Basically, Chainalisys was able to gather more offchain metadata (IP in this case by setting ip-logging nodes) that then helped them narrow down some heuristics to try to guess some things on the blockchain. From the leaked video, they can't trace nothing and they say "Monero is awesome". Cool.
And the US Dollar in cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less. Money will always be used by people you disagree with. And you should not try to use the money itself as a way of limiting what people do. For if you do, one day it could be you that finds himself unable to spend his money the way he wants to because someone else, more powerful than you, disagrees with how you spend that money.
Using money that is yours should never be illegal. Prosecute the bad people for the bad thing they did in the first place to get the money / the bad thing that someone paid them money for.
It's much easier to follow someone using a public ledger than having to beg/subpoena banks for records with the broken/outdated AML/KYC/KYB system, with bank secrecy in many places, with banks participating in illicit activities too sometimes, etc.
> Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.
This is a completely made up statistic and it is showing your bias and/or ignorance about the topic. The lower estimates from industry sources like Chainalysis (0.15-0.62%) contrast sharply with higher academic estimates (23-46%) because the latter tend to include illicit activities that happen off chain but get "washed" on-chain which explains their own huge range of estimation... it is hard to quantify but nobody serious ever came close to 99%.
Something for which there are estimates close to 90% is the volume of transactions happening on centralized exchanges, and since these are required pretty much everywhere to follow AML procedures, just like traditional banks (sometimes even more intrusive than banks), it means it is just as easy, if not easier, to prosecute criminals who would use these... with the added bonus of having a public ledger with records of their activity on-chain.
> cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less.
That is exactly what many are proposing, or at least a core argument of many anti-cash proponents.
Crypto is not money. Money is coupled to a value; crypto is as much a currency as paintings are: completely arbitrary.
Effectively, human work. Money is an abstraction over the relative value we assign physical goods; instead of bartering, we collectively agree on using money as an intermediate form. The financial system, then, is a lot more abstraction over the value of producers of things—and thereby human work.
Of course it's way more complex than that, but that's the basic difference between real-world money and crypto currencies.
I'm not a crypto bro by any means, but I think crypto satisfies those criteria.
If you want to know the actual answer however. The answer is debt. Or more specifically assets and liabilities on various bank ledgers. Those banks organically set the value to monetary systems. This system would fall apart without a forced taxation system for a given currency.
The actual value is debt and taxation. I'm not complaining, who am I to criticize? But that is the answer.
One could conceive of such a crypto ledger system, and that would be a CBDC.
Doesn't that come down to the same thing effectively? Debt and taxation are details of a system of trusted authorities built around the economic system of human work.
And if we consider a CBDC to still count as cryptocurrency, in my opinion we've just shifted the goal posts from a decentralised, anonymous, revolutionary, grass-roots form of digital currency to the technical underpinnings of the digitisation process of the global banking system.
The current centralization is what keeps it "stable". This stability makes the currency lose it's value in a very gradual way. Only housing, property, education, and healthcare are gaining value at a outlier rate.
Decentralization will incentivize hoarding. Why spend crypto when it might go to the moon tomorrow. Maybe that is a feature, maybe not.
Wrong. For all intent and purposes, you could switch any cryptocurrency with whatever FIAT in your sentence and it still applies. I don't hunt money and wear it as a necklace (lion teeth). I don't mine it out of a gold mine. It is given to me in exchange for work.
Given.
Exchange.
If you and I agree that we only accept little tin circles; What's the difference? When you say money, what are you referring to? Just the US bank note? Some brass coins? Any FIAT?
Today's FIAT have nothing to do with what currency, basically just a fancy IOU note, used to be.
Currency WAS representative of human work. Directly. The oldest known form are lion teeth. You had to WORK to get them. It was direct proof of work. And it was important to keep that link so no arbitrary value is taken or added to it.
The next major leap of currency was IOU notes. Notes that banks respected between each other. One bank gives you some paper that says "trust me, bro, I'm worth 2 lion teeth". You go to another bank and can exchange that paper back to 2 lion teeth.
