"Not your keys, not your crypto" -- but only in the minds of "crypto-enthousiasts" that's a feature rather than a bug
Every Bitcoin thread on HN attracts crypto proponents who try to compare cryptocurrency to storing cash under your mattress or keeping gold bars in your basement, when that comparison is useless for 99% of people who wisely choose to use modern banking systems and all of the protections they afford.
Cryptocurrency also attracts people who like the complexity and rituals of managing it all. Playing with crypto wallets and blockchains and different ways of moving numbers around is fun to a lot of people, and they don’t understand why the things they enjoy are actually a hassle to everyone else.
Finally, crypto enthusiasts love the scarcity of their crypto, so seeing other people lose crypto makes their own holdings more valuable. It financially benefits them each time coins are lost forever, because the market cap stays high but those lost coins will never be sold, removing them from downward price pressure.
We just don't like the costs typically associated with these nice things. We gain protections and stability but in exchange we are subjected to the whims of government: arbitrary freezing of accounts, invasion of privacy, erosion of freedom, abusive taxation, highly inflationary monetary policy... It's no wonder people like a system that lets them escape all of that if they want.
A bug is something unintentional. I guess you don't carry any cash or drive a car either, since 'anyone can take it and you have zero recourse'. Stealing cryptocurrency is still illegal.
> It's one of the "original sins" if you will. Because that's not what anyone actually wants.
It may not be what you want, but if you need to send money electronically to another person somewhere else in the world you might think differently. If you are tired of your credit card number getting passed around you might like being able to see a transaction, approve it and be done with it. If you live in a country with hyperinflation or banking controls it could be the separation between two very different lifestyles. I can guess ahead of time that you will move the goal posts here from 'no one wants it' to 'I don't see people doing that'.
> I've never met anyone who was thrilled by the prospect that if anything went wrong nobody could help them.
Even when people lose cryptocurrency it is either from losing access to the keys or being scammed. The idea that people actually get their own keys is much more rare. Modern banking solves some problems of reversibility, but the same could easily be applied to cryptocurrency. The reverse - being able to use money electronically, peer to peer, without a third party, is not something the modern banking system has given anyone yet.
Yes, I literally do not carry cash, not more than $20, for exactly that reason. And neither does anyone else I know of not actively involved in a drug deal.
I do not however see why you mentioned a car, that's a tool, not a store of value. I don't transact car.
> Stealing cryptocurrency is still illegal.
Code is law. It's not stealing if you take it from a smart contract. Like a DAO. I'm sure the illegality of their actions is of big consolation to every Turkish person right now. I hear there was an exit scam.
> It may not be what you want, but if you need to send money electronically to another person somewhere else in the world you might think differently.
It's not what anyone wants. That's why Visa offers chargebacks and all issuers have fraud departments.
Let me ask you this: when was the last time you heard any customer gripe at the merchant, "man, I really really wish I couldn't charge you back in the event this product isn't as advertised and you refuse to help me out -- what a nightmare!" Chargebacks are the reason e-commerce is even a thing. The only way people trusted websites to pay for stuff is safe in the knowledge if shit hit the fan they had someone to sort it out.
> If you live in a country with hyperinflation or banking controls it could be the separation between two very different lifestyles. I can guess ahead of time that you will move the goal posts here from 'no one wants it' to 'I don't see people doing that'.
Do people in hyperinflationary countries use it? No, because they don't want their currency to drop 30% overnight like BTC did this week. That's just as bad if not worse than their home currency. Worse, in the sense it comes with a $50 transaction fee, which is a months salary in a lot of these places.
Not to mention the value of the crypto assets these Turks held dropped to 0 the second their bank fled to Thailand with them.
> The reverse - being able to use money electronically, peer to peer, without a third party, is not something the modern banking system has given anyone yet.
And yet it works great. Almost like it's not something people need. Or want! Because intermediaries add value. That's why we pay them.
It could be taken from you with 'no recourse'.
> Code is law.
No it isn't
> It's not stealing if you take it from a smart contract. Like a DAO. I'm sure the illegality of their actions is of big consolation to every Turkish person right now. I hear there was an exit scam.
What kind of goal post moving nonsense is this? First you were talking about basic general cryptocurrency, now you are on to exotic ethereum specific stuff for some reason instead of confronting what you said before.
> It's not what anyone wants.
