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Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

>What is even more amazing is watching these same people (no necessarily you OP, but prevailing opinion on HN...) then go on an argue that a permission-less distributed ledger like Bitcoin is a completely unnecessary waste of resources.

Hating the way modern banking works doesn't mean blockchain is a flawless solution. It comes with a ton of its own problems (not the least of which being that it's utterly inscrutable to normies). I personally would prefer we go back to currency backed by gold or some other comparable commodity (silver, etc.)

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Sure, I'd agree commodity money is preferable (and certainly trustless in p2p transactions), and in many ways better than blockchain. I just don't see how to map that paradigm onto a world where people who have never met each other regularly transact across continents without introducing some trusted 3rd party. And the moment you add that 3rd party you end up right back where we are now.

How do you transact across continents without a trusted 3rd party, with blockchains? The only transactions you can do trust-less are transactions that happen completely on-chain, i.e. exchanging some cryptocurrency for other cryptocurrency or similar tokens. As soon as you want to exchange currency for good or services, that trusted 3rd party becomes necessary in the exact same way, no matter how "smart" your blockchain money is.

By trust-less I am referring to a trusted 3rd party (e.g bank or escrow service) needed to mediate the transaction between the two parties. Not necessarily a lack of trust between the two parties themselves (obviously it would be foolish to pay someone you didn't trust at all in an irreversible way, but I can order something from Amazon any day with an implicit guarantee I will receive it or a refund, despite not knowing anyone there personally). An if you are referring to the shipping company that is going to move the goods, that would be a separate p2p transaction (and probably insured) between the seller/buyer and the delivery company.

Everyone who transacts in a fiat currency digitally has a defacto third (or more) party in the bank that mediates the transaction, and even non-digital cash transactions inherently include the central issuing bank (who you must trust not to debase the currency...just ask a Turkish citizen how that's going).

So a transaction using cryptocurrency has third parties, who do just the same thing and require trust, but which you don't want to call "defacto" because...?

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