It's hard for it to die when countries like Venezuela tried to create their own crypto to get around US sanctions on the Venezuelan dollar. And when that failed, Venezuelans switched to Bitcoin because the Bolívar currency was inflating too fast.
Next on the crypto train is Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka government is warning against using crypto, but we'll see if the citizens choose it over their own Rupees.
I just did a quick calculation. If the Sri Lankans had traded their Rupees for Bitcoin at the peak, they'd be down about 4% less. However, if they had bought USD instead, they'd up 73%!
Bitcoin seems like a poor inflation hedge to me.
However, it does seem to be working out well for them. Joke is on me, I guess.
> “It’s like the banks have colluded with the sleazebags on the street to be able to steal,” said Bruce Barth, another victim. In late 2020, Mr. Barth was hospitalized with Covid-19 and his phone disappeared from his hospital room. A thief got access to his digital wallet and ran up charges on his credit card, took out cash at an A.T.M. and used Zelle to make three transfers totaling $2,500.
> All three accounts were at Bank of America, where Mr. Barth has been a customer for more than 30 years. When he filed fraud reports, the bank quickly refunded his cash and credit card losses. But it denied his claims for the Zelle thefts, saying the transactions were validated by authentication codes sent to a phone that had been previously used for that account. Bank of America was essentially saying that the Zelle transactions were authorized — even if his phone was stolen.
He's trying to be sarcastic but failing at it. The primary focus of creating encryption was to keep messages secret from military enemies. It was later used for non-military purposes. The primary focus of the creation of Tornado Cash was to facilitate money laundering. Privacy was the public justification for its existence, but not why it exists.
> The primary focus of the creation of Tornado Cash was to facilitate money laundering
This is a GIGANTIC claim that you're going to have to evidence. Alexey Pertsev, Roman Semenov, and Roman Storm all studied STEM subjects at university, spent years working as pentesters, QAs, SWEs etc, as some sort of long-con to create a money laundering platform? What a totally absurd thing to say, and is quite frankly insulting to the entirety of this site.
Not as much of a dunk as you think. For some reason we take it for granted that all electronic financial activity must be logged and monitored. Things could have easily gone the same for all electronic communication, and the people arguing against encryption used the same exact arguments as the people arguing against financial privacy in this thread. That is what my sarcastic comment, and your comment illustrate.
Yes and this is a case where the best technology doesn't win, but the first technology to come to market or the first technology with the first killer app. But this bug can be viewed as a feature. Give a person a hammer and everything becomes a nail.
> You have a lot of faith in these brands. Bombas was founded in 2019 by an MBA grad and a marketing graduate. They have no reputation. These aren't like hand crafted sock makers doing this for decades in Italy. They're advertising companies and they sold you.
Usually the story goes:
1. Bob is unhappy with his socks, can't find better quality socks anywhere.
2. Bob creates a company with the sole purpose of creating better socks.
3. Bob find a factory in China and asks them to use the best materials to create the ultimate socks.
4. Bob is super happy with the product and happily pads his advertising materials.
5. Bob finds a customer and places an order with the factory and is shocked at the price.
6. Bob tells factory to do whatever it can to lower price to competitors' levels without compromising quality.
7. Socks turn out shit, because price is too low and no economies of scale because order quantity is low.
8. Bob sells shit socks with original marketing materials and secretly vows to restore the quality in some distant future.
Alibaba ran a Foreign Exchange service on top of crypto. I don't know if it is still running or not. It functioned like Western Union. Customers sent local currency to Alibaba, Alibaba bought crypto with that local currency and in another country sold that crypto for foreign currency and then deposited it into the foreign currency account.
The crypto part adds nothing to this process. There are already very efficient systems for exchanging one fiat currency for another without going through crypto.
Alibaba could already avoid that need for individual transactions by just holding balances in the different currencies, like e.g. Wise and many other retail forex providers do. They only need to deal with correspondent banks for balancing out those accounts in case more money flows in one direction than the other, and those transactions are large so the costs are not as much of a concern.
In any case, your argument presumes some desire to get rid of the correspondent banks. Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes — like criminals, avoiding sanctions, avoiding capital controls, etc — which is why crypto stays on those fringes.
>>Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes
Yes, it is for the fringes. One day Alibaba could find itself on the fringes, as collateral damage in some geopolitical dispute that locks it out of the centralized global financial system, as a result of which country it is based in.
I have no idea if this concern motivated Alibaba's reliance on crypto though.
I didn't realize you suggested gold. I thought you meant "runescape gold". Yes gold is durable.
I suspect cryptocurrency will be a store of value far further into the future than gold. Gold becomes plentiful once extracting resources from asteroids becomes economically viable.
This article is basically an ad for Parity, and doesn't contain any details on how those savings were actually achieved, any way to verify that the number is genuine, or any way to know whether the same savings could have been achieved with improved processes with or without blockchain (which is very likely).
Next on the crypto train is Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka government is warning against using crypto, but we'll see if the citizens choose it over their own Rupees.