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Comment by theboywho | Hacker News Reader

One of Blockchain's killer apps is...Bitcoin. There is no need to talk about "the crypto dream", people are using what they find useful (coinbase is currently #5 top YC company), and I personally see it inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model, with smart contracts as a driving force, because of autonomy.

Humans haven't really evolved much from say other Apes (or many more other animals) in the way a group is organised. We haven't yet discovered a way to organise a group without the need for a central entity (an alpha male, a government, central banks, etc.)

Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity.

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> I personally see it inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model, with smart contracts as a driving force, because of autonomy.

People don't want autonomy.

I don't want to be my own bank.

My bank is insured, they are secure, they provide me with a ton of services, and there is an identifiable party to go to if it all goes wrong, or if liability needs to be established.

This idea that decentralisation is amazing because people can free themselves from the shackles of financial institutions is just all backwards when you start to look at what those entities actually provide.

And this -

> Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity.

Is just meaningless utopianism.

That's like saying "Open Source" won't work because I don't want to be my own maintainer. It's not about one person. You not wanting autonomy or being your own bank doesn't matter. People on coinbase aren't their own bank either.

It's not like that at all, and cryptocurrency systems, as you so ably point out, are already tending towards centralisation.

People on coinbase are also throwing away a large part of what supposedly makes cryptocurrencies valuable. They're essentially day traders.

To dismiss something as 'meaningless utopianism' just because it doesn't agree with your personal experience is incredibly naive and shortsighted.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting a decentralised alternative to banking. Just recently there was an article posted on here about how money is used as a system of control. [0] Even under the best case scenario of well regulated financial institutions in a functioning democracy there is still little recourse/accountability if these institutions or the government decides to freeze your accounts. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043888 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044914

Money as a system of control from the point of view of someone with a vested interest in cryptocurrencies. I'd be more interested were it from an even slightly known economist or other dispassionate observer.

What recourse is there to reverse a scam bitcoin transaction? To recover funds from one of the many fraudulent or failed exchanges - the only way to get bitcoin into real money?

At least a banking licence comes with obligations. Cryptocurrency for now comes with blind optimism and utopianism. It's great for a little speculation with some disposable stake money though. :)

> To dismiss something as 'meaningless utopianism' just because it doesn't agree with your personal experience is incredibly naive and shortsighted.

I'm not. That phrase "Smart contracts allowing for autonomous organisations might well be the first time a species is organising itself without a central entity." is ridiculous.

Plenty of organisms organise between individuals without a centralised entity. Look at, for example, Stromatolites, which have been formed by self-organising bacterial colonies for around 3.5 billion years.

> There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting a decentralised alternative to banking.

There are a few, but those edge cases do not add up to it being "inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model". And they don't outweigh the services and capabilities of the bank-mediated model for me, or I imagine many others.

When was the last time the bank froze your assets at the command of the government? I don't imagine it's even on the radar for most folks.

To be clear, I am in no way advocating the view that it is "inevitable that everything in banking/finance will move to a decentralized model". Financial institutions, although not perfect, serve many function which would not be suited to a decentralised model. There is no dichotomy here between traditional banking and decentralised finance.

There is however no reason for banks to have a monopoly on these services and every reason to encourage decentralised systems to develop. You claim that people don't want autonomy when this is clearly untrue. It's easy to assume this if speaking from a position of privilege, however there are more than a few edge cases where autonomy is required. A dissident in HK, an anonymous donor in Turkey, a worker in Venezuela, or perhaps even someone in the West wishing to make an international payment but not wanting to wait 2-5 days for a SWIFT payment to clear whilst also incurring a number of handling and transaction fees.

> You claim that people don't want autonomy when this is clearly untrue.

The vast majority don't. I agree, there are some small edge cases where this may be desirable, but these are neither mass market nor have mass appeal. For most use cases it's worse than the existing system by a long way.

> someone in the West wishing to make an international payment but not wanting to wait 2-5 days for a SWIFT payment to clear whilst also incurring a number of handling and transaction fees.

That person might want to move into the 21st century and stop complaining about things that changed in the 90s. For instance in the EU we can send between countries effectively instantly and mostly free, with fewer middlemen and fees than a similar transfer using cryptocurrency requires. And even to non EU countries the middlemen and fees are pretty low compared to the multiple fees and less than trustworthy parties you need to involve to transfer money using BTC.

