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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies?

None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.

The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done.

The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.

The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.

Which is like, neat and all. But also infuriating. We don't have crypto-currencies, we just have crypto-banks.

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You're getting a lot of responses, because this is a pretty common complaint about crypto, and it taps into a great "WELL ACTUALLY" moment, because your concern is close enough to the "at least real money is backed by something" misconception (which, tbh, I'm sure you're aware of at this point if you weren't already).

Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can operate regardless of whether or not there are bad actors involved (including and most commonly as the central authority, aka banks). Historically, it's been a lot easier to build systems that don't account for bad actors, and it's been continually problematic for society because that assumption is so obviously and blatantly false.

Maybe crypto, as we know it, isn't the solution, and certainly proof-of-work has serious negative drawbacks. However, with the advent of automated computational devices, the possibility of evolving past our many-thousand year old system of bartering is too enticing to just ignore. We know there's a better way, and the odds we'll nail it on the first try are nearly zero, so I personally welcome any attempts that lurch us forward in the meantime, even if they're not the end destination.

Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.

I think it's backed by the hope that on a couple of years it will be worth lot more (instead of looking backwards, people look forward and hope to get rich).

Why can't it be the hope that it's worth something (not necessarily a lot more)?

That sounds like the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Just because something valuable was already wasted, doesn't make the result valuable.

Agreed, that is why on a long enough timeline someone will end up holding the bag.

A lot of people are comparing crypto to some kind of ponzi pyramid thing, ie a scam where some people will get rich but a lot will suffer. But isn’t that true about everything, ie smarter/more lucky ones will find ways to increase their wealth and those making suboptimal decisions will get broke? It looks like only when it gets obvious how the scheme works it becomes a scam.

The challenge with crypto is it is so easily manipulated/wash traded by those with large holdings. So those who are later to the game (with smaller holdings) are at a systemic disadvantage.

It could stabilize at a price and not crash, but who knows.

I sold most of my crypto because it's too risky/sketchy for me now.

ETH is backed by the distributed computer you can pay ETH to execute software on.

And what is the value of a distributed computer?

Turns out, virtually nil, because it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it, because there is no real-world use case for contracts written as software.

> it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it

That's laughably wrong, go look up how much revenue the Ethereum network is bringing in with smart contract fees.

And what are those smart contract fees being used for?

- Speculators buying ETH to ride the bubble

- A revolving door of Proof-of-concept startups with backing from starry-eyed VCs and no viable business plans that pop up, use a bunch of compute, and then fail, every couple of months.

Ethereum mining conglomerates don't even use Smart Contracts, they just cite "a long history of successful payouts", trust, and old-fashioned promises written in vernacular English.

So you're moving the goalpost from "no users" to "no users I approve of"?

A few other use cases: DeFi (mainly crypto backed loans), NFTs (so far not too interesting to me), distributed ETH2 staking pools, distributed betting markets (the coolest one in my opinion).

No, the goal posts are standing still at "competitively successful commercial activity". The fact that somebody somewhere hammers nails with glass jars doesn't mean that glass hammers are about to take over the hardware world. Early investors getting rich off of a Ponzi scheme doesn't make the Ponzi a good businessman.

DeFi is used almost exclusively as margin for speculation. Since smart contracts have no legal force, the only way lenders can be guaranteed their money back is by demanding collateral that is greater than the value of the loan. When is the last time you needed a loan of $10,000, for which you were happy to put up $15,000 of your own dollars in escrow as collateral, other than securities gambling?

NFTs are just cryptokitties by another name, ETH2 staking pools are just private equity firms but without security because millions of dollars are stolen out of them every year, and crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal.

Which brings us right back to where these conversations always end: the only things blockchain has or will ever be useful for are speculation and obscuring criminal activity.

> nobody is using it > no competitively successful commercial activity

Those are two wildly different claims but I'll bite anyway:

Your argument against DeFi could be made about Schwab, or any brokerage providing margin so I don't find it very compelling. Is selling margin to gamblers not a "competitively successful commercial activity"? Your original claim was that there were no users.

> crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal

That's like saying self driving cars are patently illegal. Of course they are (more illegal than grey market sports betting), but it's a nascent technology and it's not obvious that it will stay illegal.

