• KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.

    But a currency is stable. Which means you don’t magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn’t get attention, and therefore doesn’t get widely adopted.

    Everyone likes Bitcoin because it’s speculative digital gold.

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      nano was my favorite

      Hello, fellow Nanite!

      I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it’s cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don’t know how resilient the network is currently.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      There are plenty of people who want a digital equivalent to cash from a privacy perspective.

        • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net
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          2 days ago

          I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

          • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder

            That, my friends, is what NFT are is perfect at.

            “Oh, what, tax authority? No, I didn’t steal this money. I earned it legit by selling my newly-minted monkey NFT to some sucker for 100 ETH.”

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      3 days ago

      It’d be nice to have a singular system for payment around the world. I work on e-commerce sites that take payment in many different countries, and some of those payment providers are better designed than others.

    • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Name one stable currency. All currency fluctuates (Forex trading). But yes, crypto is very volatile comparatively

        • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I don’t think investors in crypto want it to lose volatility. But again, all currencies are subjected to volatility. No currency is perfectly stable. Hence, derivatives.

          • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            That was my point, in essence. Crypto fails as currency because the people in that market don’t want it to be less volatile, making it bad for typical currency uses.

            While yes, the relative values of currency fluctuate over time and in relation to one another, it’s orders of magnitude less and driven by far more predictable and based on actual real world factors. Instead of Fomo, whims, market whales, and indecipherable white papers.