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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Not being pegged to a centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me. It's still in infancy and it's true that 99% of the projects are get-rich-quick schemes with no intrinsic value. Though, I think the author lives in a country with a trustworthy government because that's not the case for many people including me. In the last two days my country's currency has shaken much more than crypto and I don't trust a single word my government says. In this case, crypto really shines. In addition, as more services get integrated into crypto ecosystem and as get-rich bubbles wear off, combined with solutions to scalability and speed problems, many will see much more value in crypto.

12 years is nothing when reinventing fundamental workings of economics is at stake. Give it more time.

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Not being pegged to a state-controlled currency means your devalued currency competes with stronger ones, at least on the fictitious transitional period, you're sure you want that ?

Assuming a stateless money, when/if someone then steals your crypto coin, which gov't backed law/judicial system are you gonna turn to ?

if you aren’t wealthy you are effectively priced out of the US law/judicial system anyway.

If I took $5,000, maybe even $10,000 from you right now there would be almost nothing you could do because the legal efforts to pursue me for that amount would likely equal or surpass that.

That's... unsettling.

10 years ago I had my bank account wiped/stolen in Brazil (!!!):

- went to the police, then to the bank (same day)

couple days later: all the money was back in my account.

I think you misread their comment. They said that not being pegged to state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker, whereas you seem to be thinking they said it was something they wanted.

> I think the author lives in a country with a trustworthy government because that's not the case for many people including me.

Well, given OP distrusts his government...

Right. His government is presumably not the same thing as a government that has had stable currency management for over a century.

> Assuming a stateless money, when/if someone then steals your crypto coin, which gov't backed law/judicial system are you gonna turn to ?

In many regimes where you can't trust the government, it's not really relevant what kind of currency is stolen, the police are probably not the people you'll go to for restitution.

There's an argument to be made that some cryptocurrencies (privacy-coins specifically) may also give you more protection from your finances being seized by a corrupt government, though you're generally SoL in such situations regardless of how you keep your money.

The probability of government controlling/seizing my money or fixing foreign currency rates (effectively limiting my income severely) is more than someone compromising my crypto wallets. I don't do anything illegal, I just live in a country with an extremely corrupted government and economy.

> Not being pegged to a centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me

Pretty sure you mean the opposite

He probably did, but there's wisdom in his typo.

I don’t think so. I think they were saying there’s a benefit to being able to transact using a concurrency of a trusted govt when you’re own govt is not trusted.

I'm a little surprised that the author is missing the critical innovation of crypto which is digital trust and observability. Sure it is easy to make an argument that one cryptocurrency or another is a bubble, but don't underestimate the importance of being able to distribute work and verify trust at scale.

Just look at how git has transformed software development by mapping code to a hash. Or how DNS + SSL has transformed how people trust and transact online. Is the scalable future one where people and organizations trust their data to the cloud or other 3rd parties with no way to verify integrity?

Do people think that the future of human agreements is signatures on little pieces of paper managed by courts and lawyers? Personally I think it will be digital. Given it is digital, do you think there will be some "centralized database" run by government or a commercial entity that can be trusted as single point of failure? Personally I sure hope that there is some way to distribute and verify data integrity even if it isn't full blown proof of work. I'd sure prefer something more like git where I can see if two branches are the same even from different sources.

Thats all true but still there is the hard to deny fact that a federated trust based system is more efficient. See tls in web. With all the flaws it works remarkably well.

That sounds like regular old cryptography, which I don't think anyone would argue isn't important. It's a very different discussion than "crypto" a.k.a cryptocurrencies.

Author is making an argument against any blockchain or distributed ledger. To quote from article. "Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime."

I'd like to see people look past the noise of cryptocurrencies to see how important digital trust and new applications of cryptography will be as we try to scale the ability of humans to work together effectively at scale.

So, can you name one single successful application of blockchain in the real world? Apart from crime.

I believe this is exactly the point of the author - there's lots of handwavy bubblebabble about this technology, but we're now well into the second decade of blockchain/distributed ledgers, and yet to see one single non-criminal real world application.

I'd argue that git is a distributed blockchain that has been pretty impactful, it just doesn't use proof of work for validation.

If it needs to be a company Ripple uses blockchain to help companies move currency safely around the globe. (https://ripple.com/)

It's hard to believe $2.6T worth of crypto is all for criminal applications. Maybe you've overlooked something.

From just before the dot-com bubble burst to when it had fully deflated, the tech stocks had lost some $5T of stock market valuation - in 2002 dollars. So no, it's completely feasible that there is $2.6T of hot air speculative investment in cryptos. In fact, considering how divorced from practical and technical reality all of the proposed crypto schemes so far have been, that sounds like a low estimate.

There is some value in providing shadow banking to the global criminal underworld, but I don't think it will be the next technological revolution.

Which is dumb because he works on a digital coin on a distributed ledger

You're exactly right.

Reading this article and the other HN comments, it makes me think our community is aging and becoming stuck in old ways of thinking.

It's surprising and disappointing to see it happen to this group, but I guess it's inevitable.

If you're going to use a different currency, why not just use USD or EUR?

"If they don't have bread, let them eat cake."

Edit: I think in the kind of countries that GP mentions, access to stable foreign currencies will be very restricted, especially during times where the country's native currency is in crisis.

Because the government is corrupted in my country and at any time they can seize my money or fix currency rates. Crypto, even in its fluctating nature, is safer than either my country's currency or keeping USD/EUR etc in a bank here (and I don't have any other option).

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