Now you're just being deliberately obtuse.

> semantics

Every competent English speaker knows that the phrase "nobody uses X" is never meant to be taken literally. When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.

> margin trading

Margin accounts are not commercial activity. When you buy or trade securities, whether on margin or otherwise, no new value is being created, no workers are being paid, no commodities are being traded, no products are being consumed.

The entire market could vanish overnight and nobody would notice, because it isn't doing anything, it's just making increasingly complicated guesses at what other people will do.

> betting is like self-driving cars

Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.

> When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.

Well that's bad analogy, because unlike PowerPC there are more users of Ethereum than ever before, and Ethereum is generating more revenue than ever before.

> Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.

I think you're being obtuse. Ethereum is the new technology here, that enables a distributed betting platform that was previously not possible. Self driving cars are a new technology that enable a type of transportation (existing market, like betting) that previously wasn't possible.

> That's laughably wrong, go look up how much revenue the Ethereum network is bringing in with smart contract fees.

Nobody is using the compute power, though. Can you point to what they are using it for, if you have an example?

What do you mean by compute power? Smart contracts (which run on-chain code) pay fees for each command they execute. The most popular smart contracts are token exchanges and DeFi (ie crypto backed loans).

Having trouble finding the total smart contract revenue, but this article has examples of the top few, and gives an idea of their usage patterns: https://medium.com/@vikati/ranking-ethereum-smart-contracts-...

At least you could try a quick googling before you write a comment.

I love how this comment amounts to "nuh-uh!" because you can't think of a single example even though you're an enthusiast.

The only people using smart-contracts are enthusiasts and proof-of-concept startups that have no traction in the market because smart contracts don't offer any advantage over any other computing system.

So users you don't like?

Somebody, somewhere, is using glass jars to drive nails. That doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job.

I'd modify that to:

"Crypto is 'backed' by the value of the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it."

...which is to say: nothing.

But for as long as collective agreement persists, there is volatility. And where there's volatility, there are profitable trades.

The natural question becomes "Why does, and for how long will, the collective agreement persist?".

For that, I have no answer. :)

We can (and China already does) use energy that would otherwise be wasted to mine bitcoin: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1369007894969122816?s...

This only holds water if you completely disconnect supply from demand, which is obviously ridiculous.

Same here in Iceland where we mine 11% of the btc Network.

Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies are not mined, so where do they get their value from? Plenty of them have high market caps.

I suppose the value is derived from staking your coins on PoS. There is real opportunity cost associated with locking up assets.

This is an interesting thought that crypto (or at least proof of work crypto) is backed by a sunk cost of an otherwise useless task. But let me extend that paradigm: why is (or isn't) gold also not baked by a sunk cost? What was the point of all that expensive mining and digging if not for the sole purpose to extract that shiny metal from the earth's crust?

Mining gold removes it from the earth in the future; mining Bitcoin secures the blockchain in the past.

If the moment you stopped mining gold, it began to sink into the earth again, would the amount of mining you did in the past have value in the future?

To some degree they are similar. The one difference is perhaps that BTC mining income is effectively guaranteed, ie if you join a mining pool and invest enough money, you will get a return of known quantity. In contrast, you could invest a virtually unlimited amount of money in a gold mining operation but not get anything back.

Paper USD is backed by something though isn't it? It's backed by the US Govt. It's backed by the USG guaranteeing they will accept it.

Crypto ain't even backed by that.

It's a misrepresentation, but you're on to something. Crypto is also backed in addition by all the other network participants willing to transact in crypto. which scales log with number of network participants.

I think the mindset of those people who make such arguments are those who want to delegate individual responsibilities that involve such risks to other parties. They might not understand the risk involved when such parties get big enough to dominate and decide what to do and how to do it.

Usually, we commonly agree by coming to consensus on what to do and not to. But here the consensus, sometimes, can get hijacked by the third parties which lot of people don't understand how it happens (read historical events). 2008 banks bailouts is a good example to begin with.

As Satoshi mentioned, in the OG Bitcoin paper, that cryptocurrencies will be attractive to Libertarians. That's a fair assumption as one would start to notice a lot of activities involved in being part of cryptocurrency, atleast currently, requires lot of individual responsibilities, especially maintaining the wallet's credentials. Not to say that they can't be automated away.

