There are several crypto projects (some even fairly popular) where we do know who's behind them - Ripple, Stellar, Ethereum, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Tron, EOS, etc. Hell, the core dev team members of Bitcoin itself is public knowledge.
I think it's interesting that while crypto was a bunch of hobbyists and startups, it was just a bunch of folks wasting their money, but now that FB is involved it's a threat to the global monetary order. (Personally, I think the threat of FB is overblown - I'd bet that it'll make some significant noise over the next 2-3 years but fail over the next 10 - but the threat of startups and new crypto projects is underestimated. While the government is obsessed with FB's 2 billion users, someone else will come up with a cryptocurrency that's actually useful and take those 2 billion users for themselves.)
It's like any other startup: building a product that's useful enough to get widespread adoption requires nailing a lot of different details. You leave one critical feature off and you don't get adoption. You get all of them right and the product takes off on a hypergrowth curve. It's like how Reddit took off once they added comments, or AirBnB took off once they started taking professional-quality photos. It's not that comments define Reddit (a Reddit with comments but no links or upvoting is a mailing list) or that photos define AirBnB (an AirBnB with photos but no booking, billing, or review systems is a travel blog), but that those were the last critical features needed for success.
Speaking of the platform coins (Ethereum, EOS, Tron), I can think of few critical features they're missing. Scalability is one of them, which Ethereum is working on and EOS has - the network has to support more than 10 TPS. The ability to host a pretty, intuitive UI on the blockchain itself (so that you don't also need to run a website that listens to blockchain events for average users to run your DApp) is another. Discoverability is another, letting ordinary users find useful apps and spread them around.
Do you view privacy as an important quality? Nano seems like a pretty good attempt at making a cryptocurrency that's useful as a currency, but transactions are not private and I'm not sure how big of a problem that is
I don't personally, but there are cryptocurrencies that have made some really big strides there: Monero and ZCash. I've heard that a lot of dark-web business is actually switching over from Bitcoin to Monero, so it's getting some real adoption.
One of the interesting things about the cryptocurrency space is that it's challenging one of our fundamental assumptions about economics, namely that currency is a winner-take-all market and everything works better if there's a single currency used for everything. Instead we're seeing that currencies can actually have different properties, and that this can actually affect which currency you'd chose to use in which circumstance. Want to do things that you don't want the government to know about? Use a privacy coin like ZCash or Monero. Want to let your computer programs transact economically? Use a platform coin like Ethereum, EOS, or Tron, and select which based on whether you want to write your smart contracts in Solidity, WebAssembly, or Java, respectively. Want to define a marketplace and create a utility coin to mediate transactions in it? That's what coins like BAT (Brave), Kin (Kik) and now Libra (Facebook) do.
The primary functions of a currency (store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account) are also now getting unbundled: Bitcoin is used as a store of value, but not as a medium of exchange, while something like Monero or BAT is much more a medium of exchange than a store of value, and stablecoins like Tether or USDC are filling the unit-of-account role. That trend has been going on for decades - stocks and bonds are stores of value, but not mediums of exchanges or units of account, while in-game currencies are units of accounts but not a good store of value or unit of exchange - but the crypto space has made it explicitly clear.
It's not exactly a corner of the web I frequent, so your guess is as good as mine. The ones I've heard of include drugs, armaments, zero-day security exploits, data breaches, and identity theft. Child porn and human trafficking are probably on there somewhere too. Porn (between consenting adults) isn't a dark-web industry, at least in the West: you can put a credit card into any number of adult businesses online and get your fill of any sexual fetish imaginable without breaking any laws.
We are not going to need any of them until we do. People just don't adopt them because wallets are still difficult to use, , they are a nightmare tax-wise and because most banks fear/hate them. But in a world beyond those obstacles, many of them will be useful for different reasons. Some will be safer as long term value stores , others will be fast enough for microtransactions. Considering that exchanging between them is trivial and instant, i think there will be many of them circulating in parallel
Thats the beauty of decentralization. You can't really blame one person for bitcoin's value today, you have to blame everyone who participates in it (Really, who would the congress question, and what could that person do? take down bitcoin?). While Libra is centralized so single point of failure
What? Are you aware that all commodities are basically deflation?
Do you think it is "evil" to buy commodities?
This is all about freedom of choice. If you don't like the properties of certain products, then buy the one that you like.
But lots of people would apparently prefer to spend their own money on deflationary assets. Who are you to say it is evil to do this with assets that one owns?
I assert with exactly as much evidence as you (zero) that it is the extraordinary claim.
Show me a so-called "decentralized" coin that is designed to not just be dominated by a handful of miners. It's a natural consequence of proof of work, isn't it? Large-scale miners will always be able to buy electricity for cheaper than your average person.
Very few crypto currencies are censoring transactions.
If we define "decentralized" as "the ability to send transactions that are unlikely to be censored", then pretty much all cryptos fulfill this requirement.
Transaction censorship just isn't something that is happening on most cryptos. You can send whatever transactions that you want, and it almost certainly isn't going to be stopped by any centralized parties.
That's not my definition of decentralization, sorry. Censorship resistance is but one of many necessary requirements for me. Another requirement is that no single entity should be able to mine more than a small percentage of coins.
A truly decentralized currency would have built-in protections against any sort of concentration of power, whether it's based on the ability to buy electricity in bulk cheaply or based on the ability to censor transactions. To date no currency is decentralized.
If you had 51% of the CPU power within the Bitcoin network, would you a) choose to cheat with a rather high chance of crashing the exchange rate, or b) use the CPU power to collect rewards while leaving the exchange rate ”unaffected” with probability = 1?
Satoshi considered this scenario.
It is also a public ledger, ie even if you don’t mine it is easy to track everything.
some currencies have different consensus protocol, e.g. stellar. others are actively fighting it, e.g. monero. and even in the case of a takeover, forks are possible , ensuring decentralization
it's not just decentralization, it's competing decentralized currencies in a free market.
Well, this sort of meta-decentralization applies to all currencies including Libra.
I think you can either say that no currencies are decentralized or that all currencies are. In practice any currency gives up some axes of decentralization.
FB has been the subject of several congressional and parliamentary hearings around the globe recently. Why would they not question Libra?