Nano has the same ponzi-like economics as the rest of the cryptocurrencies so that's a no-go. GNU Taler is explicitly not a cryptocurrency, in particular it should not be used in a fully peer-to-peer manner, there needs to be a centralized operator that's legally required to hold the funds backing the tokens. That thing that stablecoins were supposed to do, but didn't because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money.

>that doesn't involve Fiat.

By definition, all cryptocurrency involves fiat because all cryptocurrencies are technically also fiat money. Tokens in a ledger don't have any inherent value or consuming demand, they're backed by nothing but empty promises.

>There is a reasonable use-case for giving the average person the same privacy they expect from cash, but with the ability to make transfers over the internet (that are signed in a secure way!).

This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. You don't need to invent a new currency to have a privately signed transaction. Innovation should keep happening in payment systems (with the full involvement of regulators) but it's hard to do that when these fraudulent crypto companies are hogging up all the mindshare and promoting the (false) idea that blockchains are the one true way to accomplish this. They aren't even a good way to accomplish it!

>the system will continue to develop as long as there is financial interest in DN infrastructure

I certainly hope not. All the more reason to make it illegal ASAP.

Then fork it yourself and change the tokenomics to suit your interests. If others agree with you, then your fork may become popular and useful.

>GNU Taler is explicitly not a cryptocurrency, in particular it should not be used in a fully peer-to-peer manner, there needs to be a centralized operator that's legally required to hold the funds backing the tokens

The issuer does not need to be legally anything. What you need is for the peers to trust the issuer not to double spend. If the law enables that, then so be it, but the GNU Taler system can also function as part of an extralegal system.

>That thing that stablecoins were supposed to do, but didn't because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money.

The difference between GNU Taler and stablecoins is that stablecoins encourage custodial "staking" AKA investing in ponzi schemes. Whereas in GNU Taler, the issuer can only charge the users on withdrawls/deposits like a typical bank.

"because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money?" Please. Users gravitate towards ponzi schemes because they want to be the ones scamming, even if odds are they're getting scammed themselves. The investors are the ones that instigate this behavior, whether that's through a lack of due diligence or otherwise.

>Tokens in a ledger don't have any inherent value or consuming demand, they're backed by nothing but empty promises.

There is no need for cryptocurrencies to be "backed" by gold, because creating coins or double-spending is non-trivial, so there is no desperate need for additional assurances. The goal of cryptocurrency is not to be a sound investment but instead a useful medium of exchange. To that end, it only needs to ensure its value in the short-term.

Cryptocurrencies are not backed by "empty promises". They are not backed by anything at all. If users have an expectation that they will be able to redeem their cryptocurrency for goods and services in the (near) future, then it may be valuable for them if they find utility in it versus some other payment method. But they own that risk themselves, regardless of what snake-oil salesmen will tell them.

>I certainly hope not. All the more reason to make it illegal ASAP.

I agree. We need to make crime illegal again. Should civilians have access to military-grade cryptography? Bring back the crypto wars!

I don't need to fork it, the easiest solution is to just not have "tokenomics" at all. If the last several years have been any indication, those will always regress to a ponzi scheme in the end because they're all inherently backed by nothing. In my experience it's also impossible to seek any "agreement" with crypto enthusiasts because they fundamentally disagree with me on what the purpose of money is, and aren't interested in changing their mind, and (tellingly) the only way they have to get me to change my mind is to convince me to invest in one of their tokens. No thank you, it should be a huge red flag to you that the only way for someone to get involved is to become a bag holder. Even in the real world, only the most high-risk high-reward startups are even able to get away with that, and even then it's still acknowledged that you're most likely to lose your entire investment.

>The issuer does not need to be legally anything. What you need is for the peers to trust the issuer not to double spend. If the law enables that, then so be it, but the GNU Taler system can also function as part of an extralegal system.

An extralegal system is one where the other party can just run off with whatever money is in the system and not give any of it back. I'm sorry but I don't want that, I don't think anyone who doesn't like being scammed wants that. The issuer legally needs to do this if they want to avoid being fraudulent.

>The difference between GNU Taler and stablecoins is that stablecoins encourage custodial "staking" AKA investing in ponzi schemes. Whereas in GNU Taler, the issuer can only charge the users on withdrawls/deposits like a typical bank.

Yes, that's one reason why Taler is fundamentally different from a cryptocurrency.