Coming to terms with taking individual responsibilities in general is very hard. Most people want others (Government) to do it.

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone.

Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old.

I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed.

No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than controlled by the government.

They are having to mandate cash acceptance at stores now as many would prefer to do away with it.

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are...

The possibility of not getting robbed because you have $4000 cash on the till is a damn killer feature. Sure, this would just lead to an evolution in methodology. but for now its worth it.

Safes exist. There's no reason to have $4000 in a till.

Besides, even without cash, you're still going to get robbed. They'll just take merchandise instead of cash.

I'm old and in the same boat as you, for many years now. I haven't been to a cash machine in years, because maybe once a year I get someone who wants to pay me in cash for something, so that just becomes my "bank" for the year. I use so little cash that just one person paying me for their part of a nice meal is enough for the entire year. Even the vendors on the side of the road prefer Venmo/PayPal now.

Hell, aside from recurring bills, I put everything on credit and then pay it off within the week. That way I get cashback rewards, build credit and can ensure I have the peace of mind of being able to pay for anything at the time of transaction without worrying about shifting money between accounts or where I am in the pay cycle. It also ensures that, due to building my credit score, I have ample credit at my disposal in an emergency situation. And, of course, the antifraud benefits are immeasurable.

Those 1% cash back rewards cost everybody you buy from 3%

That sounds like a complaint to take to your representatives. It won't be solved with a boycott of using credit cards.

My understanding is that Europe has strict limits on credit card fees, and as such, most cards in Europe don't have rewards.

As someone who comes from a working class background, I hate this system. Credit is something that ought to be abolished in its current form. Credit card companies and banks abuse this system to offer overpriced loans to desperate people, and they oversell the convenience to working class folks, encouraging them to buy things on credit they otherwise couldn’t afford... Now they most likely will pay their credit card bill at the end of the month, but at the cost of not having any money for the rest of the month.

Moving to America I was horrified to learn that in order to get applicable for loans (including home loans) I had to “work up my credit”, which includes maxing out on credit cards and then paying it back. As a teenager I made it my philosophy (experiencing second hand stress from the people around me) never to get a credit card. Now if I want to have a realistic opportunity to buy a house here I’m forced to abandon this philosophy and to the thing that kept my mom in constant state of stress. This credit system ought to be abolished.

From my personal perspective, credit cards are a systematic way to bamboozle the working class into over-consuming and keep them in constant state of dept. And to reward the wealthy for the same behavior, which only serves to shove it in the face of poor folks that the rich get away with everything. This system ought to be abolished.

Save the risk of forgery, physical cash is still the only way for a seller to guarantee the dollar value of a transaction with an unknown buyer. Otherwise Paypal could block it, or your bank, or the buyer could reverse the charge, or whatever.

And that's why plenty of businesses still only take cash. Casinos want cash for chips. Peter Luger's still only takes cash. When you buy something like a dog from a breeder, it will be in cash. Any transaction where person on the other end has little recourse if your payment didn't go through will be in cash. Or if the business is popular enough to force it (in the case of Luger's).

I've never been robbed for cash. I have had my bank account emptied multiple times though, recently too.

When I hand cash over to someone, I know how much is leaving and coming back right then and there. When I fill out a payment form with my card details I'm handing over my entire balance into the ether. I could be sleeping and quietly money is leaving my bank account, which happened. So cash is king still.

Plus it's generational. If I said walkman's are the best I would guess you have a different response, more digital based I imagine.

You're aware that your experiences are not universal though, yes? Anecdotally, I know far more people who have been mugged than had their accounts zeroed out. I actually know more people who have been passed counterfeit money than have had their accounts zeroed as well!

It's also hard to have silverfish eat your bank account balance, or have your credit card account catch fire and disappear.

https://pestrepublic.com/do-silverfish-eat-money-how-to-keep...

I'm curious how your bank account is being emptied so often?

and what his account number and pin are!

I work in digital marketing so generally I make purchases for random ebooks, courses etc. Chrome tells me that basically every major website has been hacked or exposed.

