this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Bitcoin is not about investment any more than Lemmy is. It is about decentralization that unfortunately has been viewed as an investment.
The thing is that we don't want decentralisation when it comes to money.
Money used to be completely decentralised in the past, there is a reason why we moved away from it.
We are now re-encountering the same issues with cryto as we had in past with real money.
For example our current system allows us to undo human mistakes, like accidentally sending money to the wrong address. With crypto, that just isn't possible.
It is the same reason why so many crypto exchanges popped up, they are essentially the banks of crypto, who have control over the different transactions of their users.
But because it is less regulated, tons of those exchanges are basically scams.
To know how scummy they are, visit: web3isgoinggreat.com
This is generally my take as well, though I think there may be a place for it, as another layer or for localised systems... I don't really know, I am not much of a financial person. I think it just needs to marinate a bit to find its niche, though. Monero seems cool for transactional stuff and I have played around with it a bit. It definitely has very limited use cases, though. I have a good friend who is an anarchist (defo not ancap, though) who is interested in this stuff, and I have chatted with her quite a bit about it, but I think she sometimes does not see the tech side clearly and I frankly think we need the somewhat fluid nature of our current systems as you mentioned more than we think. It's a cool idea anyway.
Now, I admit I am stupid on this stuff and may be missing something (please correct me), but I am quite interested in ideas about regulating power and data aspects of cloud computing with it, however, maybe as a way to earn something for crunching while idle like Gridcoin; maybe for environmental reasons (less local hardware) too... Remember SETI, those old screensavers that looked for alien life in the 90s? That's where they are now. The projects that they have whitelisted are super interesting: https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm I think that there are others like this too, but I have not gone down that rabbit hole. Even for just a closed circuit like universities, government-wide public services (large-scale GIS and flood modelling in underfunded areas!), NGOs, etc... I am less convinced about how people are trying to implement it with AI stuff or any kind of daily retail, currently anyway. Anyway, that is where my brain has gone with that one. I played with Gridcoin, and it was a fun little experiment, but I didn't want to fiddle around fixing it after something broke. It isn't monetarily really worth anything, anyway.
Lemmy being decentralized is a solution to a problem that exists: media companies start nice and then fuck their users when they have enough of them. Decentralization means that acquiring that much power to rug pull is way harder.
Bitcoin has been forever a solution without a problem. The concept of Bitcoin doesn't make sense, the execution of it even less. So the only use it has is taking advantage of techbros' hopium that one day an actual problem will be solved by Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't even do the job of decentralization very well either. The blockchain is controlled by the wealthy miners with warehouses full of asic miners. Monero is a better cryptocurrency for that reason.
I thought Monero was just for buying drugs
Would you want to buy drugs with a centralized currency?
https://monerica.com/
Miners do not control the blockchain though.They just offer to verify transactions and maintain the blockchain. They have no control over the price, the algorithm, the supply etc. not saying Monero is not a good choice too.
Unfortunately that's the issue. Only a small amount of miners are the ones making a significant dent in mining. Consumer hardware cannot compete with the corporations with large asic mining warehouses, especially ones run by governments and large corporations. This leads to further centralization due to the high barrier of entry and makes the blockchain susceptible to manipulation and things like a 51 percent attack.
still, 90% of the Bitcoin is concentrated in the top 1%
That does not make it bad though. Bitcoin is not able to solve all monetary issues nor was it designed to. No monetary system right now solves that issue. This is like saying an EV is bad as it still can speed and kill people without recognizing all the other benefits over gas cars.
monero is a better option in this case