I just explained why that isn't true. Repeating your assertions doesn't mean anything.
> That's why Visa offers chargebacks and all issuers have fraud departments.
Visa is not a currency. There are debit cards that can be recharged with cryptocurrencies. This has been explained to you many times.
> when was the last time you heard any customer gripe at the merchant, "man, I really really wish I couldn't charge you back in the event this product isn't as advertised and you refuse to help me out -- what a nightmare!
When was the last time you heard someone say they wished transactions would take a month instead of a few minutes? Also again, credit cards are not currencies. Credit cards are a service and they add 3% on to everything you buy from their transaction fees.
Crypto currencies and credit cards can both be used to make transactions electronically, that single overlapping use case does not make them 1:1 substitutions for each other.
> Do people in hyperinflationary countries use it?
Called it. Also, yes they do. For all the volatility of cryptocurrencies, in places like venezuela, argentina zimbabwe, russia and many other places that have had huge currency crisies, having something volatile is better than having something rapidly diminishing.
> Worse, in the sense it comes with a $50 transaction fee, which is a months salary in a lot of these places.
Bitcoin is useless at this point. Any cryptocurrency besides bitcoin and ethereum fill these roles. Bitcoin was intentionally crippled, the technology obviously works.
> Not to mention the value of the crypto assets these Turks held dropped to 0
I think even you understand that having the assets you have a claim to stolen is not the same as having those assets 'drop to 0'.
> And yet it works great.
It works great for you, but you don't live in a country with massive inflation or banking controls. You don't need to send remittances. You aren't trying to get paid by someone in another country for freelance work.
> Because intermediaries add value. That's why we pay them.
This is not an argument anyone made in a general sense.
> Almost like it's not something people need.
Someone in Greenland might say that no one needs air conditioning and someone in Malaysia might say that no one needs a furnace to heat their house. They would both be exceptionally selfish and myopic positions to take. It is also objectively not true.
Yeah, no, that's simply not true. There's lo-jacks, there's DOT owned cameras, there's the police. There's a ton of recourse afforded by the legal system. You know, with the police and the judges and the whatnot?
It's asinine to make this argument.
> Code is law. - No it isn't.
Well you should tell the Ethereum foundation lol.
> What kind of goal post moving nonsense is this? First you were talking about basic general cryptocurrency, now you are on to exotic ethereum specific stuff for some reason instead of confronting what you said before.
"Code is law" is a smart contract expression, I'm sure you know that. As for stealing crypto, it's a question of possession being 9/10ths of the law for an asset class designed to circumvent efforts to reclaim it or prevent its transaction.
> I just explained why that isn't true. Repeating your assertions doesn't mean anything.
You explained nothing.
> Visa is not a currency. There are debit cards that can be recharged with cryptocurrencies. This has been explained to you many times.
Because it's a really strange distinction to make for a unit that marries the two together. Sorry, if you build a hybrid of a currency and a transaction system you have to defend its role as both.
> When was the last time you heard someone say they wished transactions would take a month instead of a few minutes? Also again, credit cards are not currencies. Credit cards are a service and they add 3% on to everything you buy from their transaction fees.
I have no idea what kind of transaction you're talking about, and it's clear you don't either. Anything that takes a while is simply factored via lending. This is not a problem that exists in reality, just contrived.
That 3%, by the way, exists primarily in the US. Visanet takes about 0.1%, the rest is passed on to the issuing bank where it offsets the cost of loan origination and servicing, and paying rewards to customers. The interchange rate varies by card type. This also pays for insurances, and things like chargebacks. Things customers want.
In the EU it's 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, and they just don't have rewards programs. Australia is also a capped interchange market.
By the way, acceptance of credit increases average ticket size for merchants about 20%, and reduces their costs associated with managing cash.
This is a disingenuous argument based on a total lack of understanding of the modern financial system.
> Called it. Also, yes they do. For all the volatility of cryptocurrencies, in places like venezuela, argentina zimbabwe, russia and many other places that have had huge currency crisies, having something volatile is better than having something rapidly diminishing.
I'm sorry but they don't. The countries with the largest crypto penetration are Nigeria (where it's now illegal and dropping) and the US. It's less than 5% in the US and less than 1% globally.
