Cryptocurrency Isn't Even Practical

2023-07-23 20:57:31Z (last updated 2023-10-16 08:55:03Z)

Cryptocurrency. Bad.

Yep, I said it. And I'm going to talk about the impractical bits of cryptocurrency in this post.

This is kind of an extension to a blog post titled "Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster".

Also, since I'm required by request in that post to disclose my stake. To my knowledge:

I hold no secret keys to any crypto, so I hold ~0 (caveat: see last point in sub-list) in crypto.

My previous holdings (before I destroyed my secret keys) were about $10 in Monero, and barely enough Bitcoin to even make a transaction, all of which came from mining them on my computers.

My findings in my KeePassXC database got nothing related to "crypto", "currency", Bitcoin (except for a service I already deleted the account for) and Monero.

I did find coinbase but I also filed it "unable to delete" so I guess fuck you to coinbase and never deal with them! I have erased the password from my vault so I can't access the account anymore (except for maybe recovery or something)

I do have a coinpayments account with 0.00078423 BTC for some reason, ~~I was going to delete that but they never responded to my GDPR erasure request~~ Nevermind, they deliberately say "we don't delete accounts" (Did the same for coinbase; Erase password but recovery potentially possible?)

Cryptocurrency can be massively impractical to even participate in

Do you want to get into cryptocurrency and do the things yourself instead of through some third party? Well I got bad news for you!

You'll need a computer

You'll need an internet connection

A **full** copy of the Monero blockchain is about 150 GB

A full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain is reaching 500 gigabytes or with another perspective, 0.5 terabytes

The first time, you'll need a lot of time

The blockchain size will never stop growing

Eventually, it is completely inaccessible to even most people (it probably already is)

Monero blockchain size

Bitcoin blockchain size

Cryptocurrency is legitimately unused

Where do you see places that accept Bitcoin? Monero? Ethereum?

Yeah, cryptocurrency isn't really widespread. Literally.

And if you do see it, well, is it even at a place?

(Except for that one time that a country started using Bitcoin, but basically restricted it to a specific centralized(?) wallet provider if I recall correctly. But I think is still a horrible idea)

Bitcoin is barely decentralized

Miners and Wallet providers are a major point of centralization. Want to fuck up the blockchain? The miners probably have enough power to do so.

Time is time, processing power is not.

I setup a Monero testnet for testing reasons.

To get enough coins to exchange with the wallets, I had to spend any amount of processing power and wait for 2 hours.

The important part is that it will take 2 hours. No matter how much processing power it takes, the time that must pass is 2 hours.

That means if you have an infinite amount of processing power, you'll probably run out of processing power before you run out of those 2 hours that's needed to run out.

Cryptocurrency struggles to exist correctly

This is quite a bit of nonsense I guess, but the intended uses of cryptocurrency... Basically don't exist.

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