As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
I don’t think you’ll find most people have such a vendetta against PayPal or venmo that they’ll use some other alternative banking system to avoid using it.
That’s not a feature… especially if it’s worse than PayPal.
You might be right about that, but why would it matter what most people do?
It offers better privacy than PayPal and that’s what matters to me. Oh and nobody can lock me out of my account.
Bitcoin does not provide privacy. There are transactional logs from the beginning of Bitcoin until now with every transaction you’ve ever done on them.
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency. You can use Monero.
Or I can just not buy drugs on the Internet.
Ah so you think only criminals deserve privacy.
Nah, I’m speaking in practical terms. I frankly don’t have enough illicit online purchases to navigate all of the bullshit around coins and wallets and vendors to bother with “privacy coins”.
I also wonder why someone would subpoena your PayPal account if you weren’t doing illegal things.
If you want to make anonymous transactions, cash is still king.
EDIT: And it’s also not a matter of whether I think “only criminals deserve privacy” but a legitimate question of who, other than criminals, needs absolute, unsubpoenable privacy in online financial transactions? I’d say privacy for everyone is paramount when it comes to communications, but who needs to exchange money illicitly other than those breaking the law?
Additionally, with crypto (unlike PayPal) there is no mediator to act on behalf of one of the parties when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Unless you are purely exchanging currencies or NFTs or something, there’s no way to dispute a transaction. That capability is far more necessary for people conducting normal online transactions than privacy, and is largely why PayPal was created in the first place.
There are a few problems when it comes to privacy. First is the bank or PayPal tracking your every transaction. If the government needs a subpoena to access that data, that’s good, because they probably won’t be tracking everybody in an automated way. But I suspect that’s not the case in every country. The second problem is random stores knowing who you are. When you buy digital stuff like music or a game, why should the website know your identity? I don’t want my private information to leak to random people when the website gets hacked. The less they know about me, the better.
This probably depends on a country.
True, but not for online payments.
Your transactions can say a lot about you. It doesn’t matter if it’s just something you buy or you want to support a political cause. In some countries it might be dangerous to reveal certain information about yourself. Everyone deserves privacy though.
There is no mediator, but I think there can be. You can see it in some decentralized exchanges. I don’t know much about it, but you can read how Bisq handles it here: https://bisq.wiki/Frequently_asked_questions#Is_Bisq_safe.3F
So now we’ve pivoted again from mainstream usage to some hypothetical country where the government asks for every transaction you ever do… But also in which the citizens have unfettered Internet access, and it’s still not clear what you’d be doing on there that isn’t criminal.
I dunno man, seems pretty fringe to me.
I also think there’s a way to make digital cash, but I highly doubt distributed ledgers are a good way to accomplish that. Seems like any good version of digital cash would be easily usable and exchangeable offline, easily verifiable without going back through the history of the planet first, and not carry with it a complete transactional history as a functional requirement.
Ironically enough scammers today already use things similar to the above as actual currency right now, they call them Amazon gift cards.
The “decentralized” bug has bitten you so good that you don’t see how an alternative, actually useful form of digital currency could be created with a central signing authority (or several). IMO “decentralized” is yet another “feature” that serves no meaningful purpose.
I’d recommend buying drugs in person and in cash.