• GiorgioPerlasca@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Cryptocurrencies have various use cases:

    • moving money from and to sanctioned countries, like Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Russia
    • paying for criminal activities, like hitmen, organs, drugs
    • scams

    In most cases, they do more harm than good.

        • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          The point of crypto is it is controlled via programmed rules, depending on the type, which in theory would make it more fair if coded properly.

          • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca
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            10 hours ago

            You’re talking about programming control, I’m taking about macroeconomic control. Switching to crypto removes many of the levers of macroeconomic control, or it shifts the control over to exchanges, mediators (courts), miners, validators, whales, and - probably not what crypto boosters want to hear - governments, who remain the power brokers and can easily assume these roles. Moreover, if crypto boosters think banks won’t use their enormous capital, power and overall economics expertise to shift into one of these roles, they’re delusional. I feel like crypto boosters think that banks just “don’t get it”, and this is ludicrous…banks have hundreds of years of institutional economic knowledge and experience. Economics doesn’t just get invalidated by crypto.

            All of this ignores the fact that crypto is highly susceptible to volatility and scamming overall. Crypto has a larger more complex attack surface at the application layer, and this makes it substantially more risky particularly as malicious technology advances in that domain and can quickly outpace the technology required to secure against it.