Honest question - what would a crypto credit card look like? What would its purpose be? Who would benefit?

If BTC/USD dropped, the debtors, who'd still have had most of their expenses and wages in fiat, would be celebrating the amnesty.

If BTC/USD went to the moon, the debtors would get rekt much harder than those Russians who took out loans in USD in 2014 at rates that seemed attractive prior to the crash of the ruble, and the creditors would have a hard time collecting.

Jokes aside, a loan in BTC with payments pegged to the debtor's local currency would be a slightly better idea, however, it wouldn't more beneficial to either party than an online P2P loan in fiat, except if the debtor lived in a grossly underdeveloped country where it's hard to make fiat transfers.

So bitcoin credit cards are just a way to borrow money denominated in bitcoin? That seems like a solution to a non-existent problem.

I've looked up only one implementation (cryptocreditcard.io), and there, the loans will be offered in both fiat and the system's own ERC20 tokens (the latter loan option is crazy). Hilariously, the ecosystem will also include PAMM accounts - the founders come from Russia, where PAMMs are a popular way of trying to get rich quick. Another funny thing is that the telephone of the company is a landline based in Moscow, so it's expensive for non-Russians to call it.

Needless to say, I'm not going to put a cent into the ICO.

Crypto debit cards, tied to a wallet in a highly obfuscated coin like MaidSafeCoin (?), could be at least applied in tax evasion Of course, using a BTC wallet for that purpose would be insane, as the blockchain is public and allows the revenue service of a developing country to get info way too easy.

The only reason you can't do it with regular transactions is because governments have decided to not allow it. Whether you believe their reasons or not, you think it's a good idea to 'invest' in something that's main point is to avoid government regulations?

Code,

1. You don't invest, you hodl till moon.

2. Governments are totally powerless to do anything against btc.

3. Non believers will become enslaved by btc hodlers.

4. Btc is the only thing that can't be taken from you under any circumstances.

5. The lack of any consumer protections is a feature not a bug.

6. Every hodler is up infinite dollars, and anyone who is not a hodler is an idiot who doesn't understand what btc is, and has no right to discuss it.

Those who understand how blockchains work, understand it is a completely inferior technology.

If there is ever going to be some type of crypto-coin that will be successful long-term, it is going to be based on something that does not yet exist today. I'm watching for that.

You can say blockchains aren't as efficient as centralised systems but that doesn't them 'inferior' and is missing the value proposition of btc and other potential usecases for btc and other blockchains. Show me how I can trustlessly send someone on the other side of the world $100,000 in 20 mins or less please.

Show me a legitimate reason to do that please, something that the current financial industry cannot already handle.

Also, I do not consider donating $100k anonymously to wikileaks to be a legitimate reason, so come up with something better than that. Try your hardest to come up with one legitimate thing.

If I try to send $10k to a friend my bank may ask what that money is for or ring me for an anti-fraud check and delay the payment. If I'm transferring money on a weekend to someone, the money may not get to that person until Monday. If I'm transferring over £25k to someone, my bank charges me a fee. If I move money from one country to another country I'll have to wait 48 hours to a week for the money to arrive, pay a fee and get an exchange rate 1-2% below the market rate. People use services like western union to transfer small amounts of money between countries all the time.

There are a load of examples where a trustless p2p system is superior to the current real world alternatives and I'm not sure how you could disagree with that statement. You may think btc or any other current blockchains will not gain significant use in every day life and that's fine, we can agree to disagree but saying 'blockchain is inferior' is a stupid statement.

Though SHA256d-based PoW is a poor way of merit measurement that has resulted in the oligarchy of ASIC producers, I thank Satoshi for igniting the cryptoanarchist movement, encouraging some of the world's best cryptographers to start looking for a solution to the problem of governments' greed (I agree that it's yet to be found).

lol, he posts this on a poker forum of all places.

Isn't the poker / betting / gambling volume rather small relatively to the overall global personal transaction volume, though? If so, and if gambling is the only legit use case for BTC, then why has it appreciated so much?

BTC is not about improving the current payment system. Centralized systems will always be more efficient.

The point of making it decentralized, and thus very inefficient is the amount of censorship resistance you gain by doing this. Banks are not the 'enemy' perse here, central banks are. In the history of money there are countless examples where giving one central authority the power over monetary policy has led to this central authority abusing their power. It's fair to say there has never been a central authority who has NOT abused their power over monetary policy.

