This article isn't very good. Half of it is about 51% attacks, which is the one attack blockchains were always transparent about, and the other half talks about how some smart contracts are buggy. Cool.
Personally, I think the entire concept of cryptocurrency is flawed because it punts on the governance problem. Ditto for smart contracts. People / companies like to have the ability to dispute the outcome of a transaction, and you really can’t do that without vesting authority in a governing body to overrule the technology. But then, if you have a central authority that has the power to modify transactions, do you really need blockchain?
These are not central parties and they present risks with anything one does with a computer on a network.
> what to do if a transaction goes badly. In the cryptocurrency case, for the most part you're SOL, because cryptocurrencies by design don't allow anyone to e.g. void a transaction.
Transaction finality is a feature not a bug. Whatever conveniences that are enjoyed int traditional banking can be implemented in a layer on top of the base protocol.
If someone compromises my OS and steals my credit card details, the bank sends me a new card and handles the fraudulent charges on my behalf. I'm not out any money
If someone compromises my OS and steals my bitcoin private key, they can drain my entire wallet and I've lost everything, and have zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone uses a stolen or cloned credit card, or simply performs a charge-back, they get my goods for free and I have basically zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone pays me with bitcoin, I'm not out any money regardless, nor do I have to expend time/money/legal resources to ensure I keep that payment.
Crypto currency doesn't stop this. You can dispute cash transactions and you can dispute crypto transactions. If I pay for something in crypto and it is not delivered, I can sue, complain, etc just as I would with a credit card. What you can't do with crypto is run to visa and have them magically reverse the charge (possibly screwing over the merchant). But dispute away my friend.
Except that only holds true when you perform a crypto transaction in the same way as you do a cash transaction, for local services. The moment you do it for something remote, you will run into all sorts of issues.
If a merchant in my country fails to deliver on a cash/crypto transaction, the dispute process is easy.
If a merchant in another country fails to deliver on a crypto transaction (posting cash is a whole other topic that we'll avoid here), what dispute mechanism do I have? International law is a minefield.
Our financial system is its own brand of crapshoot. As we speak, I've just issued my 6th chargeback (6th month) to Amazon more an AWS account that someone hacked and changed all my details except for my payment info. I think about this every time I see someone nit-picking some imperfection in cryptocurrencies.
I just want a choice.
In the real world, I lose my actual wallet every 5 years or so. Worst case, I lose $40 cash and have to spend a couple hours reporting credit cards stolen.
The best feature of a bank is that you can outsource all that opsec to them in exchange for a trust relationship with the bank. The latter is far easier to manage day-to-day.