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Comment by mitchdoogle | Hacker News Reader

The problem with bank accounts is the banks. The promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust any institution, such as a bank, to keep track of your money.

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Now you need to trust developers who wrote the client code, trust large mining(/staking whatever) pools not to collude and 51% you, and uhhhh trust yourself to not lose the fucking keys, or to be an expert in all the various "protection" schemes like multi-signature wallets (until they explode because there's a bug in them)… You also have to 100% trust yourself to not get scammed — there's no chargeback if you do.

Regarding not losing the keys (ie. responsibility for your own security), this was my #1 grounds for skepticism in crypto when I first entered the space. I could predict that without some compromise on this, most people would not use crypto. However, social recovery is already one potential solution for that, so don’t discount that surprising ideas can come up (https://cryptonews.com/news/social-recovery-wallet-is-better...)

Which could be compelling if you lived in a society where the banks were extremely unstable, but looks terrible if you live in one with regulation, deposit insurance and and other account protections.

Banks are the government's instrument of total surveillance and enforcement in the financial sector.

You weren't here in 2008?

I was (if 'here' is the US), and I didn't lose money in my bank accounts?

It was a very close call, all because the banks were so reckless. Are you sure next time they will have enough money to bail them out again?

Of course, "too big to fail" - some of them almost certainly should have, though I would have expected the FDIC to work as intended then (instead of using public funds to prop up the banks themselves, it could have covered our deposits).

How much of the world have you described?

Bitcoin is better in those unstable currency countries. The market will decide (has decided in some cases). So maybe inexorably bitcoin will be the reserve currency for a large portion of the planet. And at some point there will be a tipping point where it's going to be attractive enough to all other central banks.

It turns an everyday person worldwide into equals with central banks. That's pretty radical.

The promise of crypto(currency) is that you buy some and then you get rich.

I'm not even trying to be super-negative here - after all, if it does become a lasting store of value, accepted as money in the long term, then early adopters will be holding something valuable. It could happen. But right now the hype is self-perpetuating.

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