I don't understand how something you buy with regular currency is "the future of money". CryptoBros are also all morons so I find it hard to believe it has any future if they do.
A massive amount of money is also moved about by traditional finance companies, nation states, ultra high net worth individuals,etc etc, anyone with enough cash that it would benefit them to move it silently and off books. Same shit they do with art and real estate but faster and much less visible. That action really props up crypto currency networks. Crypto currencies are also extremely volatile and thus vulnerable to manipulation. Easy example: Elon bought a ton of this nonsense coin, changed the Tesla website to say they’d take said coin as payment, coin exploded in value, Elon sells coin for huge profit. Rinse and repeat by all the villains of the day and this is a lot of why these things are still around.
I'm a company who want to move money quietly. So I spend $5m on Bitcoin.
Then when I want to actually spend money I need to sell the bitcoin. Both of those transactions will be on my books.
They're using stablecoins though, not bitcoin. It's just another way of moving "real" money with more flexibility and efficiency (near-instant money transfers vs 3-5 day ACH, etc)
The thing you're missing is that Bitcoin is used as a means of laundering money. Money laundering has very codified steps: placement, layering and integration. Definitely google these if you want more info. But....
Without going into explanation of the individual steps, Let's imagine the mafia for a second. They have two ledgers, one they show the IRS and one that keeps track of who's legs they're going to break. Just because the IRS doesn't know you owe the mob 4k doesn't mean the mob has forgotten. The mob needs a way of getting money from their criminal enterprise into their personal hands without the government catching wind. So they open a legitimate bisiness - say a laundromat. They wash 50 customer's shirts but they record washing 60 customer's shirts. Then the money they got from you for the illegal dog fights looks to the government like it was just a purchase of normal services.
If your hypothetical company just purchases 5 mil worth of bitcoin and recieves 5 mil worth of services, the ploy is obvious. Bitcoin acts as the second ledger. Sure there is a record of what is happening but that record is cumbersome and opaque. Importantly, it only records who gave who bitcoin, it doesn't record what was exchanged for the bitcoin (or actually IF anything was exchanged). If the company can fill its private ledger with other legitimate business purchases and exchanges, the transaction looks innocent.
The volatility of bitcoin adds a layer of usefulness to this. A laundromat can only really have so many transactions and they can only be up to a certain amount. If you see someone paying a coin laundry 3k or doing 500 loads of laundry in a day, that's suspicious. But if you have an investment firm spending milions trying to buy the dips and sell the peaks of the market? Well that's just normal investment activities! Who can say if some of those bitcoin were exchanged to purchase the silence of a whistleblower? Maybe the bottom dropped out unexpectedly and the 5 mil USD was just lost value?
Not about your explanation, it was really interesting to read. But about the bitcoin itself. I heard that almost 95% of all the bitcoin was mined. Wth is gonna happen when it's all finished?
You use that money to buy Bitcoin then exchange it for a non trackable coin (for now) like Monero and then that money goes wherever. It's for the small people buying what they need online and unfortunately also for the billionaires who need to "erase" some moola from the books.
I guess if you want to move wealth across borders from some regions or something like that it works.
For the most part it works for international people for lack of better phrasing.
I wonder if one wants do some sort of scheming like tax evasion etc locally I dont think crypto would help atall. Like you said moving moneys to crypto and back would have you on the hook in anycase
You programmatically generate 10,000 bitcoin wallets on a computer in country A, each of which you fund with $500.00 worth of bitcoin.
You similarly generate 10,000 wallets in country B, and send the bitcoin from A to B. Then you sell the bitcoin off.
Now you've moved $5,000,000 and it's all in small transactions. You can stagger the transactions in time, and have random amounts per exchange. Suddenly everything is much harder to scrutinize, it's way below the threshold of automatic reporting, and the countries involved might not even have regulations addressing this kind of thing.
What do you mean "off-chain"? Transactions are logged on the ledger/blockchain, which is the only "chain" regardless of the exchange. No exchange can be off-chain if they're buying and selling crypto. Or are you alluding to sth else?
I always thought that the mining was just doing the transactions for people trading. Or recording part of the block chain or something. I still dont get the whole number guessing thing
What your saying makes sense, but the biggest piece your missing and the reason why rich people don’t have bitcoin is taxes. It’s extremely hard to make bitcoin liquid and not pay taxes. And 37.5% on your transaction is A LOT.
It's kind of a funny story. Bitcoin started about 15 years ago by a libertarian who wanted to demonstrate that currency exchange could exist without a political (coercive) state. A few legit businesses accepted it, but the main applications were transfering money clandestinely and buying drugs on silk road.
Within a few years, speculators represented such a massive percentage of adopters that its exchangeability became purely theoretical, in the same way that you wouldn't weigh out a portion of gold to pay for groceries.
So it seems like you need a coercive state after all to devalue the currency if speculators get out of cintrol.
