RE: RE: The useful part of cryprocurrency

I feel I ought to explain my position. I think I understand and respect idiomdrottning's view. I just feel misinterpreted. And I'll try my best not to strawman him. If I do, by all means, it's my fault.

The amount of money that gets stolen daily over crypto is pretty big too. So I’m not super convinced it does a particularly good job in that regard. Like, “it’s more safe and secure” is not the hot take I would’ve expected on the same day that Celsius Network collapsed stealing everyone’s savings.

My fault. I should have make it clear in my post. I mean "secure" by cryptographically secure, not "secure" as in "you won't loose money because market or scams" secure. "Not your keys, not your Crypto" would be a good way to put it. Signing Bitcoin transactions using your key is secure because <insert course on cryptography>. Just like you can't sign your emails with RMS' digital signacutre without his actual key. Your Bitcoin won't magically disappear witout you (or be accurate, someone with your private key, which hopefully is only you alone) signing the transaction. In contrast with credit cards, knowing the card number and CVC is enough to initiate a transaction. Or a rogue bank manager can sign you up for a credit card without your actual consent. Breaking ECDSA is much, much harder than faking your (hand) signature.

I wish banking is as secure as XKCD #538 is. It'll be nice if banks can provide a card that doesn't have a card number or CVC. Instead the chip on it stores my ECDSA key and transactions only recognize signatures made with that key. And they provide actual good 2FA.

That and a lending platform like Celsius Network is not included my list of "useful" crypto.

I do agree with his other points. It's too volatile to be any good use for transaction. Too inefficent using up power and caused the GPU price hike. Yeiks. Energy consumption can be solved by transition to PoS for forgo the entire blockchain structure. Lock-free decentralized 0-trust consistant avaliable anonymous transaction is really hard. Yet, these are solvable with more engineering (and less hype). I don't think gas fee is much of a problem. For the use cases I presented, overseans transaction. Typically it's around 3% using banks. And more if an intermediary is involved. If I were to buy a $5000 server from Supermicro, the fee lands around $150. But with XMR the worst case is around 0.7USD and average of $0.02 2 weeks ago. ETH is at ~20USD few weeks back. That's a bargain. Furthermore, the transaction fee of XMR is comparable with a credit card for anything > $6.00. And the ~2min transaction time is good enough for online shopping.