The astute among you may notice that my site no longer offers cryptocurrency donation options. I have had time to mull over cryptocurrency for awhile now and see where it's been headed, and I think it's time I collect my thoughts together somewhere so I can point people to it when they want my opinion on crypto.
What I think cryptocurrency (particularly Monero) does well, is providing a quick, decentralized method of exchanging money for services that doesn't require going through a centralized bank or credit card. This can have massive benefits for people's security by isolating certain tasks to only being done on Monero, which further reduces your tracking fingerprint in the things that matter the most: where you're spending money. This data is hugely valuable to pretty much everyone because it can be used to influence marketing, investments, and whatnot, and it's just too personal of a thing to be so public. Like the Tor Browser, anonymizing cryptocurrency also allows people who are in desperate situations (war-torn countries, political refugees, etc.) to do business or build funds in ethical ways without having to risk their true identity being exposed using central banks, which may have ties to the government.
Except that's not what's happening at all.
That's not what crypto actually ends up being in practice. In practice, crypto is not usable on most storefronts, most people do not accept crypto as payment or donation, and generally it exists in an ethical capacity only for speculation. This is so counterintuitive to the idea of cryptocurrency that started as being cheaper than real money that it's reached a point of absurdity.
Nowadays, the culture surrounding crypto is like a distilled form of the worst aspects of anarcho-capitalism and outright greed. People hacking your wallets to gain access to all your funds with no security or refund in place. Crypto being known almost exclusively for its use in trafficking solicit goods or as payment for ransomware. Everyone trying to make some new cryptocurrency left and right to pump and dump themselves into being rich overnight. Miners consuming more power than entire countries. Graphics cards being siphoned off for use in mining leaving consumers unable to buy a decent graphics card at a reasonable price.
There's so many negatives to crypto, and even for those that still believe in the technology in certain use cases, the negative public opinion alone is a huge barrier now to new adoption.
And this is only talking about Monero, which is one of the more stable in price, up-to-date, and effective cryptocurrencies. There are so, so many more problems with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a huge mess. The technology is slow and clunky. The data is all 100% public and everyone can see everyone's balance without every individual transaction going through MASSIVE hoops. The miner tip that you have to pay to make a transaction is exhorbitantly expensive compared to any other method of payment. There are so many coins unaccounted for that someone could easily show up tomorrow with a hard drive from an early Bitcoin miner and make $1 million overnight and cause fluctuations in price by adding more Bitcoin to the market.
And the worst part is, Bitcoin can never change. They tried to change once; a faction of miners came together to fork Bitcoin with updated transaction speed and lower fees, and what they ended up doing is just making a new coin called Bitcoin Cash and duplicating all Bitcoin holders' existing wallets in Bitcoin Cash. The original Bitcoin is nowadays worth 400x more than Bitcoin Cash, so most people don't even know a fork happened at all. And if you try and approach someone with a fresh and completely different alternative to Bitcoin, you're just adding yet another coin to the market, flooding and saturating the system to the point that all crypto seems less and less valuable or meaningful.
This isn't even talking about NFTs! NFTs have absolutely no reasonable use case and are a complete scam to remove even more of your access to digital goods and services; I talked about this earlier in a previous article.
Overall, I've just reached the point where I think cryptocurrency on this website, and in my life in general, is sending the wrong message. The message I want to be sending when I express myself on the internet is one of freedom and liberation, not scams, speculation, and syndicates. I will disclose here that I have not received any donations to this website, so it is no loss to me whatsoever that I disabled crypto donations, regardless of their ethical considerations. I once bought $100 worth of Monero a few years ago as just a "what the hell" move or to donate to other people that use cryptocurrency donations. Ultimately I converted it all to Litecoin and gave it to the FSF anonymously in tandem with my yearly associate membership fees when I didn't find any worthy place to spend or use it after waiting for so long (a few years). The conversions and how long I waited to spend the money ended up decreasing that $100 to around a $50 value at the end of the day for the FSF, which they will then have to convert again back to fiat for another fee. Even if I held it all today, I wouldn't have gained any value from the rate I purchased it at by speculating.
I'm just going to leave cryptocurrency behind and hope 15 years from now I'm not forced to pay my taxes in Bitcoin.
March 3, 2025.