Could you please elaborate on this? What are the benefits on crypto in this context? Is it illegal to buy estrogen where you live, or do you need to hide your identity?
It's cheaper, you can customize your HRT regimen to your specifications, and less records in the medical system might matter on the margins someday (could go either way though - illegibility has it's downsides too).
I understand the second part of your post. But I do not understand the first part:
It's cheaper, you can customize your HRT regimen to your specifications
Why does crypto enable this?
Well, normally you'd have to get HRT thru a doctor, who may or may not be willing to provide you with what you want. Whereas if you buy it directly from a supplier you don't need an official prescription and you can just say "give me a vial of 40mg/ml estradiol enanthate and a bottle of bicalutamide" and you'll get it, no questions asked.
For example, most doctors don't prescribe estradiol enanthate because it's less standard than estradiol valerate. But enanthate has a longer half life, which means it produces more stable levels and weaker mood swings, making it a much better product. Bicalutamide has rare but flashy side effects, whereas the much more commonly prescribed Spiro almost always inflicts the same set of low grade side effects - so doctors tend to prefer prescribing Spiro, even tho as an individual you might prefer to roll the dice on bicalutamide (especially since you can just stop if you get unlucky).
And of course, these days, there are creeping bans on HRT - bans on starting it as a teen but I believe they are trying to make it illegal as an adult as well.
Of course, being outside the system has it's downsides too. You can't get surgeries if the system thinks you haven't even started HRT, and it usually requires several letters of approval from doctors and therapists. But surgeries are expensive, their waitlista are years long, and if you don't plan on getting them anytime soon...
Well, I live in America. I don't think it's illegal, but they do sort of expect you to get it with a prescription. But like, if people were selling it for USD, I would be fine with that? My understanding is that they typically do not.
It solves virtually no problems that warrant solving and is mostly useful for criminal activity.
If I were to steelman this, I'd say:
I don't know of any problems that cryptocurrencies are used, that warrant solving.
To respond to that:
- This is mostly the case in Western countries where fintechs and banks are well-funded and modern. As it were, there are billions of people who live in countries where stablecoins (a form of cryptocurrency) allow you to hold dollars instead of a rapidly inflating currency (USD inflation discussions set aside for the purpose of discussion).
- You can go to Latin America, parts of Europe, parts of Asia, and parts of Africa that take stablecoins or cryptocurrency as payment.
- Tether (USDT) was created in part as a response to a need for a 'dollar' asset that moved faster than banking rails, and in part in response to early crypto users' desire to evade capital controls. Currently, Visa hosts a website tracking stablecoin values, and over $9 Trillion has moved across USDT (created off-shore, but one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world; currently one of the few funding energy initiatives in the global south), USDC (US-made stablecoin by Circle), and many others. Even if you discount USDT and assume it's unbacked (feel free to ask an LLM or search "Tether is unbacked" to learn more), there are still trillions in backed stablecoins that move on crypto rails, because people want to move fiat currencies 24/7.
There's an argument that because stablecoins aren't volatile, that ought not be connoted as 'cryptocurrency', and that classing them as such only muddies the low-respectability of cryptocurrency. But stablecoins wouldn't exist without cryptocurrency. The money stablecoin users in the global south saved from inflation-related loss contributes to their local economy more than if their spending power were inflated away; and transacting via stablecoins are cheaper and faster than using traditional banking rails for most people on the planet.
As for the volatile cryptocurrencies, they were an emergent product of ZIRP + fintech + reg-arb. The valuations were overinflated in part because of retail speculation, market inefficiencies, and lack of regulatory clarity. There are genuinely useful products that make the tools needed to manage one's own finances accessible to people with less money, but respectability politics leads to more talk about volatile assets and less talk about access to personal finance tools as a wedge for dollarization for people earning wages in inflationary fiat currencies.
This was a very good explanation (the part about people in countries with unstable currencies). Thanks! Upvoted.
I did not understand your last paragraph, though.