But here is my PIN **

This sounds really stupid. No bank allows it here. You get redirected to the bank's site and are asked to confirm the transaction with all the details including the amount of money, plus there's an OTP pin required. Maybe it's the damn socialism protecting it's citizens with regulations again.

Card not present is the bane of the ecommerce world. Which is how most fraud is done but it makes it very easy for banks to recover it.

As you've discovered yourself once last year, the option of using cash (without permission / knowledge of a third party) is more important than actually using it.

This is the same misleading argument as when people claim that BTC is in practice equivalent to USD as most people just keep it on exchanges (same as USD in banks). Yes, but BTC/crypto also gives you one new option, i.e. not keepign money on an exchange ("being your own bank"). You're free to take that option, or not - but it exists.

> No one I know uses physical cash anymore.

But physical cash should always be an option. You can't have a truly free society without it. Some intermediary could always have control over your transactions.

It's much easier to imagine a scenario where physical money is controlled by an outside force than crypto. Holding physical zimbabwean dollars, for example, did not ensure you held anything of value.

I think arguing that control over crypto transactions is more likely than the devaluing of physical currencies is a little far-fetched since we've seen plenty of the former without much of an example of any centralized power being able to control users actions on the internet.

Just think of all the wealth changing hands on the internet today against the will of governments.

> Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old.

No need to be ageist. It's a fair perspective. There is a quality of independence and agency that comes from being able to purchase things with cash.

Ironically, your weed transaction is a perfect example of that. I am a little confused by your argument though. Are you saying that you used cash because you couldn't pay legally with a debit/credit card or something? How come you didn't you use crypto? That aside, even with cash you were able to come to an independent accord (without the gov) and trade value for value. You could almost call it a barter, if you really consider cash to be a relic.

Despite having laws against this, society is mostly okay with some gray area around "off the books" transactions - which is why you can brag about it online and no one really cares, much like jaywalking.

More options for independent transactions don't necessarily hurt, but they do muddy the waters. The thing about cash is, since it is so commonly used, people generally understand what it is worth.

If I sell a TV for $100 on Craigslist, I take my $100 and I have a good idea of what I can buy at the grocery store with that. Offer to trade me 0.0020 BTC (~$100 right now) and I'm less likely to engage in the transaction because I don't understand its inherent value. You could even offer me 0.0022 BTC ($110) and I'd pass. How much gas can I buy with 0.0022 BTC? Do any gas stations around me take BTC? Do I need to convert it? I don't know. Add even more cryptos and it becomes even less clear...

I'm not against more options. More crypto options = more ability to barter. You and your dealer can decide to transact in Pokémon cards and no one's going care. But I do not see it being some sort of fix-all for the downsides to cash.

Re. buying/selling with BTC, one other problem is stability of value. Without stability, usability as a currency becomes hard. How does one even list items' cost in BTC when the value of BTC is constantly fluctuating?

There are stablecoins on Ethereum that fix that problem. Some of them are derivatives backed by nothing but ETH.

So, right back to fiat!

No reason we couldn't peg those to the price of gold, a basket of commodities, or of consumer goods.

Cash’s no. 1 use case in the 21st century is tax evasion. Most people just refuse to acknowledge that because they like evading taxes.

I’m sure there are ways to use cryptocurrency to do the same.

There are certainly a lot of people who use it for tax evasion, to be sure. One interesting tangible example that this problem exists is the recent removal of large bank notes by the Indian Central Bank, which was done expressly to combat tax evasion and money laundering.

The fact that lots of people in India have had serious issues because they were unbanked does seem to indicate that there's a sizable population of people using cash for everything*. I'm curious if there's any research into whether that's for tax-evasion reasons or for some other reason.

My personal belief is that the number one use is for money laundering, and that people who are using it that way would be willing to pay taxes on the money they are laundering from some other illegal activity. For instance, there are all-cash drug dealers who pay taxes on their drug money. I'm sure Al Capone wishes in retrospect that he'd paid taxes...

> My personal belief is that the number one use is for money laundering...

Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? One thing you realize quite quickly is that your debit card is useless. That doesn’t mean transactions stop, people are still buying and selling, those with cash at least. If there’s runs on banks, infrastructure outages, etc, those relying entirely on debit and other payment cards won’t be buying food!

