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Comment by mikegreenberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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