bugs are a famously-profitable client group for finance; crypto is the same. Let's put them on the same level.
Gold and crypto are already taxed the same and on the same level (capital gains). Go ahead and regulate fraud how is crypto packets flowing preventing you? The blockchain is more open and transparent than the banking system. Don't you wish you could see JP Morgans or the Pentagons books laid bare like the blockchain?
> This is gold buggery. Which means gold does a fine enough job.
It's really expensive to secure my own gold. I can't easily verify my own gold. I can't easily send my goal in under a minute to help my friends in Venezuela who's government has inflated his money supply by 5,000% and confiscate most of what sent physically or through the banking system. The USG also has a precedent for confiscating everyones gold. I can't take gold with me across a border in an undetectable manner. Sorry but gold is not doing a fine enough job for me and I'd like something a little more advanced and modern.
I understand for us privileged westerners (assumption about you on my part) that this all this seems a little silly, but for my family and friends in situations where their government is behaving really badly, this is serious. And "buy T bills or a house or the sp500" are not the solutions you think they are.
And I hope it doesn't come to the US but it seems a little silly if you are rich enough to not hedge against that possibility, especially given the US financial competency these last two decades.
> Gold and crypto are already taxed the same and on the same level (capital gains)...It's really expensive to secure my own gold
Gold bugs pay for their own security. Crypto outsources investigation, enforcement and regulation onto the public.
> how is crypto packets flowing preventing you
My taxes pay for investigation and enforcement.
> Don't you wish you could see JP Morgans or the Pentagons books laid bare like the blockchain?
No? J.P. Morgan is audited. Almost nobody dives into their various filings with the SEC, FDIC, Fed, and every state banking and securities regulator. As for the Pentagon, absolutely not–that's a huge national security hole.
> for us privileged westerners (assumption about you on my part) that this all this seems a little silly, but for my family and friends in situations where their government is behaving really badly, this is serious
I don't think it's silly. I just don't think it should be subsidized by us.
> it doesn't come to the US but it seems a little silly if you are rich enough to not hedge against that possibility
It's a common pass-time for the rich. Crypto, like gold buggery, is aimed at soothing an emotional need to hedge. The fact that those with most to lose play by a different playbook should speak for itself.
Good dialogue so far but you've lost me with this.
When I buy a big vault, extra door locks, a pitbull, and a gun to protect the gold I store at home to go full gold buggery, am I paying for the investigation, enforcement, and regulation of gold? This is what I mean by its expensive to secure my own gold.
When I store gold at a business that specializes in such services, am I paying for the investigation, enforcement, and regulation of gold?
If yes for either of these, how am I not paying for that same investigation, enforcement, and regulation of crypto when buying a vault for my crypto or paying one of many such companies to hold it for me?
I don't really get what you are subsidizing that you don't also subsidize for pokemon cards, private equity, or any collectable.
Gold is exempt from sales tax in most US states so I really have no clue what you are on about.
Incase I've missed something, on behalf of all crypto users you have my full permission to stop subsidizing all USG employees trying to investigate, enforce, and regulate crypto.
> When I buy a big vault, extra door locks, a pitbull, and a gun to protect the gold I store at home to go full gold buggery, am I paying for the investigation, enforcement, and regulation of gold?
No, you’re paying to secure it. That minimises the fraud around gold.
> When I store gold at a business that specializes in such services, am I paying for the investigation, enforcement, and regulation of gold?
Id.
> don't really get what you are subsidizing that you don't also subsidize for pokemon cards, private equity, or any collectable
Private equity is subject to some reporting standards under the ‘40 Act because it is a haven for fraudsters. Pokémon cards are not similarly problematic so they’re not. Crypto, like securities and gambling, has proven itself a haven for fraud.
I don’t demonise crypto. But we need visibility, laws and enforcement, as well as a stream of revenue to pay for it.
And how has that alleged inflation hedge performed last year when inflation was at its highest? It went down about 80% YoY. Crypto is not a hedge against inflation. It's not a currency, and it barely works as a shitty payment system. It truly is one of the worst technologies ever invented, and nothing would be lost if it just ceased to exist.
All of these proposed alternatives are centrally owned either by a private company or state central bank, and only work in and between specific countries.
Crypto lies in stark contrast as a shared and open source protocol across the globe, that is not as easily centrally owned. Whether that is worth the pains of self custody, throughput and volatility is going to depend on who you ask.
There are hundreds of wallets, some of them OSS, some of them closed source, some of them homebrew. I have used several different wallets, including some that I have coded myself from lower level cryptographic APIs. This is the beauty of it: users are not limited to MetaMask, just like users are not limited to browsing the web in Chrome - despite it obviously having major market share.
Where do you live? Almost all of Africa, many parts of South-East Asia, India, many parts (if not all) of China, and nearly all of South America are heavily cash-based societies. Try to work your way up to Northern Burkina Faso, which has little to no electricity in most places, and your stance on cash being a poor substitute will quickly change.
All those payment systems you mentioned are centralized and the gov can shut you down if they dont like you. The UPI in specific has been used to shut down protestors across India who dare to protest agaist the fascist Indian regime.