That's a reason why you might have cash, not why you would use it. For example, you might own a gun in case society collapses. It stays locked in a hard to find place in your house. You don't walk down the street with it on your hip. Similarly, you don't pay for goods and services with cash when you're not in a crisis unless you're breaking some law, whether or not you want to figure out if you are or not.

There's something like $13 trillion in consumer spending in the US each year, and something like 9% of that is in cash.

That's like $1.2 trillion in boring, normal, law-abiding cash transactions each year.

What makes you think that it's law-abiding? You're aware that literally the entire goal of money laundering is to appear law-abiding, yes?

What country are you from? I’ve only seen this kind of hate towards cash in the European countries. Last time in Sweden and ask to use cash they looked like they were about to kick me out of the store.

You should get out of your bubble more?

Heh, I’ve been to about 30 countries, how about you?

112, disaster response is a great way to see the world.

Do you seriously think that even a large minority of cash transactions are somehow related to natural disasters...?

So logically we get rid of it since most transaction don’t happen for those reasons? Is my point invalidated in any way if a majority of cash transactions are not during a natural disaster?

You replied to, and quoted, a comment about the majority of cash transactions. Your point is entirely irrelevant to that discussion.

Also, for the record, I have been in and responded to a number of natural disasters in the "first world". With the exception of a few hours here and there, using cards was never a problem. If the infrastructure is so wrecked that cards don't work, food/water is coming from people in high-vis vests.

No my point is relevant and struck a nerve, hence the hostile replies. Keep loving digital currencies tho.

Try a hurricane, or something serious enough to be registered as a natural disaster.

I doubt that’s true. It doesn’t seem to work out logically.

Lets say for the sake of argument that you are right, and the no. 1 use case of cash is to evade taxes. Then the people getting payed for their tax-free labor will need to use this cash somehow. The easiest (and cheapest) is simply to circulate the money while buying regular goods and services. So buying of regular goods and services would rise to be at least as popular use case of cash as tax evasion is.

Also note that there are plenty of people willing to pay tax for their transaction, but the transaction is made illegal by their government and hence they cannot. Then the reason to use cash is not tax evasion, but illegal transaction, (note that this includes paying and receiving salaries for people not allowed to work because of immigration status). Tax evasion then becomes a happy byproduct of the no. 1 reason for using cash, illegal transaction.

But I honestly doubt that either illegal transactions, nor tax evasion comes even close to why most people use cash. Convenience. Though I could be persuaded if I saw some data pointing to the opposite.

Seriously, cash is awesome:

* If I want to get payed quickly for a quick job, cash is the preferred payment method.

* If I immigrate to a country where I am not allowed to work legally, cash would be my preferred payment method.

* If I’m buying something illegal (including labor from a person not allowed to work in my country) cash is the preferred payment method.

* I can use cash to pay for products in the farmstand across the street without any transaction fees or 3rd party apps.

* I can use cash during a week long blackout.

* I can use cash without an internet access.

Parent might not personally use cash. But for many people around the world cash is by far the most convenient payment method. And for many less privileged people cash is the only payment method.

If you want a hipper, 21st-century term all the yutes love, cash is peer-to-peer.

Crypto-currencies don't provide a way to transfer value peer-to-peer, online, just a third party that is (hopefully) neutral.

If you both have full node bitcoin wallets it's possible, just like how it worked in the first place. But having a full node on your computer takes up >350GB of space now, so I doubt there's too many people that still do that.

Is this true? You still need connections to the rest of the network so that you know your block chain is the longest one and you get the number of confirmations that both of you feel is sufficient to remove double-spend risk. So it's not really just between the two of you, even if you both have full nodes. Right?

run a pruned node and it only takes up 3Gb

Maybe you’re just too young but it’s still recommended to store your fancy digital cash in offline paper wallets. Maybe research what happened with Mt Gox :)

>Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction.

That's only true if you discount the US government as the third party (at least for USD$) who are involved in every transaction, by virtue of them needing to exist for the $ to have any value or for the seller to accept the $ in the first place i.e for them to know it will still be worth something in 3 weeks when they want to spend it.