It's been 13 years. There's high school students younger than Bitcoin. Nobody in these countries is interested in paying a months salary in transaction fees for a coffee - or to dump their live savings into an easily scammable store of value that fluctuates 20% day over day. [citaiton needed] on your part.
> Bitcoin is useless at this point. Any cryptocurrency besides bitcoin and ethereum fill these roles. Bitcoin was intentionally crippled, the technology obviously works.
Competitors are only cheap because nobody uses them. This is the crypto way.
> I think even you understand that having the assets you have a claim to stolen is not the same as having those assets 'drop to 0'.
It is if the intrinsic characteristics of the currency are the reason you no longer have it. Trustlessness, censorship resistance, decentralization - this is why $2B could flee in the first place. And be fenced. You can't do that with traditional currencies.
> It works great for you, but you don't live in a country with massive inflation or banking controls. You don't need to send remittances. You aren't trying to get paid by someone in another country for freelance work.
Sure, I do, thanks to TransferWise Borderless, something thats "been explained to you many times" to borrow a turn of phrase.
> Someone in Greenland might say that no one needs air conditioning and someone in Malaysia might say that no one needs a furnace to heat their house. They would both be exceptionally selfish and myopic positions to take. It is also objectively not true.
And everyone would say we don't need to spend a country of power so some ancaps can trade spreadsheet cells :)
And if someone steals the keys to cryptocurrency you can transfer your balance before. If someone scraps a car, you don't get it back. The asinine argument would be to pretend cryptocurrency is somehow unique here.
> Well you should tell the Ethereum foundation lol.
You brought up ethereum stuff as a diversion and a gish gallop instead of admitting that what you originally said was not just hyperbolic but a lie. This has nothing to do with anything except for you to ignore what contradicts everything you say.
> I have no idea what kind of transaction you're talking about, and it's clear you don't either. Anything that takes a while is simply factored via lending. This is not a problem that exists in reality, just contrived.
Once again, just because you don't know something, it doesn't mean that no one else does. How do you think charge backs work? Credit card transactions take a month to clear and make it to the vendor.
> That 3%, by the way, exists primarily in the US.
And? You were making an argument that credit cards somehow negate benefits of cryptocurrencies.
> By the way, acceptance of credit increases average ticket size for merchants about 20%, and reduces their costs associated with managing cash.
And? This isn't about credit cards, you said no one wanted anything that cryptocurrency does.
> I'm sorry but they don't. The countries with the largest crypto penetration are Nigeria (where it's now illegal and dropping) and the US. It's less than 5% in the US and less than 1% globally.
They do. Again, repeating your assertions isn't evidence. First you said no one uses it and no one wants it. Now you are back peddling into saying "it's only millions of people". Here is some actual information instead of hallucinated nonsense to try to shift around from your original claims - 106 million people are estimated to be cryptocurrency users.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-u...
> It's been 13 years. There's high school students younger than Bitcoin.
This means nothing.
> Nobody in these countries is interested in paying a months salary in transaction fees for a coffee -
No one is making an argument for bitcoin. I explicitly said that already and you copied and pasted it. Then you still argue against something you hallucinated.
> or to dump their live savings into an easily scammable store of value that fluctuates 20% day over day. [citaiton needed] on your part.
All of this is nonsense and reeks of desperate frustration to validate hating something instead of understanding it.
> Competitors are only cheap because nobody uses them. This is the crypto way.
Bitcoin Cash has more transactions that bitcoin and 32x the transaction throughput. Monero has a dynamically increasing block size with gradual penalties for outlier large blocks. What you are saying is completely disproven by these two examples alone.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.ht...
> It is if the intrinsic characteristics of the currency are the reason you no longer have it. Trustlessness, censorship resistance, decentralization - this is why $2B could flee in the first place. And be fenced. You can't do that with traditional currencies.
They didn't really have it in the first place, just like paypal. They had a number and never touched cryptocurrencies. You should tell all the people with frozen paypal accounts that this "can't happen with traditional currencies". You should also tell the citizens of Moldova.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_bank_fraud_scandal
You should also tell the Bangladesh bank that was hacked and -used to make over $100 million in SWIFT transactions from the Federal Reserve in New York-. They would be pleased to know this can't happen with "traditional currencies".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
> Sure, I do, thanks to TransferWise Borderless
That's interesting that you mention them, since they make heavy use of ACH, which takes 3-4 business days to clear, and receiving USD wire transfers costs $7.50.