Waving flags for payment systems that enable fascist wannabe dictators to cling on to power - well done.
"FedNow is coming in a months time so it should hasten crypto’s inevitable downfall faster."
You arent even trying to be original here. Wonder which twitter account you stole that from
Part of the issue is that rightly or wrongly, all of its strengths have effectively been regulated out of existence.
I needed to quickly send some money internationally for a perfectly legal purpose. I have an old Coinbase account I wanted to use for the purpose that I hadn't left any money in (because crypto is not a good investment vehicle). Thanks to changes in KYC laws, I found myself completely unable to do this. I had to give them a very uncomfortable amount of information just to unlock the account (including a scan of my driver's license and my social security number). At this point, they still wouldn't let me deposit any cash without further verification. They then proceeded to refuse to let me verify every payment method I tried using (including debit card, PayPal, checking account... they were "unable to verify" any of them). There was some third party service they wanted to use that would literally log into my bank account to provide verification (??!!), but I drew the line there.
So I just ... gave up. Forget any of the more interesting uses of crypto. We're not even talking gray market goods here (it would be interesting for people who need cheap insulin to be able to order it from international pharmacies in countries with lax laws, for example). We're talking boring ordinary transfers, effectively made impossible by regulation.
And yes, there are a lot of scams in crypto. It's not very economically or environmentally efficient (usually). Maybe it deserves to be regulated out of existence. But I do know that for a while it was able to do some things that were difficult or annoying to do in other ways.
The point is that crypto used to be able to do that, trivially. So it very much speaks to the question of whether crypto has any strengths versus other approaches to the same problems. It used to, and doesn't anymore.
Crypto absolutely can still do that. There's nothing in the Bitcoin protocol itself that enforces KYC, so you can send whatever you want to whoever you want using a basic Bitcoin client. Meanwhile, good luck sending a wire from your bank account to Iran. That will flat out be prevented. But with crypto, you take all the burden/consequences of the KYC on yourself, and the algorithm itself disallows no transactions.
They used to do it...by simply ignoring the laws. That's a measure of the chutzpah of the people running some of these early exchanges, not anything inherent about a distributed blockchain.
In fact e-gold did all that 20 years ago with a simple centralized ledger.
Unfortunately, that strength mostly boils down to "you can launder money with it". The idea that it would maintain that property indefinitely seems naiive at best.
"I've made the perfect platform for criminals, but for some reason there are a lot of people using it for crimes and now law enforcement is shutting me down! This is an outrage!"
This reminds me of why there are so few ways to simply send someone a large file on the Internet. All of the easy ways make it too easy to spread copyrighted worked, so they all need to suck in one way or another to avoid being shut down.
This is actually sort of an example of what I'm talking about. Yeah, part of the strength of cryptocurrency is that it allows bad people to do bad things. Sort of how part of the strength of encrypted messages is that they allow bad people to do bad things. Same with file transfers.
The defenses people give of file transfers, chat encryption, etc etc are pretty straightforward: certain things should be equally usable by both law-abiders and criminals, for both legitimate and illegitimate ends. That kind of broad protection is the only way to insure that the civil liberties of all users are protected. Some of the illegal things that people do with these tools are unfortunate, but protecting them remains worthwhile.
What I'm saying is that the people who invented cryptocurrency believed basically the same thing about finances - that we would be better off treating the ability to transfer money as an absolute right, kind of like Signal treats encrypted messaging as an absolute right. The fact that the government doesn't see this as "legitimate" is kind of the point. (It was illegal to export many forms of encryption for *years.) As someone who at some points has used cryptocurrency for completely legal money transfers, I've directly benefited from the ease of use and simplicity this entailed.
Is it "naive at best" to hope that Signal will indefinitely maintain the property of protecting my chats against intrusion by third parties? Maybe! But that doesn't change the point that the fact that Signal does this is the whole reason I use Signal!
Signal gets away with it because money doesn't change hands. Law Enforcement is mostly about protecting money. If Signal became a platform for scamming people out of their retirement savings they would get in trouble.
Just googled FedNow and there's FAQ where one of the questions is "Will FedNow replace services like Venmo, Cashap, zelle..." and the answer there is no... which doesn't make sense if it's suppose to be a way to instantly transfer money. Wouldn't FedNow replace all of those?
FedNow is the replacement for ETF. It is a service not an app. Venmo, Cashapp, and Zelle apps are built on top of ETF service. Those apps will presumably switch to FedNow. It is will likely be integrated into bank apps sort of like Zelle is now. I really hope that different apps will be able to send money to each other.
> Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody
It’s gambling. It should be regulated and taxed like gambling. It shouldn’t be banned, and academic exploration should be unfettered. But anyone making money off it should be monitored by the public and the law, and pay for that oversight.
There is no need to kid ourselves here anymore to even entertain crypto.
Crypto is a complete scam, with no legitimate or legal use case and nothing else to offer anybody.
I only wish crypto died sooner and that nobody uses it.
We have other systems that are more robust than crypto that is used in the order of hundreds of millions such as UPI, PIX, Wise, Mpesa, Sendwave, etc that has time and time again proved to be better than crypto.
FedNow is coming in a months time so it should hasten crypto’s inevitable downfall faster.