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Comment by forty | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you can give away millions by mistake and do nothing about it then break the systems then do not much about it says a lot about crypto currency practicality ;) I wonder when this madness is going to stop.

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Your comment reminds me of that xkcd: wow you suck at math vs wow girls suck at math, where girls equals crypto.

1 crypto project out of thousands does not represent them all.

the reason this tweet is even being discussed is because it is so unusual.

I believe that the fact that bugs are hard to fix and that operations are hard to revert is a pretty common property of most crypto-currency/asset/contact and that's what makes them IMO impractical for many usages, and in particular currency

How many crypto bugs to date have you followed that you would classify as harder to resolve than it's more traditional counterpart?

That fact that it can happen at all when a time-proven solution has already existed for centuries is telling. I don't know why people think having irreversible transactions where no recourse, even legal, can force a reversal of the transaction, is a good thing.

The rate at which bugs like this happen isn't the dominant metric of risk here, it is that when they happen they are often catastrophic and ruinous. And so it could be that, though rare, playing in this game eventually equals ruin the longer you are in it. Good discussion of these types of risk[0], "The Logic of Risk Taking" by Taleb

[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410...

I mean, maybe not on this scale, but this happens with checking accounts all the time. Wire the money to the wrong account #? Tough luck.

Au contraire, this madness is going to become the norm for the next generation. Personally I think the more things break in the immediate future, the better.

Hopefully we will reach some sort of steady state where users keep a baseline of trustworthiness / reliability for a portion of their wealth, yet willing to occasionally play around with another portion of their wealth trying out bug-infested moonshots.

>this madness is going to become the norm for the next generation

all the hype and the news and market valuations might create the illusion that there is a lot of crypto activity but compare the money moved through crypto to money moved across normal financial markets. SWIFT moves 5 trillion per day, Tenpay does 500 billion transactions per year. There is what, a few hundred thousand bitcoin transactions per day?

In its current state crypto does not and will not influence the lives of ordinary people who go shopping, pay their rent and whatnot.

> it says a lot about crypto currency practicality

Isnt that a feature not a bug?

You dont want a central authority like a govt or a corporation messing with your money(tokens)

I think most crypto-supporters overestimate how much of a police state modern banking is, and underestimate how much of a wild west the current crypto ecosystem is.

They’re willing to trade a system with reasonable and democratic oversight for a “free for all” shark infested pool that will rip from their hands their retirement fund just before they mean to retire.

This is a thoughtful comment.

I wonder how much central banks and treasuries could do to engage people on what they actually do. It's still ripe for disruption on some level, but still, people have no idea I think.

It's not thoughtful, it is hyperbolic. That's not what is going on here and this is not crypto in general. These are smart contracts which the vast majority of crypto users have no involvement in.

I'm pretty sure I do want people and banks to be able to get back millions they have given away because of a bug :)

Citibank wants that too: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-...

yes that is a valid point but there are others who dont want that because then the central authority can take away your money or stop payments send to you just because they dont like you like what happened to Wikileaks.

Yes, it's true that in case you are in the legendary fascist state that steals your money but allows you the hide your money in crypto currency it can be useful ;) it reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/ (note that I do not count government taxes in democratic countries as stealing, while I do think tax avoidance is stealing in that case).

And what would you call the US dollar's monetary expansion of over 40% [1] since the start of the pandemic, if not stealing?

The Cantillon Effect has never been stronger, but those that continue to measure their financial worth in a unit of account that is shrinking in its purchasing power every day are missing the point. The system _is_ stealing your savings!

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Let’s not act like the infusions were for no reason. Many people are willing to incur some inflation and inflation risk in a gamble to avert a near-certain societal level catastrophe.

and which people were those? rich people, that's who...

I agree that desperate times call for desperate measures, but there are fairer ways to fund this. Just inflating the money supply just hits asset-poor people hardest... this is the very definition of the Cantillon Effect...

Which of these fairer mechanisms were actually practically available to us on the time frame and scale that we needed them?

taxing big tech properly?

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