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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

People are used to "manage it myself money" - it's called cash and most people do not want to carry large amounts of it around or have it at home.

And cash has significant security advantages over crypto in that it's very hard to remotely steal the dollars from someone's physical wallet or mattress; even if it is relatively easy to just walk up and take them.

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When I was writing my comment initially I wrote a comparison between individual crypto wallets and cash, and how centralized banks spawned from people not wanting to be the only one responsible for their large amounts of cash, hence banks, but I removed it because my comment was already running long. We're totally on the same page.

Edit: Also, I know cash is the governmental evolution of bank notes which didn't exist before banks, and that the original decentralized currency would be like, pinches of gold or whatever.

On the other hand it’s hard (and illegal) to create backup copies of cash :)

There's a 51% defense that's available, however; if you have 51% of the bill or such you can get it replaced!

https://www.frbservices.org/assets/financial-services/cash/f...

https://www.moneyfactory.gov/services/currencyredemption.htm...

(If the government had a sense of humor that would be moneyprinter.gov heh)

Right, but this happens so rarely. If someone breaks into your home and finds 49% of your cash, they're taking ALL of those bills which would be irrecoverable.

Which a large reason why people use banks. Even if someone breaks into the bank and steals the exact bills you deposited, you don't lose any money. Crypto is closer to cash in that it's anonymous but not private, with the advantage being you can send money wherever you want in the world without mailing an envelope of cash. But like cash if you send it to the wrong place, or someone finds it, it's gone. The decentralization is great because it means no single entity can say "That's it, you can't send money to XYZ anymore" but the usecase is still smaller than cash (maybe not forever), or a bank account (probably forever).

> if you have 51% of the bill or such you can get it replaced

What if it's the middle third of the bill that's missing? Does the 51% need to be contiguous? The links suggest that you only need 51% in total, even if the bill was shredded.

Concretely: Could you take 1/3 from opposite ends of two different bills and present the pieces as 2/3 of three different bills to turn two old bills into three new ones? Putting aside the fact that this would be fraud, of course. Someone must have tried it at some point.

US currency has serial numbers printed on both sides of the bill, and while you might be able to cut it up in such a way that they aren't included, I believe they also put it in the watermarks, so even if there is a strategic way to cut it that hides the watermarks and serial numbers, I think they'd start to catch on before you made much. It's an interesting thought experiment though. How many banks would you be able to try it at before they caught on?

Are you joking, or do you really think that cash has superior security properties to asymmetric key management?

It's a lot easier to steal my cash, or my bank balance, or my securities, or any other physical or fiat asset I own, than it is to steal even moderately-secured Bitcoins.

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