At one point in time, the US bamboozled the entire world and declared the US dollar as some form of new gold bar (what it was previously tied to, gold; proof of work). Tying all of FIAT to it. A value that can more easily be arbitrarily changed. And, since then, propaganda reigns supreme and people like you are born. Praising a nonsensical paper as some kind immovable artefact of mankind.
Language evolved.
Law evolved.
Currency didn't evolve.
And, for some reason, you are fighting its evolution.
This is simply not correct. A fiat currency is ultimately bound to the performance of the global economy, so it sure ties into gold mines or the lion teeth gathered by hunters, I've you're so inclined to keep it savage.
The dollar is fundamentally a promise of the US government that they owe you a given amount of money. As long as the US government exists, a dollar is going to have a worth. You may debate the virtue of the US government all you want, but at the same time, there's nobody to give you any such guarantee for a Bitcoin, or an NFT. The moment the market settles for a new plaything, these binary numbers you praise will be entirely worthless. So when I say money, I'm referring to the trustworthiness of its issuer.
The only thing Crypto has brought us is a gambling system rich people use to get richer, and poor people use to loose money; lots of brainlessly burned electricity; a neat way to collect ransomware payouts; and a bunch of Ponzi schemes.
People like you like to feel smarter than anybody else, and I know you'll stay committed to cryptocurrency regardless of any reason. So I will drop out of this discussion here, as it's fruitless.
Government backing, our shared delusion, unicorn dust, take your pick: whatever it is, it's something stable enough that it doesn't experience quintuple digit deflation in a decade.
And you're comparing annualised inflation to the deflation over a decade, which is equally embarrassing. Regardless, all other things being equal anyone who has their own financial interests at heart would rather hold a currency that experienced 20,000% deflation since its creation than one that lost 99% of its value to inflation since its creation. Because the best predictor of future performance is past performance.
Did you just try to browbeat me for not breaking down the deflation over a time period... then compare 10 years of BTC movement to some arbitrary period of USD movement?
Then top it off by claiming someone would want a currency that deflates 20,000%?
no, no, I love 10% inflation, it's really good for employers, they can charge customers more because of "inflation", and they don't have to pay me any more, because their costs have gone up so much because of... "inflation".
You're being downvoted but as someone running an AI generation site, I can't even imagine the kind of bottom of the barrel filth you'd attract not even having the tiny deterrent of KYC.
You wouldn't end up being "just another generation site with crypto", you'd become a magnet for everyone who's generating things they're scared of having their legal identity tied to.
I had to stop supporting logged out users because 99% of the CSAM generated on the site came from people trying to skirt the basic login requirements.
Sorry but your privacy doesn't trump my not wanting to run a child porn site, and the overwhelming majority of the public manages to live through having to login in and pay for things with traceable money.
And before the conversation goes there: is it a perfect filter? No. But a 99% reduction (realistically near 100% reduction) in unwanted behavior is what I'd call very effective.
The moment you say "Please stop with FUD" I instantly assume that the reason you're actually worried about FUD is because it's directly linked to the value of your tokens.
genai.orchid.com (Note: I am not just affiliated with this company, but am "in charge of technology" for it... however, I haven't actually used this demo we are building, except to understand how to better generalize it into our overall platform; I thereby cannot vouch for the "quality", though I will happily vouch for it not stealing your money or anything.)
this is awesome. I hope some video editor comes up that can compete with Premiere. Then with pikimov and photopea, I could totally ditch Adobe for one. Have you considered open sourcing the app to benefit from contributors and build a community?
Good, it's great to have alternativew in this space. My gf uses Drip [1] and it's a very good app for this, it allows to also track mood, sexual activity, aches, etc...
