I personally view crypto and the crypto boom as an experiment in unfettered capitalism - it's still a new technology, the governments haven't caught up to it yet so no regulations, yet quite literally 99% of crypto usage was in trying to take advantage of others (scams) and speculation.

The only thing with actual value that came out of crypto was probably Monero, which allowed for completely anonymous payments, something that crypto, when paired with crypto exchanges, is bad at.

[–] pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io 9 points 1 year ago

That being if you can get yourself some Monero anonymously. I can see valid use cases for that, for example in the drug busines...

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago

Maybe I'm not very knowledgable, but even Monero seems sketchy to me. I've clicked into what I thought were blogs about privacy that ended up being sites that exist only to promote Monero, once you look into them. That and the way certain accounts will do nothing but praise Monero just seems very greasy to me. I also wonder how it solves some of the other problems inherent to crypto, such as the environmental concerns.

For things like drugs like the person mentioned below, I don't think I'd trust someone who didn't just use cash.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The level of the NFT craze was kind of wild though. I remember watching this Hot Ones interview with Mila Kunis where she mentioned "connecting with the audience through NFTs" and "the audience owns the art to the show".

https://youtu.be/NAeOzDhL6tc?t=1m55s

At the time I remember thinking that I don't really understand how that would work in practice or what value NFTs really bring to this situation. I just assumed I didn't understand. Turns out...nobody did. It's just a bunch of bullshit.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 2 points 1 year ago

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[–] explodicle@local106.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Onion routing (like Tor) is the default for the Lightning Network. Every crypto that supports it already has private payments, including Bitcoin.

There's no way to validate the total supply of Monero. So if it ever has a supply bug (like Bitcoin's value overflow incident), then it won't be detected and patched.

[–] z0rg0n@monero.town 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Monero has mechanisms for validating supply:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vW9H6VIONWM&t=174s

If you're going to repeat this argument ad nauseam then at least don't do it in a misleading absolutist way.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 11 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

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[–] explodicle@local106.com 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't 100% disagree with him. Like he said, it is an additional risk. Assuming no supply bugs, you can validate what is published.

I just disagree with him that it's "near zero probability". This already did happen with Bitcoin and we only caught it because we weren't assuming zero supply bugs. Bugs happen and we're talking about the future money supply for all humans.

Edit to add: and BTW it's not just cryptography bugs (rare), but anything related to validation (like value overflow)