[syl_sau]

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly what it's been used for so far (if we ignore speculation and various scams).

I think it's hard to argue with this.

[thegginthesky]

Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that.

Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.

[hocuspocus]

> Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that.

Or you could use Wise.

[boltzmann-brain]

As much as I'd like this to be the case, that's not a valid argument. If you're a random person who wants to fund a certain organization, you're going to have to buy the cryptocurrency somehow. For anything except tiny amounts this is going to require you to do KYC at some point. Every transaction on a blockchain is recorded forever and traceable back to you and the legal ID that you used during KYC. No one's going to mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.

The way covert funding of illegal or unpopular operations or bribes _actually_ works in the real world is different. It often involves stuff like gambling, getting a thousand pre-paid cards, having a bank that issues credit cards (eg Russian-owned MyWireCard which now dissolved issued huge, prepaid, free cards to EU politicians), or "ant work" such as hacking or grinding up game accounts and selling them for profit. That's the covert and difficult part - not having a blockchain. Before you could get paid for your OF leaks with Ethereum, you'd get paid with Amazon prepaid card codes. The tender being on a blockchain doesn't improve anything at all for those performing the payment or those receiving it.

[alwayslikethis]

> mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.

Am I missing something here? This is the main use case for Monero. You can just buy it with your credit card or after buying bitcoins thru a KYC'd service. That's the point - once you got Monero, it is practically untraceable by the authorities or anyone else interested. No one can see who sent or received money without a view key. The same cannot be said for most other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH, since once you buy these from a KYC service, it's tied to your identity forever.

[herbst]

No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few companies that restrict things that go way further than the law.

You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services.

There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for.

Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.

[EdwardDiego]

Yeah, that's the killer use case. It's also the use case that'll bring in _so much_ regulation.

[nicbou]

Pseudonymous, not anonymous. It's only anonymous while you take steps to make it so, and only until you make a tiny mistake.

[alwayslikethis]

Monero is close to anonymous by default. You generate wallet, and send money there. While this first step can be tracked, you can just transfer the XMR from the first wallet to a new one. This time, no one can see your transactions or associate this address with you (unless you, for example, publish it next to your name).