I never used cryptocurrency, but wanted to try it so I went around the web to try and learn. Here’s what I don’t understand:
It seems in every case in order to initially buy cryptocurrency I have to give personal information, birthday, name, address, telephone…just like if I were to apply for a credit card. And I have to give it to a company that I never heard of, that I probably trust less then my bank, my ISP, or Paypal.
So what’s the privacy about? It hides my personal info from a seller I’m buying from? Is that all? I guess I can see it if I’m buying something with Tor and a seller doesn’t give full disclosure themselves, guess I’d feel safer…maybe. But using cryptocurrency on the “regular” Internet for an “routine” purchase. What’s the point?
you absolutely don’t have to give information to get cryptocurrency. you can mine it yourself, be compensated by a hash renting service for it, do odd jobs in exchange for it, or buy a prepaid phone with cash and use it to interface with a physical ATM
also, few if any cryptocurrencies are untraceable or fully anonymous (fungible) in the first place, that’s mostly a marketing wank narrative promoted by scam artists in the space. Public key cryptography works by virtue of being uniquely identifying, and proof-of-work chains are 100% transparent without another layer used for obfuscation of transactions.
The “actual advantage” of using some cryptocurrencies (outside of bitcoin you’re essentially just rolling dice on multi-level-marketing) is that no one can seize your funds or stop you from making transactions, and, if you live in a place suffering from hyperinflation or capital outflow controls, allows you to store value much better than native means would normally allow.
If those two things aren’t something you need, and you can’t think of any other reasons you might need cryptocurrency, then don’t buy it. That simple.
I get like 20% of what your saying and I’m sure you’re correct and breaking it down as best possible. I mean I started looking at what “mining” is and my smoke started coming out my ears. I need to do more reading on this and then maybe I’ll come back with questions. Thanks for getting me started on this…
I found the Etherium Whitepaper to be a good introduction into how cryptocurrencies work. Most of the introduced concepts translate to other currencies as well, including Bitcoin.
that’s one of the worst starting places for learning, actually. Ethereum is incredibly anachronistic and the whitepaper badly explains or perverts the meaning of a lot of core concepts.
White papers in general are essentially just advertising these days.
Like I said though, it probably “cleared them up” wrong. That whitepaper is incredibly self serving in that regard. It is not a good source of information, except for academic source mining.