Frankly no.

I have said for years and will continue saying, it’s actually just not that useful, especially for the amount of wasted compute (which embodies electricity and water, in turn embodying fossil fuels and exploitative extraction, in turn embodying pollution and greenhouse gases, etc.). In order for a cryptocurrency to have meaningful privacy and resilience guarantees, it must be proof-of-work (proof-of-stake is horseshit, just a way for the wealthy to control the ledger again). In order for it to be widely used, that work must be performed at scale, leading back to the previous concern of wasted compute. If you relax the privacy and “decentralization” features to relax that compute - what exactly are we left with? A currency that behaves like any other except it is not state-backed and you don’t have to install venmo or zelle or whatever new start-up forms to facilitate moving money from one place to another without being taxed.

And I have not even bothered itemizing how those privacy and decentralization “features” are, frankly, worthless. Every transaction taking place inside a computer is traceable with enough time and energy. Some might require nation-state level resources to do that tracing, but the fact remains. If this is to be used for some grand “free” future, a dual financial system where the hand of the state is stayed, it fails at that purpose. In terms of preventing fraud, preventing abuse - these systems are also made by humans. All of the math in the world cannot stop someone being handed a $100 bill and being told to leave a backdoor in some validation algorithm. All the cryptographic guarantees do not stop someone slapping the wrong label on a box. Do not let the techbros convince you that math somehow fixes these human interactions - do not let them convince you that economic relations are not, in fact, social relations.

Cryptocurrency invents a world that does not exist, and prescribes a solution to the problems of that world.

Currency sovereignty is fundamental to any socialist project.

Crypto is designed without the possibility of sovereignty, from the ground up it was envisioned as a way to stop governments from controlling their own currency and force them to only obey market forces. The crypto currency vision of the future is one where every government is forced to have a so-called “balanced budget.”

No. Bitcoin fundamentally cannot “be done well”.

Aside from the fact that it features a public ledger that makes tracking funds and users easier than cash does, and that right there blows any chance of it functioning as a stateless, anonymous payment system out of the water, it was also designed to do what it does, ballon in price to reflect the feedback loop of rising cost of electricity that makes its use possible. Bitcoin was a bet that we wouldn’t have cheap power and it was a correct bet.

If we did have cheap power then there wouldn’t be anything stopping wealthy entities from using their wealth to poison the well on both proof of work and proof of stake systems.

It’s designed as a pyramid scheme to siphon up cheap power and kick the stored value up the chain to people who have more money or got in earlier.

We basically need a leftist Fiverr type marketplace that sits on Tor where all transactions are done through monero. Ideally, the marketplace makes enough from monero donations to cover costs (including labor) and then donates the rest to irl mutual aid orgs.

Frankly, at this stage of the game, we should already have a whole content creation ecosystem sitting on Tor building leftist content to train our own LLMs that could be creating quick slop disseminated to turnkey leftist media sites that uses mainstream ad publishing services and affiliate marketing to earn funds that get funneled back into monero where we could be building our own tor based welfare state. But you know, whatever. This is fine too, I guess.

The original one is pretty much nonfunctional for anything resembling “currency”, but there are improved versions of the “truly decentralized” tokens on distributed ledger. Monero is the only one with real utility nowadays, the others are just for speculation or useless.

State-issued/single-miner tokens are actually probably pretty useful. Can provide total transparency on the volume of currency, totally prevents counterfeiting, and can be integrated with other national systems (lending, welfare, taxation, reversals/anti-fraud, maybe even removing money from the political process if some state wanted to take it that far, the ultimate statistics collection vehicle too if invoices or summaries in standard formats were embedded in the notes on each transaction for central planners). The privacy protection afforded by Monero & similar projects could even be supported for a reasonable amount of total monetary value per month, like cash allows, for each individuals’ wallet, to prevent privacy abuses where it’s not warranted.

What you want is a CBDC.

The trustless-blockchain story is the big red herring. In the real world, we don’t need immutable distributed databases to settle the ledger because there’s a legal system to arbitrate. So a CBDC can be implemented by an efficient conventional database operated by the state. Goodbye environmental waste; a data message is probably greener than printing a banknote.

Implementing it as a twin of a real currency also deflates most of the speculative BS.

Cryptocurrency is basically “bottled scarcity”-- an asset without a real use, so it inherently goes to speculation. Real currencies have anchors to their value because real goods and services are priced in them directly. Even a currency without a “real” country like the Somaliland Shilling works that way, but anyone accepting BTC or Dogecoin is taking really USD and translating in real time.

You still get some noxiousness from Forex-as-an-investment types but nobody is HODLing a CBDC yuan at a scale to cause deflationary crisis deathloops.

i was wondering this basically too cause i was trying to theorycraft some kind of alternative to itchio which is open and decentralised and not beholden to the profit motive. the big problem i think is lots of people have a rightful aversion to using crypto. so i have no idea what the solution is.

I felt the same when it first began. I was kinda hyped for an alternative currency. But the main barriers were, next to no one answered Bitcoin payments for actual goods or services (yet), and then it just sort of became more of a money making investmentb scheme than a currency people can actually use in their daily life.

I know that these days it’s a little more widely accepted, but still no where near enough yet for me to adopt it.

I have no interest in trying to get rich from crypto. But if there was a legitimate use case for everyday people to use it instead of government legal tender then I would give it a go.

If the project doesn’t have to be a traditional crypto, but just an alternative payment system, there’s probably some stuff already. I’ve bumped into community based time tracking software before that had a similar goal of making sure folks were compensated for taking care of common spaces and neighbors.

I think we could somewhat reasonably setup a labor voucher network where participating organizations and people can compensate other individuals with single use vouchers for time worked, that can then be used at that same network of participating companies. Like all monetary like systems its subject to many potential exploits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already some decent technical and social solutions for many of them.

I would say yes. The only existing cryptocurrency that is a currency and not a security or a proof of concept is monero. The usecase is more or less contained to illegal or shameful purchases, which are not necessarily immortal, but a lot of them are. Any proof of work system will be computationally expensive, but the usecase of proper crypto is so small the scaling isn’t a massive issue. I don’t expect cryptocurrency to be that useful in the future, but a niche usecase will probably remain.