CBDC don’t have to be crypto. They can be just any kind of virtual currency. You don’t need to waste all the compute to ensure the chain doesn’t get forked. CBDCs aren’t going to be distributed and anarchistic like bitcoin and Eth.
Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy. Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy.
I don't think so. The amount of fraud in crypto is nothing compared to what has been exposed in the FinCEN leaks [0], which the fraud is even worse with the banks allowing the laundering of trillions of dollars for criminals, drug-lords and gangsters. The same is true with the Zelle payments platform also rife with rampant fraud. [1]
Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain will be caught as soon as the money hits the exchange or frozen once swapped into stablecoins.
Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain
Remember the NFT craze? Use dirty money to pump the price of some flavor of NFT. Then use clean money to speculate on a sure thing and take out the profit. Money got laundered but nothing shows up on any chain that links the dirty money to the clean speculation profits. You have to be a little clever, but blockchains absolutely don't prevent money laundering.
Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
Thank you for enlightening the dirty masses. Maybe you have other insights, for example should one invest into banks or wait for the "crash". In any case I think your opinion is worth nothing and should be prefaced with "IMHO", rather than stating something we all know is logically impossible to have something and it to be useless.
Here is a logical exercise, if something exists it is useful by the fact that it has a name for example which groups loose entities into a whole. I got more of this ...
People sure get agitated when I point out -- correctly I might add -- that crypto is uniquely suited for crime. The SEC is busting crypto exchanges left and right, if you haven't noticed.
If you had stopped with your first paragraph, I would’ve agreed with you. The second paragraph is hyperbole, and is no better than what the loudest cryptocurrency enthusiasts would say about your banks and your trust systems. To make bold claims that banks are reliable or imply that banks don’t launder money (only cryptocurrency facilitates that) is disingenuous.
I think it's considerably harder to construct an argument for why CBDCs controlled by a central bank should be a use case for database structures designed for decentralisation. Even the standard "it doesn't need to be a cryptoasset but it's a great marketing pitch" doesn't work because central banks don't worry about lack of adoption from the average member of the public, the average member of the public does worry about cryptocurrency, and the average cryptoenthusiast is not a fan of central banking
A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.
It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.
There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.
A CBDC by definition isn't "split between multiple institutions": it's emitted by a single central bank, which doesn't need or want a mechanism to obtain "consensus" of third party users of its currency (institutional or otherwise) for its operational decisions.
Similarly, it doesn't have any need to invent Lightning networks to overcome the crippling limitations some blockchains impose on transaction throughput (and it's not like you need blockchains to implement payment layers and eventual consistency of records where that's seen as preferable to instant settlement) and if central banks want people to be able to write 'contracts' to automate interactions with its money to a greater extent than is already possible through third party institutions, it's perfectly capable of providing a permissioned read/write API to its records without implementing itself on the Ethereum blockchain.
A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.
Yes, but one of the core premise of crypto is "trustlessness". Once you drop that requirement far simpler distributed consensus algorithms dominate the field.
I have had colleagues who enjoyed casinos. On a business trip, they stayed out late on the Friday night, and it involved cards, drinks and losing money. It does nothing at all for me, but they seem to have had a good time.
I have had colleagues who were cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The casino enthusiasts did not say "we're going to replace the international financial system with casinos! Poker chips are better than dollars!" No-one stumbled wide-eyed up of the casino at dawn, up $1K, insisting that this was the future of the economy for everyone. After I said that I wasn't interested in poker or roulette, none of them tried to preach the value of poker or roulette to me.
Because they knew it was a game. An adult game with real money at stake; but all the same, just for play. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not have that same level of awareness.
Bitcoin is not a scam. Is it worth $30K? That's a totally different question (I'd argue that it isn't in its current state and that a lot of it is speculation). Bitcoin is a set ideas [1].
For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature, it's much harder to make a similar case. I tend to be on the side to not trust it.
For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature
Some others are more altruistic than bitcoin (having a pure linear emission which prevents the current generation from hoarding most of the supply). What do you mean by non-anonymous nature?
The cryptocurrency I have in mind features not one, but two anonymous creators; one to author the Mimblewimble protocol that improves both scalability and privacy at the same time, and another to implement the protocol in altruistic manner.
High-visibility, no-trust decentralized append-only ledgers are not viable for CBDCs for all the reasons we've seen in the past few months. The conmen, the incentives, and the ways they've been caught all come together to paint a picture of cryptocurrency as the stupid choice of currency for the future.
Whatever the hard money crowd say. We as society really don't want to go to that kind of system. It simply removes way too many tools. Be this hard money crypto or gold or silver...
There is really no good reason to use crypto. If there was a true political want an better working international currency or system could be made relatively fast.
Comments
Are most cryptocurrencies a scam? Maybe. All? Probably not but let's assume so. That they have no use? Definitely not the case.
I have a very hard time believing they have a sound argument for why CBDCs aren't a use case.
