Take your favorite payment provider (PayPal, Stripe, whichever bank provides your Visa/MasterCard, etc.), and look at their terms of service. Enumerate all the prohibited usages. From that list, delete illegal activities, of course.
The remaining items on the list are your practical examples of use cases. It's roughly the set of things that are legal, but that big corporations have decided you can't do because they're morally questionable or financially risky.
* Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts
* Online dating services
* Bankruptcy attorneys and bail bonds
* Sports forecasting or odds making with a monetary or material prize
* Charity sweepstakes and raffles for the explicit purpose of fundraising
* Unauthorized sale of brand name or designer products or services
And so on. All these are legal, but in a cashless society without decentralized currency, they might as well be illegal because no centralized payment processor will allow them.
But hey, Bitcoin can also be used for CSAM, unlike VPNs, Tor, or cash, which is why the HN cognoscenti condemns it.
Besides the payment processor I use allowing these things afaik(but that might be an EU vs USA thing): isn't the point of blockchain that everything is immutable and a full history of every transaction is kept? That means that if your wallet(or w/e you use to pay) is ever connected to you as a person, everyone will know what "morally questionable or financially risky" things you did in the past, which unless you don't care about that will still cause you to be really careful using your money on these type of things(honestly: even more careful than right now probably).
You could be careful to not leak your wallet address of course, but if we'd truly be a cashless society without decentralized currency you'd want to buy your groceries with it too, or order computer parts. What prevents these shops you buy from from having a security issue and leaking your wallet address? You could have a separate wallet per shop, but you need to get money into it somehow which can be traced as well(because it's the blockchain).
Note: I'm not an expert on blockchain/crypto, there might be ways to mitigate this, I'm just legit curious as to how this would be solved in a world like this.
Preserving privacy, reliable transactions with no, i repeat, no bank or govmnt involvement, no kyc. No/low fees (on some currencies), public immutable databases...
Somehow I'm living day to day without needing to think about being associated with a service I am paying for. I totally get your point about minimizing interference, but there is absolutely no way anyone thinks Monero is a good solution to this problem who isn't involved in some shady business.
Well, you are - and I mean this with as little offense as possible - only entertaining the blockchain from a likely incredibly privileged position. Consider people living under an oppressive regime. Things you are considering perfectly normal, like freely living as a homosexual, may be a punishable offense and illegal for its citizens. "Illegal nonsense" uses of the blockchain may be live-saving privacy for them.
sowbug|2 years ago
Take your favorite payment provider (PayPal, Stripe, whichever bank provides your Visa/MasterCard, etc.), and look at their terms of service. Enumerate all the prohibited usages. From that list, delete illegal activities, of course.
The remaining items on the list are your practical examples of use cases. It's roughly the set of things that are legal, but that big corporations have decided you can't do because they're morally questionable or financially risky.
Stripe has an excellent list of examples (https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses). Here is a selection:
* Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts
* Online dating services
* Bankruptcy attorneys and bail bonds
* Sports forecasting or odds making with a monetary or material prize
* Charity sweepstakes and raffles for the explicit purpose of fundraising
* Unauthorized sale of brand name or designer products or services
And so on. All these are legal, but in a cashless society without decentralized currency, they might as well be illegal because no centralized payment processor will allow them.
But hey, Bitcoin can also be used for CSAM, unlike VPNs, Tor, or cash, which is why the HN cognoscenti condemns it.
xaitv|2 years ago
You could be careful to not leak your wallet address of course, but if we'd truly be a cashless society without decentralized currency you'd want to buy your groceries with it too, or order computer parts. What prevents these shops you buy from from having a security issue and leaking your wallet address? You could have a separate wallet per shop, but you need to get money into it somehow which can be traced as well(because it's the blockchain).
Note: I'm not an expert on blockchain/crypto, there might be ways to mitigate this, I'm just legit curious as to how this would be solved in a world like this.
psd1|2 years ago
Straw man much?
kdwikzncba|2 years ago
fturst|2 years ago
LetsGetTechnicl|2 years ago
schleck8|2 years ago
michaelcampbell|2 years ago
demondemidi|2 years ago
Literally does not understand crypto.
remexre|2 years ago
lazide|2 years ago
mcintyre1994|2 years ago
AFAIK there’s nothing competitive with sending an international payment of any amount in half a second for a tiny fraction of a cent in fees.
For example, Visa recently expanded their pilot of USDC settlement to include Solana, citing its speed and low fees: https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
They refer to it as “modernizing cross-border money movement” and I think that summarises the potential pretty well!
DoodahMan|2 years ago
[0] https://news.rublex.io/gridless-uses-mining/ [1] https://africancrypto.com/gridless-enables-cheap-renewable-e...
j-krieger|2 years ago