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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns. Understanding this may necessitate reading some books, but in short, sovereigns have historically proven to be untrustworthy, so a trust-free form of money is a powerful notion.

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Of all the world ills I can think of, none are caused by money as means of exchange or by trust systems more broadly. Crypto isn’t going to do anything for global warming or for rampant inequality caused by the unstoppable compounding growth of big capital (in fact it may do the opposite).

The premise that trust systems have failed humanity is flawed. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise but I doubt this will come from reading “a couple books” because as it stands I firmly believe that the idea is complete nonsense.

This book is the best summary that I can give you to being persuaded. Bitcoin's price movement is just a market signal that there's something deeply wrong and unfair with the current financial system. The more you learn about it, the more you can profit from the huge value transfer that's going on in front of your eyes. If you want a link, I suggest hope.com as well (as I could suggest many others, but what's important is that the ROI of learning about the reason for Bitcoin is huge).

> Bitcoin's price movement is just a market signal that there's something deeply wrong and unfair with the current financial system

Sorry but this sounds like the conspiracy drivel commonly heard in crypto circles. To a reasonable person, Bitcoin's price movement is a market signal of people speculating and trying to become richer - simple as. Occam's Razor, and all that.

That's true of every asset in the world. But it doesn't explain why Bitcoin is the best performing asset in the history of humankind for more than 10 years now. Bitcoin as a software is very simple, you can code it in a day in a high level language. But if you don't take the time to go deep on monetary history to see why a money takes over another (or not), you'll miss out on huge gains.

All reasonal people start as Bitcoin skeptics BTW, that's fine.

> Crypto isn’t going to do anything for global warming

Actually this is a pretty good example of a problem that quadratic funding has a good chance of helping with. It's really hard to coordinate all nations on Earth but not actually that hard to coordinate people from all over the Earth. https://wtfisqf.com/

so instead of sovereign powers, we should hand our monetary policy to the neo-nobility that is large stakeholders (PoS) or the sovereign granted patents in ASIC mining in PoW coins? I feel like we're just shifting who to trust and not the fact that we all have trust; haven't even touched the whole idea of having to on-ramp/off-ramp fiat on central exchanges with sovereign backed currencies.

One could argue that Ethereum like any other cryptocurrency is under the strict control of the development team, though.

Such team undergoes way less scrutiny than any trading firm or sovereign nation, probably.

> The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns.

Do you believe that any existing cryptocurrencies currently fulfill that criterion?

Yes.

This may not be the case with any crypto currencies soon. The entire asset class is already way beyond 'let the geeks play with it' stage. It's taxed,it can be seized and banned all together,if that's what governments want. Not quite the freedom tbh..

sure, I can agree, but surely a form of money that fluctuates like crazy and needs people to read books about it to understand it is not going to convince the people that need this kind of system the most.

I would like to see a scenario where not one but several sovereign fiat currencies have utterly failed and yet ETH is still useful.

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