>"because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money?" Please. Users gravitate towards ponzi schemes because they want to be the ones scamming, even if odds are they're getting scammed themselves.

I wish you wouldn't try and victim blame and excuse the behavior of these companies. They've lied to these people by telling them it was a safe investment. This is how every confidence scam operates, by telling the victim what they want to hear.

>There is no need for cryptocurrencies to be "backed" by gold, because creating coins or double-spending is non-trivial, so there is no desperate need for additional assurances.

I'm sorry I don't understand this at all. You can observe from the extreme price volatility in every cryptocurrency, and resulting uselessness as a medium of exchange, that there is a need for additional assurances. You can't use something as a medium of exchange when its value can change 50% in a day.

>But they own that risk themselves

I hope you can see the futility (and extreme capability for fraud) of trying to create a financial system where no company wants to assume any risk, and all of it gets unconditionally pushed off onto the users. In a modern economy this is completely unusable, and it's totally outrageous that crypto people are even suggesting it.

>We need to make crime illegal again. Should civilians have access to military-grade cryptography? Bring back the crypto wars!

Less of the snark, please. It's extremely tiring to keep hearing people make false comparisons to the crypto wars. It's very clear that adding encryption into general purpose systems helps everyone. Blockchains don't help anyone unless you're trying to launch a ponzi scheme or other type of fraud. These systems are intentionally built to have no capital controls and no fraud protection whatsoever. In fact some of them are designed to purposely make it difficult to add fraud prevention in. This isn't a technical advancement that helps anyone, except huge fraudsters like Bitfinex and Coinbase that are reaping billions from "crypto investors" that are being lied to on a daily basis. We can see right now that it isn't helping anyone, but it is destroying the planet and causing a lot of people to lose their life savings. It's a big fraud, fraud is already illegal, the main problem is that it takes too long for a bureaucracy to crack down on such a large fraud.

When have I ever said that you should invest in cryptocurrency? I have made it pretty clear that I am skeptical of cryptocurrency as an investment.

Creating a fork of a cryptocurrency does not necessarily involve forking the existing transactions or balances, you can just start a new genesis block if you don't believe in the validity of the existing owners (For example the Bytecoin-BitMonero fork). "Forking" in this context just means copying and modifying the code in a new source tree.

>An extralegal system is one where the other party can just run off with whatever money is in the system and not give any of it back. I'm sorry but I don't want that, I don't think anyone who doesn't like being scammed wants that. The issuer legally needs to do this if they want to avoid being fraudulent.

That is a narrow and inaccurate portrayal of how the extralegal markets operate.

>I'm sorry I don't understand this at all. You can observe from the extreme price volatility in every cryptocurrency, and resulting uselessness as a medium of exchange, that there is a need for additional assurances. You can't use something as a medium of exchange when its value can change 50% in a day.

"Volatility" and "Liquidity" are not some sort of magical property that conventional currencies have by merit of being controlled by a central entity. The volatility is a result of it being used for speculative investment rather than a medium of exchange. The more that vendors/customers use a cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange, the less volatility there will be because vendors/customers will be forced to stomach the change in price over the course of a transaction (for better or for worse). Conventional currencies are stable because there are lots of vendors/customers that don't want to constantly change their prices every nanosecond. Why are there lots of vendors? because it is stable. So it is circular logic in either case.

I use cryptocurrency as a payment network all the time, and I accept the risks. It is good for my use case. I am not saying that it will take over the global economy, but I do think it would be a major boon for the internet economy because it will make many transactions feasible that aren't otherwise. You cannot trust banks to implement proper security and privacy when they benefit from obscurity and surveillance. If you could, then we would all be using DigiCash and Bitcoin would have never existed in the first place.

>Less of the snark, please. It's extremely tiring to keep hearing people make false comparisons to the crypto wars.

Here's your argument with an extra-small side of diet snark: regulation of cryptocurrencies may not seem ethically the same as regulation of strong encryption, but it is effectively just as difficult if not impossible. You are trying to regulate a computer program, and every time world governments have tried to stomp out the network it has only adapted to become more resistant to censorship.

>These systems are intentionally built to have no fraud protection whatsoever. In fact some of them are designed to purposely make it difficult to add fraud prevention in.

The fraud protection is designed to prevent double spending. If "fraud prevention" involves a third party who puts their thumb on the scale and gets to determine what is or isn't fraud, then it's not desirable for a trust-less network. Shame that cash does not have a built in fraud detection mechanism that allows authorities to remotely destroy it. The privacy guarantees of cryptocurrencies are only comparable to those of cash.

