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.
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_...
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!
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.
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.
> 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).
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.