Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second:
The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. The former is designed to provide this quality, and the latter is not.
Put another way, there is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams.
Articles like the ones you linked above want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
> Ordinary person: “Your weird Internet money sucks to use. It’s slow and expensive. I lost my coins by mistake and it can’t be fixed. If I get hacked it can’t be fixed either.”
> Bitcoin advocate: “But everyone wants [list of ideological aims held only by weird people]! Everyone I know, anyway.”
But in specifics, censorship resistance? I just read that in an article.
> “You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”
Being slow and expensive doesn't make something a scam. If you falsely label the blockchain as a scam, and want people to not have even the option of using, I contend that your real issue is with people having self-custody over their money, and thus you believe in a modern form of serfdom.
There is not a word that would contend any of the arguments made. If you meant:
> The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody.
Then this is nonsense. The fundamental difference between the two is that one deals with real money while the other does not.
To be frank, only an extreme minority cares about censorship resistance, especially when it comes in a form of inconvenience. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen again and again even within cryptoheads, the choice of storing their money in a centralized place (Binance, Coinbase, FTX) rather than self-custody.
It’s just people have limited amount of time in a day, and caring that government X can trace their transaction is waste of time. Also, in the last 3 years of lawsuits, we’ve kind of seen how crypto payments are traceable as well if someone really wants to find the source.
A huge proportion of crypto is self-custodied. The important point is that with crypto, people have an option of self-custodying, in a form of convenient, secure and useful than physical commodities.
Even without anonymity, it raises the cost for the government to enforce broad restrictions, because the chokepoints—which are intermediaries like financial institutions—are gone.
In any case, anonymity is a gradient. It's a question of how much resources a state has to expend to track a user, and that value can be increased with better privacy technology, so that the state has to eschew broad-based restrictions on mutually voluntary interactions and focus its investigative resources on only the most dangerous actors, who engage in genuinely predatory behavior (murderers, thieves, etc).
This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains:
https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...
Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second:
https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity