Using Venmo anonymously is much harder than XMR or even BTC, and probably illegal too.
I fully agree. I just also think crypto is terrible for that use case. If you’d be caught for using Venmo for drugs they can catch you using crypto. It might be harder, but that whole public immutable ledger means all they have to do is tie accounts to names. Which coincidentally you need to do to cash out or cash in.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 6 months ago
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wait are you telling me that the company that ties a debit card to my name and is owned by the founder of a surveillance company and funder of fascists isn’t secure? /s But yeah, Venmo is the opposite of secure, but it’s filled a specific use case that cash is great for and that crypto often likes to act like it’s good for.
So what would it take for me to trust a cryptocurrency? Stability, wide use, actual security, and low transfer costs and risks. It’s competing with cash and Venmo for use case so it needs to actually compete with them.
I think crypto has more or less shit the bed here. BTC is created by a gold fetishist and is deflationary. The whole of normal people’s perception of crypto is that it’s an investment. There’s also the resource intensity of everything. There’s just so many problems here that cash just resolves.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 6 months ago
Yea, crypto is not without its problems. But it is the closest we have to cash for online world. What would you really do when you can’t go somewhere physically? Send cadh by mail? This is indeed an option in some places, but in other the cash has a high chance of not getting through at all.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Public immutable ledger as a means of tracing is not an issue XMR has because it’s all anonymous.
But even if LEOs wanted to tie all that to names then they’d have to use either bank records (easily avoided - don’t buy anything from a bank or licensed exchange and not P2P with bank cards or anything else tied to them i.e. use PayPal under a fake name if you were grandfathered in before all the KYC shit) or they’d have to tie it to shipment addresses for stuff off DNMs which they could, if they bust a vendor, but it doesn’t mean jack shit in a court of law - Who ordered a kg of amph to my household? Lord only knows.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yes, and no. You do need to cash in at some point, but you don’t have to do it thru a public exchange. People do sell physical wallets for hard cash. And even if you do use an exchange, when I last looked into crypto the common currency for drugs (monero) was obtainable on exchanges that didn’t have KYC rules. Outside of exchanges, you can also transmit currency directly to other parties, and once you use tumblers and other anonymous platforms, tracking becomes extremely difficult. It’s not impossible, but it becomes troublesome enough that unless you’re a big fish/crime lord/whatever, the FBI isn’t going to be bothered wasting resources.