- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
- Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
- Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
I ask this sincerely, what have you personally needed an anonymous currency for?
I used Monero to pay for my domain and VPS while under sanctions and thus failed by the mainstream payment system. And in daily life I use pretty much only cash.
Also the phrasing of this implies some “nothing-to-hide” mentality. Would I be in danger if I paid for my stuff with a KYC method? Not really, I connect to my VPS and request my domain daily from home, their existence is not secret. Do I benefit from the transaction being anonymous? Still yes, the less data you trust the third parties with, the better. Same as to why I encrypt my chats even though they are mundane. Just because they are nobody’s business.
The obvious one is buying drugs. I don’t feel like arguing the morality of doing that but anonymous money is definitely useful for that.
All fairy tales. Stories are awash with bags of coins and no-one ever worries who owned the cash previously.
I like it as a way to donate to creators without revealing my identity. It comes close to handing over cash.
You could also use it to pay for a VPN, but since the VPN provider sees your original IP address anyways, I don’t think that’s useful.
Love it for donations. Monero specifically is also super fast: open wallet, scan QR, enter amount, hit send. Easily done in 30s or less.
It’s also good for VPNs, because now the VPN provider needs to figure out who owns the IP, rather then looking up the clear name in the payment info. Doesn’t make you anonymous, but reduces risk of data brokers buying your personal info.
Another use I can think of is paying for a domain and registering it with fake info. Registrars require pretty sensitive information, and apparently can check if it is real by comparing it to the info tied to a card used to pay, which crypto eliminates.
Wish there were more XMR-accepting registrars though.
I read somewhere that someone was using anonymous currencies to buy life saving medicine from “non traditional” markets because they were much much cheaper. Let me see if I find the article
Well, that might be the only form of payment they take, and so you’ve got to use it I suppose. But the anonymous part really isn’t a huge factor here.
I would be a little cautious of buying “non traditional” medication from someone who doesn’t want a paper trail.
Unless you mean drugs, and then yes a paper trail is bad haha.
Buying groceries. Personally, I guess I don’t need an anonymous cryptocurrency, but why wouldn’t you have an anonymous cryptocurrency? That would be the equivalent of letting everybody in the world see your bank account and your withdrawals and deposits. And who would do that? That and while people would like you to believe otherwise, you still have a right to privacy.
In the case of groceries, use cash? I understand the overall privacy issue, and I don’t fall into the “I have nothing to hide so why should I care” category, but I struggle to find a real world example of where an anonymous digital currency would be required outside of illegal purchases. There are certainly “illegal” purchases that shouldn’t be illegal, depending on your area. Birth control will be a big one.
The problem is that cash suffers from the same thing that digital money does being inflation by the government, whichever government you happen to live under. Ask people in Argentina or Venezuela how good cash is. The answer is it’s not. The government cannot be allowed to print money because they will abuse that power and hurt everybody.
