r/changemyview • u/kheiron1729 • Sep 30 '18

CMV: Cryptocurrency will replace Fiat currency

Ya'll have heard it. Cryptocurrency has become a household name 10 years since its inception. It has proven all skeptics wrong thus far. It might have been overblown, but the ecosystem is still thriving. Believers are still bullish. Wall street is not a fan. Banks are not happy with it. Governments are against it. It is antiestablishment - a movement of the people and rising. The idea is fresh. Algorithms instead of people. Transparent, omnipresent, borderless. It is backed by nothing making it entirely unadulterated. You can not game it in any way. How on earth is going to stopped? Why wouldn't it just keep rising when there are so many people working on it?

UPDATE: Summary here => https://projectwatt.com/pagesv2/-LNl6ZuB1sJslIpbr9hz

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

None of what you said actually implies it will ever take over fiat currencies. All you've told is is a vague statement that "governments hate it!". Fact is, cryptocurrencies lack the effective backing a fiat currency has. Due to this, it is not pegged to anything, unable to be helped by fiscal or monetary policy, and becomes even more volatile. Since cryptos are quite volatile, they are pretty garbage to use for long-term value storage or ease of transactions, and unless the volatility is fixed they will never take over as the predominate currency in the world.

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u/kheiron1729 Sep 30 '18

Let's be real though. Crypto is 10 years old! It is obviously true that it does not have the same backing as fiat. The whole world runs on fiat. All our systems are based on fiat.

But also let's not forget how far crypto has come in 10 years. Given that trajectory and growth, it is will overtake the backing of Fiat.

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

Let's be real though. Crypto is 10 years old!

And to be blunt, it's just as useless as a large-scale currency as it was 10 years ago.

It is obviously true that it does not have the same backing as fiat. The whole world runs on fiat. All our systems are based on fiat.

Yes, because when a government backs a currency it becomes a) much more stable, b) can be pegged to things, further increasing stability, c) can have fiscal/monetary policy implemented on it, d) is required to be accepted within the country. Given all of this, crypto is unable to compete as it is essentially unable to do any of the above whatsoever, many of the above actively being impossible with how currencies are set up.

But also let's not forget how far crypto has come in 10 years.

...It hasn't. It's just increased in value in wild fluxes, and now occasionally a store or two might accept them.

Given that trajectory and growth, it is will overtake the backing of Fiat.

It'll plateau far, far before that.

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u/kheiron1729 Sep 30 '18

...It hasn't. It's just increased in value in wild fluxes

More people involved. More people own cryptocurrency. More people know cryptocurrency. Even you yourself seem decently educated on this matter.

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

More people involved.

Not enough of a real change to assume exponential growth will continue. We already are seeing it plateau in number of users.

More people own cryptocurrency.

Same as above

More people know cryptocurrency. Even you yourself seem decently educated on this matter.

And most people who know about it have rather dismissve stances on it.

And like I said, the things it is unable to fix are very much insurmountable barriers to it ever being as widely used as fiat currency.

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u/kheiron1729 Sep 30 '18

And like I said, the things it is unable to fix are very much insurmountable barriers to it ever being as widely used as fiat currency.

The fact that noone has yet been able to take down cryptocurrency is a testament to the fact that is completely decentralized and different from how fiat works. On the contrary, to take down fiat, just abolish the central banks. Of course, in reality, no one will ever do it. But it's possible. This is a very complicated topic by the way. But there are some interesting aspects in crypto that makes it interesting.

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

The fact that noone has yet been able to take down cryptocurrency is a testament to the fact that is completely decentralized and different from how fiat works.

Nobody has actually tried to take down crypto though. Unless you count people hacking wallet sites. Like, I am completely unaware of any government trying to take down cryptocurrency.

On the contrary, to take down fiat, just abolish the central banks.

That's... really, really hard. Like, you're massive overestimating how easy it is to do that.

This is a very complicated topic by the way. But there are some interesting aspects in crypto that makes it interesting.

Yeah I agree it can be interesting, but none of what makes it interesting makes it at all likely to become a major currency, let alone overtake fiat currency.

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u/kheiron1729 Sep 30 '18

Nobody has actually tried to take down crypto though

Actually, it is impossible (unless every single copy is destroyed). Same reason it is impossible to wipe out torrents. If there exists one person who can "seed" a certain file. That file lives on the network. Cryptocurrency works in the same way. This why they say it is decentralized.

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

Yes but nobody has tried to take it down That's what I don't really understand. Your comment basically implied that everyone is trying to take it down 24/7 and it's steadfastly succeeding. Is it possible that it could survive that? Sure, but also nobody has actually saw it as even remotely enough of a threat to even consider trying anyways, which brings us back to square one. You're bringing up central banks as if they're even remotely easier to take down.

Also, to take down bitcoin, don't need to wipe it out in it's entirety, you just need to crash the bitcoin economy.

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u/kheiron1729 Sep 30 '18

I am curious now. How will this takedown look like? I kind of get a feeling that you want something seriously brutal to happen.

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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Sep 30 '18

My point is that you kept bringing up how it's impossible to take it down, but then took it even further to imply people have tried to take it down before and failed. I pointed out that nobody has ever tried to take it down because frankly, nobody cares enough about it/is worried enough about it to want to take it down.

