Comment by LinuxAmbulance
1 day ago
> The goal of cryptocurrency is to have a financial system with none of that pesky government regulation.
Except it's just a speculative asset, not an actual financial system, unless you count its use by criminal elements to actually transfer funds.
Ledgers can't scale to allow for a financial system that could serve an entire country either, due to transaction speed issues.
I think there's some good ideas involved - a financial system not under the control of a government, but the current implementation of everything crypto is failing at everything other than financial speculation.
There is nothing stopping people from using it as peer-to-peer cash.
I used crypto sell a GPU to someone I know. I regularly use it to trade hardware over the internet, and I would use it more if more vendors on ebay and such accepted it.
It has low fees, works with open source software, and is pretty straightforward to accept without fear of charge-backs or fraud. The volatility is only a problem in the short term, and I don't mind holding on to crypto despite volatility because it has a lower inflation rate than the USD.
>Ledgers can't scale to allow for a financial system that could serve an entire country either, due to transaction speed issues.
A lot of the issues with transaction throughput have to do with the network parameters of old cryptocurrencies like bitcoin which were optimized for a 2009 internet.
A single ledger can't scale, but if you just boosted the block size of a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency to ~200MB you would have transaction throughput on the order of paypal. If you do payment channels on top of that and/or have atomic swaps between multiple merge-mined ledgers I think that you would have a decentralized payment network which could serve the entire world's current needs, at least for online transactions.
> is pretty straightforward to accept without fear of charge-backs or fraud
Well yeah, it's a great option for the seller. You get non-recourse cash before shipping the item. The real question is why people are willing to send it to you. From the other side, it's basically asking to be defrauded.
You can have escrow or something using a 2-of-3 multisignature if you are worried, but you can also just have trust mechanisms outside of the payment network.