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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

> FTX was the antithesis of cryptocurrency

No true scotsman. "The USSR wasn't real communism."

What cryptocurrency could be or should be in an ideal world is irrelevant. If cryptocurrency fails to live up to its ideals, it may be because these ideals are impossible to fulfill. That could be due to technological limitations, human nature, or something else. And in this case, we have no choice but to judge crypto for what it looks like in the world of today.

What matters is what cryptocurrency looks like in practice. And that is FTX, Mt Gox, Three Arrows, and others.

Crypto isn't sound enough to have mass adoption.

The USSR was real communism. And FTX is crypto principles at work.

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I get the point and I can understand how it can feel like that from the outside. But the same people that are saying that FTX is not crypto now, were saying it before and same applies to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance... Luna and Terra were crypto, though, economically unsound design with Ponzi economics but crypto. And the litmus test is actually super simple and foolproof. Does whatever you are doing settle a transaction in a public, tamper-resistant ledger that is cryptographically verifiable? FTX business and operations does not involve such a thing. It's a traditional corporation, established in the Bahamas, running some SQL/noSQL DB or perhaps more likely paper napkins as a system of record... And as such was vulnerable to the same kind of abuses that have plagued financial fraud forever.

Here is actual projects that are implemented in a blockchain:

- A exchange, e.g. Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/

Here is a smart contract that executes its transactions: https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c...

You can see the transactions live. You can see the code that runs this exchange: https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c...

- Lending and borrowing, e.g. Aave: https://aave.com/

- Decentralized staking, e.g. RocketPool: https://rocketpool.net ...

Nothing of this has failed. It's working 24/7 without maintenance windows. Everything is on-chain, publicly verifiable, automated and involves no humans.

This is a silly criticism, as long as the concepts of "cryptocurrency as a decentralized idea" and "cryptocurrency as many people use it in practice" are described by a single word.

If the article is correct about "practicurrency", then you're responding to someone saying that it won't affect "decencurrency". One of them is indeed not a Scotsman. All you're saying is that the word has more than one definition for two wildly different things.

It is impossible for a monetary system to be decentralized, safe, and have mass adoption. Because security requires either inconvenience or centralization, and inconvenience is a hard barrier to mass adoption.

I'm a user of Bitcoin and I never used any exchange.

Okay, pray tell, how do you buy bitcoin?

From people around me, in person.

Ah, that settles it then.

That's irrelevant to the comment you're responding to. The point is that there may be people who use it rationally, but how it works in the real world now that it's leaking out beyond its initial user base is getting really problematic.

It works in real world without any exchanges. All of them could crash and burn and Bitcoin would continue on.

Sure, for the 2,000 people who use it without exchanges. (made up number)

So when are you going to sell your Bitcoin when it goes to $5K or more realistically less than $5K?

I don't hold Bitcoin. I use it for cross-continent transactions.

Why do you need to send money across continents?

I pay for software engineering work done in Africa and sometimes South-East Asia.

You do realise this is nothing new and you can use TransferWise, MPesa or PayTM for this right?

Bitcoin is slower than all this and violently fluctuates which loses people's money quickly. People also need to pay their bills in fiat anyway so whoever is receiving the Bitcoin needs to cash out to fiat anyway.

At that point you might as well just use fiat instead.

All of these options you listed are significantly more expensive, and some of the contractors I work with don't even have that option due to KYC requirements - these people don't have access to functioning governments, they don't have passports. Also, most of my contractors don't use/have bank accounts (because where they live it costs money to have one) - so no way to take out the money if they used these services.

I did this dance at least 100 times and never ever had a problem with price fluctuation. Bitcoin is pretty stable on a 3-day timeframe.

Genuine question: How do you use it? Do you mean you use it to make purchases, or do you mean you hold it as a store of value, and that's the use? Something else?

I don't hold Bitcoin. I use it for cross-continent transactions. I buy it from people in my city using a local FB group or (way in the past) Localbitcoins.com and then send it to the recipient. They usually use Localbitcoins to convert it to their own currency AFAIK. The fees (transfer and exchange) are much lower this way - usually less than 0.5% all things considered. Compared to $100+ fee to just transfer the money + 5-10% currency exchange fee (both my and the recipient's currency aren't the most well known).

How long does it take for a typical transaction to finalize?

2 days - I get the BTC around noon, transfer it immediately, in the evening I get a confirmation from the recipient that they got it, and then I see them transfer it to someone the second day. Sometimes it's just 1 day.

To get that rate, how much do you have to send in one batch?

Just obtaining Bitcoin is expensive unless you have a high trust off-chain method to prevent double-spending.

I'm usually sending around $500-$1000 once every 2-3 months (per contractor - I work with multiple).

It's not "no true scotsman".

People here did not own any crypto. It's a simple fact, not some nebulous idea of what is or isn't communism. People gave money to fraudsters, who said "give us money and we'll hold crypto on your behalf", but FTX didn't actually have that crypto. They just ran with the money.

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