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I used to be a sober guy with a typical penis and U.S. dollars in the bank. I would often lay awake at night, wondering, “How can I solve this?”

You see, I was stuck in a rut. I wanted drugs, massive boners, and the thrill of a wildly unstable currency, all while shrouded under the cloak of anonymity.

That’s when I became a blockchain enthusiast.

Ad hominem and strawman, a private but verified payment solution isn't all drugs, money laundering and underground illegal purchases.

Crypto is one step above cash, no fraud protection but some amount of verification. So is everyone that uses cash looking to skirt the law just because they want it private? Maybe they don't want their credit card company knowing they ate fast food for days straight.

Money is the root of all evil but it is the people not the currency that can be bad. There are real world examples and uses for crypto. Is it used for bad things? Sure. Do criminals use all types of money? Yes. Crypto is just another currency, people are still good and bad.

The article is exaggerating, there must be someone who has problems that are solved by Bitcoin.

However, one of Bitcoin's features is that it has a completely public permanent ledger showing all transactions assigned to everyone. It is a wildly inappropriate technology for doing illegal things or skirting the law (which cross-country transfers outside the system could well be). It has more downsides than cash in a duffle bag.

That's exactly the issue privacy currencies like Monero and to an extent Zcash solve.

I feel like we confuse bitcoin and blockchain. People's problems have been solved by a globally available currency that can handle simple transactions but that all happens incredibly inefficiently and despite of all the failings of he underlying blockchain tech.

Add to the solution of paying anonymously or globally that transfers are generally shorter than bank account transfers.

With banks and checking/savings accounts you have 3-5 business days, mainly due to the ACH and for fraud protection. But some transactions don't need fraud protection or are low enough that it might not matter. In that case bitcoin can transfer funds, verify it within an hour and many times around 20 minutes or so, that is much faster than transferring some money that settles 3-5 days later.

A real world use case for bitcoin is to transfer money into it then buy from third party small products vendors or donations that one may or may not trust with credit card or to maintain privacy on purchases. Paypal usually fills that type of role but some don't use that. In those cases bitcoin and solutions like Bitpay work nicely.

One can use bitcoin (or other alts you like) like a wallet/cash by having a smaller amount in there for transactions that you don't want to share your credit/payment processor information with similar to Paypal. Some might even trust bitcoin wallets more than Paypal and competition is always good. Credit card companies correlate your data through your card email/id to sell your ad data i.e. you order food out you might get competitive food ads. Privacy in bitcoin is a big killer app in those aspects, trust and non-tracked purchases.

Bitcoin is more volatile, if your bank and credit cards are RDBMS then bitcoin is memcached/redis/mongo, more volatile but private. A nice side effect of bitcoin is money may go up in value but alternatively it can lower in value.

Bitcoin could also allow someone to sell products globally without credit processors or other payment solutions that may be blocked or instead of setting those up. This can help entrepreneurs get their products available globally and not just for underground products but small hobbyists, creators, artists, and more. Bitcoin also greatly helps with donations and tips for FOSS and others that setting up a paypal invoice or credit transaction would be more of a pain.

Is 3-5 days standard in the US?

Transfers here in the UK are effectively instant and free.

Yeah paying with savings/checking accounts they can take 3-5 business days. It may be faster but usually processes in that amount of time. If someone gives you a check the other side can take 3-5 days before it can be pulled/reversed as well. Much of this is due to fraud protections but also to get cheaper transactions during ACH sweeps. You can setup ACH transfers that happen nightly but usually that is for something like regular payment that it is worth setting it up i.e. maybe direct deposit for a contracting job.

>> If someone gives you a check

Ha, I haven't had a chequebook for over a decade now. Seems like archaic tech :)

Who’s still using cheques?

But it didn't actually solve anything. That's just tax evasion and/or money laundering by another name and there are countless ways to do that.

There may have been countless ways of doing money laundering, but give me another way of paying for drugs online anonymously. There's a reason the darknets markets are so popular.

> If Ripple, Silk Road, Slush Pool, and the DAO all prefer “old way” systems of creating and enforcing trust, it’s no wonder that the outside world had not adopted trustless systems either!

CHECK MATE ATHEISTS. Actually the article is pretty moronic. Besides being written by a person named "Kai" who supports "Whatever the opposite of a futurist is", it's obvious that the crypto crowd is trying to decentralize All The Things. Slush Pool as p2p alternatives, as does silk road.

Trust systems have trade-offs. Decentralization is hard. Nothing of interest was revealed here, besides HN has a hard-on for centralized authority.

blockchain fan boy triggered

Cryptocurrency is so decentralized that most of it is held in a hand full of exchanges (aka, centralized).

It seems the crypto community also does not care about the obvious centralization, but who would've ever thought major contradictions would come out of cryptocurrency?

With Bitcoin or ether, I can hold the currency on paper wallets without Central storage, and immediately spend it if needed. Not as easy with cash, and impossible with checking/credit accounts.

the decentralization of cryptos like bitcoin refers to the source of the money (the miners), not its end location. most of the "contradictions" come down to misunderstandings like this. there's nothing that forces me to use a particular exchange and if the exchange crashes it will not affect my personal wallet, and i can feel safe knowing no 3rd party can come bail out the failed exchange at my indirect expense.

"... i can feel safe knowing no 3rd party can come bail out the failed exchange at my indirect expense."

Er, well, no. You can feel pretty safe that no 3rd party will come bail out the failed exchange, but I'm not sure how you could conclude that they could not. At least, until all the bitcoins have been irrevocably lost.

> It seems the crypto community also does not care about the obvious centralization

Again, more lies. Where did you get this information? Everyone in crypto knows the biggest risk are the exchanges.

I'm curious, who takes time out of their day to villainize a database architecture? People are getting desperate.

> Again, more lies. Where did you get this information?

97% of Bitcoin is held by 4% of addresses - textbook centralization. (http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-a...) Now that can be whales, or it can be exchanges, which isn't clear. However, calling someone a liar for stating the fact that Bitcoin isn't the decentralized utopia you've dreamed of is uncalled for.

> Everyone in crypto knows the biggest risk are the exchanges.

Alot of crypto is purchased and held by people who aren't "in crypto" but are just normal people who have a FOMO.

It should be possible to separate whales from exchanges since the ledger is public, no? The latter would seem likely to have many more transactions with many more counter-parties.

(I've been mildly interested in this question for a while, since it seems like them as got into bitcoin early ought to be whales, right? First come, first served and all.)

> does not care about the obvious centralization

Was there a poll of the community? We're lumping in early adopters of "the web" with promoters of the dot com bubble. The position is uneducated at best and disingenuous at worst. I suspect "Kai" benefits from click bait.

The exchanges hold a good portion of all cryptocurrency in existence on behalf of others.

"Everyone in crypto knows" perhaps, but their actions suggest that centralised services are preferred by most and this is entirely verifiable.

Anecdotes certainly aren't as effective in the blockchain world.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/886/which-ether...