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Are bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies used outside of crime and investment?

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eplpwr:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 05, 2020, 12:22:44 am ---It's possible there is a very small economy worldwide (outside of crime) working with cryptocurrencies out there, it's probably pretty confidential though, and unsignificant.

--- End quote ---

I think a number of sanctioned entities use cryptos. If that is illegal or not depends on how you look at the jurisdiction of some very large country. The scale of sanctions avoidance would imply rather large sums.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 05, 2020, 02:35:44 am ---There seems to be an innate desire in people to posses the stuff, countless have been killed over it.

--- End quote ---
That depends on the society. As far as I can see the Aborigines in Australia didn't care much for the stuff (until the Europeans came over) even though it can be found in abundance in many places. The same goes for the Indians in the US.

You can also look at gold and silver as being secure against fraud because it is not trivial to make and/or acquire.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: magic on April 05, 2020, 05:26:54 am ---
--- Quote from: MadTux on April 04, 2020, 10:21:18 pm ---Or just buy 60pounds of lead, 40pounds of tin on ebay, mix in a couple of copper scraps and cook it for a while on your favorite stove. ;D

--- End quote ---
Selling any alloy with more than 0.3% of lead (or thereabouts) is illegal in the Glorious Democratic People's Union of Europe ;D

--- End quote ---
Complete nonsense. You can buy all kinds of leaded solder (86 types of 60/40 alone) from Farnell.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: nctnico on April 05, 2020, 01:35:28 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on April 05, 2020, 01:07:56 am ---Gold is very useful stuff in itself, it has inherent value. Cryptocurrency isn't even a tangible object that exists, you can't actually do anything with it.

--- End quote ---
But what makes gold different from money or cryptocurrency? After all you can't eat it so when the world goes to sh*t it is of no use. Whether it is gold, money (physical or in a bank account) or crypto currency; it is only 'worth' what someone wants to give to you in exchange.

--- End quote ---

Whereas gold has very good chances of still being a dependable reserve of value whatever happens, I still think cryptocurrencies (as long again as the infrastructure is still there to serve them) have chances of being also useful in times of trouble. Of course either way it's all in the trust people put in them. But if there's no workable alternative, a number of people WILL trust them, and it's not unlikely crypto's would be easier to get ahold of and use than gold in such times. And as I said, gold is inconvenient to work with - not easy to split in smaller chunks of value, possibly unsafe to store/carry around (dead easy to steal), etc.

It again of course all depends on the state of society. Cryptocurrencies heavily depend on technology. If networks and maybe even electricity stop being usable, certainly gold will still be there for transactions. So what I'm envisioning here is a possible scenario during a deep worldwide financial crisis, but with basic infrastructures still working. And I don't think this scenario is THAT unbelievable at this point.

As to inherent value, it's all relative. Gold has value because 1/ it can be used in many applications (but if society collapses, this point may become completely moot except maybe still making jewels just like we used gold thousands of years ago, not that essential) and 2/ it takes effort/cost to extract it. Cryptocurrencies also have a cost for "extracting" ("mining") and maintaining them, so they effectively also have "inherent value" in that respect. Another point possibly going for them is that they are almost impossible to "counterfeit". So they might become attractive if things get bad.

james_s:
I still think gold will always have value, if society collapses and the human race survives, new societies will soon form and starting from scratch a material like gold is going to become useful and/or desirable much sooner than an abstract series of numbers. The infrastructure crypto depends on is a serious consideration, imagine today that someone handed you a stack of 8" floppy disks that contained valuable information, what would you do with them? How about a tape pack from some now obscure 1970s mainframe? A smartphone app from 3 years ago? Huge quantities of digital data have been lost to time due to failing hardware and damaged media, I lost most of the programs I wrote when I was a teenager because the bits faded off the hard drive and the floppy disks were lost or damaged, that stuff is just gone.

I would be shocked if more than a small handful of the cryptocurrencies people are messing with today are around 20 years from now, much less 50 or 100 years from now. It also wouldn't surprise me if sometime in the next 100 years some new fundamental development in computing makes it trivial to do the calculations that today require an enormous amount of computational power. Much like the way encryption used during WWII can now be trivially cracked by simple brute force.

I'm also morally bothered by the vast amounts of energy that are expended "mining" crypto, it all amounts to useless busy work and yet it consumes as much power as is used by some entire countries. I think some day we will look back on that and shake our heads at the vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to produce something that has no tangible existence.

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