With cryptocurrency users can expose themselves to as many third parties as they voluntarily choose (e.g. a Bisq-like trading system).

>This isn't a technical advancement that helps anyone

Well it helps me. It is not good for every use-case, but it works for my use-case and it is decent at what it does.

>but it is destroying the planet

The environmental impact of cryptocurrency is a problem, but has perhaps it has been misrepresented in the common discourse.

>the main problem is that it takes too long for a bureaucracy to crack down on such a large fraud.

I guess we'll see about that.

Sorry, I should have been clear I didn't mean you. I've heard so many crypto promoters ignore my comments and tell me I don't understand unless I buy the token. Asking me to fork their project and start selling my own token is dangerously close to what they say, so please don't ask me to do that either. No one can solve the problem with ponzi schemes by creating more ponzi schemes.

>That is a narrow and inaccurate portrayal of how the extralegal markets operate.

It wasn't meant to be a complete portrayal, it's just one example. Fraud is rampant in those markets.

>The more that vendors/customers use a cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange, the less volatility there will be because vendors/customers will be forced to stomach the change in price over the course of a transaction (for better or for worse)

But this doesn't make sense. You're not saying there's actually less volatility, you're saying the users will just be forced to accept extreme volatility. That's markedly different from what's happening with the USD. And why should they accept it? Why would they want to be forced to accept a 50% increase in the price of something over 10 minutes? There's no reason for them to do that other than the (entirely philosophical) insistence from blockchain programmers that there should never be any price stabilization because capital controls are bad, and completely free unregulated markets are somehow good despite that you can very obviously see how that philosophy is repeatedly and directly causing people to lose their life savings gambling in the various crypto frauds and hacks and bankruptcies.

>I use cryptocurrency as a payment network all the time, and I accept the risks. It is good for my use case.

I disagree that it's good for your use case, because crypto is bad for any use case. I'm serious, it's that useless of a technology. There's nothing it does that can't be better served by something else. Perhaps you just haven't looked at the other alternatives?

>You cannot trust banks to implement proper security and privacy when they benefit from obscurity and surveillance.

You cannot trust crypto companies to implement that either, judging by the ridiculous amount of times they've suffered catastrophic hacks and thefts. Or sometimes they just openly run a ponzi scheme that's guaranteed to lose your money no matter how secure or private it is.

>regulation of cryptocurrencies may not seem ethically the same as regulation of strong encryption, but it is effectively just as difficult if not impossible.

No it's not, you just crack down on the exchanges and stablecoin issuers. Those are incredibly centralized by necessity, and almost all the liquidity and pumping can be traced directly back to them. They were all fraudulent from the start too; without them, very very few people would have any use for crypto at all. Get rid of them and it's obvious to even the most clueless of crypto investors that the emperor has no clothes.

>The fraud protection is designed to prevent double spending.

Double-spend is only one type of fraud among a countless other ways to commit fraud. See all the other fraud and theft that is committed by various crypto companies on a daily basis.

>If "fraud prevention" involves a third party who puts their thumb on the scale and gets to determine what is or isn't fraud, then it's not desirable for a trust-less network.

This sentence is nonsense. Blockchains are fundamentally not a trustless network, you're trusting that the miners (a third party who puts their thumb on the scale) will maintain the network in a certain way that you interpret as being fair. Just like with cash, there are certain things the government can to do crack down on the illicit use of cash, you just trust that they won't do it.

>With cryptocurrency users can expose themselves to as many third parties as they voluntarily choose (e.g. a Bisq-like trading system).

What possible reason would any user have to want to "voluntarily" expose themself to fraud and theft?

Crypto on the other hand, requires a running network of many publicly identifiable participants to function. The blockchain code by itself does nothing; this network only functions if it has a critical mass of miners to run the network and a critical mass of buyers to pump up the price of the token. Without those things, the token becomes insecure and worthless and can't be used. So inherently, crypto will always be an easy target for attackers, will always be vulnerable to getting shut down by governments, and will always be manipulated by ponzi schemers looking to make a quick buck. This is a fundamental design property of the system, you can't fix it by adding some more code to it. It's also the same reason why all the marketing around it is a lie. Cryptocurrency is terrible as a currency and terrible as an investment, and just all around terrible.