Duion {l Wrote}:Why Cryptocurrencies, is there any benefit? I mean the likelyness to get donations is close to zero already and using weird ways for payments will make it worse.
Why not if it is an additional means of payment?
But IMHO unless some sort of technological breakthrough is reached I would stay clear of crypto currencies right now. Basically they are all pyramid schemes and the get-rich-quick phase is over.
Other than that there are some specific issues:
Bitcoin has reached a level of compute complexity and number of transactions which it was never designed for (it was initially just a proof of concept), resulting in lots of technical issues and maybe more importantly that it is more or less controlled by a few commercial bitcoin mining companies in China, which makes the idea of global independant crypto-currencies kind of moot.
Etherum is maybe the most interesting right now, not because of it's use as a crypto-currency, but rather for "smart contracts". The track record of it rather suggests to stay clear though, with many huge bugs requiring hard forks and resulting in all sorts of issues. The above mining issue probably applies to it as well, or will soon (not sure).
Monero seems very shady right now... strong spider senses tingling in regards to criminal run pyramid scheme. Yes you can still mine regularly... but it appears that this is achieved by opting for a compute algorithm that will never scale (even more so than other systems). It's probably also used massively for money laundering (although the idea to have truly anonymous transactions is good in theory). Last but not least... very shady stuff going on with "companies" approaching websites and mobile app developers to include a (hidden) Monero mining client in their software so that mostly unsuspecting users are mining as a sort of botnet. This of course drives up energy consumption and battery use, and is in general just morally corrupt in my opinion.
Interesting thought or rather conspiracy theory:
If there was a (almost) super-human artificial intelligence on the loose, how would it make sure people build sufficient compute capacity for it to run? Yep, invent a clever algorithm for itself (that a normal human will not understand as doing anything special) and link it to a get-rich-quick scheme = Bitcoin.
Somewhat related: don't miss the Daemon and Freedom books by Daniel Suarez!