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Comment by vinniejames | Hacker News Reader

You just fully described cryptocurrency transactions. Crypto having the additional benefit of applying to online transactions as well vs in-person only transactions with cash

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But most crypto is anonymous, not private. It's usually worse than even banks since anyone can look up your transaction history given your wallet address. All it takes is one place where your wallet links to your identity and you have even less privacy than with banks.

If you can't find a way to use crypto privately, then it might not be ready for you yet. But you can guarantee that this will change, much like early HTTP had no TLS.

You can find any number of shortcomings, but the point is crypto _does_ solve many of this problems.

I personally can and do use it privately, my point is that it isn't that way for most people and privacy isn't inherent to all or even most crypto, and that's something only being made worse as crypto goes more and more mainstream.

After all, most people trade in public blockchain crypto through CEXs and leave their coins in hot wallets. Effectively the same as using a bank.

To put it differently, crypto _can_ solve many of these problems, but it does not _inherently_ solve them, it takes a skilled and cautious person to use crypto in a way that does not link to their identity.

FWIW, I was speaking about the "collective" you. And of course one does not automatically get the value out of anything without using it properly. If you use something other than how it was intended, you will get something other than advertised.

And I also agree that cryptocurrency is still not easy to use, but I'm not sure why it needs to "inherently" solve something (even though it has intrinsic value in certain dimensions). HTTP was inherently made to transfer structured text. No one was hoping it was going to replace the postal service, and yet the majority of the worlds information is transmitted using the protocol.

And just because you couldn't use "HTTP" when it was being first developed by researchers, it still served a purpose for them at the time and gradually became the invisible technology that it is today. Now replace "HTTP" with "cryptocurrency" and "at the time" with "now".

This is exactly what I meant when I said that maybe cryptocurrency wasn't ready for (collective) you.

I just interpreted the original comment as suggesting that these were inherent features of cryptocurrency. I do entirely agree with your premise about the possibilities enabled by cryptocurrencies when implemented/used properly.

Surely ”It's easy to understand” does not describe cryptocurrency transactions.

I would repeat the same thing as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30209760

And to your point and from my perspective, I would disagree as there are many cryptocurrency experiences where "understanding it" is reduced to similar UX as using zelle or paypal. More than likely, you've (or whomever you're describing) already made your (their) opinion and aren't interested in understanding.

The original quote made a comparison between cash and debit/credit cards. Cards are easy to use, too, so clearly "understand" here does not relate to user experience, but to the complexity of the system itself.

That's not true. How to use credit cards very much have an "interface".

- It is open and requires that you protect the numbers on the outside or access to the data on-chip. Many of these security problems have hurt consumers over and over again despite how "easy" cards are to use specifically because those users don't understand the complexity of the card's system. - It requires you to insert, tap, or swipe it to borrow funds. This interaction is not obvious for a child who has never done this before. It is a learned behavior. And that learned behavior for interfacing with the credit card network with your CC token is complex enough that the US has had significant friction introducing chipped and contactless credit cards over the past years. Because the interface and the UX are there for cards too.

I'm not sure the reason for your distinction between understanding the UX vs the complexity of the system. You can't consider UX without considering complexity... one follows the other necessarily.

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