All money is fiat money. It has an agreed upon value outside of its intrinsic worth. If you want to get away from fiat money you have to go back to barter.
It's backed by math. There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. We have never had the concept of "digital scarcity" before. There are thousands of computers running independently that are following a consensus algorithm. it's an open, permisionless, trustless system that anyone on the planet can be part of.
You would rather have money controlled by corrupt governments? Hilarious.
That is part of the problem. As long as the economy grows, then Bitcoin is deflationary. This encourages people who have it to hoard it, rather than to move it around and drive the economy. It is almost perfectly designed to be used as a speculative investment rather than an actual day-to-day currency.
Having a fixed pool of money to represent your economy only makes sense if the total value of the economy will never change. This doesn't happen in the real world. Populations grow, new technologies add value, and poverty generally goes down. This is all fairly simple math.
Bitcoin is digital gold. Other cryptocurrencies will become used as well for basic payments. Eventually you will be able to pay cross chain so it wont even matter which coins you hold.
Amid all of this, nobody has managed to give me a reason why I would want to use crypto for transactions instead of my debit/credit card.
Crypto doesn’t come with any of the consumer protections I expect from my current payment methods. And in fact, it is designed to make some of them literally impossible (I.e. chargebacks). This might be appealing to sellers, but financial transactions are a buyers market. Sellers hate dealing with PayPal, but they put up with it because consumers trust PayPal and demand to use it.
So right now, crypto has these problems:
It is riskier to me than my current solutions.
Even with PoS, it is an order of magnitude more energy intensive than current centralized solutions. The the energy cost for just McDonald’s to replace all their credit card transactions with Ethereum would be staggering.
Most importantly, it does not solve any problems I have that other solutions do not. There needs to be a reason for consumers to change their habits. You can’t build your sales pitch on intangible benefits that are only relevant to a tiny minority.
It’s been over a decade and blockchains are still a neat technology without a useful practical application.
Ah, I see, you think that because you can mint Schmecklebux or whatever and use it as a medium of exchange, you're somehow exempt from the laws of whatever country you're in when the trade goes down? Tell me, does your flag have a fringe on it?
Why do you assume I think I'm exempt from laws? I paid over $300,000 usd in taxes last year! I'm not using crypto to break laws, I'm using to to become wealthy.
Then how are you free from "corrupt governments"? You're still paying taxes on income and on property, so even if you acquired property with funny money the government is still getting its cut. And if the government felt like crypto was getting out of hands it would apply further laws to it or outlaw it.
ipv4 addresses. Also bitcoin is the worst example here, as it's just an asset. It's not bearable as real money, you can't trust its always changing value. It's also a victim of constant market manipulation. XMR on the other hand is a relatively stable currency.
Bitcoin is also a privacy and ecological nightmare.
In general it's also really fun that you can lose all your money without doing anything wrong.
But that's digital scarcity, even if not designed like that.
You didn't lose anything because it's completely random. There are big pools just randomly generating wallets to see if they get a used one. And they had multiple hits.
Even when not talking about people not good with computers, people mess up backups and forget passwords. They shouldn't lose their belongings just because of that.
I think crypto could have its place as the cash of the internet. No one can watch your transaction, but if the other person takes your money and runs you are shit outta luck. No way to revert transactions, perfect for money laundering, but also anonymous, which can be a plus.
But all this makes it completely unsuitable in everyday use.
Also: yes, there is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. But you know what governments all over the world did when Inflation was sky high? Change the interest rates to change the amount of money that goes into the economy to make everyday items affordable again.
And for Bitcoin in particular, if everyone actually uses it as intended the artificial limit of the transaction rate would only allow you to perform one transaction every two yearsor something like that.
Fiat money can be:
* Any money that is not backed by a commodity.
* Money declared by a person, institution or government to be legal tender,[5] meaning that it must be accepted in payment of a debt in specific circumstances.[6]
* State-issued money which is neither convertible through a central bank to anything else nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[7]
* Money used because of government decree.[2]
* An otherwise non-valuable object that serves as a medium of exchange[8] (also known as fiduciary money).[9]
Doesn't have to come from a government. Crypto is three of these. The article even starts with "Fiat money is a type of currency that is not backed by a commodity, such as gold or silver." Nothing about government there either.
Money is a social construct that only has value because people agree it has value. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the best forms of money humans have ever invented. Once we have privacy at the base layer, fiat money is dead.
Money has value because it is an efficient medium to facilitate trade. Specific forms of money have value because of what backs it and it acts as a medium for trade. And yeah I'm sure what society really values will at some point be a money that limits the ability to deal with economic crises. Or that slowly disappears, because privacy Bob didn't believe in banks but his SSD failed, or because Crypto Karen forgot her password. Or a hacker loots an exchange.
I mean, it's not like those are fundamental problems that could bring an economy to it's knees right? But hey, at least the money has privacy (it won't) and we don't have to worry about inflation (deflation on the other hand...).
Cryptocurrency is the most efficient money we have. It doesn't require any middle man bankers. Sure, hackers can hack and loot exchanges, but right now we have the government looting us with inflation.
The problems you mentioned are being worked on. There are ways to backup and restore your wallet that will become easy.
The global economy doesn't need to only rely on Bitcoin, so the argument that we have to worry about deflation is just wrong.
This is the wild west of innovation. Scammers like money, so of course they will be attracted to cyrptocurrency. They are also very attracted to fiat currency.
All of the references on that page have to do with random NFT projects and shitcoins.
You should try to separate the concept of "Crypto" from the concept of base layer blockchain protocols that actually have value.
Brave, the browser, is very useful in a practical sense. It has some nice features out of the box, and if you disable the naughty out of the box features it's pretty decent. However, you have to trust that each update from the developer is good, and past experience raises very serious questions with this particular business.
Maybe you might be seeing some returns from the cryptocurrency. My undestanding is that users have lost far more than they've gained - and that's before you actually look into the true value of what users are sacrificing in exchange for their tokens. Meanwhile, Brave are pulling a steady revenue making money from their users, milking them just so.
Yepp, I started just using vanilla chromium though instead, as that offers a barebones option to guarantee I don't need to mess around to test something works.
Brave has built in ad-blocking that is good to test against. One of our tools wasn't able to submit new issues to jira because atlassian.net was being blocked by the browser.