As always, don't let your coins sit on an exchange. If you don't have the keys, it's not your coins.
It's basically just a digital obstacle course to see who can keep hold of their coins lol. You make fun of people who forget their passwords, you make fun of people who get rekked when an exchange exit scams. You send the wrong Elon bitcoin (both the fake and real ones now accept bitcoin) it's SFYL. Ransomeware? Whoopsie poopsie. SFYL.
It's always the customer's fault, never the technology.
I do wish this Turkish gentleman best of luck building that orphanage in India with Gerald Cotton though. With the billions between them I'm sure the children will be well looked after.
What gives you the right to proclaim what a user wants their software to do?
If it is a feature to some people they are perfectly fine to consider it as such.
What's that? They put their money in a bank? What if the bank owner takes all the money and flees to Venezuela? "You should only use trustworthy banks", you say? Interesting.
My cash in the bank is protected by the US government. If they're not good for it, I've got bigger problems of the "zombie apocalypse" scale.
One important problem of cryptocurrencies is blockchain's immutable nature. This is, of course, by design, but it's not something you actually want for real money. When I fuck up when banking, I can get the bank to reverse it. If the bank fucks up, they can easily undo it, or I can compel them to undo it by proxy of the court (or threat of it). In the fiat world, unmaking a transaction is a relatively cheap operation. On the blockchain, not so much. While we can start piling up social and technological abstractions on top of crypto to allow for decent UX, this also erases the whole selling point of crypto (decentralization, anarchy) - at which point one has to ask, why burn all that energy just to reimplement fiat, poorly?
Wire transfers
As for why people are willing to pay high gas fees on L1 - have you considered the possibility that the opportunities and value that they're getting out of it are worth the cost?
Here's something worth pondering: what happens if you trigger a bug in a smart contract? What options do you have to fix or undo it?
Smart contracts are all bug-ridden by definition - formally codifying intent is a General-AI-complete problem, and since we are nowhere near close to making a human-level AI, it follows that a smart contract is just a crude approximation of the most obvious aspects of what you actually meant it to represent (no different than any other program here). Traditional contracts are smart enough to not even try - they don't codify intent, they just help achieve mutual understanding and pin down shared context for further reference. Interpretation, execution and debugging are all left to the general framework of common sense, tradition, regulations and accumulated case law.
No, you're comparing dissimilar things. Cryptocurrency is cash (with the benefit of not having to be close to someone for a transfer), and you can't "roll back" the giving of cash to someone (except compel them to give it back with the help of a court).
If you want to compare a bank to something, you need to compare it to another custodial/off-chain solution.
If not having to be close to the payee is the only benefit of cryptocurrency over cash, that problem has been solved for literally centuries by the concept of giro transfers.
Tangential:
From Wikipedia, "A giro transfer (...) is a payment transfer from one bank account to another bank account and initiated by the payer, not the payee. The debit card has a similar model."
Maybe it's my European bias speaking, but how does that even deserve a weird name? Isn't this how normal paying works? Who else should initiate the transfer? The payee? Why?
Bank failures are indeed a problem of the banking system. That's also why developed countries impose strict regulations and depository insurance on their banks, so average people do not need to perform costly due diligence on their daily-use bank.
Cryptocurrency exchanges currently dis-favour government regulation, so I doubt they will be seeking a mandatory deposit insurance regime anytime soon. Nothing prevents an exchange from taking out voluntary insurance from a private insurer, but I imagine that the underwriting fees would be costly.
Certainly, but they have a big vested interest in telling their customers "your money is safe with us, we even have the insurance to prove it!".
I also didn't get into it in the parent comment, but deposit insurance also may not be suitable for those who are deliberately taking advantage of the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrency. In the event of an exchange failure, the insurer or trustee would obviously need to know the personal details of the account-holder in order to remit payment. Keeping such contact information up-to-date and verified would replicate many of the same know-your-client rules that exchanges hate to follow.
They may hate to, but do you know any that don't? All the ones I've used asked for ID.
Bitcoin reality: “Buy me because number go up; make the rich richer. Also, use a bank.”
Ledger Hack - What Happened with Pascal Gauthier: «Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, the point is, would you keep $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 in your house? No, that would be crazy; you'd keep it in the bank. And, you have to consider your security is your own personal bank. I mean, I recommend, ever since I've been with Casa, I would recommend everybody who has a serious amount of Bitcoin to consider setting themselves up with that, because it does protect you in so many ways.
Pascal Gauthier: Just on this, you're right, because you asked me the question offline, but multisig is definitely -- this is why I'm saying today, like in the present.» —https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/wbd290-pascal-gauthier
glad to see account abstraction being pushed in optimism and other rollups so we can start building these new mechanisms that arent so hostile.
The "marketing" of "everyone should keep their own wallet" is off, as it was initially only for the computer savvy. But that is also the main selling point. If you want to have it, you get full control.
The average user is better off keeping their coins in an online wallet/exchange. We wouldn't expect them to interact directly with bank/forex/stock back-end networks and not fuck something up. The main difference here is that they can if they want to.
> It's always the customer's fault, never the technology.
No, the field is still green and over-hyped, lots of gullible "investors" coming in, scammers follow. The regulations have not fully caught up.
Even with some regulations, I assure you, if you choose a shady bank or a broker for stocks you can lose your money just as easily. If you don't keep the coins yourself it becomes a question of who to trust. I really don't see what that has to do with "the technology".
Can anyone even cite a single banking exit scam in the United States in recent history? The closest I can think of is Ponzi schemes like Madoff, but those were operated as businesses, not banks.
Meanwhile, we hear about multiple crypto exit scams per year. More if you include all of the suspicious coin disappearances that were blamed on hacks.
It would be nearly impossible for an actual bank owner in the United States to abscond to a foreign country with customer funds and avoid consequences, and even more unlikely that those customers wouldn't be made whole.
But with cryptocurrency banks, being able to abscond with funds and avoid traceability/consequences is almost a core feature.
I don't understand how anyone can think traditional, regulated, insured banks are in any way equivalent to unregulated, international crypto exchanges. The two couldn't be any more different when it comes to safety.
I'm from east EU so I can't comment on US, but we've had at least two major banks go under (that I can remember) due to some shady manipulations. A lot of people lost a lot of money.
> in recent history
Part of my point is that the regulations aren't here yet. We've had hundreds of years of experience with dealing with banks. They're so highly regulated precisely because there's been plenty of fraud.
> regulated, insured banks are in any way equivalent to unregulated, international crypto exchanges
Exactly! They aren't even near equivalent without the regulation. But I don't see why they couldn't come close with proper regulation.
For the vast majority of people, if they do have the keys, their personal security is poor enough that someone will get a copy.
I don't feel bad about it at all, I never imagined or considered it would become what it is and it was just a toy app I ran for a while after SETI@home and Folding@Home got me intrigued with the concept of massively distributed computing.
"Man Has Two Login Attempts Left to Access $220 Million in Bitcoin Before It's All Lost" https://www.newsweek.com/man-has-two-login-attempts-left-acc...
(see also Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/aKXqZh43OH8?t=11)
The issue with someone security conscious like me is that, although you can make many backups, you have to secure each of those backups. The more copies you have the more opportunities for someone to attack, so every backup needs to be fully secure.
Eventually I did such a good job of securing them that I locked myself out.
Lost my time and automated cost basis calculations. No thanks, digital wallets. Time > paranoia.