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Comment by tjpaudio | Hacker News Reader

Federal laws and the protections/insurances a US bank provides would have you without losses right now. Why do we want a decentralized currency again?

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A non-federally controlled pseudo-anonymous currency similar to cash has the positive upside of enabling digital privacy in spite of the blockchain. That's why. There are still trustworthy tumbler services to obfuscate and hold your bitcoins similar to a bank. And with what some claim, inarguably so, of government overreach and corporate over-sharing of your personal data, it's something I can sympathize with.

Similar to a bank as in a guaranteed insurance of my funds, like the FDIC in the US?

FDIC is the government overreach the parent was talking about.

It's also a relatively new thing.

People who cry about government overreach seem to rarely ponder why it is there in the first place. Well, TFA shows why.

TFA?

The eFfing Article (as in RTFA, "read the effing article"). I.e. the thing we're all discussing here.

Thanks.

Because it covers the use cases of cash but for online. Sometimes you're willing to have no safety guarantees but also not have to deal with paypal etc. Send a small tip to a content creator, pay content creators in small amounts in a patreon-like setting without having to deal with rules against content payment processors don't like (I saw recently this was being launched but I forget the name), lots of use cases.

I really need to call out crypto shill when I see it. As it stands, bitcoin is utterly unusable for micropayments, the transaction fees are way too high for that. There has been attempts at creating micropayment services on top, these all have failed to gain traction.

I still maintain as I did several times here in the past: bitcoin (and in general, crypto"currencies" because they are not currencies) are a scam, a new kind of scam for sure but a scam nonetheless. There are simply no (legit) use cases.

Bitcoin isn't the only crypto. Dogecoin is great for microtransactions.

I pay all my dogs in Doge

> There has been attempts at creating micropayment services on top, these all have failed to gain traction.

I'd argue that Bitcoin's lightning network is gaining traction, and it accomplishes a lot of what you are asking for.

Who doesn't want to learn the lessons of the last millennia of finance all over again?

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