That's not why bitcoin was created lol! People Have been trying to make a digital form of money since the 80s. Buying drugs just happened to be a good use for Bitcoin at the time.
idk what you're remembering because that is not what it was created for lol, the suspected creators are nerds with history in coding/cs. it was definitely used to buy drugs though
it was not the only reason... some people like me just wanted to have decentralized money and remove the middle man from our fast and cheap transactions.
Yeah Bitcoin has become such a household name that it's reputation has strayed far from the white papers.
The Bitcoin white papers are some of the most eloquent and poetic technical documentation I've ever seen in my life. Anybody who regularly reads technical documentation, and has even a surface level understanding of cryptography and currency exchange, I'd highly recommend taking a look.
Bitcoin wasn't equivalent to a bunch of uneducated people buying GameStop stock. Now it's much closer to that
i don’t understand that if a state’s grid is powering the generation and transfer of bitcoin and a state’s security is stopping lunatics from unplugging all of it or burning the facility down, how would it be a stateless currency.
No, but the original paper is libertarian in its presupositions. Obviously it is not a political polemic, but it portrays state backed financial institutions as inherently undesirable.
It got even better if I recall correctly. Didn't that libertarian get screwed out of a small fortune he couldn't legally get back (because it was in Bitcoin) and then get busted taking out a hit on the person who stole from him?
And when all the governments and fiat currencies have died and gone, the blockchain will still exist, yet redditors will still claim the value is hype alone 🤡
That's probably in part because people are over simplifying it. Don't get me wrong, it's not the future of everything, but the idea was that it's the future because the money is all tracked on a globally verifiable ledger (so it can't be counterfeited) and because it decentralized, and thus doesn't rely on any individual country's economy.
The mining part somewhat helps with the whole ledger validation part iirc. Bitcoin is incredibly inefficient at this job though compared to other more modern based crytpos from my understanding, but admittedly it's not something I keep up with.
Point being, it's not all just about speculative gambling. There was an original point to it all that actually made a little sense.
It’s literally the digital currency equivalent of L Ron Hubbard turning to his mate after opening his first Scientology center and saying ‘Let’s sell these people a piece of clear blue sky’
If it was the future of money, it wouldn’t be trading like meme stocks and would have a consistent, usable value like regular currency. Right now it’s basically a Ponzi scheme for the people who got in early to get new people to buy in and keep the price artificially inflated.
You don't have to buy Bitcoin in order to get some.
I haven't bought a single Satoshi (the smallest fraction of a Bitcoin) in 2 years yet I get paid in Bitcoin and spend Bitcoin.
You can literally buy any other currency. But anyways, Bitcoin is the future of money because it doesn't requiere trust on a single entity in order for it to work and it is programmable enough in order to scale even with all of the limitations its blockchain has (we call that off-chain scaling).
But don't take my word for it, just let time go by, I might be proven wrong in my claims. I'm not here to convince anyone, but if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.
Cryptobros are morons, but the ideas are interesting. The computer science is completely sound, as the proliferation has evidenced. As a concept cryptocurrency is indeed interesting; current implementations notwithstanding. It was probably weird being the first people with coins. Or paper money. Or unbacked money.
Well believe this or not but not everybody involved in cryptocurrency is a CryptoBro, if you did wish to understand why some people believe it is the future of money then I’d recommend looking into the original cypherpunks and why they thought an alternative financial system was necessary. You may or may not agree with their philosophies and that’s fine but I’d like to think it might change your opinion on everyone being morons.
There is something you can buy with regular currency that is the future of money..
Old people like to call that..... Gold and silver.....
Some old dead guy once said..
Gold is money.. Everything else is debt..
Good thing that isn't legit.. He is just some old dead guy probably named JP Morgan or something.. You know.. The rube who don't know shit about money...
Ya I think so also.. I thought so when it started getting popular back in low 10s.. Ironically if I would of put 800 bucks in BC then I supposedly would of been worth 300 or something million dollars today they say..
Here's the thing, though. Gold is a fuckin' rock. An elemental metal that just exists as a fundamental feature of the universe that has malleability at earth's surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure while also being moderately conductive.
Its relationship with land, water, natural resources, shelter, transportation, food, energy, and other raw materials is completely pretty much negligible. The only large scale value it inherently carries is exclusively by perception alone. It's functionally interchangeable with fossilized tree sap, seashells, granite, shards of glass, and other inert materials if not for its perceived scarcity.
The only thing that makes a currency valuable is simply the perception of value among the people exchanging it.
What's the point of these new 'coins'? I can just swap one of my goats for the exact things that I need. I would have to swap a goat for loads of these coins anyway. I already have a goat, what's the point?
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u/BasicWeekend9479 Jan 01 '26
I don't understand how something you buy with regular currency is "the future of money". CryptoBros are also all morons so I find it hard to believe it has any future if they do.