> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet
I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case?
You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow businesses to accept payments digitally, without the risk of their payment processor or bank completely ruining them? (PayPal horror stories swarm the internet.) Or how people in collapsing economies, like Venezuela with ridiculous inflation, can use them to cross the borders with their wealth somewhat intact?
And it's always dismissed with the same lazy arguments like "volatility" or "nobody uses it". Those are real issues for sure, but they don't invalidate the use cases.
Cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous. They also don't eliminate payment processor risk: fraudulent exchanges, hackers, and your own mistakes can all lose or lock you out of your money. And generally there's far less legal recourse when that happens with crypto.
I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al, but if you have some data on that, I'd be curious to hear about it. In particular I'm curious why cryptocurrencies were a better means of rescuing your bolívar-denominated wealth than any other currency or investment vehicle such as real estate, gold, dollars, etc.
> They also don't eliminate payment processor risk
Of course they don't magically solve all problems, but that doesn't make them useless.
> I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al
I've read some article from people who did it, but I don't think it's common.
The problem with leaving the country is, how do you take your assets with you? You cannot easily move a house, and you will get searched at the border and your gold, dollars, jewelry etc will get confiscated if found. With cryptocurrencies you can theoretically move any amount, by just memorizing 12 or 24 words, by hiding a piece of paper or by encrypting it and placing it online somewhere.
Monero is unfortunately not really anonymous either in many common scenario's, like repeatedly sending payments to or from the same address. [0] It's definitely better than Bitcoin though, but far from anonymous.
Overall I think that cryptocurrencies (and the internet overall) could use some better privacy strategies. Tor-like routing, no possibility of finger printing, etc.
> Many, including Satoshi, believed cryptocurrencies provided privacy for payments.
(emphasis mine)
Satoshi's writings indicated that he understood the public ledger he was creating was not anonymous. He even talked about ring signatures as a possible method to add obfuscation.
(Ring signatures is one aspect combined with others that Monero uses to achieve financial privacy. Anonymity requires extra steps taken by the user. Financial privacy ≠ anonymity.)
You don't, as a best practice, repeatedly send payments to or from the same address in Bitcoin. So if you continue not doing so in Monero, you end up with much more anonymity.
This is of course anecdata, but I've personally used BTC to send remittances in Venezuela.
I'm not sure how many people here use BTC as a means of preserving the value of their money since most people would rather hold USD, but for sending remittances, it cannot be beat.
As another interesting anecdote, my sister is in Argentina and a bunch of friends started asking her how to buy BTC before the election yesterday. Seems that those that managed to move their Argentine pesos to BTC did so just in time:
https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/argentina-central-bank-cu...
Yes there is, sometimes they don't even remit but rather use btc. I send $10 a month to ~5 people in Venezuela and it's one of the only ways now to help out and/or live there
Can you provide more detail on how they actually use the bitcoin? Genuinely curious as in most countries the use cases are very limited, and there is a large cut when converting into/out of bitcoin that doesn't make it worth it.
There are also a few shops (even one very large shop) accepting some cryptos now, like BTC and Dash. I'm not sure what volume they are seeing in sales though.
A more common case for preserving wealth on emigration is actually South Africa. Many reasonably prosperous South Africans that emigrated used Bitcoin to bypass SA's strict capital flight restrictions.
I deal with SARS pretty regularly and I'd like to know where you heard that since you're describing tax evasion. The kind of tax evasion that is covered by extradition treaties in most countries....
Yes, they are, zcash, bitcoin/ethereum mixers etc. and intense research around zero-knowledge proofs will yield first-class, easy to use anonymity relatively quickly.
> there's far less legal recourse when that happens with crypto
cryptocurrencies are cash, not credit cards or banks. It's a category that is completely missing from the internet. hence all the drawbacks, but they have their also many uses, most of them hitherto unimplemented (because we never had cash on the net)
> why cryptocurrencies were a better means of rescuing your bolívar
I presume because bitcoin was available where all other currencies weren't
IMHO there is one killer feature for decentralised payment systems: it allows people who can not get a bank account with reasonable terms to make monetary transfers. People who are born into rich first world countries don't realise how difficult it can be. In many places in the world you can not get a bank account unless you have an address. You can not rent a place unless you can transfer money. You are stuck. Even when I first moved to the UK, there were many flats I couldn't get because 1) my bank account in Japan refused to let me transfer money internationally (because I'm wasn't a permanent resident of Japan) 2) I couldn't get a bank account in the UK without a permanent UK address 3) Most letting agencies wouldn't take cash. I eventually had to make a 5 month deposit (think London prices!!!) to get someone to take cash so I could get a bank account.
