this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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askchapo

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Can cryptocurrency be done well? (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 months ago by Andrzej3K@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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I was kind of sympathetic to Bitcoin in the early days. Despite the awful politics of the community surrounding it and the obvious grift angle, it seemed a positive that we might possibly be able to escape the stranglehold that payment processors are currently demonstrating online.

Obviously, the incentives at play inevitability led the project to become a series of pyramid schemes within pyramid schemes, and anyone who has actually used the Bitcoin network will tell you that it did not scale well, with slow transfers and high fees.

However, could it be done well? Is it conceptually possible to have a left cryptocurrency? How would that work, technically, politically, practicality within this economy?

To be perfectly honest, these were the questions I wished our glorious thought leaders in left media would grapple with a decade ago, but maybe we all have enough perspective on this thing now that there is some fruitful discussion to be had on here at least.

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[–] leftAF@hexbear.net 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.