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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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