There are lots of these kinds of catch 22s in the world and they are much, much, much worse in developing countries that have a large disparity between haves and have-nots. There are places where you are basically locked out of commerce of anything larger than pocket money -- because that's the way the large institutions want it. If they allow you to do business as all, it comes with a really hefty price tag.
The potential Bitcoin for me has always been one of 2 things: 1) a potentially convenient way to do online shopping 2) a way to enable commerce for the poor or disadvantaged. For years and years, I was unable to to get a credit card in Japan because they were unavailable to people without permanent residence status. Even now, the only bank that agreed to give me a business account for my consulting company refuses to allow the business to have a credit card. I can not buy any business related supplies on credit. I can not make online purchases for my business in most cases. This is insanity, but there are no banks who care where I live and they have a monopoly.
This is the advantage of something like Bitcoin. It breaks the monopoly of the banks. Of course, that comes with a whole raft of problems, but it really is frustrating when people in privileged positions just refuse to put the effort into seeing that their privilege doesn't extend to everyone in the world.
Edit: I should actually add that patio11 does actually understand the banking difficulties in Japan, and has written a bit about it before ;-)
it allows people who can not get a bank account with reasonable terms to make monetary transfers.
This is really pretty much a solved issue since 2007, at least in big parts of Africa. And with none of the bad whiff and dodginess, which inevitable comes with just about any crypto currency scheme.
I don't know if there's something similar in the UK, but in the US you can buy a money order with cash from any Walmart for a couple bucks in fees and solve the "they don't take cash" issue that way.
All of your use cases involve anonymity. Crypto currencies don’t provide anonymity. Sure it’s not directly tied to your name and address, but it’s quite possible to make that tie. Such cases are on the news fairly frequently.
It doesn't matter whether most people's use cases are "truly" anonymous or not, because not everyone who makes an anonymous payment is the kingpin of a human trafficking ring who will actually have large amounts of resources brought to bear on them.
People use burner phones to get drugs for nights out. Theoretically none of this is really anonymous, you're pinging cell towers, you're probably on CCTV, etc etc. But realistically that doesn't matter and it works as a system.
Even something like Monero which might have claim to be truly untraceable really isn't because you're on like, an Intel ME machine and the NSA likely has backdoors in the Linux kernel and ... blah blah blah ...
But it's good enough.
Imagine if Hacker News required ID-verified real name front and center on every post. Throwaway accounts are impossible. They were never perfect anyway, but now they don't exist.
The discourse would change. Perhaps an individual might see it as being better, or worse, but it'd definitely be different.
The traditional banking system is that ID-verified world. Cryptocurrencies are the release valve.
Most wallets nowadays don’t let you reuse addresses; even with plain vanilla Bitcoin transactions, this makes it much more difficult to link an identity with a Bitcoin transaction.
You're right that Bitcoin is only pseudo-anonymous. But there are cryptocurrencies like Monero which provides much better anonymity.
Also, anonymity isn't black and white. It would be very difficult for the Venezuelan government to prevent you from buying Bitcoin in-person and then walking out of the country, with your Bitcoin keys written on a small piece of paper or even memorized.
All Venezuela has to do is to make it illegal for anyone to sell you Bitcoin.
Effectively, the current situation is rather close to that: the financial system is predicated on Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that make moving large amounts of money for anonymous purposes dangerous for financial institutions. Given that cryptocurrency has struggled to provide any rationale for its existence other than the anonymous money flows that government regulation is trying to root out, dealing with it as a financial institution raises regulatory compliance red flags. As the article demonstrates, this means that your only real option is to rely on criminals and hope that money moves through the system fast enough that the government doesn't notice and the criminals handling your wealth don't skim too much off.
I'm pointing out that anonymous money flows are already effectively illegal, given the KYC/AML laws. At some point, any Funny Money system you create has to interact with the fiat system so that people can actually do stuff like pay their utility bills, and if Funny Money is triggering compliance alarm bells, and at that point, well, read the article.
Something else to point out is that just because a system is unsustainable doesn't mean it will collapse immediately.
Oh alright. I don't see how this invalidates the use cases? The businesses that have payment processor problems aren't illegal, and can easily prove their revenue.
And I do agree that unsustainable systems don't collapse immediately. I've been waiting for Tether to collapse for years. But I don't think cryptocurrencies as a whole are unsustainable (the larger proper exchanges that don't use Tether as their "fiat option" should survive).
