Crypto: Enabling Crime, or Change?
I saw the following phrase written on a peer's cubicle yesterday and thought of this whole Cryptocurrency thing we all find so fascinating:
This made me think of a conversation I'd had with a former colleague on Facebook earlier that week. I'd been hyping an educational documentary named "The Blockchain and Us" (found here: http://blockchain-documentary.com/)
An old peer argued that Bitcoin and Crypto currency was primarily motivated by crime. Every major spike in bitcoin has directly followed a worldwide ransomware attack. People are paying premium value on crypto-currency to pay a criminal to unlock their data. And speculators in the curriencies used are directly profiting from crime. And that Crypto enthusiasts know it, and that's why they're in.
Its an interesting point - but Bitcoin is only half the story. I argued that dismissing all cryptocurrency because the criminal element uses Bitcoin is little like refusing to swim, take a boat, or eat fish because criminals drown people in water.
An Imperfect Current State
It was clear that he hadn't looked at the Ethereum blockchain and some of the benefits of enabling direct peer to peer trustless transactions. While I do not endorse or condone cybercrime, terrorism, or tax evasion - and these are a certainly an unsavoury element of our shared passion - I argued that there is an enormous amount of potential to drive value and prosperity for every day retail investors like us.
The current state of the traditional securities market and "Big Finance" is no better. Taking a look at the current state of the SEC, the endless layers of markup (brokerage, distribution houses, banks etc), the extreme cost of listing stocks on traditional excahages - leeches most of the value of any transaction that occurs. I looked at a $10k investment I'd made in arguably one of Canada's largest banks limp along at a meager 4% annually for years - while the bank smashed its estimates quarter after quarter. Somebody was making a ton of money - it just wasn't the shareholders!
A Ray of Hope
Here are a few examples of Blockchain (ETH) that drive legitimate benefit to investors and businesses alike:
Veritaseum (VERI) - software driven peer-to-peer capital markets that remove the need for the brokerages, banks, distribution houses, etc. Stocks can be traded between individuals without trusted 3rd parties, reducing fees for everyone. They're currently in talks with the Jamaican stock exchange, and there's intimation that they've begun talks with a major exchange (my suspicion is the NASDAQ based on the value estimates of the exhange). This will put more of the returns into the hands of the investors.
Populous (PPT) - if you are a small business, you do work, and recieve an invoice its often times a promise to pay within 3o, 60, or even 90 days. You have bills to pay now! Taking them to a major invoice financing company can result in fees as high as 35%, again robbing small businesses of value. Instead take your invoice using Populous where investors like you and I will bid on them based on the coin we have. The cheapest bid (from an interest perspective) gets the bid, driving a return on investment for retail investors like you and me and massive interest savings to the small business.
These are just a couple of examples. What about our mutual favorite site Steem!? Just an other example of how the blockchain is putting power (and wealth) back into the hands of every day folk like you and me... often times at the expense of Big Business. What about very interesting experiements like POWR that enable peer to peer green energy exchange off the grid? There are many many examples!
Fortune Favours the Bold!
Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here. Maybe I'm giving each of us a pat on the back. I can't help but think that while returning power, prosperity, and wealth to the people some legitimate good can be done by this whole blockchain phenomenon!
What ways do you think the Blockchain is revolutionizing the world? Or is my problem focused colleague right? Crypto is only good for criminals? Lets discuss!
Cheers,
Stanimal
I agree with you. I think cryptocurrencies offer a new wave of opportunities way beyond investments and the convenience of digital portability.
I'm curious which currencies your friend has identified as never being used for crime ... Cryptocurrencies have no doubt been used for crime and fraud, and they have inherent features perfect for criminal purposes, but I'm pretty sure criminals have used dollars, francs, eurodollars, yuan, and yen for crime too.
The fact is the fundamental enabling technology for cryptocurrencies (blockchain technology) offers tremendous advantages even beyond cryptocurrencies. And cryptcurrencies offer many advantages beyond physical currencies. Undoubtedly, some will evaporate and disappear, but I don't think they are going away in total.
I am curious though ...
What do you think it would take to make cryptocurrencies (or even one specific cryptcurrency) go away?
I have a couple ideas, but I'd like to know what all the readers think.
@drstoker "I'm curious which currencies your friend has identified as never being used for crime"... I had a chuckle at that one. His argument that was because many Cryptos are essentially anonymous they're particularly well suited. Most countries have controls over large cash transfers so criminal activity can be stopped - having to transfer through registered bank accounts, providing ID at cash transfer locations like Western Union etc.
As for making crypto go away I suppose local governments could use specific technologies to snoop on the type of data coming and going. I think about how I get an email from HBO every now and then when the new season of Game of Thrones comes out and I forget to enable my VPN. My guess is that traffic is tracked back and forth from a particluar centralized site. Could they do that with blockchain to stop specific transactions?
I think the first hurdle anyone faces with cryptocurrencies is that they are money, in every sense of the word. Bitcoin and Dash function like fiat currency, just without a nation-state backing their value.
As for the association of crypto with criminality, one must first spend some time looking at the teams behind each currency. If all the folks currently rushing to build the next big crypto all turn out to be crooks, then the global economic system is in far more trouble than we think it is.
Of course, there is always the other possibility to consider: That since cryptocurrencies carry actual, tradeable monetary value, criminals are bound to find them attractive, because greedy people like money, not paper.
So I would then say, that criminals are criminals whether they use crypto or cash. If all criminals used crypto, that would still not be enough evidence to convince a court that everyone who uses crypto is a criminal.
Hope that made sense
@your-nomad-soul There's a discussion point there, regarding whether cryptocurrencies are in fact money. One arguable factor is that money includes a "Store of Value" factor. For traditional precious metals an ounce of silver represented something like 20 "man hours" to extract and purify it. For mining operations like Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc where mining is required (like legit ore being pulled from the ground) I agree - it costs something like $1000 in power consumption and man hours. What about other altcoins where no mining is required? Like Steem for instance. Is that actually money? I'm not sure.
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