stonerboner

When someone attempts to italicize the title of the post

The huge difference between mail or phone and telegram is that both mail and phone work with law enforcement, with useful records being made available upon subpoena. Telegram, by design, will not.

If you think drawing that parallel is useful to Telegram, they would then also be required to maintain the same standards of security as the mail, with package inspections, drug dogs, entire teams of government officials investigating illegal activities etc.

The criminals use it precisely because it is not a parallel to other available channels, as it circumvents those safeguards.

Yep. The issue is that they put out a tool that does some good things, but is also heavily adopted by criminals who piggyback on it.

Should we let child abuse just proliferate with these tools, because there’s so much need for privacy? How do you weed out the bad without kneecapping the good? There’s no good answer here. The good parts of the tech working enable the bad parts, too.

There has to be a certain level of knowledge and acceptance of the bad parts to continue developing it. It’s a catch 22, so law enforcement has to pick between sacrificing the privacy or allowing a tool to exist that proliferates child abuse material and other ills.

There are valid arguments for the importance of privacy, and valid arguments for making sure there these crimes shouldn’t have a safe haven. Action to either end will hurt some people and enrage others.

Imagine being so fleeced by a scam that you post messages pretending others are dumb for not falling for the scam lmao

Saying crypto is pretty much the same as cash is disingenuous.

You don’t need to make an account to spend cash. You don’t need to pay fees to give cash to someone else. You don’t need to pay fees to process cash transactions. You don’t need an internet connection to acquire or spend cash. Cash transactions are executed in person, where mistakes can be reversed. If my personal info is compromised, my cash on hand is safe. Cash is generally much more stable, and is generally accepted everywhere.

And let’s address a biggie- cash doesn’t destroy the earth, unlike crypto. For all the protest I see about AI’s energy consumption, crypto was worse in 2022 than AI is projected to be in 2027. Let that sink in.

What is needed before crypto can actually be useful:

• needs to be as easy to use as real currency
• needs to be able to be spent freely on basic necessities
• recourse for fraud
• recourse to recover lost keys instead of losing funds permanently
• protection against market manipulation
• widespread merchant adoption
• address liquidity concerns
• actionable process to protect from illegal activities
• MASSIVE environmental protections- crypto was worse for the environment 4 years ago than AI is projected to be in 2027

There’s more, but I won’t bother as the above issues are more than enough to confirm that crypto is a scam.

How is it convenient? Its not simple setting up a wallet, picking a coin, registering with a market, hoping that the merchant you want something for happens to take your type of coin? And being anonymous is a turn off for most people- the vast majority of people want consumer protection. Merchants carry higher risk with a volatile, unregulated market, so they are hesitant to accept it.

Why would I pay fees to buy a faux currency, to pay for a pre-paid card of the same currency I used to buy to the faux currency, to spend it on things that can’t be paid for with the faux currency anyway? What?!?!

You might have had a salient point if the ancient Greeks made it popular for “solving thirst across the known world,” but really it was a novelty. Or if crypto was marketed as a novelty. But crypto was hyped to be the next big things, spreading around the world, no monetary boundaries. The same people making those claims are spending hundreds of millions on the election to making sure it stay unregulated with no consumer protection.

But sure, crypto somehow parallels steam?

99.9% of people could not pay for what they want or need except the handful of niche places that happen to accept it. Can’t pay medical bills with it, can’t buy my food at the grocery store with it, can’t buy my gas with it, can’t really apply it where I want to, only in the few spaces I get to.

That’s not what the developers claimed it would do, or what the investors wanted it to do. It’s not cost effective or simple. It’s created more problems than it’s solved. It flat out a scam.

Until there is an actual use case for Crypto, it’s definitely a scam as a technology. It exists only for investors and scammers, anyone attempting to actually use it is getting reamed.

Something can certainly be better than nothing, but the bias of the bias checker definitely skews right. It muddies the water, and serves counter to its stated purpose.

Thank you! Electric Forest was an absolutely amazing first date. We fell in love and I proposed a year later at the same festival. We now have a beautiful family :)