Note: I have never owned any cryptocurrency.
cryptocurrency has negligible value
1 Bitcoin is currently worth about AUD$108,000. The current total value of all Bitcoin is around $1.5 trillion USD; of all Ethereum, around $280 billion USD. If only I had some of this negligible value for myself!
Perhaps you deplore that rogue states and organized crime are among the holders of cryptocurrency. May I nonetheless point out that the majority of paid evil that has been done in the world, was and is paid for using old-fashioned national currencies?
At this point, crypto is just another medium of exchange. Like national fiat-based economies, the crypto economy extends from the realm of ordinary practical transactions, all the way up to a realm of "whales" whose cryptic movements decide whether the currency is going up or down in value. Yes, the commanding heights of crypto must contain some sinister elements. Meanwhile, traditional currency and commodity markets are shaped by decisions of war and dictatorship, and I would guess that 99+% of the wealth of the world's oligarchs is held in assets other than crypto. If you want to clean up the Augean stables of world finance, crypto probably isn't very high on the list.
May I nonetheless point out that the majority of paid evil that has been done in the world, was and is paid for using old-fashioned national currencies?
You may not point it out if you're being rational.
In order to compare how easy to abuse things are (or to make just about any similar comparison) you need to consider base rates. The majority of paid evil has been done without cryptocurrency being available, so the fact that it doesn't use cryptocurrency doesn't mean much.
Furthermore, cryptocurrency is abusable in specific ways and not all evil is done using those ways.
1 Bitcoin is currently worth about AUD$108,000. The current total value of all Bitcoin is around $1.5 trillion USD; of all Ethereum, around $280 billion USD. If only I had some of this negligible value for myself!
I did not mean market value. I meant the kind of value that makes the world better.
Perhaps you deplore that rogue states and organized crime are among the holders of cryptocurrency. May I nonetheless point out that the majority of paid evil that has been done in the world, was and is paid for using old-fashioned national currencies?
This argument seems invalid to me. It is the equivalent of saying: "Perhaps you deplore that some criminals have guns. May I point out that the majority of crime is committed without guns?"
If you want to clean up the Augean stables of world finance, crypto probably isn't very high on the list.
This sounds as though you have some kind of action in mind. What do you suggest?
I did not mean market value. I meant the kind of value that makes the world better.
One person's market value is another person's purchasing power. If I had just a tenth of a bitcoin, I should be able to keep at bay, for a few more crucial months, certain evil consequences which I do not presently know how I will otherwise avoid.
In other words, cryptocurrency is a currency and it enables all the mundane things, like purchase of goods and services, and transfer of purchasing power, which are among the benefits of money in general.
This sounds as though you have some kind of action in mind.
I don't (and unfortunately I don't have the luxury to think about how to reform it, right now). World finance is complicated and it is part of the social machinery that feeds and clothes billions. I think it's not easily judged, or changed for the better.
It's the same reason they like prediction markets: they can't model normal people well enough to understand how normal people will use the technology, so they just see it as a clever thing, and being clever is good. At best they might understand that people will use it for something bad, but not understand how common the bad thing will be compared to other uses.
They are also too tied to the libertarian idea that if someone does a bad thing voluntarily, the person who made it drastically easier is not to blame since people are responsible for their own voluntary acts. So they'll think "if someone uses it for money laundering, that's on him. It doesn't matter that I made a system that facilitates money laundering."
I agree that many rationalists are way too libertarian for my liking.
IMO at least one other respondent addressed a strawman of my argument, but ironically I think that your take here makes a strawman out of the cryptophiliac rationalist...
