I want to understand, as I don't believe anything in this world can be entirely good or bad. It's just that no argument presented to defend crypto has been strong enough to convince me that it's actually something that was either invented with the purpose of, or has the ability to make the world a better place. I've honestly learned a lot from you and other advocates of crypto here, but I'm still not convinced.
- Lower energy usage than bank offices and branches: may be true, but 1. blockchain calculations consume way more energy than bank transactions, 2. having a branch you can physically walk into and ask experts about products and general advice is really helpful and necessary in the modern monetary world. Not everyone is a financial expert or computer genius.
- Independence from central banks and governments: true, but you're dependent on other people using the same currency as you. If everyone swaps for RANDOMBScoin, your money is worthless unless you act fast and make the switch soon enough yourself. It's infinitely more volatile than any national currency, and that's not something a lot of people would want to live with.
- Promoting freedom and non-aggression: that sounds fancy, but being free from a central bank doesn't mean you're entirely free. You're still dependent on the crypto market, the security of your wallet, laws, etc. You can't buy freedom, and you can't mine it, either. You're also dependent on other people doing their daily jobs. If nobody makes food and nobody delivers it to supermarkets, then what do you eat? Expecting everybody to be a crypto miner/trader is pure arrogance. And that brings us to the next bullet point:
It's not you. It's the general attitude of crypto as I see it:
"F* the government, F* central banks, F* the economy, I quit, and let my computer do all the money earning from now on". If you say crypto is the future, you're basically expecting other people to be stuck in the current economy with their minimum wage jobs and deliver the goods that you order with your virtual money that you earned by building a PC entirely for yourself. Because you give them no other choice. Someone has to do it. Then when they get interested in crypto mining themselves, or just want to play games after a hard day at work, and go out to buy a PC with their hard-earned money, they can't, because all the graphics cards have already been bought up by large-scale farmers just because they can. Or should I say: they have the
freedom to do so? Non-aggression my arse!
Obviously nothing in this world can be entirely good or bad. I don't think anybody would make that claim about crypto.
You seem to be under the impression that you have to be a computer genius or a financial expert to use crypto... You don't have to mine crypto to use crypto. USING crypto is just as easy as any payment system on your phone (apple pay, android pay, etc.) And there are services that you can actually use crypto on a debit card, both using crypto directly and transferring seamlessly to fiat for places that don't accept crypto. These things are not mainstream yet. Hopefully they eventually will be. But there is no technological barrier to entry. You do not need to mine crypto in order to use crypto.
Independence from central banks and governments IS the point. Right now, you are dependent on everyone using the same currency as you. If the US dollar or whatever other currency collapses (and it absolutely can) then your money is worthless unless you act fast and make the switch soon enough yourself. See how that works? Fiat currencies are based on trust just as much as crypto, it's just WHO you trust that changes. Fiat, the trust is in governments. Crypto, trust is in the masses. I get it if you choose to trust governments more, but do not pretend that it's somehow different. It's exactly the same. Yes, crypto is generally far more volatile NOW. The hope is that that is not the case in the future, and it is changing. BTC has been pretty much as stable as the stock market in general for a couple of years now. Hopefully that track record can continue, and eventually reach stability parity with a fiat currency.
Freedom from central banks aids in freedom from other things. It's not a silver bullet, no. Nobody said it was. But considering EVERYTHING is about money, including politics, it makes sense that wresting control of the money supply away from centralized government creates a more free environment. You are INHERENTLY more free by using crypto, because the money you are using is not controlled by a centralized government. I realize this sort of thing isn't on many peoples' minds... for some of us, it's very important. Continue to live in your cage if you wish, I say, but don't hinder me in my quest to break free.
I don't understand your bizarre idea that crypto will make nobody bake bread and deliver it to supermarkets. The only thing I can guess here is that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're doing here. You do not have to mine crypto in order to use crypto, and if crypto replaced the world's currencies, there would still be people who bake bread and deliver it to supermarkets... they'd just get paid in crypto instead of dollar and pounds. Nobody is expecting everybody to be a crypto miner. That's silly, and I'm not sure why you'd even bring it up.
I'm not going to continue to argue the gamer vs miner thing after this point. Buying a graphics card that I have a right to buy is not aggression. You may THINK it harms you, but it doesn't, because you don't have a right to the card in the first place. When I buy a graphics card to mine with, I have made a consensual transaction with the graphics card seller to purchase it for my own purposes. YOU do not have a right to intervene in that transaction, no matter what you think. You may not like it, but there are lots of things you probably don't like. In fact, there are lots of things I don't like. I don't like being forced under threat of violence to pay taxes that go to building bombs to murder children in Afghanistan, for instance. But here we are. It is my prerogative to say
F* the government , and crypto doesn't depend on your liking that. Again, I'm trying to be educational here, but if you reject the base assumption, there's nothing I can do about that, and I'm wasting my time.
