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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively: Many people will not pass an opportunity of a "risk-free" 20% APY. (Not sure if Binance in particular is paying interest on deposits, but many exchanges do, as far as I know.)

Also, how are wallets the same thing as servers? That analogy seems a bit stretched.

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> Also, how are wallets the same thing as servers? That analogy seems a bit stretched.

It's a stretch but I think we can agree of the underlying statement: People. Aren't. Nerds.

The learning curve to understand the technology of wallets is comparable to that of understanding the technology of running servers.

PS: After writing this out loud I'm tending towards more people understanding how servers work than how wallets work.

It's the usability of gpg, but with a cost of losing all your money if you make a mistake with the user interface.

> It's the usability of gpg

Hehe, so using custodian wallets is like using Gmail to host your private gpg keys.

If people spend the time I think you could learn the "details" - but even knowing the difference between running a node and a miner and server and what a wallet is and the keys associated with it, etc, even knowing and doing all that - it's still a hassle and more expensive! If you "trade" bitcoin inside an exchange and not on-chain, they don't have to pay the chain fees and therefore don't have to charge you to cover them.

It's the same with email - it's actually relatively easy to run an email server even with all the issues; but the spam and deliverability issues are enough that basically nobody except the "true nerds" bother. I suspect most people on HN could run their own email server on a $5 node, but don't bother.

Even Bernie Madoff only promised ~13%

Bernie was paying for 20years straight

20% interest paid out in a shitcoin whose nominal value will be down 90% by the end of the year

Anybody who thinks 20% crypto APY is risk free is asking for trouble.

Anybody who thinks 20% APY is risk free is asking for trouble. S&P gives you an average of 6% a year so getting to 10% is hard and 20 and above is probably a scam or has extreme risk.

Of course they are not. What the author means here is that people create wallets without owning servers, so they are in fact delegating chain verification to thrid parties like Etherscan, rather than by themselves. This is effectively centralizing the crypto on a few entities.

Exactly, thank you. Generally, wallets need to connect to nodes, and nodes are servers. People do not run their own nodes, they connect to existing ones.

Nobody wants to download the blockchain on a desktop, start up a node, write their keys in a note pad, and configure their phone’s wallet app to point to their new locally hosted node.

God help you if you didn’t even compile your node and wallet app yourself.

Anything less than that involves trust

At least with Fiat if someone running my local Chase Bank branch siphons money out of my account, I can trust that a guy with a shiny badge will walk over with a baton to beat them up.

And more importantly there's a whole procedure for Chase to make you whole, and if Chase itself fails, FDIC steps up, and if they fail, the Fed steps up, and if they fail, the US will nuke someone.

I’ve only heard of this mythical “risk free 20%” after the crash.

I never heard anyone advertising that rate before.

Not quite 20%, but I got slapped around on crypto Twitter by a blue check account for suggesting that supposed 15% returns were not risk-free. https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1466802265956577283

Only a few months earlier in HN threads I read some comments saying that 10 to 13% interest rates on crypto are a good reason to invest in crypto.

I saw a finance TikTok of someone advertising how they were able to afford a $1M+ home by essentially having crypto interest cover payments. This video was taken down a few weeks ago (lol).

Were they also offering a simple 3 day training course to teach you how to do it, for only $999?

https://medium.com/dare-to-be-better/anchor-protocol-insane-...

And that's only the first Google result that hasn't been unpublished in the meanwhile...

You’re kidding right? Anchor was famous for 20% APY - I know people who got very rich off this Ponzi.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/03/25/anchor-protocol-...

Tons of alt coins offering triple digit APYs over the last few years.

Must not know any crypto punters. They were all in on this.

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