And I'm sorry, but I don't believe BTC is much help to that many people in Venezuela or Hong Kong, I believe these are cryptocurrency-enthusiast's fantasies.

> I don't want to be my own bank.

Try living in Cuba, Venezuela, African countries, China etc etc. Actually except from the so called developed countries, people really don't want banks because it's unlike anything you are used to. So the reasoning that in USA we don't need asset sovereignity because the banks are not controlled by some crazy dictator maniacs holds only in USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia more or less.

I believe that in a lot of places where the banking system is less developed, systems like M-Pesa serve the unbanked really quite well.

I also believe that "look, Venezuela" is just the latest in a bunch of straws the cryptocurrency community is grasping at on its way to irrelevance, and very much doubt that on the ground cryptocurrency is helping or ever could help.

Centralization and trust are massive efficiencies as demonstrated by the sheer unparalleled inefficiency of proof of work chains. It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw.

1 bitcoin transaction is 607kWh (is 288kgCO2 and 85g of ewaste). That’s enough spent power to drive a Tesla from SF to San Jose, round trip. Twice. 20 days power consumption for the average US home. At that rate you may as well take physical dollars and drive them to San Jose.

> It blows my mind that hipsters refuse to use single-use straws and try and pay with bitcoin which yields thousands of times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as the straw.

I know, right? Humanity is insane. The world is heading towards a potentially civilization ending climate disaster of its own making, and someone goes and invents an over-complicated solution to largely imagined problems that is wasteful and getting more wasteful to counter efficiency gains by design.

If you're going to make the energy-usage argument you'll need to position it against a comparable alternative, not how far you can drive a Tesla. How much energy does the current financial industry use on a per transaction basis? If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?

> If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?

Yes, on a per transaction basis. You can only have 7tx/sec which means only a tiny tiny number of people could ever use it, and yet it uses as much power as Denmark. Currently nobody uses it and it uses as much power as Denmark. I would rather another Denmark or Austria than an incredibly inefficient payments system. To underscore just how little bitcoin matters ask yourself, if it just disappeared one day would anyone outside the industry even notice? And on that you want to spend an entire nations energy budget?

Visa processes 600,000 transactions in the same energy budget as a single bitcoin payment. Six hundred thousand times more efficient.

I can’t understand why you’d compare it to the entire global financial system when it can’t possibly ever replace even a sliver of it. I could outperform it with a single AWS instance and one table in RDS or DynamoDB.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

> We haven't yet discovered a way to organise a group without the need for a central entity (an alpha male, a government, central banks, etc.)

Markets (at least, free markets) are exactly a way of organizing a group without the need for a central authority.

How many markets have there been in history that don't have some kind of central authority involved - to issue the money used if nothing else?

Edit: Of course there have been barter based markets, but aren't markets actually more effective when there is a central authority?

One can argue black markets don't have a central authority and are more effective

Markets existed millennia before fiat currencies did. Even now, if you look at the world economy instead of an individual economy, there are lots of separate authorities rather than one central one (though, granted, the US government still has quite a bit of power.)

That's not the goal of markets. You don't get to have the Universal market.

A market is a way to organize a group of people in a decentralized way, but its existence and correct operation requires a different, centralized group that manages it. Market participants are decentralized, market regulators are not. Now, the solution for the "what if I don't want centralization in the market regulation space?" problem is recursion. You create a market for markets.

What happens if you don't centralize? You get something like global trade, which is a meta-market for national trade markets (which are centralized). Global trade is decentralized - in the sense that men with most guns tell everyone else what to do, because there's no central authority to prevent that.

You saying like that is a bad thing, but in fact centralisation is something that let us survive through wars, hunger and other hardships.

Thinking is limited by intelligence, so just because you think it's the best solution, doesn't mean it's a universal truth, it only means that maybe the human level of intelligence can't think of a better solution.

Smart Contracts are far more capable on Ethereum, so I don't see Bitcoin as the killer app.

Well bitcoin is a killer app, I didn't talk about it being _the_ killer app.

I also don't think it's smart to compare and take sides when it comes to technology, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both interesting technologies, and one can learn a lot from both.

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