No I'm not. Also, with cryptocurrency you still have middlemen. To whom are you paying fees to clear your transactions on your dog-slow, unscalable, extremely inefficient network?
And why do these systems have the negative characteristics I just mentioned? The peculiar ideological obsessions I referred to earlier.
> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
I'll believe it when I see it. And frankly, those use cases are nonsensical. How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency, and after they do that, what use is it? It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with. It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
True, but that's as close as you'll get to P2P for a currency. Still, there's thousands of btc nodes and anyone could theoretically run one... unlike "just one bank" or "just one Mastercard".
It is slow, and inefficient precisely because there's no central authority (lool up Bizantine Generals problem). It has scaled extremely well for what it actually is.
Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
>> How exactly is someone supposed to convert their Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency
You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
You can sell it back to an individual even if exchanges don't work.
>> It's mainly speculative investment surrounded by enormous hype.
That's just a byproduct. For example, I don't "save in bitcoin", I just use it for its intended purposes when I have to make a purchase.
By the way, my govt said exacty the same about the black market of US dollars, because people here use them to protect themselves from a quickly devaluing currency (>60% yearly inflation) and to avoid the corrupt govt control over their money (enormous taxes in exchange for nothing).
> Some people don't seem to understand this and compare it with, say VISA transactions.
The point is almost all people don't really care about that feature of having "no central authority." Cryptocurrency goes through extraordinary effort to solve "problems" people don't actually have and implement features people don't actually care about.
It's like if someone at Google decided all search absolutely must run on 486 machines for weird reasons, and as a consequence it starts taking two minutes to load a page of results. Maybe the two minute load times are a phenomenal achievement of some brilliant engineers, but none of that matters to me as a user who hasn't joined the cult of the 486.
>> It's not like it's an actual currency that you can buy things with.
> It is. I can pay someone to build a website using bitcoin. Or, I can buy a car using bitcoin. You just need to agree on a number.
Theoretically, but that's not what people actually use Bitcoin for. It's also a superfluous detour in those transactions, merely adding unnecessary exchange and other fees.
>>> Why do you think it's so popular in corrupt authorarian thirld-word countries? And if you live in the US/Europe, you'll get there eventually.
> You can always buy bitcoin from an individual in exchange for Syrian pounds. It's like bartering.
Which ones deal in Syrian pounds? Give me an example.
And even there is one, how is someone in a "corrupt authorarian thirld-word [sic]" country supposed to get their money there? The banking system, perhaps? Or some black market broker? Doesn't that defeat the point?
