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Comment by dashdot | Hacker News Reader

Managing (digital) assets/values in a permissionless, self-sovereign way.

There is no alternative as far as I know.

In a self-contained fantasy economy with no attachment points to the real world, this might be compelling. In practice, the rest of the economy, society, etc. doesn't operate in a self-sovereign way, and neither do you.

It's not much different than the problem of micronations[1]. Exciting as they are for D&Ders of a sort, they aren't real nations for the simple reason that they lack a defining feature of a nation (among others): that everyone else think they're a nation.

Cryptocurrency is perhaps not as extreme; a reasonably large number of people appear to be persuaded that units of cryptocurrency are a real asset, and some begrudging convertibility into other kinds of assets (a defining feature of a currency) does exist. Still, it suffers from a similar problem, in kind if not in degree.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation

> In practice

This is the difficult part for me with Cryptocurrency. Sure, the idea is cool, but I can't really use crypto with any of the services I use except for maybe my VPS provider or other technical services (which requires me to provide an email address anyway). I'd love to hear about mainstream services allowing financial transactions through cryptocurrency. Pornhub is the only mainstream/non-tech service I can think of.

The only practical use for me with cryptocurrency would be to convert it back into USD eventually.

I suppose crypto enthusiasts would argue that this is just a matter of not having reached the tipping point for mass adoption yet (as with electric vehicles, for instance). However, I've heard that since the late 2000s.

I paid my rent in BTC for about a year, and have bought food/alcohol with it directly.

I suspect those may have been edge cases though.

Whoa! That is awesome! I wish that was an option where I live in the US. Even if I didn't use it, that would be nice to just have other options.

Because there are still very rough edges to smooth out. So it works only for niches. Kinda like online shopping in the 90s

Same can be said about your local classroom, universities, and even companies. There's different types of currencies (whether it's your grades or performance reviews), cryptocurrency is no different than the value that is exchanged between two members of the community.

Let's not assume that it's going to be the end-all and be-all, because it's not. It's a medium of exchange between members of a community (BTC, ETH, Doge, or whatever).

The common misconception that "oh crypto is such a scam" type of group is that they assume this is designed to replace something else. It's not a replacement of any kind, it's a tool for a medium of exchange between communities.

Buzzwordy, what exactly do you mean. Management of digital assets via NFT is just fraud imho.

Transferring and holding. This only requires a private key. NFTs are not needed for this.

Smells like law-evasion, so scam the state. What assets/values do you need to manage? What does permissionless means in that case? And why is crypto superior to existing solutions? And no, self-sovereignity is not an acceptable answer here, unless you life in north-korea.

To put it bluntly: fuck the state.

Absolutely not. My country wants to know what assets (or waht they're worth to be more precise) I have end of Year, so I declare it. I have no problems with that. Good living conditions have a price so I happily pay my cut. If I don't like it, I'll leave.

Permissionless means that there is no central entity needed to observe or even approve my actions with my assets.

What existing solutions?

I strongly disagree, self-soverignty is a personal decision. It doesn't matter in what country you live.

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