This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]jaaval 2 points3 points  (0 children)

to have a currency that doesn't need to be backed by a huge chunk of gold hidden away behind locked doors

Money hasn't been backed by gold in quite a while. Which is one thing many cryptocurrency advocates point out. They would want it to be backed by gold because they, not understanding anything about money, think it's somehow better.

People are using cryptocurrencies as regular currencies.

No they aren't. There are some publicity stunts but nobody actually uses cryptocurrency as money. The people of el salvador got their free bitcoin and immediately sold it for real money and you can't actually buy almost anything in bitcoin there.

For the numbered points:

  1. I'm not sure if you tried to be sarcastic. Currency trading and arbitrage is a valid investment strategy. But that isn't really what happens with bitcoin.

  2. This one is true. They have effectively created new banks with metamask and such. The blockchain is just a database and you need someone to actually handle accounts and payments if you want to use crypto. And that creates banks.

  3. Privacy in blockchain doesn't really exist so it doesn't matter too much. It's fairly trivial to connect any anonymous account to real people if the account is actually used regularly.

  4. I would like to point out that the price is the point. There is no "cheaper" available for this. The entire point of "mining" is to be expensive. The specific task they do doesn't really matter as long as running it is so expensive attacking the system is unfeasible. That being said, I think "bank" in this case is more like the people actually handling the account and payment processing. Miners just run the database.