That's the thing, you only depend on centralized actors if you want to. The entire point of cryptocurrencies are to not depend on centralized institutions that can screw you over.
I’m intrigued by crypto but merely because I’m a nerd. I don’t care about crypto when it comes to my day to day life.
Now.. the question remains as to whether it would be the same, if it tech was not made so accessible ( some people would be forced to learn since the bar was high ). I mostly think that battle is already lost.
Thunderbird[0] has pretty good (see what I did there?) PGP integration[1]. The UI is decent and there is discoverability support with various key servers as well.
But that would require folks to break their addiction to web-based email and use an actual email client. As such, I won't hold my breath.
[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...
The blockchain, being a public ledger, ensures that transactions are accurately recorded and can be publicly verified as such.
But it’s been centuries since the actual accurate recording of transactions has been an issue. The real problems are far removed from this. When was the last time you heard about people complaining that they paid off their Visa but it did not credit them for the payment?
Meanwhile, real problems that people do face, such as a vendor not providing you the goods or services that you paid for, are still a problem with blockchain.
The fundamental problem with cryptocurrencies are that they add a whole lot of complexity to solve a problem which is a trivial issue in practice at best, without providing any tools to solve the actual problems people face and in many cases making it harder to find solutions for those problems.
https://medium.com/@qroshan/block-chain-solving-imaginary-pr...
Not just still a problem. Far worse off a problem. Chargebacks exist for credit cards and most bank transactions including wired funds. Send the crypto the wrong way at the wrong time or to the wrong place? Poof. Bye bye money.
This problem is not trivial, and as far as I can see crypto is the only scalable solution to it outside of legislation that isn't ever going to happen.
What about the privacy implications of having nearly every payment on the planet go through 2 megacorporations?
And I can see the response now, while every crypto transaction is public, it's a lot harder to tie identities to wallet addresses than it is to tie a name to a credit card number.
That's a silly claim. Ethereum forked because of a hack and enough people wanting to undo it. Tether regularly freezes funds (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/tether-freezes-...). Ownership of a cryptocurrency can be made a crime. Developers can be sanctioned and arrested.
Tether is centralized and a scam (and arguably a scam because it is centralized) and irrelevant to the discussion. Anyone can make any token they want and run it according to whoever's rules; this logic would indict the entire internet based on the existence of badly moderated websites.
And cryptography can be made a crime as well. Meanwhile, in the world we inhabit today rather than infinite hypothetical ones, no such thing is happening outside of totalitarian governments, and despite their effort, not one single crypto currency transaction has ever been successfully censored.
The two diverging lines were very much unequal.
> Tether is centralized and a scam (and arguably a scam because it is centralized) and irrelevant to the discussion.
Arguing Tether is irrelevant to the crypto space is absurd. (I agree it's a scam. That's a major problem for the whole ecosystem.)
> And cryptography can be made a crime as well.
Correct. You can censor cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
What is your point? Surely you aren't arguing that the governance of one specific token in the broader crypto ecosystem invalidates the general uncensorability of crypto transactions? Because that would be pretty fucking disingenuous as a false equivalence.
Being able to use money electronically without a 3rd party is something that wasn't possible before. Anyone wanting to cut a credit card out of their deal or choose a currency other than their what their country mandates can now do that.
These institutions can also screw you over by massively inflating the crypto bubble and then crashing spectacularly, tanking your value and poisoning the public perception of cryptocurrency.
The 'point' of cryptocurrency may well be to avoid dependence on centralized institutions, but the effect of cryptocurrency has been to enable all this nonsense. At this point in time you can't say "well it's not crypto's fault!" because it absolutely is. You don't just look at intent when assessing outcomes.
Since the major collapses were by organizations which had a monopoly on creating their own currencies ("tokens") you could call them 'central banks'. Note I am not defending cryptocurrencies -- I am pointing out that you calling something 'gibberish' when people do have an understanding of the meaning is not productive.
This is pretty well established, almost to the point that it doesn't need to be said.
How can one tell that with a straight-face when the poster-boys of crypto (like Coinbase, FTX, ConsenSys, Circle, Uniswap, Binance etc) depend on centralized actors like VCs and Stock Exchanges?