CBDC don’t have to be crypto. They can be just any kind of virtual currency. You don’t need to waste all the compute to ensure the chain doesn’t get forked. CBDCs aren’t going to be distributed and anarchistic like bitcoin and Eth.
Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy. Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.
I don't think so. The amount of fraud in crypto is nothing compared to what has been exposed in the FinCEN leaks [0], which the fraud is even worse with the banks allowing the laundering of trillions of dollars for criminals, drug-lords and gangsters. The same is true with the Zelle payments platform also rife with rampant fraud. [1]
Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain will be caught as soon as the money hits the exchange or frozen once swapped into stablecoins.
[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...
Remember the NFT craze? Use dirty money to pump the price of some flavor of NFT. Then use clean money to speculate on a sure thing and take out the profit. Money got laundered but nothing shows up on any chain that links the dirty money to the clean speculation profits. You have to be a little clever, but blockchains absolutely don't prevent money laundering.
Thank you for enlightening the dirty masses. Maybe you have other insights, for example should one invest into banks or wait for the "crash". In any case I think your opinion is worth nothing and should be prefaced with "IMHO", rather than stating something we all know is logically impossible to have something and it to be useless. Here is a logical exercise, if something exists it is useful by the fact that it has a name for example which groups loose entities into a whole. I got more of this ...
People sure get agitated when I point out -- correctly I might add -- that crypto is uniquely suited for crime. The SEC is busting crypto exchanges left and right, if you haven't noticed.
SEC is about to approve a crypto ETF and we're done discussing usefulness or lack thereof... or should I say blah blah, blah.
If you had stopped with your first paragraph, I would’ve agreed with you. The second paragraph is hyperbole, and is no better than what the loudest cryptocurrency enthusiasts would say about your banks and your trust systems. To make bold claims that banks are reliable or imply that banks don’t launder money (only cryptocurrency facilitates that) is disingenuous.
I think it's considerably harder to construct an argument for why CBDCs controlled by a central bank should be a use case for database structures designed for decentralisation. Even the standard "it doesn't need to be a cryptoasset but it's a great marketing pitch" doesn't work because central banks don't worry about lack of adoption from the average member of the public, the average member of the public does worry about cryptocurrency, and the average cryptoenthusiast is not a fan of central banking
A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.
It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.
There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.
A CBDC by definition isn't "split between multiple institutions": it's emitted by a single central bank, which doesn't need or want a mechanism to obtain "consensus" of third party users of its currency (institutional or otherwise) for its operational decisions.
Similarly, it doesn't have any need to invent Lightning networks to overcome the crippling limitations some blockchains impose on transaction throughput (and it's not like you need blockchains to implement payment layers and eventual consistency of records where that's seen as preferable to instant settlement) and if central banks want people to be able to write 'contracts' to automate interactions with its money to a greater extent than is already possible through third party institutions, it's perfectly capable of providing a permissioned read/write API to its records without implementing itself on the Ethereum blockchain.
Yes, but one of the core premise of crypto is "trustlessness". Once you drop that requirement far simpler distributed consensus algorithms dominate the field.
What's the use case of casino's except wasting electricity and taking advantage of the most vulnerable?
Entertainment? Okay, Bitcoin is entertaining.
I have had colleagues who enjoyed casinos. On a business trip, they stayed out late on the Friday night, and it involved cards, drinks and losing money. It does nothing at all for me, but they seem to have had a good time.
I have had colleagues who were cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The casino enthusiasts did not say "we're going to replace the international financial system with casinos! Poker chips are better than dollars!" No-one stumbled wide-eyed up of the casino at dawn, up $1K, insisting that this was the future of the economy for everyone. After I said that I wasn't interested in poker or roulette, none of them tried to preach the value of poker or roulette to me.
Because they knew it was a game. An adult game with real money at stake; but all the same, just for play. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not have that same level of awareness.
Bitcoin is not a scam. Is it worth $30K? That's a totally different question (I'd argue that it isn't in its current state and that a lot of it is speculation). Bitcoin is a set ideas [1].
For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature, it's much harder to make a similar case. I tend to be on the side to not trust it.
[1] The idea is described in the paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Some others are more altruistic than bitcoin (having a pure linear emission which prevents the current generation from hoarding most of the supply). What do you mean by non-anonymous nature?
No one knows who Satoshi is. With other cryptocurrencies that I've looked at it's the opposite.
The cryptocurrency I have in mind features not one, but two anonymous creators; one to author the Mimblewimble protocol that improves both scalability and privacy at the same time, and another to implement the protocol in altruistic manner.
https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/A-Brief-History-of...
High-visibility, no-trust decentralized append-only ledgers are not viable for CBDCs for all the reasons we've seen in the past few months. The conmen, the incentives, and the ways they've been caught all come together to paint a picture of cryptocurrency as the stupid choice of currency for the future.
Whatever the hard money crowd say. We as society really don't want to go to that kind of system. It simply removes way too many tools. Be this hard money crypto or gold or silver...
There is really no good reason to use crypto. If there was a true political want an better working international currency or system could be made relatively fast.