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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, can't they "triangulate" who you are by your transactions?

In the same way tracking your location for sure can determine who you are.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

Based on just a few transactions they can figure out that you're a middle aged guy, living in Nowhereville, Iowa, that's into samba, anime and drives a Toyota Corolla, etc. and then from that it's not hard to actually figure out who that person is.

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I don't see a particular reason to conduct every transaction on-chain, or at least on a public L1. At any rate, I was mostly replying about your login data being public which isn't true.

Then how will we conduct our transactions?

Right now I use my country's currency, do you want me to go to a mix of currencies like I'm playing some sort of Android free to play game?

That's just adding complexity to my life for no obvious reason.

I use both PayPal and my bank for different transaction with no issues. I won't care to use some crypto app if that's popular, too. At any rate, I'm not personally advocating for crypto here, and the projects in crypto which I'm following are less about pure payments (which I don't mind doing via debit card or equivalent, whether built via banks or on top of crypto) and more about more complex smart contracts (e.g. the dex approach vs traditional exchanges and its assosiated different profit incentives, mechanisms and safety profile).

PayPal and your bank both transact in dollars. In the crypto space, presumably, you’d need to operate with different currencies at varying exchange rates. Or use some kind of “wrapped” currency at significant complexity and risk (see recent Ethereum-Solana bridge exploit and associated massive loss).

End users didn't suffer a loss after that exploit and I expect my risk from holding usdc and it crashing without Coinbase paying to fix things is already lower than the risk of my PayPal account being closed which I've seen happen to people.

I think no one really knows whether DeFi can be really safer than OldFi. Since it's old, we sort of know what to expect. In DeFi we obviously are still discovering.

I dislike OldFi and want to contribute to a new, healthier system to serve people in general. But, short term, risk of DeFi is obviously higher due to its imaturity.

OldFi has been maturing for 100's of years. Perhaps we could argue 1000's. It'll take at least 20-50 more years to reach a similar maturity in DeFi.

By maturity I mean: people understand the risks and know what to expect.

Crypto is sort of like the increasing plethora of streaming services, except crypto projects seem to reproduce at a much higher rate and further deprioritize UX. It's not every day, if ever, that I'm dealing with fiat currency conversion. In crypto, it's another one of those seemingly unnecessary hassles that is tolerated as a matter of course.

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