- I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second.
- I can send any twitter user address money by tweeting (eg. Send 100 USDC to @randomuser)
Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.
> I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second
This is clearly a very big problem for the majority of the world population!
It's like saying tesla solved the problem of going from 0 to 60 in 3 second in a 2t+ car, it's neato but virtually nobody had that problem, if you're not into illegal activities you will most likely never need or want to transfer 1m usd outside of a safe environment anyways
Name one Crypto chain that takes hours to confirm a transaction. Bitcoin has a blocktime of 10 minutes and Ethereum is 10 to 20 seconds. More modern networks process transactions in orders of magnitude less time, eg. Solana has a slot time of 0.5 seconds and time to finality being 1 or 2 seconds.
Last time I bought something with Bitcoin (admittedly a couple of months ago) it took 7.5 hours for the transaction to clear. This wasn't with a bottom barrel transaction fee either, although it also wasn't exceptionally large. The transaction fee ended up being about 40% of what I spent on the whole thing.
Or maybe it's just the most brilliant scam to ever be conceived? A ponzy scheme with a built-in rinse and repeat function that also put the final nail in the coffin of the war on drugs. Scam or not, it was a revolutionary idea which was executed perfectly.
It's not even that! It's just that most people seem to have no idea how long most scams are able to run. Bernie Madoff was operating for 17 years before things fell apart, and he was just one man. The layers of scam involved in crypto will take many, many, many more years to unravel.
Just wait until you read about John Law's antics in the early 1700s in creating fractional reserve banking & central banks... No way that ponzi scheme could hold up!
Positive, you are averaging out the risk by spreading out your purchases and averaging into your position.
Negative, time in the market beats timing the market, therefore you are better to have all your money you intend to invest in the market right away so you can enjoy appreciation, dividends etc
If you have a large lump sum to invest it can be better to buy in one go or in a shorter period. However if you earn money over time and look to invest, it makes sense to DCA each month you receive your salary rather than waiting to time the market.
If you're in your early 20's and reading along in this thread, I have some wisdom to drop on you:
The real value of investing at a young age is not compound interest and having another 5-10 years of time with part of your money in the market. For most of us our earning potential will keep going up until at least our 40's, so the number of dollars you have later will swamp whatever you can save now.
The real value of starting at 25, 24, 23 is that you only have a little money to invest, and when you lose it, it will subjectively hurt more. If you wait until 30 you'll be gambling a larger pile of cash without those hard won lessons to keep you out of trouble. The money you invest at the beginning increases the effectiveness of the much larger pile of money you can invest 5 years in.
If you read enough personal finance articles, aimed at real humans, you will start to get a feel for the way in which finances, like dieting or time management, has a much larger psychological factor that the objective bean counters dismiss as if the math is all that matters. What matters most is you.
I've lost some money on stupid investments (buying individual tech stocks last year, buying put options right as 2020 downturn hit its v shaped recovery)
I'm just glad that the amount lost is in the low thousands, not tens of thousands.
> I want my transactions to be private to the world but it's reasonable that law enforcement has a method to investigate criminal behavior.
If law enforcement has a method to investigate your behavior, its not private. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Either you enjoy privacy (and so do criminals) or criminals do not (and neither do you).
> If law enforcement has a method to investigate your behavior, its not private.
That doesn't seem to reflect how the world has worked up until now.
There are plenty of things that are private except with a legal warrant. There's an entire legal history of wiretap laws and circumstances under which law enforcement can open mail I'd invite you to look at.
It seems like you're making a sweeping argument against the legitimacy of the subpoena and investigatory power of governments. If a government cannot compel private entities to hand over evidence in criminal investigations, their ability to enforce laws falls apart.
> None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse.
How involved are you in the space to make this claim? Are you staying informed? What is your highly confident language based on?
Can you tease out how you come to "1000x worse"?
You are incredibly confident, it leads me to believe you have some big blind points.
Putting my bias at the front, I own crypto and am "pro" crypto if we can boil it down simply. I'm also deeply skeptical of a lot of projects in crypto, most OG's are because there is a lot of vaporware and scams and ponzis.
Nonetheless, the vision of having a shared consensus truth that the whole world can rely on for transacting I find very compelling.
> Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - info@buymeafighterjet.com . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.
> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.
>one can send very large sums of value between two addresses
This is not the same thing as sending money to Ukraine. If I send money between two addresses, I've just sent money between 2 addresses.
> This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
But not to actually buy anything in Ukraine. To do that you have to find someone with Fiat. As you see with all the other examples I gave you, what you've done is used the modern banking system to buy crypto currency - some bank transfer to a crypto exchange, send it from one address to another, and then left yourself with the problem of getting the money back out of crypto in Ukraine. Which as you'll see with almost all of the charitable giving in crypto to Ukraine, happens via the modern banking system, often with the direct involvement of the Ukrainian government.
So it seems to me, that this entire thing about using Crypto for Ukraine is rubbish. And it seems like that to you too - because when I start interrogating the idea, the Crypto to Ukraine story morphs into a Rwandan sending money to Nigeria.
My take is that Crypto in your example, was a worthless layer of complexity that doesn't solve the difficult problems of international banking, it solves the trivial bit in the middle.
For most trade questions, and that's what Ukraine is using the funds for, international finance is a solved problem. When it comes to tax evasion, large scale fraud, money laundering and so on it is definitely not. Unfortunately, crypto is only making the unsolved problems worse.
And regarding the case with the guy in Nigeria: How much access do people in the developing world have to crypto? And don't start with the crap scam Sam Altman came up with.
> What's the alternative? Someone commits a felony, and then you...?
The US is the OECD country with the highest per capita % of incarcerated individuals. By orders of magnitude. So it seems other countries have found other approaches?
> Source: Half of the OECD countries have less than 100 people in prison
per 100 000 inhabitants. Thirteen have between 100 and 200. Two
countries exceed this – Poland with 230 and the United States with
more than 700. The US rate is the highest in the world followed
by Russia with about 600 per 100 000 inhabitants. Except in the
United States imprisonment rates for women are negligible.
Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.