Narrator: It doesn't.

I don't understand how anyone can be on HN talking about crypto without knowing any of crypto's use cases. I mean you don't see people here in Rust threads commenting "I can't think of a single use case of Rust".

Also possible with cash, but extremely risky for most people. Not an advantage of crypto, not an advantage in general.

> send money anonymously

Only relevant for crime. Disadvantage or irrelevant for most legitimate businesses (you anyway need to provide address for shipment).

> send money [] internationally in seconds without an intermediary

Also possible with many banks, VISA, Western Union. The fact that you're using an intermediary is irrelevant - since either way you're paying transaction fees, and trying to avoid sanctions is too dangerous for most people.

> Decentralization

In practice, it's far more centralized (far fewer exchanges in the world than banks, and the majority of people using crypto hold it with an exchange)

> composibility, programmable money

Doesn't really mean anything. Money is money, it can only change hands with a legal contract, and "smart contracts" are not legal contracts.

> Only relevant for crime

Absolute nonsense. There are people who prefer paying with cash for the same privacy advantages.

> Also possible with many banks, VISA, Western Union. The fact that you're using an intermediary is irrelevant

Sending crypto is way easier, faster, and cheaper than sending an international wire transfer or Western Union transfer. With crypto, it is peer to peer and no one can censor you. In the traditional finance world, anyone can have their bank account, payment provider, or transactions blocked by their bank, payment provider, government, or any of the other countless middlemen who need to approve of your transactions.

> In practice, it's far more centralized

Peer to peer money and self-custody is more decentralized than holding money in any centralized institution.

> Doesn't really mean anything

You clearly don't understand the concept, so please educate yourself before you comment. The composability of smart contracts is what enables defi.

Unless they're mailing in cash envelopes, they're usually doing this in person, so while there is some privacy advantage, it's not as great as most think.

> Peer to peer money and self-custody is more decentralized than holding money in any centralized institution.

First off, crypto is not money - it is an asset that you invest in. Secondly, few people ever bother with self-custody, because it is extremely dangerous for any significant sum, and very very hard compared to the alternative - getting someone to take you dollars and give you BTC or or ETH in return (in a trustworthy manner) is much more difficult, so few people do it. And there are far fewer actual exchanges (real money to crypto) than there are banks in most of the world. This also hits on the point about money transfers: for the way people use crypto in practice, it is justa s easy if not easier to prevent them from trading it tahn it is to trade money.

> You clearly don't understand the concept, so please educate yourself before you comment. The composability of smart contracts is what enables defi.

"DeFi" itself is a meaningless notion, just like NFTs were. It has no legal power, and it can't be used to trade real-world goods or even real money (again, crypto in general is not money, it is something closer to stock, at least in the USA). The fact that the technology allows you to trade ETH for Dogecoin or whatever it is is neat, but irrelevant - my income is in RON and things I want to buy are in USD, EUR or RON - and this is true for the vast majority of the world.

Not OP but yes. The government needs taxes to fund itself which means it needs to track some financial transactions in order to levy taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

I can easily do this without crypto. (It many cases it's illegal, ofc, but it's trivial to do without crypto if you don't mind breaking the law, and using crypto doesn't suddenly make illegal things legal.)

> Decentralization, composibility, programmable

Glad to see that the dot com era OOP consultants found new employment opportunities that don't involve agile or scrum consulting.

Good for you, not everyone in the world has this privilege.

Please take your substanceless sarcasm to Reddit, this is not the place.

For comparison, credit cards can verify in less than a second.