@crypto.pior: While there may be less privacy with crypto, it will still be possible (for example through mixing with different coins to break traceable links). But the idea of working within the cryptoverse and not offramping to fiat would reduce the touch points accessible to governments. It becomes in essence a barter system where you trade your goods and services for another’s. I had a friend that owned an upholstery shop. A good portion of his business was through barter. While it has its limitations, it is completely untaxed and invisible to the government.
The concerns about ’utility’ tokens used as payments to creators are valid. Crypto, in general, is not widely accepted for every day expenses, and where it is accepted, it is mostly only bitcoin. Until functional cross-chain distributed exchanges (DEX) are ubiquitous, or the goods and services creators desire are readily available in the coin they earn, their payments are more for status than for wealth (and I’m a steem believer!). It can get there, but it’s not quite there yet.
As to the cashless society, I largely live in that mode already because of its convenience. However, if we are FORCED to live that way, then I agree that only bad will come of it! We totally need alternative means of exchanging value that is not completely controlled by a single entity. You will see old fashioned barter come back in a big way just to avoid the constraints and limitations such a restriction would impose.
I am no economist, just a pragmatist. I believe in crypto for many reasons, but it has to useful to the everyday person (even they are not even aware they are using it!) before it will truly change the world. I believe it will happen, just not sure how or when. Projects like steem are what will get us there as they evolve.
Late thank you for your reply @jdkennedy
ps.
Would you mind sharing with me what's your impression so far after latest forks? One week after hf21 and hf21 has been introduced?
ps.
Check out my latest publication..
It brought some real emotions. I've been downvoted by over half million SP (attack of few accounts), however I also received solid support and few strong upvotes and now I will be enjoying the biggest genuine payout in my lifetime ;)
Yours, Piotr
@crypto.piotr: The first impression I had about the HFs was the immediate need for the second HF. I’m familiar with unexpected issues when a project goes live on the operational system. No matter how hard you try, it’s very difficult to get the dev and test environments to faithfully replicate operations. But it is unusual to see an issue big enough to require a full rev number change so soon out of the gate. I recognize that distributed systems like Steem are still a very new construct that the devs are still coming to grips with, so I’m pretty tolerant of the hiccups. Similarly, they are doing this on a shoestring budget with development and test environments that are probably still in development themselves, another reason for being patient. Note that these comments are made with no direct exposure to the codebase (haven’t had time to go spelunking through the project GitHub yet :).
As to the impact of the changes made by the HFs, I don’t really have an opinion, mostly because I was just beginning to get a feel for using steem and have not fully digested the nuances of it yet (I’ve only been on it since early July).
Nonetheless, the discussions I have read suggest that the changes are moving the system more towards how I thought it already was - a place where the posts were meant to be more meaningful than ”what I had for lunch today” with the value determined by upvotes of the community. A bit idealistic I realize now, but not far from what I believe is the intended goal.
With respect to your other post, I experienced a form of that when I posted a couple of short stories I had also gotten published on 365tomorrows.com. An anti-plagiarism bot called out the copies, but because they are now in the other site’s archives, I could not meet proof criteria. At first I was upset, but now I better understand the purpose of qualifying the legitimacy of a post, especially by a new account.
All of that is to say I think you are right to point out the abuses on both sides of fence. It’s important to confront those who truly are abusing the system for their personal gain while not substantially contributing to the community (admittedly a very subjective standard). It is also important to do that without, at some point, damaging an innocent, well intentioned contributor.
I am still learning the significance of these issues and posts like yours are helping me get there, even if some may take exception some of your thoughts.
Cheers!