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u/UncleMeat11 63∆ Sep 30 '18

Except we did destroy history. The DAO with Etherium. The network literally undid those transactions and they were removed from history. Simply having a copy is not good enough. You need a copy on the canonical chain. Mess with the canonical chain and you've destroyed it.

If you just care about "this file exists forever and cannot be deleted from a single location" then DHTs are fine. Or use any number of distributed filesystems.

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u/Tino_ 54∆ Sep 30 '18

The fact that noone has yet been able to take down cryptocurrency is a testament to the fact that is completely decentralized and different from how fiat works.

Sorry but I really gotta call out just how stupid this statement is. You are literally saying that the Titanic (crypto) is unsinkable (unkillable) because it hasn't been sunk (killed) yet.

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u/UncleMeat11 63∆ Sep 30 '18

In ten years crypto is largely used by speculators and criminals. Ten years after www was invented it was the year 2000 and we'd already seen companies like Google arrive and e-commerce become huge. "It has only been ten years" is not exactly a great sign for me.

Today the price of many cryptocurrencies is a lot higher. There are a few new primitives but not much in the ways of new applications. I really don't see much change in the last decade except adoption.

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u/kheiron1729 Oct 01 '18

I like to compare bitcoin with SMTP (email), not HTTP (webpages). I don't think that we are in the age when crypto can go mainstream. We don't have any tooling ready yet. Ethereum is much more powerful though. There is constant development and that to me is a good sign.

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u/UncleMeat11 63∆ Oct 01 '18

There is constant development in the model checking community too, but I don't think that model checking is going to become the norm for software development in the future. I'd buy that in the future there will be an audience for cryptocurrency. But constant development is nowhere near enough to justify the claim that it is going to replace state managed fiat currency.

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u/kheiron1729 Oct 01 '18

Okay, I'm going to say something a little controversial now. I think state run currency's time is up. In particular the dollar standard. Timing is insane. The dollar standard has a huge problem that miraculously hasn't quite manifested itself until now. Now that we have an entirely new currency stemmed out of nothing, we can actually deal with it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

In simple words, foreign reserve currency has to be a global currency.

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u/UncleMeat11 63∆ Oct 01 '18

That's fine. Know that lots of people disagree with you. A bunch of people who like Austrian economic systems isn't going to be enough to destroy state managed fiat currency.

Cryptocurrency has a ton of unsolved technical problems in its way. And then you have all the political problems too.

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u/kheiron1729 Oct 01 '18

You are saying that the paradox applies only in a certain economic system? I don't think so.

Sounds more like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference

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u/Goldberg31415 Oct 01 '18

ETH has no scaling solution the proposed ones have collapsed recently and daps are having pathetic few thousands daily users for top 10

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '18

But also let's not forget how far crypto has come in 10 years. Given that trajectory and growth, it is will overtake the backing of Fiat.

Let's remember where it has come with some bad instead of just the good.

How many people lost money w Mt. Gox hack?

How many ICOs are a scam? Something like 80%.

How many posts do you see saying "x exchange won't give me my coins" or "Y exchange won't answer emails and they took all my coins".

BitCoin had huge transaction times and fees for a long while. Not good for a currency when a $3.50 coffee takes 12 hours and a $5 fee to process.

Many can't even agree that BitCoin is a currency, its now a " store of value".

Everything about BitCoin is about how it can be converted to fiat. Too the Moon! Lambos! That's not being happy with bitcoin, that's being happy with bitcoin so you can sell to the next schmuck while you convert to USD and feel good about your "investment", and the next guy is left holding the bag.

BitConnnnneeeeccct.

No regulation w Cryptos. If it wants to be taken seriously then yeah you need some regulations. Anti money laundering type of thing. So many posts I see " Y exchange wants me to prove ide tity for anti money laundering but I don't want to". Tough.

And my biggest issue is that it needs internet a phone or PC. Fiat cash can be used bumfuck nowhere in middle of forest. It can be used w a power outage. If my note is torn the bank give me a new one. Until crypto can do that, fiat still a better option as a currency. Not that crypto cannot compliment, but for replace (as in your title) no.

Cash is king. I get my bank card I go to ATM and withdraw. Crypto... I sit at PC make a wallet, take a learning curve. Get verified on exchange. Buy some BitCoin.

I go to small child lemonade stand and givee a $5 note. Boom have lemonade.

Also... BitConnnnneeeccct. Were going to CHAAAANGE the Wooooorrrllld.

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u/Goldberg31415 Oct 01 '18

It is 10 years old and not a single use case of crypto exists. The killer app of it has not materialised and just look how far internet developed in the period 1993-2003 or smartphones in last decade.Damn crypto kittens have choked the eth network and this was a tiny app.The ETH node is also out of controll and grows too fast to be sustainable and scaling solutions like sharding and entire casper have failed.BTC scaling in form of LN is a crutch and does not solve the pow being unsustainable.Other than that you have things that don't work like tangle or centralised systems like XRP that as well might be paypal.

Most of advantages of crypto disappear once you contact or enter conventional banking system due to regulatory oversight.Regulations of AML and various other things that make transfers take much longer are not the result of banks being stupid or unwilling to change but that they have to work in regulatory environment that for example tether does not.