Eh, it's arguable how much the US Government is determining the worth of dollars rather than cultural consensus. I can guarantee that in the event of a zombie apocalypse where the government falls, USD would be used for a long time after.

the us government is a cultural consensus, just like the dollar. there's not much space between the two.

I don't think it would. In a zombie (or other type) apocalypse dollars have zero value. You can't eat them or use them as fuel. Gold may have value as a medium of exchange but it would quickly revert to barter system for food, fuel etc.

What good is selling food for dollars if you can't spend those dollars next week? Better to swap the food for another good which can be used or exchanged.

Gold is a terrible medium of exchange. People would continue using dollars for a long time because they still exist

Just existing doesn't give them value. After an apocalypse event, even with some sort of US military and US government functioning dollars will lose their fungibility quickly. What could happen is an increased supply of them e.g unprotected banks/vaults could be robbed. But this would have the effect of making more dollars available, so although they exist they are not scarce, if they are not scarce then why would I swap them for 10gallons of fuel? ATMs would be easily looted and are widely located.

> I can guarantee that in the event of a zombie apocalypse where the government falls, USD would be used for a long time after.

This seems like a strange guarantee, I think it's incorrect, and I would have absolutely no way in a zombie apocalypse to hold you to the guarantee. Which is, inherently, why I think it's incorrect.

A zombie apocalypse would lead to a collapse in production and thus eliminate the ability to exchange USD for physical goods and services. Currency is just a points system used to allocate resources. It's a necessary evil. If we could allocate resources in a more effective way we would do it.

What resources does Bitcoin allocate? Isn't Bitcoin merely glorifying the concept of currencies but without anything to justify its existence? Since when did we ever talk about the USD (or any other currency) as being an end in itself rather than a means to an end?

That's any fiat currency, though. But if you think not being backed by something tangible is bad, wait until you hear about 51% attacks...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp

Kinda like you waking up to a brand-new bank account, with proof! The only thing stopping 51% on BitCoin is the cost of mounting one: were it a smaller crypto currency, it would be at risk. (I'm pretty sure I got that right, but I'll be corrected if I didn't!)

A smaller currency would be at risk but the upside would also be smaller. Generally speaking there doesn't seem to be an incentive large enough to justify the enormous costs associated with a 51% attack.

I'm probably speaking _way_ out of my league here, but I imagine it's somehow spoofable, kinda like how you can generate fake MACs or IPs, so why not? One terrifying/beautiful element of tech is that where there's a will there's a way!

It's spoofable in the same way that a hash collision or guessing a password is "spoofable", given infinite time and / or energy you could. But the chain would move on while you're generating your spoof, and you're limited by the constraints of the physical world and your available computing power.

Not exactly... You just need the majority to agree that the new manipulated chain is the real chain. You don't need to find a SHA256 collision.

> The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.

> The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.

And what would be, at least intuitively, a solution to the "you can copy bits, give them away but also keep a valid copy for yourself" problem which is a problem for currency but also the default way digital information work?

If you had access to a near-perfect money printing machine, you would have just the same problem, we are just "saved" by the implementation difficulty. Just the same as with the ledger approach.

Hmm. But the ledger is the solution to that problem. You hand someone the sequence of bits, the ledger authoritatively rules that they are now the holder of those bits, and not you.

> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.

Many of the other comments have pointed out how money doesn't have this quality either. This comparison is a wash: buy gold if that's your goal (at least until we find/mine a gold-laden asteroid).

The other comparison is who you have to trust to insure the value of that currency. In the case of cash, it is your government/Treasury. In the case of cryptocurrency, it is mathematics. I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash...

That's why I have a small clutch of proof-of-stake.

>I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash...

Have you ever thought about how to boost the economy and thus the ability to exchange zimbabwean dollars for more services and goods? Because that is what is necessary to get the zimbabwean dollar back in order.

Anything whose price is going up is scare and its domestic production must be expanded.

Yes, you have to do the opposite of what the government did (printing more cash): remove money from circulation. The Zimbabwean dollar ceases to exist, regardless. They have adopted forex, usually ZAR and USD.

My main point is that fiat currency implies trust in some entity. Zimbabwean vendors have chosen to trust the South African and US governments.

