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Comment by volkse | Hacker News Reader

I can’t understand how anyone has any confidence in crypto after the current Ukraine/Russia situation. I thought that crypto was decentralized and no-one could place restrictions on who could own it, and what they could do with it.

This also turned out to be total BS as Russian crypto accounts keep getting frozen. Funnily enough, I haven’t heard the “crypto community” make a single peep about this. Hilarious..

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People use custodial wallets which is a bad idea anyway; but it supports the original point; people generally do not understand or care about the basic premise of decentralisation (and, as such, have no interest in the added inconvenience, although with enough tech that can be solved). They use crypto because ‘get rich quick’ and ‘no taxes’ and they do not know or care about how it works. Their coins are in centralised wallets or exchanges . Adoption of the decentralised might (but probably not at all) come slowly over time. You need to read up on things before shouting BS though; there is a lot wrong with all the blockchain stuff but one good thing is; they cannot freeze your wallet if you have it locally; if you do not have your crypto currencies in your locally wallet, you do not own them as such is what any crypto pundit will tell you.

But rarely anyone is capable of securing local wallets, especially when it concerns serious amounts of money. So back at trust we are.

I wouldn't say it's rare for those actually entrenched in the crypto community. Hardware wallets are fairly easy to secure and if you really want no trace of ownership, you can just memorize your 12 word seed phrase.

Noone’s crypto wallets have been frozen, afaik. Custodial services have frozen people’s accounts, but those are websites which hold your crypto for you. Not your keys, not your crypto.

What I understand is that Hardware wallets cannot be "frozen", but they are much harder to maintain than an online account you can log into with a single click, so people prefer that.

> I can’t understand how anyone has any confidence in crypto after the current Ukraine/Russia situation. I thought that crypto was decentralized and no-one could place restrictions on who could own it, and what they could do with it.

You do realize that their are capital controls self-imposed by the Ukrainian National Bank, right? And that Bitcoin has been legalized in Ukraine [0] after the influx of Bitcoin donations (and other alts) which were used to fund supplies, logistics, military efforts, as well as the formal Ukrainian Government to continue the war effort.

If anything I'd say it proves that what we have said all along was the case, Bitcoin isn't going to matter to functional economies in the developed World, but will excel most in crisis situations in mainly developed nations.

Lastly, the only one to 'restrict' accounts was the YC-backed Coinbase [1] (the bane of the Bitcoin community as they hold so much BTC despite being vocal opponents of it since Segwit).

So, all I have been able to gather from all of this is that YC/HN remains incredibly ignorant of what Bitcoin and crypto avails, and will draw conclusions based more on that ignorance then take the time to actually look into what is actually taking place.

0: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ukraine-legalises-bitcoi...

1: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coinbase-bloc...

> So, all I have been able to gather from all of this is that YC/HN remains incredibly ignorant of what Bitcoin and crypto avails, and will draw conclusions based more on that ignorance then take the time to actually look into what is actually taking place.

And yet, you people think crypto is seriously going to "catch on" for the average person? I'm sorry, but "you need a certain IQ to understand Rick and M- I mean crypto!" isn't going to magically make crypto useful at all. The fact that crypto people have to go into long tirades full of technical jargon just to answer the question "Why?" tells the whole story.

The average user doesn't need to 'get it,' they need to be incentivized to use it, believe me I had a startup that targeted a demographic that you'd never suspect would ever use it, that is until they had to because they were unable to hold a bank account and were subject to financial censorship and had thier accounts frozen or seized: the average age of said demographic was in the mid 60s.

Personally speaking, I think Bitcoin won't get 'mass adoption' in the developed World until they are using it without actually realizing: think a GUI and UX similar to that of online banking, and unfortunately, custodial services and wallets.

The idealist crypto-nerd in me wished everyone would be running their own mainchain and LN node and would be securing their funds on hardware wallets, and only communicated over End to End or PgP encrypted platforms with keys they swapped in person: but after over 10 years in this space I have come to realize that the average person will gravitate towards convince in orders of magnitude much more than security.

It's a harsh reality that I have long accepted when it comes to the 'average user' and it helps explain the prevalence of why the leaks, hacks and data breaches using these leaky services continues.

Personally speaking, this isn't 2011, you don't need to learn how to use Linux to download the blockchain and synch up to the network using QT and create wallets in the terminal, thus the IQ factor isn't relevant anymore... all you need is a relatively modern smart phone and an internet connection (and when that is down a Blockstream satellite or access to Starlink as has been proven to be the case in Tonga and Ukraine this year) to plug into this inclusive financial system: it's very telling that 3G/4G availability is more prevalent in the developed World than running water is.

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