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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

What useful service? Scams as a service?

If it wasn't for all the speculation and grotesque scams surrounding it could actually be useful as a decentralized currency. But we can't have nice things.

This might be a learning moment. Without government, aka anarchy, society would quickly devolve into bitter, cruel chaos.

Long ago given up on cryptocurrency, at least as long as current technical problems exist. But that without government we'd devolve into "bitter, cruel chaos" is definitely not a lesson. That's "not even wrong" level stuff.

Alright, you want me and the majority of society to take cryptocurrency seriously? Find a way to disallow or at least police illicit uses of it. Until you do that, I refuse to even entertain the idea that it’s a valuable asset and certainly not currency.

This is not a technical challenge I’m making. This is a political demand.

You would also still have to prove it’s more efficient and has a smaller carbon and energy footprint than traditional currency.

Have we effectively disallowed or policed the illicit use of $100 bills for drugs, weapons, or other trade?

I agree with you that cryptocurrency is not currently particularly intrinsically useful, but I don't believe that "let everyone use it in a decentralized tamper-proof manner" fundamentally requires "and simultaneously restrict it from the following uses, which a subset of the global population deems undesirable".

(In that regard, it's similar to "regular" crypto. I don't mind that people I don't particularly like are also able to use crypto to secure their communications. It's essential to my use case that they not be able to intercept my comms, and I accept in return that I can't intercept their comms either.)

There are genuine attempts made to police those uses. In the case of USD, the US enjoys being the default global currency. That bad actors also use it is more of a side note alongside everyone using it.

What about cultures that didn't have centralized government like native Americans?

They had various forms of government, depending on which particular tribe you are thinking of. Many had a theocracy, and some, like the Iroquois were part of a federation.

Before blockchains, I wondered about how to prove something on the internet. I thought about an authority that could hash any piece of data and you could query it. For example if someone claimed someone tweeted "X", the authority website could show that the hash is really from that Twitter account and is the sentence "X", or disprove it.

I didn't really think about distributed cryptographic "proof" and the chaining so you can't delete B from A - B - C and chain up A - C, indeed the authority would just have to be trusted and be somehow tamper proof.

Blockchain would be interesting to record the sequence of events you want to make sure people can't change retroactively, making it distributed means it's ecologically disastrous though.

Before Blockchains, most people who cared about cryptography were well aware of Merkle Trees. They date back to 1979.

Yes, there's also the proof-of-work part. We had that in 1999 with Hashcash.

The only thing bitcoin brought to the table was moving proof-of-work from a trusted hardware module to a P2P network.

Easily moving money between countries. Not every country makes this as easy as it is in Europe.

There are a lot of ways to transfer money between countries and Bitcoin is one of the worst (sketchy exchanges, slow, huge spreads, etc). If you want easy try something like TransferWise.

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