The very fact that it’s “fake money for criminals” is exactly why I didn’t pick up any BitCoin when it was 12p per coin… I could have been rich af off of £10
It is very traceable. It’s just that the government doesn’t have a special position with tracing transactions, so there’s been a bunch of kludges built on top of the very transparent Bitcoin network to try to mask things.
For your lay: the government puts a significant fraction of the coins into these boxes and can use the statistical information gained from this to deobfuscate transactions. If you put enough money in, either at once or slowly over time, they can figure out who you are.
There are plenty of issues beyond that, especially BTC and similar coins being energy inefficient, just imagine if every single transaction ran through that. It wasn’t designed to be practical.
And on the less technical side, the biggest contributor to crypto being despised by most people is the massive prevalence of scammers, from companies that pretend to help you invest (while being a ponzi scheme) to rug pulls to other scammers being attracted to it for its perceived anonymity.
Afaik there’s legitimate uses for the underlying technology, but cryptocurrency is just inferior to regular digital currency from a practical standpoint, and you either have to put up with government regulation (defeating the purpose of a currency aside from government) or put up with fraud that can’t be stopped by our governments.
the biggest contributor to crypto being despised by most people is the massive prevalence of scammers
At risk of being called a crypto bro or something (I’m really not, I learned all this shit years before everything turned into what it is), I’d like to play Devil’s advocate here for the moment and ask how that’s different from fiat currency?
USD is practically untraceable, and people are being scammed out of it constantly with no recourse.
I too, ran across Bitcoin in the VERY early days, when it was pennies. I thought it was a scam and probably illegal, I mean “people can’t just set up their own currency, can they?” It didn’t help that I first found it when I was poking around in Tor, wondering what the “dark web” was all about.
@DarrinBrunner
I found it at $50 and knew it was for sketchy things but still tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my parents to let me give them my cash to use their debt card to buy some.
The very fact that it’s “fake money for criminals” is exactly why I didn’t pick up any BitCoin when it was 12p per coin… I could have been rich af off of £10
“criminals” = people the goverment doesnt like crypto is untraceable (mostly)
I think thats why there are so many smear campaigns against it
It is very traceable. It’s just that the government doesn’t have a special position with tracing transactions, so there’s been a bunch of kludges built on top of the very transparent Bitcoin network to try to mask things.
For laypersons: they put all the coins in a box and shake the box.
For your lay: the government puts a significant fraction of the coins into these boxes and can use the statistical information gained from this to deobfuscate transactions. If you put enough money in, either at once or slowly over time, they can figure out who you are.
thats the point, its decentralized
anything is traceable IF you have a special position in the transactions
monero, as an example, lets you run your own node
Monero is untraceable (if you don’t use a KYC exchange to get it), but Monero isn’t “most” crypto.
You said crypto, in general, is mostly untraceable and that’s very very wrong.
Monero is the exception, not the rule.
Super super incorrect.
There are plenty of issues beyond that, especially BTC and similar coins being energy inefficient, just imagine if every single transaction ran through that. It wasn’t designed to be practical.
And on the less technical side, the biggest contributor to crypto being despised by most people is the massive prevalence of scammers, from companies that pretend to help you invest (while being a ponzi scheme) to rug pulls to other scammers being attracted to it for its perceived anonymity.
Afaik there’s legitimate uses for the underlying technology, but cryptocurrency is just inferior to regular digital currency from a practical standpoint, and you either have to put up with government regulation (defeating the purpose of a currency aside from government) or put up with fraud that can’t be stopped by our governments.
At risk of being called a crypto bro or something (I’m really not, I learned all this shit years before everything turned into what it is), I’d like to play Devil’s advocate here for the moment and ask how that’s different from fiat currency?
USD is practically untraceable, and people are being scammed out of it constantly with no recourse.
Bitcoin energy use doesn’t scale with the number of transactions but based upon the competition for mining.
so you have to put up with surveillance or put up with freedom?
I dont think the state should be able to trace transactions
I too, ran across Bitcoin in the VERY early days, when it was pennies. I thought it was a scam and probably illegal, I mean “people can’t just set up their own currency, can they?” It didn’t help that I first found it when I was poking around in Tor, wondering what the “dark web” was all about.
@DarrinBrunner
I found it at $50 and knew it was for sketchy things but still tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my parents to let me give them my cash to use their debt card to buy some.
I could have paid off their house 😆
@rizzothesmall
Haha, what an idiot!
Yeah, I didn’t get any either. :-/