• Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      The thing is that we don’t want decentralisation when it comes to money.

      Money used to be completely decentralised in the past, there is a reason why we moved away from it.

      We are now re-encountering the same issues with cryto as we had in past with real money.

      For example our current system allows us to undo human mistakes, like accidentally sending money to the wrong address. With crypto, that just isn’t possible.

      It is the same reason why so many crypto exchanges popped up, they are essentially the banks of crypto, who have control over the different transactions of their users.

      But because it is less regulated, tons of those exchanges are basically scams.

      To know how scummy they are, visit: web3isgoinggreat.com

      • fossilesque@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        This is generally my take as well, though I think there may be a place for it, as another layer or for localised systems… I don’t really know, I am not much of a financial person. I think it just needs to marinate a bit to find its niche, though. Monero seems cool for transactional stuff and I have played around with it a bit. It definitely has very limited use cases, though. I have a good friend who is an anarchist (defo not ancap, though) who is interested in this stuff, and I have chatted with her quite a bit about it, but I think she sometimes does not see the tech side clearly and I frankly think we need the somewhat fluid nature of our current systems as you mentioned more than we think. It’s a cool idea anyway.

        Now, I admit I am stupid on this stuff and may be missing something (please correct me), but I am quite interested in ideas about regulating power and data aspects of cloud computing with it, however, maybe as a way to earn something for crunching while idle like Gridcoin; maybe for environmental reasons (less local hardware) too… Remember SETI, those old screensavers that looked for alien life in the 90s? That’s where they are now. The projects that they have whitelisted are super interesting: https://gridcoin.us/guides/whitelist.htm I think that there are others like this too, but I have not gone down that rabbit hole. Even for just a closed circuit like universities, government-wide public services (large-scale GIS and flood modelling in underfunded areas!), NGOs, etc… I am less convinced about how people are trying to implement it with AI stuff or any kind of daily retail, currently anyway. Anyway, that is where my brain has gone with that one. I played with Gridcoin, and it was a fun little experiment, but I didn’t want to fiddle around fixing it after something broke. It isn’t monetarily really worth anything, anyway.

    • candle_lighter@lemmy.mlEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Bitcoin doesn’t even do the job of decentralization very well either. The blockchain is controlled by the wealthy miners with warehouses full of asic miners. Monero is a better cryptocurrency for that reason.

      • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Miners do not control the blockchain though.They just offer to verify transactions and maintain the blockchain. They have no control over the price, the algorithm, the supply etc. not saying Monero is not a good choice too.

          • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            11·
            1 year ago

            That does not make it bad though. Bitcoin is not able to solve all monetary issues nor was it designed to. No monetary system right now solves that issue. This is like saying an EV is bad as it still can speed and kill people without recognizing all the other benefits over gas cars.

        • candle_lighter@lemmy.mlEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          They just offer to verify transactions and maintain the blockchain.

          Unfortunately that’s the issue. Only a small amount of miners are the ones making a significant dent in mining. Consumer hardware cannot compete with the corporations with large asic mining warehouses, especially ones run by governments and large corporations. This leads to further centralization due to the high barrier of entry and makes the blockchain susceptible to manipulation and things like a 51 percent attack.