You can do that with the lightning network. The problem is double spend. With cash, it’s hard to copy. With anything electronic, it’s trivial to copy. That’s why it has to be a ledger. Notice visa requires internet connection as wel

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done.

Fiat is also moving in this direction. Credit cards, are just exchanging bits, and in Asia, with Alipay and WeChat pay you are just scanning QR codes. At least with (good) crypto currencies is you can remove the third-party from the equation.

There still remains the problem of having your transaction broadcast to the entire network, but I think that is also a solvable problem.

With money though there's still someone who needs to make it "money". It's printed, its supply is controlled, its integrity is enforced. Otherwise it's just paper with numbers on it.

With crypto all of this is taken care of by the network, and with the truly decentralized networks (not all of them are) anyone can be part of the network. No one "owns" the ledger. In my mind this has successfully created something that is more free (as in speech) than any previous form of "money" other than gold.

There are third parties involved with exchanging cash, even though it might not be obvious. Central banks take part indirectly in these transactions, since they guarantee the value of the money.

The double spending problem is not a problem; it was solved already with BTC. You can always have your crypto on a physical drive, which kinda makes it like cash in the sense that you can have it in your hands like cash.

> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.

This is the same when people's net worth is discussed though. To the average individual that hears a net worth it almost feels like they think it's cash money. But it's on paper, as in sell all the shares of businesses and assets to cash it in.

Perception is the mother of all great products and marketing.

There is nothing stopping you from signing a crypto transaction by hand using your private key from memory and handing someone an envelope.

Except that's like giving someone your ATM card and PIN code instead of handing them $5 for said sandwich.

no its not, sign a TX and let the new owner broadcast it whenever he wants to (if ever)

Alice has never given Bob her bank account, more like created another account just for Bob

Signing the transaction does zip to block a double-spend without committing it to the ledger. The buyer could walk around town signing dozens of transactions for the same money and only the first seller to submit the transaction gets the money.

There's a similar problem with handing someone the private key to a wallet with a pre-set amount of money as an offline transaction. Besides not being able to verify the amount in the wallet without checking with the central ledger, you also don't know that the other party isn't handing out the same private key to multiple people.

Paper money or even metal money can be counterfeited, sure, but in low-counterfeiting environments individuals transacting can verify the authenticity of the script locally with reasonable confidence, without consulting a (distributed, decentralized) third-party to verify.

I'm not an export but i can print off a wallet key and give it to someone, on paper or usb. Sure i can give that same wallet to someone else but it's pretty quick to check the value of a wallet before accepting it.

Why do you even need physical cash? I can carry my countries currency around with me easily enough but i generally don't bother as i don't ever need to.

Other than literal precious metal coins - everything else is a share of existing or future value - it's a credit to acquire material possessions.

Take an example of burning $100 bill. You aren't destroying more than the piece of paper, because the destroyed value is instantly shared between every other unit of currency.

cash is just a physical distributed ledger

there are many problems with bitcoin but this really isn't one of them. most dollars aren't real either. dollar transactions bounce all the time.

and there will always be some kind of cash counterpart to any electronic payment system. how else would people buy contraband or work under the table?

>The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.

I mean, you're not wrong, but this is where the cryptographic elements actually take place.

There was an article linked on HN talking about exactly this.

https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

> The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

With an offline wallet we can just give each other some tokens? The ledger is just to keep track of it.

This is why it will be very handy for African countries where no-one has a bank account but they do have cell-phones.

Cryptocurrency solves for the issue of two people that don't trust each other transacting. How do I know the $100 bill you're handing me isn't fake?

Give "Debt the first 5000 years" a read. Not sure it will change your view but it definitely provides a lot of interesting context.

> None of them are actually money

only because the US Gov didn't classify it as money for tax purposes...

You should look into Nano, it covers a lot of this.

Banks are what establish what is money, and taking ourselves as individuals, if one doesn't accept that reality, then one gets out of sync with society quickly.

Historically the events that caused this mode of exchange to be locked in were out of the hands of anyone but key economic players - world leaders and top advisors and the like. Some of them are still alive and have vested stake in the continuance of their own power.

The reset away from this depends on the incompetence and failure of institutions that otherwise permeate every aspect of modern civilization. Financial capitalism's fall will be a very big problem in its own right.

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