Almost every single one of those things can be applied to both the internet and the traditional finance system. The biggest money launderers are banks. Bitcoin uses less electricity than the global finance sector (let it be known I do think it is wasteful, Proof of Stake is better). More scams still happen through banking and web 2. Crypto is an extremely small market for money laundering compared to other methods. While not pump and dump scams, the financial gatekeeping done by traditional finance to only give access to high yielding investment opportunities to accredited investors is just another way of keeping the rich rich.
As far as I can tell, crypto is no more cancerous than existing systems. It's just that all you see out of crypto as an outsider is all the bad stuff because anything creating real value is too heads down building to make a fuss or too complex for the average joe to comprehend yet.
I don't think the software industry has quite got its head around the idea yet that it is possible for our field to produce a technology that is as harmful as tetraethyl lead.
We kid ourselves that the worst thing software can do is a Therac-25-style bug. So long as it's 'just software', though, with no hardware interfaces plugged into actual living people, how badly can we possibly screw up?
That sense that 'well, at least we're not the tobacco or petroleum industry', puts a real limit on the degree to which software people are willing to engage with the ethics of what they do.
Once again, why are companies like Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], still using cryptocurrencies then? Perhaps they recognise that not all of them are like what you just described, and they waited for further regulations to be clearer and chose mature cryptocurrencies to use for what they needed?
Also why haven't the law makers in congress, the SEC and the White House totally banned all of them yet but are instead writing down regulations to determine complaint and non-compliant cryptocurrencies like in ISO 20022?
I know people skeptical of crypto are going to hate this and people who are in favour of all cryptos taking over the financial system will also hate this but I have to say it:
Not all of them are going to go away and only a few of cryptos will survive past regulations. That is the hard truth I'm afraid.
>Once again, why are companies like Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], still using cryptocurrencies then?
Because they want to be part of the current buzzword, just like every company throwing around "AI" and "machine learning". For the most part those companies are also fairly quickly converting any crypto into hard fiat, their risk is entirely minimal, yet the fees they are charging are quite profitable.
They're mostly acting as moneychangers, not crypto fanatics. And their adoption doesn't change the fact that you can go on dozens (hundreds?) of DNMs and buy child pornography and drugs from the privacy of your living room.
The vast majority of crypto is currently speculation/pump and dump and illegal commerce. Period. It is cancer, electricity-hungry cancer.
> Because they want to be part of the current buzzword, just like every company throwing around "AI" and "machine learning".
So 'But current buzzword'. Just like 'open-source', 'privacy', 'internet of things', etc and your point is? You still have not given a valid reason for those companies to drop the ones mentioned in the article I linked in my previous comment and instead did a very bold sweeping statement (and dodged my other questions). By now they should have drop those cryptocurrencies or technologies mentioned in the articles given what you have described is happening on other blockchains, and they still haven't.
Maybe they know and recognise that not all of them are like that. But nice try at generalizing all of them.
> For the most part those companies are also fairly quickly converting any crypto into hard fiat, their risk is entirely minimal, yet the fees they are charging are quite profitable.
Assuming you read both of the links in my previous comment are you sure it is fiat or was it a stablecoin? And why do you the risk is minimal? It plays into my point on why they both waited for regulations to become clearer. They will both co-exist under regulations, especially a few stablecoins; but not all of them.
> The vast majority of crypto is currently speculation/pump and dump and illegal commerce. Period. It is cancer, electricity-hungry cancer.
So from an absolutist statement of 'crypto is cancer', 'electricity-hungry cancer' and sweeping all of them under the same brush to now back-peddling to 'vast majority of crypto'?
I wonder if you have realised that the 'vast majority of crypto' is not anonymous but pseudonymous since anyone can trace where the money or illegal activity is going. If such criminals tried to cash out that money to fiat, the exchanges will disallow it with KYC / AML checks. I'm not even defending privacy coins that will also be subject to tighter regulations [0] [1] than cryptocurrencies that use a transparent ledger and the exchanges are already de-listing many privacy coins to comply with incoming regulations. [0] [1]
Once again, crypto and some projects are not totally going away 100%, but non-compliant cryptocurrencies and projects will wither away.
