To be frank:

• Good idea in theory
• Ancaps and cryptobros ruined it for the rest of us
• Monero is okay

A public forever storage of all transactions is not good but bad for privacy.

Send money to someone and they can see your wallet and all transactions.

Identifying wallet owners may require different levels of effort. But that's kinda besides the point.

I dislike it being misused for gambling on it's value, but see the importance of currencies like Monero.

i think it's really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don't use crypto personally, but it's important that something like it exists.

cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it's obviously not going to replace "normal" money any time soon.

i feel like it's kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you're trading lots of electricity for "not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations". obviously it has it's flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.

edit: oh yeah, i didn't mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it's private and it's an esperanto word :P)

bringing back cash anonymity

Most cryptocurrencies do not have this. It is trivial to tie bitcoin to an identity. Given the nature of publicly posting the transactional records, all it takes is tying any given purchase to someone one time, to identify them and view their entire purchase history.

Monero being an exception.

Nice tech surrounded by scams.

I use Monero for private transactions and I am thankful for the existence of a private, untraceable currency (like most cash transactions IRL). I am concerned by the amount of energy expended on crypto-mining... it is a dreadful use of energy that could be used for far more productive purposes.

I see no point for it to exist.

I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life

The initial idea and the aspect of "fuck the banks" intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.

It's not real currency, it's a token.

I can't use it to pay my taxes to the US federal government and it must be traded in for actual currency to do so.

Just like a token at an arcade.

They are also vehicles of wild speculation... And unlike stocks (where I gain partial ownership of a company) and bonds (where I gain a claim on their monetary inflows and primacy if the venture crumbles), crypto gives me... What exactly?

I don't get to be an owner or a creditor. I become... Holder of a mining incentive?

I'm sorry it's not what a lot of people seem to think it is.

The original idea was to take back control of our money from greedy and corrupt banks and politicians. Very very very few people use it as that now though. Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.

As we are in the privacy sublemmy: All of the privacy issues have already been solved, those that keep saying that it is a log of everyone you ever paid kept forever have no idea what they are talking about. Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns. There are also other ways to obfuscate and stay anonymous.

It's a nice technology that should exist as an alternative to personally identifyable and government-ID-connected transactions. It's not perfect in any way though

Use Monero. Since the amount you send is private, who you send to is private, you are private when you send. Unless you are targeted specifically, it's unlikely that your transactions will be figured out.I use Monero a lot and I don't really care about the fiat value of it because I'm using it as a currency to buy my food, pay my insurance, pay for my phone bill, etc.So what happens is since I have to pay bills in it, I end up buying it every single month and then spending what I need on bills and saving the rest.I am not it for number go up like the rest of these crypto bros are. I want to ditch the manipulative government fiat system entirely, and that's the end I hope to achieve by opting out.

I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don't have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).

Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the "crypto world", but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:

• Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money's value is not diluted by supply inflation.
• You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
• It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
• At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can't say the same for most other coins.
• And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other "stranded" supply. Pretty powerful stuff.

Monero's privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.

I'm for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin

But, sadly, I'm against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn't been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA's https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn't even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d'etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.

So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I've became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.

I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.

PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I'm using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that's where the value literally is today. I'd also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they'd be technically viable.

No as it pretty much a scam

I think a lot of us first heard about bitcoin when Paypal shut down donations to Occupy Wall Street and later WikiLeaks.

Both of them turned to bitcoin to accept permissionless donations.

Bitcoin was just the first majorly successful coin. I think most orgs should accept Monero these days, for Privacy reasons.

BTC, ETH, and XMR are the only ones that matter. Some stable coins (USDC, GUSD) are okay, too.

BTC (Bitcoin) is good because it's the most widespread. If a vendor accepts crypto, odds are they accept BTC. However, the blockchain is easily traceable.

ETH (Ethereum) is good because its blockchain is far more versatile, so it can be used for other things than just crypto payments. However, it's less widely used for payments than BTC and is also easily traceable.

XMR (Monero) is excellent. It's extremely difficult to track an individual user. Your transactions are private. There are some possible attack vectors for the future, but they'd require that you be an actual target to be worthwhile. Someone that's going to track you is going to find a different way than XMR to do it. XMR isn't as widely used as the others, though, and it's also not on as many crypto exchanges. Kraken has it.

However, crypto as an investment is not a good idea. Spend your crypto.

Its awesome if you have some, its basically all time high price these days 😉

It's really useful for committing crimes on the Internet but as a daily cash replacement I remain unconvinced mostly do to the woeful speed of confirming transactions in most currencies I'm aware of.