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Comment by ksml | Hacker News Reader

But the entire premise of decentralized finance is to have no central authority, is it not?

Just because there is no central authority in control of crypto transactions like traditional banks does not mean laws and courts no longer exist. You can steal someone’s bitcoins by hacking their wallet but you can still be ordered by a court to pay it back and/or face jail time.

Thank God for real world centralized authority.

I think what the "centralised authority" steal from the people every year will put the all the crypto theft till now, combined, to shame.

> does not mean laws and courts no longer exist. You can steal someone’s bitcoins by hacking their wallet but you can still be ordered by a court to pay it back and/or face jail time.

I'm not aware of any court that would, for example, jail a Chinese citizen who stole virtual money of a US citizen? Are you?

If judges have the last word on who owns how many bitcoins why are you wasting all that electricity for? I thought it was to avoid relying on an authority...

My understanding is that decentralization helps avoid things like runaway inflation or banks deciding at will how much money they want to siphon off each transaction. If you are stealing someone else’s money, a court is not going to dismiss charges just because the transaction is not reversible according to the protocol of whatever cryptocurrency you used.

Decentralisation doesn't help with inflation, it only makes everything more expensive due to the extravagant cost of the consensus mechanism. Banks are already decentralised (should be obvious since there are many banks, not just one) and competition among banks is what prevents them from charging high fees.

Physical matter is decentralized but that doesn't give you a right to steal someone's gold without legal action.

Decentralized systems have different benefits for different people. For instance, some people like to trade 24 hours without corporate middlemen stopping you from trading at night. That's not the same as avoiding legal authority.

No central authority within the system. Treating the hacked crypto as stolen property to report to a central authority who can use the threat of physical violence is not incongruent with the current defi system. Its a false dichotomy presented by those naive to the pros and cons of all this.

Ideally governance would also be done in a decentralized manner, but we’re not there yet.

It's completely incongruent. The whole point of "decentralized" is to avoid relying on a central authority, and the price to pay is inefficiency. But if you're relying on a central authority anyway, why be inefficient?

Everyone wants no central authorities until they're being enslaved by their regional warlord.

Everyone wants central authorities until their money is incessantly devalued and squandered through cronyism and waste.

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