Bitcoin is excellent for this, monetary policy is set and extremely hard (if not impossible) to change by one party or multiple parties. This is not a bug, it's a feature. If a change to Bitcoin is proposed and it's not good/safe whatever enough, it will not be accepted by the users. It has to be this way for storing your wealth, you cannot break things and iterate like ethereum does. Bitcoin is:

- Reliable (~ Every 10 min a bunch of transactions are timestamped and put into a block while the miners are rewarded for expending energy with a coinbase reward+fees). Bitcoin uptime is 99.993%.

- Distributed (the Bitcoin software is ran over 10k+ nodes worldwide. These nodes are constantly checking if every transaction follows a (long) set of rules.

- Slow to adopt changes (again, this is good, even if you have 1-2% of your networth in BTC, you don't want any stupid bugs to be added to the code)

- Grassroots. It's entirely bottom-up. For me this is a big part of the beauty of it. It's not forced on people, everybody can choose for themselves if they want to participate in this particular monetary system or not. 9+ years ago it started out with just 2 guys sending their first transaction and testing out the code of the software. In about 9 years it has grown to a $100b+ very liquid network. This is an amazing achievement in itself.

It's all opensource software, everybody can check the code. Everybody can BUILD on the code. This makes for an environment where smart and ideological people are very motivated to create a monetary system which can potentially benefit a very big % of the world population.

He said to name one legitimate use-case. Poker players (live and online) use Bitcoin as a means to transfer money across countries because its cheaper and more accessible than bank wires. Also, it's not just to/from poker sites-- most stable owners pay out horses in Bitcoin for the same reason, it's simply the cheapest and most convenient way to transfer money across borders (especially large amounts). I've personally used Bitcoin to repatriate money when I moved back to USA, because it was cheaper than all available options, by a huge margin. I just found it hilarious that of all places to "name one legitimate use-case," this is probably the most likely places to find anecdotal evidence of people using Bitcoin for everyday business lol.

Why has Bitcoin appreciated? Because people bought it.

I use bitcoin to buy music equipment, mostly homemade stuff, electronics, eurorack modules, poker applications.
Note: I am pretty sure a couple of the people I bought eurorack modules off do not have the luxury of modern day banking.

I really like being able to buy something online without having to put my first and last name on something.

Also, Gemini now offers a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar on the ethereum blockchain

If this functions as it should, then it will have cheaper transfer rates than Paypal and not subject to crypto volatility.

@Zenzor, fair enough. I can't forbid people from buying what they want That said, BTC would be able to serve perfectly as a gambling payment processor even if its market cap were $1 bln like in H1 2013 when SwC was already operating and when fiat cashouts from US poker sites were harder than now.

In theory, yes. In practice, the voting power on BIPs remains in the hands of the managers of the top few centralized pools (the top 4 are solving ~55% of blocks), and their ordinary miners can't simply disagree and quit to join a P2P mining pool because that would require them to figure out how to reprogram the ASICs, as the hashrate on GPUs is already not enough to cover the electricity cost.

What do you mean by voting power remains in the hands of the managers of the top mining pools? Are you suggesting that the miners vote on which BIPs get implemented?

It's hard to respond to this because I have no idea what you exactly mean. The only thing I can say is that in practice it has proven to be extremely hard to even change the blocksize from 1 to 2 mb. It was tried last year, and backed by 90% of hashpower + a lot of big Bitcoin businesses, and it failed.

The hard fork "failed" because the economic majority did not want a block size increase. Bitcoin is governed by consensus of the entire ecosystem which is much larger than big businesses and miners.

We've already seen it demonstrated multiple times by BCH that block size increases are easily implement if the ecosystem reached consensus.

https://twitter.com/cburniske/status...121982976?s=21

Oops, my bad - I didn't know that a miner-activated softfork requires a 95% consensus, and there are user-activated ones as well. The politics of the BTC community are too complicated for my understanding.

Still, it's a bit annoying that as few as 4 pools are capable of performing a 51% attack if they collude.

Banks aren't doing it for their amusement, you know. If crypto would become popular enough/easy to use that it's nobrainer for most people to use it for avoiding anti-money laundering laws, there would be no point of these laws anymore and they would either:

1) remove these laws and make bank transfers more useful again than cryptos, or
2) find a way to bring these laws to cryptos or ban them. Yes, it's technically impossible to ban cryptos I guess, but how many of you would continue to use them if your country brings out a law tomorrow that makes using cryptos a felony?

They can ban the fiat gateways (but they haven't - they obv prefer to surveil them instead).

After an initial shock the price of btc would skyrocket. Look at the price of things that are made illegal (booze during prohibition, drugs, etc.).

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” - I look forward to stage 3.