I believe that this looks simple on paper, but does not really work. And then: this is called service. Coinbase offered a service, that just deals with all the hassle you are describing.
Having tried it myself, it does work and isn't that hard. Why do you think it doesn't work?
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
See? We both can play that game!
Bitcoin has no utility.
It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.
If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.
If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.
People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.
BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.
And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.
There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.
Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).
> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.
The bank is just someone else's ledger.
Yes. As a service. Which is what people want.
Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.
And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service.
Why can't there be room for both?
I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be.
Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'.
Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.
(Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)
* Email me photos because they don't know how to add them to a shared google photo album.
* Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how.
* Forget their email password so just made a new email account.
* Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time they get a new phone.
A very large segment of the population behaves in this way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these people?
What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover the money he was defrauded of?
As for Grandpa, I hope he doesn't have a checkbook.
And when Celsius suddenly halts withdrawals to a huge portion of the cryptocoin community, the only answer is "oh, you shouldn't have been using that" or "not your keys, not your wallet" and other such "Advice". Its a fundamentally hostile environment.
How difficult is it to set up a wallet, then use the same seed phrase when setting up a wallet on another device? If one of your devices gets stolen, make a new wallet and transfer the funds with your other device before they extract your keys.
Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
> Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
There has yet to be a decentralized cryptocurrency. We can't even say things like "decentralized systems work great until they don't" because so far they don't exist, and what does has been less than "great".
> Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world.
I don't even know what you're going for here? Crypto solves surveillance now? The global, distributed ledger that everyone can fundamentally access because that's the whole point?
As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
A single entity being capable of significant or total disruption of the network.
> As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
I am interested. I'm aware of some progress being made here theoretically, but I have not seen implementations (I do not follow closely at this point).
While I agree with the sentiment, this won't happen. Did the Banana Wars and using the military might to control South America prevent all the American wars in the middle east? Nope. Just as those are forgotten about, we Americans will conveniently forget anything else that puts a bad spot on our record.
But as a customer of several national US banks and having gone through the dispute process dozens of times in my life, in reality, I find that to be completely nonsense. I’ve had to deal with numerous incidents where someone stole my card, and the bank blames me (the customer) and then asks me to prove the money was stolen, only to have them make an arbitrary denial months later. It’s the same bogus argument people make for all kinds of insurance, until you go to make a claim, get denied for some obscure legal text in the policy and find out you were just being ripped off the whole time.
Meanwhile, my own credit card numbers were stolen twice.
I have had many fraudulent transactions or unauthorized charges on various accounts, such as:
* Random charges appearing for no reason
* Clear case of stolen card with a series of unusual transactions.
* Scam websites where I bought a product and never received it.
* One egregious case where someone from a IP geolocated in China brute forced my VNC server password in the middle of the night and used my saved browser credentials to PayPal themselves over $10,000 from my linked chequing account.
In all cases I have filed a dispute with the relevant institution and was fully and promptly reimbursed. In the latter case I had my money back in under a week.
Transaction reversibility is a feature, not a bug!
Which is the problem.
We can all learn to 'press a button'. But it's that time we accidentally 'double click' because we were not paying attention, that is the problem.
And now you want me to give that up, and take on the responsibility myself?
That's not a strong argument in your favor.
Is it better to be cow or a wildebeest? The answer is simple: is life greater than the sum of its individual (hedonistic) parts?
Man has relied on a society since we had tails.
But until then, is there no middle ground between surveilance state and free society?
Everyone trying to do 'their own stuff' is basically, stupid.
We gain immensely by the division of labour: the cobbler makes the shoes, the farmer grows food, the banker manages money. Were you to try to 'make your own iPhone in your back yard' you would fail.
We are 'rich' because of this.
Otherwise, we'd be literally feral monkeys.
Bitcoin has little to do with 'control or surveillance'.
You do not need to 'hold' USD in order to live. You just need to use USD in a 'current account' for purposes of transaction. In that context, monetary policy should not matter that much to you - or even frankly anything the Fed does.
If you only buy dollars when you need the to do something else, then frankly, everything about the USD should be basically irrelevant.
And you can still do most things in cash, if you really want. You can put your USDs under your bed, in the closet if you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_...