• Z4rK@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When was cryptocurrency meant to be untraceable? It literally had the complete ledger out in the public.

    • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I assume they meant anonymous. A lot of people were equating it to digital cash in the early days, where your purchases weren’t tied to your identity like they are with something like a credit card.

      • 1bluepixel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That was true back in the days when you could mine your own coins and hold them in your own wallet, but with all the KYC requirements these days, it’s pretty hard to get, say, BTC that’s not traceable to you.

        It’s not impossible, but it’s certainly not as easy as cash.

        • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Which makes me wonder what the point is these days. If the it’s no longer “digital cash”, I don’t see any upside as a functional currency as it’s far too volatile. It’s only value is for speculative investing, which makes it no better than a picture of a cartoon monkey.

          • BURN@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It’s just a shitty speculative investment. That’s about it. It’s just reached cult following and hasn’t completely crashed. But when it does someone is going to be left holding a really big bag

            • dezmd@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The real Michael Burry depicted in the Big Short movie is buying puts against the stock market. Its not just crypto bros that need to ve concerned. All day on Bloomberg today they danced around recession after labor day expectations.

              • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The stock market may be in a bubble, but regular stock investments aren’t the same as investing in crypto no matter how much the crypto bros insist it is. Stocks are shares of actual companies that (typically) make things, and they also produce dividends.

                All that said, I think the end of QE “forever” is a thing that the C-levels of big companies are still trying to get over. I think it’s much more difficult to find retail investor interest in a market where benchmark rates exceed inflation, and it looks like the AI hype juice is starting to run out.

                • dezmd@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  A stock represents a share in the ownership of a company.

                  It has no inherent requirement that a company ‘make things’ or produce dividends.

                  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Sure you can invest in companies that make nothing, have no actual value, and pay no dividends… In which case you’d be investing in something a lot more like crypto.

                    Or you could, you know, not invest in crappy companies nor speculative assets and spend more than five minutes “researching” a thing before sinking significant money into it. Most reputable companies pay dividends and you can even look up the average dividend yield of the stock over years.

        • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          Some cryptocurrency can be truly anonymous using some pretty interesting maths to verify things have properties without revealing the thing (in particular, XMR/Monero is the most well known one for doing this).

          However, it’s still crypto so it’s kinda like instant distrust and heavy skepticism (though I’m slightly less negative than I used to be for the truly anonymous ones as I’m trans and while right now I can still get HRT through normal channels after being on DIY for a bit, a backroute via DIY is always something I like to keep tabs on and within current economic structures crypto of this kind can theoretically be useful as long as it is somewhat inflationary to reduce it’s use as an investment vehicle, though I also am anti-currency in terms of my desired economic system ;3)

          With things like BTC/Bitcoin or others with a public ledger, you can pay someone a lot to essentially mix your currency with several other people before sending it to new accounts to reduce traceability, but turning it to fiat currency is still often pretty traceable for the reasons you said. To me it also seems money-laundering-ish lol ., there’s definitely tons of sketchy shit involved. But it’s crypto so that’s par for the course ;p

      • Heresy_generator@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Pseudo-anonymous. “Anonymous” until you use it in any transaction that can be traced to you, then the anonymity of that account is gone forever and every transaction you’ve ever made can be public knowledge.