this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Cybersecurity
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That's a really reductionist take, I can pay taxes with the currency of my country of residence.
The best way I've found to explain crypto currency as someone who dabbled in mining and trading.
It's like any other foreign currency. I don't know what backs the British pound, I don't know what people do with it, but I do know at any given day the pound vs the dollar fluctuates in price. Some people somewhere prefer the pound.
All that is true about most crypto currencies
The analogy isn't strictly incorrect, it's just misleading. The price of usd to btc has seen more fluctuation in the last 24 hours than gbp to usd has seen in the past year. Crypto isn't a currency, it's a speculative asset.
The fact that you don't consider Zimbabwes dollarinos an actual currency doesn't take away anything from the argument you replied to.
Honestly not sure what point you're making. ZWD has been completely stable against USD for a long time. BTC fluctuated by 7 entire goddamn percent. The currency of Zimbabwe is more of a currency than literally any crypto.
A currency isn't defined by being stable. Argentina, Venezuela, and Turkey have had crazy inflation recently, and what's inflation if not high volatility in valuation? Argentina, for example, had 200% inflation or something last year, that's nuts! It doesn't make it any less of a currency.
I consider something a currency if it is primarily used as a medium of exchange. That is absolutely true for a number of cryptocurrencies. Stability of valuation vs some benchmark is irrelevant.
Exchange for goods and services? Or exchange for real currency or other crypto in a speculative manner? That's where I draw the distinction. Very few people (as far as I'm aware) just hold and use crypto like real money.
That's the only thing I use it for, and the only thing I'm interested in. I don't care about speculation, I just want a private, digital currency so financial institutions and governments can't snoop on me.
I don't buy anything particularly interesting (mostly VPNs and other online services), but I go out of my way as a form of protest because I don't like how much tracking goes on.
I stick to Monero for my cryptocurrency use largely because there's so little speculation and it doesn't have a good way to track purchases. I only keep a couple hundred USD worth at a time in my wallet, which is plenty for the stuff I buy.
Isn't every single transaction you've made stored on the blockchain that anyone can view? How is that private?
You'd have to tie the wallet number to the person. Not sure how much effort that takes, but it's a good deal more anonymous than using a credit card.
Yes, but Monero has a ton of privacy features that makes it infeasible to track transactions. Basically it makes a bunch of fake transactions, generates a bunch of wallets, etc, so an outside observer would need some very sophisticated techniques to untangle everything, if it's possible at all. The public ledger allows you to prove the transactions are accurate, not who made them.
As far as we know, Monero hasn't been compromised, and law enforcement would need the user's device to prove they made a transaction. Even having the device of someone they transacted with doesn't help.
Basically, it's as good as unmarked cash, but digital, and transaction fees are often less than a penny.
I don't buy anything illegal, I just really like the idea of digital, untraceable cash. It's none of the government's or a bank's business what I do with my money, even if it's just mundane stuff.
We started to see offchain system that don't need an onchain transactions to transacts, it does not have the same level of security as the public ledger but what does that mean is that in the future we will probably not transact daily on the blockchain but on second layer that communicate to the base layer. Blockchain is inneficient by design but it allows us to have a decentralized immuable and neutral ledger, we will scale by other mean.
I pay almost weekly using either Bitcoin's Lightning Network or Monero. I mainly buy food, snacks, hardware and online services. I never used an online casino such as Binance or Kraken, therefore I don't use them as crypto-bank nor do I do trading (never did), I often buy on centralized exchange but it goes straight to my wallet. As of today I never sold to cashout.
Take Nigeria, India, Peru or Vietnam as exemple, many people there don't have bank accounts, however they have a smartphone connected to the internet. Those country have a high percent of people using crypto. Why ? Because thanks to that technology they are able to be there own bank simply by downloading an app. Some are not their own bank but have a banking experience. Most of them got the opportunity to own american dollar that way thanks to USDT and USDC stablecoin. It's closer to what they know the USD in cash. However there is many people realizing that Bitcoin volatility isn't bad because their local currency have worse volatility going down over the past 15 years where Bitcoin is going the opposite direction.