Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.
It’s an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
Apart from privacy coins like Monero, it’s all traceable
Good luck tracing coins that I bought for cash from John Shadyman who can’t give half a shit about KYC.
Spend some time looking into how the FBI traces wallets. It’s pretty easy, and it’s that at some point, John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you. The entire Privacy community considers cash better than every crypto other than Monero.
Also btw.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people
If I visit Shadyman twice and see that I’m getting coins from the same wallet, I’m gonna find another guy. That’s a pretty obvious thing to do.
Any pointers other than “go read some internet”? That’s a rather broad reference.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you
What “people tied to you”? I use the coins to pay some 1337Cr1m3L0rd, with neither of us ever catching a remote semblance of knowing who the other one is. Or, move them to Pierre LeCrook, who’s again giving out cash without asking questions. Shadyman and LeCrook are actually the closest links to me, but again good luck proving that I went to their house and received coins for cash or vice versa.
The pointers are that a lot of people track crypto wallets, it’s not hard to do, and that any wallet ever tied to an ID is directly identified. So any other wallet that touches those wallets gets pulled into a network cluster. Network analysis tools are decades old. Patterns get established. So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled? You trust them to be invincible?
Just use Monero or cash.
https://thecoinomist.com/learn/crypto-osint-how-crypto-and-iowners-are-tracked/
https://www.acfcs.org/acfcs-contributor-report-bitcoin-tracking-for-law-enforcement
So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled?
What you wrote right there is “Once a drug dealer is busted, it’s immediately known who ever bought drugs from them with cash”. Do you seriously not realize that it’s a loony thing to say?
Using monero or tumblers after buying the coins is of course a good advice in case the seller is a plant. But it doesn’t mean that his coins are somehow magically retroactively connected to me when he’s not a plant.
I really don’t think you understand how deep KYC goes, and how patterns get established based on wallets. This is not “loony” stuff- OSINT people do this in their spare time. Your wallet is tracked and known and connected to your dealer already by people. But hey, you do you. Just remember that you have been warned three times.
First off, read the Privacy Guides recommendations for crypto: Monero only as it provides privacy by default. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
Second, have you done KYC anywhere else? That CAN get connected indirectly to your wallet. How do you GET cash to pay Johnny Shadyshit? Did you pull out enough to also match that cash in the amounts paid by Shadyshit to a wallet within the same general time frame? Feds have this records, and if they roll Johnny, that’s classic data they use to build a case. Did someone stupid that your dealer sells to have their girlfriend deposit money from Coinbase and send the exact same amount to their boyfriend who send the same amount to the dealer? They’re connected to you, too. People you’ve never MET are making nodes on the network mapping. https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/my-journey-without-kyc/36366
Edit: And hey, I get it. Back in the day, my guy told no one to bring cash by their place ever again because he knew local PD were likely sitting across the street. So he made everyone pay him with PayPal. Park a couple blocks away, pay with what was, at the time, " less traceable" because it wasn’t a break-in robbery risk for him, and cash on hand is also something cops will get you for.
My guy, you might as well keep going with what you’re doing. Fighting with anyone about it is straight up foolish in the face of everything I’ve showing you. But remember, you’re taking a risk to maybe/maybe not be yet another example of someone ignoring all the warnings.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/bitcoin-worth-35-million-tied-213110010.html https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-historic-336-billion-cryptocurrency-seizure-and-conviction https://www.crimeworld.com/ireland/how-30m-bitcoin-seizure-from-dublin-drug-dealer-could-lead-to-360m-jackpot-for-state/a/144477652.html https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-dealer-amassed-287k-in-crypto-selling-drugs-on-the-dark-web-meth-fentanyl-dealing-guns-weapons-handgun-rifle-ak-explosion-shot-crime-investigation-homeland-security-seattle-washington-money-thousands
Not quite.
Look, ask any serious privacy community, they’ll give you the same answer. It’s kind of a known standard.
It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult
Crime, mostly.
You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that’s the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy
+1 for Monero for sure. I wouldn’t even say its just good for buying drugs like some others suggested.
https://monerica.com/ is made for you to find stuff to buy with monero. You can find almost anything there including phsical wares like clothes, food, and also lots of online services lile hosting providers for example. I even saw an accounting firm there.
Wouldn’t cash work the same here?
If you’re able to use cash, then that works too. Unfortunately, you can’t insert cash into your computer though, lol
Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.
You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn’t not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.
Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren’t anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.
So if you really know what you’re doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that’s pretty much it’s only real world application.
Also, from what I understand (I’m no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.
You can donate to private trackers with it, they already figure out how to convert it to fiat and take care of hosting
Buying drugs
Is a question still rhetorical if you’re wrong? Because you absolutely can buy a pizza and pay bills with it, you’ve been able to for years. You can also get paid in it, you’ve been able to for years.
Just because you choose not to, doesn’t mean you can’t.
It’s good for buying things online when your bank has an overly strict fraud detection system that blocks legitimate purchases because the seller is in a different country or whatever.
I’ve bought some online services with it.
Gambling.
It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.
Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.
But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.
Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.
So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.
These are the types of examples used, but I don’t not think it is actually good for these uses. If your account is hacked and someone takes the crypto, there is no way to reverse the transaction, now what the hackers own your company? If you can invalidate the shares and reissue new ones, then owning the crypto is not actually ownership of the company.
Even without theft what do you do when people simply lose access to their wallets. Maybe because they forget their password or they die and they never gave their heirs the information.
That’s all true. There are also risks with other forms of currency though. Cash is entirely vulnerable to theft (and destruction, and you can even lose it eg: forgetting where you hid it, just like forgetting a password). And other accounts can be hacked and stolen from as well, not always in any traceable way, else there would be no bank fraud or credit card theft. Nothing’s perfect.
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
If you were famous it was also good for scamming your audience :3
It still is
briefly
Yeah, that went away and has never happened again since.
