if this was a bank, he wouldve gotten it all back.
decentralize for the sake of it is foolish.
decentralize for the sake of it is foolish.
It's a tradeoff like anything else. For some people, the risk is worth the benefit. For others it's not. Still more find the risk worth the benefits for a subset of their money, and not for the rest.
All of these "financial systems" can happily coexist, and none of them are completely broken, they just prioritize different things and make different tradeoffs.
Also, bitcoin doesn't require being a lawless land where everyone can do anything all the time. It's like cash, but electronic.
If a thief breaks into your house and steals $10,000 in cash, will the police give you $10,000? If they find the guy and he still has it, sure! But what if he burned it? or spent it? now you are fucked.
It's the same with bitcoin. if they catch the person who did this, the courts can force him to return the money with threat of lots of jail time and more. If he doesn't have it, then the users that had it stolen are fucked.
and now they are caught holding bags
a future which has no real use cases.
I’m pretty sure GP isn’t trying to say that everyone should use Bitcoin. The thing that gets annoying is that there is a crowd that campaigns this, and then other people (particularly in this comment section) fight back saying nobody should use Bitcoin.
The obvious fact which I feel is somehow being overlooked here is that different people have different needs and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to banking today.
As a society, we tend to protect people from themselves because the other option is to let them die on the streets when they lose it all. Making people have insurance and using banks and payment systems that have built-in protection, is far cheaper than providing welfare for those that would otherwise be scammed out of every penny, irreversibly.
You can be a self-serving ubermensch the same day you opt out of all social help.
There absolutely is a choice - you can politically campaign for the right to opt out, or you can go and live in a country that doesn't have the protections you don't want. Most of them are pretty damn awful because they don't look after their citizens at all.
What you don't get to do is live in a society with such protections and social measures and then not play by its rules.
It is hard for me to fully internalize this point when I have a counterexample readily available, albeit one that will do nothing to convince you. I consider myself capable of making sound financial decisions for myself and would never raid my own pension account, unless faced with immediate existential danger (in which case "raiding" it would be a rational decision).
I disagree that the solution to that is to centralize funds in order to let a centralized body inefficiently misallocate (or sometimes outright steal) them and would appreciate the freedom to do this myself. I think the state has too much power and this is detrimental in the long run, as it is detrimental when any single entity has too much power.
> There absolutely is a choice - you can politically campaign for the right to opt out, or you can go and live in a country that doesn't have the protections you don't want.
> What you don't get to do is live in a society with such protections and social measures and then not play by its rules.
I can certainly campaign politically, but that also includes respectfully disagreeing with your conclusion above. This does not make your position right and mine automatically wrong (nor vice versa).
The rest of the quoted part of your post sounds like another non-choice (in that the it is highly impractical), followed by a moral judgement.
Many people do, many of these very same people are not actually competent when it comes down to it, just overconfident, or just have a run of bad luck.
> I disagree that the solution to that is to centralize funds...
Who said anything about centralising or the state? You can invest in pension funds all over the place, with many financial bodies, but you'll find access to these funds restricted in various ways.
> The rest of the quoted part of your post sounds like another non-choice (in that the it is highly impractical)
It's perfectly practical, you can move to all sorts of other nations, take your pick. It's a massive coincidence that the ones that are worth living in have restrictions and protections like these, no?
It's always better to have the option of do-overs.
multisig escrow is a solution that works and a lot of people use for years, requires the service provider have their own resources and capital to fulfill the delivery of goods.
not a solution for everyone, but a solution for many.
Wasn't the DAO rolled back?
The beauty of The DAO was that it wasn't even a hack or an attack. It was merely somebody cleverly exploiting a loophole in the contract everybody agreed to. After all in crypto-utopia "Code Is Law" and there is no interpretation of a contract outside of the code. The irony is the only actual theft that occurred was the ethereum devs rolling back the contract to save their own asses.
The DAO single handedly proved that the blockchain is fully mutable and is certainly not trustless or censorship resistant. Hanging your hat on any blockchain requires you to trust the developers and miners to do you well. And if they don't... good luck getting your voice heard.
For Not-Banks press number 2 or stay on the line.
The entire point of Bitcoin is decentralization, the rest is growing pains and price of doing business.
With Ethereum it was the core developers / top of the pyramid who stole wealth from the the DAO "hacker" who cleverly found a loophole in the "Code Is Law" contract everybody agreed to and used it to their advantage. The Ethereum devs, coupled with mob rule, clawed back all the transactions and literally stole the funds back.
I'd rather have due process provided by a government than mob rule.