You hit the nail on the head with the "out of government control" line. As has been shown by some political polling done on LW, a good chunk of rationalists (full disclosure, myself included) have libertarian leanings. We regard the government's ability to control transactions and the money supply as a huge liability. I wish I shared your optimism about our ability to "vote out" governments who do a bad job of money management and use their control of the monetary system to enforce unjust laws, inflate the money supply to prop up spending on unjust wars or all kinds of other nefarious purposes, but so far, the track record hasn't been great. "Mostly useful for criminal activity" is an overstatement--it's very useful for, say, transferring money around the world with far less fees and hassle than traditional methods like wire transfers at a bank--but it is pretty good for criminal activity, and that's not a bug, that's a feature. If there's something that you want to purchase that the government has deemed a crime for reasons you consider bad or unjust, whether it's medicines for abortion or birth control, firearm components, or recreational psychadelic drugs, cryptocurrency can enable you to do that and reduce your risk of said unjust laws being enforced on you.
I use cryptocurrencies to make international money transfers without any of the bullshit, risks, or fees of banks.
I have Russian citizenship. Even though I live in another country, banks really don't like Russians having bank accounts in them and can close the account for any random reason such as a "suspicious" transaction. Also, whenever I do a SWIFT transaction between banks of different countries, the fee is typically between 20 and 100 USD, not easily predictable in advance, and whether the transfer will reach the destination or silently bounce back after hanging there for a few days is anyone's guess.
whenever I do a SWIFT transaction between banks of different countries, the fee is typically between 20 and 100 USD, not easily predictable in advance, and whether the transfer will reach the destination or silently bounce back after hanging there for a few days is anyone's guess.
That's why I love SEPA transfers. It seems that regulation can do some good, especially against oligopolies. The fee is negligible, and the money arrives almost instantly (that last part is a recent thing).
I think this is analogical to software piracy: one reason to download software from pirate websites is to save money, but another reason is to avoid dealing with various annoying aspects of the business as usual. If you make the business as usual suck less, people will have fewer incentives to pirate things.
Similarly, if we somehow replaced SWIFT with SEPA worldwide, half of the reasons to use cryptocurrency would disappear. Until then, cryptocurrencies exist to remind Americans that things can be easier.
Anti-money laundering and fraud protections introduce a lot of bullshit and risks. Many human beings on either side of the transaction in a bank transfer are monitoring it, have to do a lot of paperwork and screening especially for large transfers (that's the "bullshit" part, and someone has to pay them to do it which results in the high fees), and one risk is that the transaction will be erroneously flagged for AML or fraud and get held up and require even more bullshit to be pushed through. Another risk is that now two governments, not just one, have the power to freeze or seize the funds being transferred for whatever sanctions or legal reasons they feel like, especially if they're involved in war or political conflict. It may not happen often in practice, but it's still a possibility and cryptocurrency eliminates that risk completely. If I had to transfer money from the US to, say, Iran or China or Russia, I'd feel much more confident that it would get there if I used crypto.
They do make a good way to exchange between different currencies in countries where that would otherwise be very difficult/illegal.
In general though, blockchain is a brilliant solution to a particular problem (decentralization). For most things having a trusted central system of record is a better solution.
I feel that way about currency too. 🤷🏻♂️ Then again, outside of my 401k, I don’t have any financial investments, so I’m a terrible source of financial advice.
I have noticed that many people in the rationalist community seem to like cryptocurrency. This seems odd to me, considering how many rationalists also care about effective altruism. Cryptocurrency seems unethical to me.
As far as I can see, cryptocurrency has negligible value. It solves virtually no problems that warrant solving and is mostly useful for criminal activity. Cryptocurrency does cost a lot of electricity, though, so it looks like net negative utility to me.
I understand that you can make money off Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, but this seems to me like unethical speculation. It is a "bigger fool" scam - technically not a pyramid scheme but ethically equivalent. You buy a Bitcoin and hope to later sell it at a higher price to a "bigger fool", who in turn hopes to sell it to a third fool - while creating nothing of value.
I gather that some people think of cryptocurrency as a political project, a kind of money supply that is out of government control. This project seems misguided to me. If cryptocurrency does become a useful tool against government control, then it is guaranteed to be co-opted by oligarchs who will probably be worse than governments because we cannot vote them out.
Am I missing something important here? Those of you who like crypto, could you please explain where you think I am wrong?
Thanks!