There is a bit of a controversy around this. And I don't say you are wrong. It's just that I personally consider that Castilian should not be used and does no longer exist. Here's why I think it like so:
Castilian originated as one of several Romance dialects in the Iberian Peninsula. It developed in the Kingdom of Castile during the Middle Ages, distinct from other regional languages like Catalan or Galician. With the unification of Spain, Castilian gained prominence, eventually evolving into modern Spanish. This was not merely a linguistic shift but also a result of political and cultural dynamics. The language we now call Spanish has absorbed influences from Arabic, indigenous languages of the Americas, and others, diverging significantly from its medieval Castilian origins. For this, Castilian has now disappeared, you just need to read how Castilian was written to see it has nothing to do with modern Spanish.
Today, Spanish is spoken by over 500 million people worldwide. In contrast, the Castilian region of Spain has a much smaller population (~3M). Referring to the language as Spanish acknowledges its extensive global presence and its modern version. Just as we refer to the language originating in Tuscany as Italian, not Tuscanian, calling the language from Castile 'Spanish' aligns with common linguistic naming conventions. Languages often take their names from the nations or cultural entities they are associated with, not their specific regions of origin.
Modern linguistic institutions, like the Real Academia Española, regard 'Castilian' and 'Spanish' as synonyms but recommend 'Spanish' for its inclusive and global character.
This is a nice and thoughtful post and I agree mostly. I'd like to add that my use of the word "Castilian" reflects my experience of usage of the term here in Barcelona (when speaking "Spanish", Catalan, and English). It's not a hard rule of course, but people are especially likely to refer to Castille over Hispania when distinguishing from other languages spoken historically within the country.
The term also usefully refers to the prestige dialect of Spanish, as might be spoken in Madrid. This is useful to distinguish from e.g. the "al-andalus" (Andalusian) spoken in the south which is more treated as a dialect than a separate language (though the distinction is of course fuzzy).
(On the other hand Barcelona in particular has a significant population of sudamericanos who will usually say "español", certainly that term is well used and understood.)
> Castilian (castellano), that is, Spanish, is the native language of the Castilians. Its origin is traditionally ascribed to an area south of the Cordillera Cantábrica, including the upper Ebro valley, in northern Spain, around the 8th and 9th centuries; however the first written standard was developed in the 13th century in the southern city of Toledo. It is descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, with Arabic influences, and perhaps Basque as well. During the Reconquista in the Middle Ages, it was brought to the south of Spain where it replaced the languages that were spoken in the former Moorish controlled zones, such as the local form of related Latin dialects now referred to as Mozarabic, and the Arabic that had been introduced by the Muslims. In this process Castilian absorbed many traits from these languages, some of which continue to be used today. Outside of Spain and a few Latin American countries, Castilian is now usually referred to as Spanish.
> In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only español but also castellano (Castilian), the language from the Kingdom of Castile, contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, Asturian, Catalan, Aragonese and Occitan.
> The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. "the other Spanish languages").
It's the same language. I'm a Spaniard, so I know it well. Name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish, Español or Castellano everywhere from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.
"name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish" is a very different proposition to "[you should say] Spanish, Castilian does not exist [and you are wrong to use that name]", which was the angle of the poster who kicked all this off.
> from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.
Sounds a bit imperialistic?
Notwithstanding the tens of millions of native speakers of autochtone non-spanish languages in these territories: Mapuche (260K), Quechua (7.2M), Aymara (1.7M), Guaraní (6.1M), Wayuu (400K), Mayan (6M), Miskito (150K), Garifuna (120K), Nahuatl (1.7M), Mixtec (530K), Catalan (4.1M), Basque (750K), Galician (2.4M). Spanish is quickly eroding all of these, but they still exist! (And this only counts native speakers. The number of people who are fluent in Guarani or Catalan is certainly more than the double of that.)
> Not imperialistic. Would you say the same of the English language too?
Yes, of course? When I think of imperialism the first thing that comes to my mind is precisely "the bri'ish empi'ah and its commonwealth"! If English is currently the world's default language is just because of the triumph of English/American imperialism.
