> Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with <existing other thing>
that's not my standard.
cater to a market because the market exists.
there are many people in the crypto space now and they have frictions and pay to reduce those frictions, and are not defrauded in the process.
its just too late to care about your standard. you can search for it if you want, but its at the expense of so many other opportunities that have nothing to do with fraud.
its the entertainment sector, its the collectibles sector, its the financial services sector..... and the crux of most arguments and moving goalposts are that all those sectors in aggregate are worth zero when crypto is involved (or that crypto is worth zero because you're not the market for any of those sectors? lol? its a paradoxical antiquated argument)
when the only trend is that crypto-versions just begin catering to even more sectors and pulling in those audiences, or crypto-natives begin being interested in those sectors.
That's like saying effective cryptography is destruction of evidence.
"Laundering" is a bullshit concept invented to legitimize total surveillance of financial transactions. This KYC/AML stuff is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance. We must resist it vigorously for the exact same reasons we resist warrantless dragnet data collection.
I see the misunderstanding: I used "laundering" to describe a method of obscuring a trail of exchanges, not a crime.
I can exchange gold, or textiles or something, and not expect surveillance of those transactions. I do live in a country that requires some reporting of those for tax purposes, but not tracking of the assets the way crypto does.
The moment I pick up a monetized piece of paper that the government printed with a serial number and all that, which is guaranteed by the full faith of the government, and is standardized by the government in a global financial system, I accept some side effects, such as the government's expectation of tracking and standardization.
Similarly, the moment I pick up a crypto currency, I accept all the technical limitations / requirements of complete ledger accessibility, and methods of circumventing that are no more sophisticated than laundering.
In effect, with gov-backed money and crypto, you are forced into a system of surveillance. I don't see the privacy angle one bit.
I was asking for examples of applications that are enabled by crypto in the first message that you quote.
Next message someone listed features, not example applications. I had two responses: that's not an application, and in addition I somewhat sloppily said that even that feature (privacy) does not exist (because it's just laundering which is defeatable).
Is there some scheme past asymmetric cryptography that I'm not aware of? Because one of the fun drawbacks for criminals of having a distributed public ledger has been their immediate connection to all of their transactions once their public key is associated with them.
Ring signatures. Every monero transaction is signed by the source of funds plus N other keys. The effect is that nobody can prove which key actually signed the transaction.
Monero has numerous privacy features. It mixes in multiple transactions into one so that amounts, sources and destinations can't be correlated. To an outside observer, it looks like everyone is constantly transacting with everyone else. Maximizes the anonymity set.
This Motte & Bailey argument using cryptocurrency and cryptography is so old, so stale, and it was never very convincing to start with. A whole field of mathematics doesn't compare to digital pet rocks.
It absolutely does compare. Especially when people start talking about how cryptocurrency was "made for crime". They sound a lot like those tiresome politicians complaining about pedophiles and terrorists "going dark" for the nth time.