Anonymous money flows aren't illegal. There are those that would like to make them illegal, but all they've managed to institute so far is KYC/AML laws relating to third party payment processors. These laws don't apply to cash or its electronic corollary, cryptocurrency.
Until a law is created that makes unmonitored use of physical and electronic cash illegal, anonymous money flows aren't across-the-board illegal.
One obstacle elitists have in instituting such laws is that enforcement would be costly, involving heavy-handed treatment of large numbers of end-users. Trusted third parties like banks are comparatively easy targets, being much less politically costly to repress.
> And all the U.S. had to do is make drugs illegal, and it would disappear. (Or not.)
Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?
The drug market being illegal means that for the vast majority of people it's only worth using for fairly inconsequential things. Recreational drugs for the weekend or the equivalent. You might not want to source your cancer drugs there for the same reasons you might not want to source your car or house loan from some random internet entity. Trust. And dealing in an illegal market makes the higher levels of trust very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.
I think the point is that cryptocurrencies will be relegated to second class currencies for as long as they can't or aren't treated with the same trust a fiat currency is.
> > And all the U.S. had to do is make drugs illegal, and it would disappear. (Or not.)
> Well, yeah. Making drugs illegal makes them disappear. From legal sources. The illegal sources share a similar set of problems as noted. Am I going to get what I paid for? Will I get all of what I paid for? Will there be repercussions? How safe is this?
It has been fascinating to me to see how important brand and reputation are in the underground, otherwise struggling-to-be-anynomous markets. But then, even in the chans there were tripcodes.
For example, lets take donating to WikiLeaks as an example. Anonymity is not needed for that, since they have never been charged with any crimes.
The only thing needed was a way to get around the banking cartel, that blocked payments to them, even though WikiLeaks was not charged with any crimes.
If it was 2011, being able to donate to WikiLeaks, was something that many people needed crypto for, regardless of anonymity.
the other open secret is that you just create a new identity in an isolated sub namespace
you ring fence all the addresses in that space with Monero over VPN or TOR: Monero swapped to Bitcoin, Monero swapped to Ether, Monero swapped to Tether (ERC20/OMNI/TRC20), a general balance in Monero since merchants accept that too, and transact there. Swap back out to Monero if you need a withdrawal.
Pencil pushers can track addresses on one transparent blockchain all fuckin day till your grandma gets tainted coins after Thanksgiving and all her accounts closed by some paranoid compliance officer and overzealous dumbass public servant, while the rest of us get every good and service we expected anonymously.
> Monero swapped to Bitcoin, Monero swapped to Ether, Monero swapped to Tether
Is there a way to do this without going through some central exchange? I thought I'd read that (eg) Shapeshift was now doing KYC/AML checks, so would you still get identified there?
You respond twice downthread that while Bitcoin may not be anonymous, Monero is. Do you then concede that anonymous payments are not a major use case for the non-anonymous Bitcoin protocol? Why then is Bitcoin so valuable?
Well, Bitcoin is good enough for these use cases even if it's only pseudo-anonymous.
But I do agree that the current valuation of Bitcoin is to a very large part driven by speculation, and from the network effect. As some comments here point to, Monero isn't even widely known despite being technically superior in many ways.
There's a spectrum of anonymity. Bitcoin isn't automatically anonymous to law enforcement, but not everything is about being anonymous to law enforcement specifically. It's nice to have the ability to make a purchase or a donation without my name and phone number being put on aggregated marketing lists, etc.
Bitcoin is valuable because people value it. If you need anonimity you mix your coins - almost every darknet market (likely bitcoin's largest transactional use case) explains how to do this
Complete sets of 1991's X-Men #1 1A/1B/1C/1D/1E gatefold covers were also valuable because people valued them, until people did not value them anymore.
I'm not familiar with the intersection of these two groups: unbanked and bitcoiners. Can you tell us more about them? Why are they unbanked? How did they get into Bitcoin? How do they acquire and spend Bitcoin? What do they buy with it?
I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case?
You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow businesses to accept payments digitally, without the risk of their payment processor or bank completely ruining them? (PayPal horror stories swarm the internet.) Or how people in collapsing economies, like Venezuela with ridiculous inflation, can use them to cross the borders with their wealth somewhat intact?
And it's always dismissed with the same lazy arguments like "volatility" or "nobody uses it". Those are real issues for sure, but they don't invalidate the use cases.