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Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

I dunno I’m an over-halfway believer in crypto.

The other day I wanted to invest in a token. So I transferred ETH out of Coinbase to MetaMask wallet, then traded my ETH for the token.

Each transaction took about 30sec and cost ~$25. That sounds like a lot!

Until you realize ETH has been around only 8 years and the transaction is entirely irreversible by an enterprising (invasive? dictatorial?) third party.

To me it’s entirely insane that I can almost instantly transfer dollars across the world (galaxy?) for so little AND the protocol delivers incredible flexibility through smart contracts.

IMO the future is bright.

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Isn't that really bad though? I paid for a VPS with my credit card recently. The transaction appeared to complete instantly. No 25 dollar transaction fee, no multiple hops through different software interfaces, just click and done. If it turned out the VPS company was a scam, I could've made a single phone call and reversed the charge saving my money.

Crypto is slower, more expensive, and less safe. True, it's only eight years old, but the important thing is it's much worse than current solutions - at least on the dimensions that I think most people care about. Plus, it's not like online credit cards are that much older.

> No 25 dollar transaction fee

to be fair, in your case there was also certainly a transaction fee, paid for you by your merchant (and probably rolled up into the price of the product)

Sure, and it also wasn't anywhere near 25 dollars.

> The transaction appeared to complete instantly.

I recently made a donation from a new bank account that took ~20-30 hours to finish processing. Meanwhile Monero trasactions have the 10-15 blocks needed for irreversibility mined in ~20-30 minutes, and the first block in ~2.

Is that the really important thing? It’s a nascent technology.

>the transaction is entirely irreversible by an enterprising (invasive? dictatorial?) third party.

Are you aware of the history of Ethereum?

Good point on ETH Classic.

I guess I didn’t think of that bc I don’t consider myself important enough to be overruled by so many people.

Possibly the good thing about the ecosystem is anyone can make a protocol or form the existing open source ones and then users and miners can vote with their feet.

Until you realize ETH has been around only 8 years and the transaction is entirely irreversible

It’s funny you make this comment specifically about ETH since it literally exists today as a result of a hard fork that reversed transactions in 2016.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ethereum-classic.asp

The fork did not reverse the transactions. Instead, it made new transactions.

Meanwhile, bitcoin reversed 53 blocks in the 2010 "inflation bug" incident.

I was pretty surprised to learn this several months ago, given how much people still cite the Ethereum fork as a putative smoking gun.

This is a hilarious lie.

irreversibility is mostly a negative for anyone who is interested in getting a scam/fraudulent charge taken back. What happens when you purchase an item from some web shop with ETH and it never arrives?

This is actually an argument I totally disagree with. Businesses are long-lived, have reputations to maintain, and need to build trust. They have every incentive possible to treat their customers right, and issue refunds on valid issues. It is the customers that are sketchy and usually one-offs, and thus use stolen credit cards to burn the business with chargebacks. Businesses lose a huge amount to fraudulent payments.

I would rather let businesses decide whether to choose payment options that allow chargebacks or not, and then customers can choose which businesses to support. The method of payment becomes one factor in shopping decisions. Businesses that eliminate chargeback risk are ultimately more competitive and can pass savings onto consumers. The whole chargeback thing is a ridiculous byproduct of our antiquated payment rails.

> They have every incentive possible to treat their customers right, and issue refunds on valid issues.

There are plenty of fly-by-night operations that will smash and grab as many transactions as they can and not care about their reputations because they'll just set up under another alias.

Further, if your account/wallet gets compromised there is also no irreversibility. Whereas with the 'regular' banking system transactions can usually get reversed.

So, just don't do business with those obvious fly-by-night companies who have no established reputation or brand?

From a company's point of view almost every individual consumer looks like a potential fly-by-nighter, so companies are forced to accept that risk, and we all share the costs of that. It could be useful to offer an alternative to this paradigm.

> So, just don't do business with those obvious fly-by-night companies who have no established reputation or brand?

You're telling people to "just" be rational. Or to not be susceptible to slick marketing gimmicks, or to not be bamboozled by a fast-talking salesman.

Another way to think about that is like cash. When someone gives you some cash, should they be able to sneak into your sock drawer and take it back? Would you accept payment that came with a remote control held by someone else when you have no such way to recover your goods or services or time?

Insurance and dispute resolution are separate jobs from the job of the money itself.

> Insurance and dispute resolution are separate jobs from the job of the money itself.

But if you layer those on top of the money does not the whole stack loose the purported benefits of crypto-currency? What I mean is if you have intermediaries to handle Insurance and dispute resolution (which are needed since people want that) do you still get any anonymization or irreversibility benefits from crypto-currency?

What's the point of crypto-currency if we need to add layers on top of it that remove all the benefits?

"But if you layer those on top of the money does not the whole stack loose the purported benefits of crypto-currency?"

No.

I don't even know where to begin with unpacking all the invalid assumptions you just made.

The job of the money is just to be a counting system. It's just a variable that holds a value. What you do with that value is whatever you want.

You want to make some transaction be tentative and have recourse and strings? You can arrange for that an infinite number of ways besides processing through Visa in exactly the same way Visa does it this moment.

And of course you don't always want recourse. Eventually you want a transaction to be done and irrevokable.

While I agree with this, the ease of chargeback will make you pause if you ever tried being a merchant. We ran a successful e-commerce operation about 10 years ago and our product was digital but every one of them cost us money and single use (think gift cards); by definition the product could not be faulty itself. Maybe you can expect a few mistakes (no clue how but let's say) and yet we got a lot of chargebacks, of course after they used the product. That is the risk of the business, but it should not be. If I can reasonable show you got the product (activation location matches your CC zip code let's say in this case) chargeback should not be possible and, after experiences like this, actually punishable IMHO. As in, if you chargeback and it is not the merchant fault your CC should be taken away as you are apparently a scammer. And do it again with another bank, the authorities should be notified. Chargeback in the US way (it is harder in the EU, they ask a lot more questions) is, in cases like ours, simply stealing which is a crime no? And yet allowed and people are even proud of it on forums etc. Consumer protection is great but as a b2c merchant I would only accept crypto from US customers if I would ever do this again (which I will not).

(The person who bought the business, and knew all the details as we provided all the exact numbers from our e-commerce system and bank, actually burnt out and killed the business at great loss to himself when he saw how many people are actually down right thieves)

My memory is fuzzy and I'm having a hard time finding details, but didn't Eth actually go through a hard fork to reverse a theft or bug in a smart contract or something?

Yeah,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

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