this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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askchapo

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Can cryptocurrency be done well? (hexbear.net)
submitted 9 months ago by Andrzej3K@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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I was kind of sympathetic to Bitcoin in the early days. Despite the awful politics of the community surrounding it and the obvious grift angle, it seemed a positive that we might possibly be able to escape the stranglehold that payment processors are currently demonstrating online.

Obviously, the incentives at play inevitability led the project to become a series of pyramid schemes within pyramid schemes, and anyone who has actually used the Bitcoin network will tell you that it did not scale well, with slow transfers and high fees.

However, could it be done well? Is it conceptually possible to have a left cryptocurrency? How would that work, technically, politically, practicality within this economy?

To be perfectly honest, these were the questions I wished our glorious thought leaders in left media would grapple with a decade ago, but maybe we all have enough perspective on this thing now that there is some fruitful discussion to be had on here at least.

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[–] HakFoo 9 points 9 months ago

What you want is a CBDC.

The trustless-blockchain story is the big red herring. In the real world, we don't need immutable distributed databases to settle the ledger because there's a legal system to arbitrate. So a CBDC can be implemented by an efficient conventional database operated by the state. Goodbye environmental waste; a data message is probably greener than printing a banknote.

Implementing it as a twin of a real currency also deflates most of the speculative BS.

Cryptocurrency is basically "bottled scarcity"-- an asset without a real use, so it inherently goes to speculation. Real currencies have anchors to their value because real goods and services are priced in them directly. Even a currency without a "real" country like the Somaliland Shilling works that way, but anyone accepting BTC or Dogecoin is taking really USD and translating in real time.

You still get some noxiousness from Forex-as-an-investment types but nobody is HODLing a CBDC yuan at a scale to cause deflationary crisis deathloops.