Once again though, you said "no one wants" cryptocurrencies. 100 million people want them and your own anecdotes don't mean anything.
> And everyone would say we don't need to spend a country of power so some ancaps can trade spreadsheet cells :)
This is nonsense to avoid talking about reality.
> All of this is nonsense and reeks of desperate frustration to validate hating something instead of understanding it.
I understand the system plenty, the difference is I look at it objectively, and you're not. You drank the kool-aid and got swept away.
tl;dr:
Cryptocurrencies are poor currencies because they're broadly speaking deflationary. That's not something we want in currencies, as it reduces the velocity of money and leads to a slower economy. They can't react to shocks, they can't react to population changes and hard currency exacerbates economic instability. Currencies only need to hold their value for as long as you possess them, be fungible (cryptos largely are not) and be cheap or free to transact anything else is a non-goal. Crypto prices are backed by Paolo's Bahamian money printer and enthusiasm. They're intrinsically inefficient because decentralization is inefficient. They're actively user-hostile because transactions are irreversible and they're super easy to lose. Not to mention they flail around wildly both up and down. Awful currency.
They're poor assets because Cryptocurrencies are negative sum vehicles. Any wealth generation is purely illusory. For every $1 you put into the system less than $1 can leave because miners extract the delta. This is simply a system to transfer wealth from new market participants to old market participants.
A business generates revenue which is used to repurchase shares, issue dividends or grow the intrinsic value of a business.
They're not actually better at anything than a classical implementation.
The actual issues in the traditional finance system can just as easily be solved within it. ACH is a great example. It's deprecated, on its way to being replaced with RTP, which settles instantly, no blockchain needed. Fedwires settle instantly and a number of US banks offer them free of charge.
If you understood a bit more about traditional finance you'd see your arguments really aren't relevant to people.
In exchange it facilitates money laundering at an unprecedented scale, and unprecedented frauds. It created a new type of crime - ransomware. And those fraud examples? Literally a rounding error on this exit scam right here. Thanks, Crypto!
That's not an argument or information of any kind. Instead of confronting anything I said, your whole post is a text book gish gallop - a bunch of nonsense arguments about things you are hallucinating since everything you said so far has been wildly contradicted.
No mention of the 100 million cryptocurrency users after you said there were none.
No mention of all the use cases after you said there were none.
No mention of your claim of 'cheap because they aren't popular' being completely and obviously false.
No mention of all the bank hacks after you said it doesn't happen with traditional currencies.
No mention of the sources I gave to back up what I said while you repeat what you want to be true with no evidence.
Instead you forget all the things you said that were not true at all and move on to venting about some sort of tangents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
> ACH is a great example. It's deprecated
Then why does the thing you linked use it?
> They're not actually better at anything than a classical implementation.
You can come up with all the "you just don't understand" BS you want (with nothing to back it up) but the truth is there is no other way you could send me money in an hour without identifying information and a third party. I'm sure you will purposely miss the point and say "but I don't want too" instead of confronting that this is obviously not true.
Just replying in kind to you haha.
In fact everything I said had basis, and is factually accurate, even if you choose to pretend otherwise. And of course no reply to any substantiation points I raised just complaining about other points I raised but set aside due to the conversation lacking focus.
You said no one uses cryptocurrency, I linked you an article with its own sources saying there are over 100 million users.
You said cheap transactions are because no one uses them, I linked you a graph of actual transactions showing bitcoin cash has more transactions than regular bitcoin even though it has 1/600th the transaction cost and I explained why. I told you how monero dynamic block size work, which is something you can verify if some day you want to learn.
You there are no uses, I pointed out multiple uses and you didn't contradict any. You just said you personally didn't want them.
You said you could do anything with some money transfer service, I pointed out the actual numbers which involve 3-4 business day transactions and a cost of $7.50 to RECIEVE a wire transfer.
Meanwhile you keep making assertions and thinking that repeating them is the same as explaining them. Then you ignore everything that directly contradicts what you say to try to talk about nonsense that has no relevance, then you say 'there is a lack of focus'.
This is what people do when they have their conclusions picked out ahead of time and are desperate to get their nonsense validated. It is everything people hate about political discourse - no reality, no sources, no evidence, no data and no accountability when someone lies.
If it is a feature to some people they are perfectly fine to consider it as such.