this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn't help much to include it...
Or a decentralized alternative that isn't just used to scam people, that doesn't eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.
But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.
There is already a PoW crypto that is actually private called Monero. It uses ring signatures to sign transactions and rotating public keys to keep public keys private. It also happens to be relatively stable since it's basically the only crypto that people use as a currency (generally to buy illegal contraband online). It's PoW though, so has the energy consumption issues.
Since it's PoW, though, it still consumes buckets. Something I thought looked cool was Chia coin, which somehow uses hard drive space as a consensus algorithm which saves a ton of electricity, but I haven't read the whitepaper on that, so I don't fully understand it.