this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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paying in crypto is nice partly for this reason
But a lot of uneducated people will spam "crypto is a scam"
What reason are you referring to?
I imagine the part in the article where OPP destroyed the vps and cancelled the domain because he realized he paid for the vps with his credit card?
Crypto is not anonymous, the entire concept of how it works is to be the worlds most public and distributed transaction ledger. It is more difficult to track than credit card transactions, but that's a very big difference from being impossible to track. There have been multiple papers published at this point on how you can de-anonymize any crypto purchase.
People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.
Some crypto, like Monero, is anonymous. Bitcoin/Ethereum is not.
In any case, if you use anonymous crypto, make sure to first sent it to a wallet (preferably with a subaddress in case of Monero), and then send it elsewhere.
Crypto can be anonymous, if you use the right cryptocurrency and do things correctly. "Crypto" is a very broad term. Different cryptocurrencies have different functions and purposes.
Exactly. That's why you had to fill out all the KYC paperwork when you create your Bitcoin wallet.
Oh, you didn't?
Crypto is not hidden, but it can be anonymous. You can't hide that you got money from X account and spent it at Y account. But there's no name tied to the transaction.
Where did the coin come from? Unless you mined it yourself, you've left a trail that may eventually lead to you. Even using crypto ATMs, you're still on surveillance and hoping the tapes/drives roll over before someone comes knocking (which is a very likely bet to win), and even then, you still have a real world location to tie the wallet to because of where the transaction originated.
Anything that interacts with the real world can anchor your identity to your wallet. Travelling out of state can help obfuscate that to an extent, but a high level adversary will be able to correlate travel with that transaction as well.
Ever heard of BTC/any-> XMR -> BTC/any?
If you know your thing, you can churn, buy the initial crypto with gift cards, use VPNs or Tor... yea GL for finding me
that's pseudonymous, but if you remove all links with your original identity, you can even use non-privacy coins and not be known
You can hide it using coinjoin transactions. It's like a mixer but native. It's not perfect but it's nice to have
You know, except for Monero. Really sucks that real private anonymous internet money is getting pushed out of all places possible, while crap like Bitcoin freely exists.
This
No worries, we can still swap conventional coins to XMR. Many smaller countries are not interested in reguling it, and we already know a few exchanges that don't give a fuck
And people should also know that there are privacy coins and mixers
I might be mistaken, but isn’t using a mixer considered money laundering in the US?
USA also claimed they owned all BTC that went through dark net markets. I don’t care what they think about X or Y thing
But yea that would be considered ML in many countries because you’re hiding the links and making it seem like normal money, which it should be imo
It's not anonymous, it in fact exchanges everything else from real currencies' good properties to be hard to control.
Anonymous / private payments
The whole point of the blockchain is it for it to be traceable, though. There's only the illusion of anonymity with crypto
That's complete misinformation.
The point of blockchain is not to be traceable but not alterable or tamperable with unauthorized or false data. A distributed database that can't easily be faked.
Some cryptocurrencies, like Monero, achieve high anonymity. While not perfect, good opsec will fix its flaws. Just like anything. That's not the case with the majority of cryptocurrencies though, but saying anonymity is but an illusion is just false.
Crypto is a scam.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/ben-mckenzie-crypto-documentary-everyone-is-lying-to-you-for-money/
Your existence is a scam.
Breaking news! Criminals (but not only) use crypto, and people get scammed. This happens as well with fiat, so that must surely mean fiat is a scam!
Flawless logic, really. You people impress me with your thinking.
Don't even bother. You'll never get through to these drones.
Wtf are you talking about
You won't convince anyone one here that crypto isn't a scam. These people are set in their ways.
And stubbornly entitled
Their uncle must’ve been rug pulled when buying a shitcoin or something and now they believe crypto is nothing but a scam
But yea there’s nothing to do. If you can’t educate them then let them stay in their ignorance if they like it. I just don’t feel that letting them spread their misinformation is a good thing
Crypto is not a scam, it's just plain stupid.
The entire idea behind it is what a third grader might come up with and think it's a great idea. It's not.
It literally requires every connected wallet to process the same transactions as everyone else. Can you imagine doing billions of transactions per day this way? It is extremely inefficient and yes, this is one of the reasons why even the relatively low amount of transactions that Bitcoin processes costs more electricity than a small modern country.
It's in a way comparable to a cpu doing 6+7 in a single CPU cycle whilst AI needs to burn down a forest to answer the same question
Crypto is stupid.
I get what its trying to replace and i agree that the current system sucks as well for a long list of reasons, but crypto is NOT the solution. A fundamentally different system must be designed to be able to solve the issues that crypto is trying to solve
wat?
wallets don't process any transactions other than yours. and even then, wallets do the easy work.
You don’t understand how crypto works it seems
That’s misleading. Your wallet scans blocks for transactions that goes to your wallet, but this is super fast for many cryptocurrencies. Wallets usually sync in seconds.
No. The main reason is block size and block emission period. Also, you’re completely forgetting the fact that non Proof Of Work cryptocurrencies exist, and have close to 0 electricity cost
If they do they’re pretty much a fucking genius for their age
Too bad the rich control it now.
If you mean through regulation, yes, partly
If you mean they hold most of it and thus have a total decision power, then I must disagree
Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one
What about donating money to people online without giving away your name and privacy? What about avoiding scams for P2P transactions? What about boycotting the banking system? What about avoiding international payment fees?
These all seem valid use cases to me
Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy
Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto
What specifically are you boycotting? The money that backs your crypto (i.e. that you bought it with) still sits in a bank account somewhere and continues to support the banks. All you're boycotting then are payments, but those are usually free for consumers (many banks lose money on them) so you're not exactly "sticking it to the man" by not using them. Evem if you were somehow hurting banks by using crypto, if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.
You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less