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> Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression).

Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization.

> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it.

I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is.

I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.

I don’t disagree that the boom/bust cycle could be created by centralization, but I also don’t care I suppose. I mean, there’s no perfect solution out there so a boom/bust is a reasonably mild price.

A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature.

I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society.

Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.

I don't think crypto, as most chains implement it, is at all vulnerable to runaway inflation.

A functional crypto can go downhill for a lot of reasons. Technical failures. Association with scams.

But I am not sure how a tightly controlled supply over time, or asymptotically fixed supply, coin can have runaway inflation - if everyone starts demanding more of the coin for goods and services, there just isn't more of the coin for that.

> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations?

So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...

That doesn't return your money to you like the credit card though. The irreversibility 'feature' of most cryptocurrencies makes it really hard to recover funds stolen through fraud... I guess that is a desirable feature for anybody performing fraud though.

Of the things that make cryptocurrency something I want to avoid, the irreversibility part is the biggest problem.

Nothing is ever irreversible, it's just a question of how expensive it is to make the database writes. Ethereum forked the whole currency to undo a write (the DAO hack) and if the legal system can find a hacker they can make them reverse their transaction.

…But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.

Most (but not all) things in life are technically reversible. But some things are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible nonetheless.

I'm guessing you avoid cash for the same reason?

if you can locate the physical person who stole your crypto, you can always use the rubber hose method of returning your money. I bet it works.

VR doesn't need to replace social media for it to be useful.

AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful.

Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful.

If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay.

Think "and" instead of "or".

I agree. VR will have killer apps in particular domains, but that doesn’t mean it will be used by everyone all of the time. For example, I work in ocean mapping where we have large amounts of point cloud data that need occasional manual editing/QAQC in an environment that matches the dimensionality of the data. My colleagues are working on some very interesting VR point cloud editing tools [1].

[1] https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/

I agree!

But that's not how any of those things are being sold.

I think crypto is great for anonymous digital markets. It would be great to disrupt the financial industry, but that's a really big thing. For the markets, I think NFTs is a really good use case. That's a way for artists to have digital galleries, receiving international payments, work can get traded, all independent of the marketplace itself. No company behind that. Books, audio content, ..., and so on are also easily the target of a next generation. I don't believe in this tokenization of physical goods, because then you have a company behind creating the link between token and good. But for purely virtual goods, I think it is great.

In a Blockchain world, how was there anonymity with crypto?

I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.

Monera supposedly is untraceable somehow. And you can do things with passing private keys and mixers even on bitcoin.

You have to analyze the entire system including what they use the untraceable currency for.

Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?

Thats basic money laundering and HSBC is ready to help you.

The desire to have untraceable money isn't always because you're trying to do something illegal or immoral.

Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.

If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.

Has nothing to do with my question but I agree with everything you said.

> You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.

Truer words were never spoken. It is hard to get this across to people with the completely understandable "I didn't do anything wrong so nothing can happen to me" attitude.

As Beria said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"...

Yeah, it's weird that people can perceive anonymous transactions to be only valuable to ne-er-do-wells at the same time that large swaths of the US are criminalizing access to abortifacients.

> It would be great to disrupt the financial industry

Only if there was something at least as good to replace it. Cryptocurrency isn't that.

Disruption just for disruption's sake is a Bad Thing.

> NFTs is a really good use case.

Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.

NTFs seem silly. You own a digital asset on a block chain. But anyone could use a jpeg, it just has no real value to have so-called ownership.

Small correction: NFTs that point to images is one example of how to use the NFT standard, not what an NFT is.

The NFT discussion always ends up at "its just a link to a jpeg", when there are NFTs that have nothing to do with images.

Can you give me some examples of these other kinds of NFTs that are useful then?

California's DMV investigating them for licenses/registrations is an example that hit HN's front page earlier this week.

This is interesting because I haven't heard of this. Would it be something like your license is controlled by you? Somehow you have to keep it private though. Having someone control a position on the blockchain wouldn't seem to be that different than name and password. You can use that to prove who you are, and you can lose that just like you can lose control of your crypto wallet if you forget your password or someone guesses it or hacks your machine.

One workaround would be to store the license/registration tokens in multisig wallets, requiring both the licensee and the DMV to approve of transfers (or add a third signer and go with two of three). A fair bit more centralized than what's ideal, but the very concept of a state-issued license or registration is already implicitly centralized anyway.

> > NFTs is a really good use case.

> Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.

I don't really think NFTs have a real use case, but i can see why it might. It is effectively a digital certificate of authenticity that cannot be faked. But like a physical certificate of authenticity, it is worth as much as the general market would place trust in it. And it isn't much, since collectors of digital goods currently do not value authenticity (realistically) - they value the actual digital good, and thus, a copy is as good as the "real thing".

Therefore, collectors can only really exist for physical goods, and thus NFTs don't actually provide much value, beyond the ability for someone to speculate with it.

What’s the point of disruption without a solution?

Like let’s say my sink keeps leaking so you suggest smashing it. Great, you fixed the leak, but I have no sink now.

Now if you came along and said you’d smash my sink and then replace it with a better sink, I’ll allow it.

People are not hung up on the disruption part. People are hung up on having no sink.

Crypto would be extremely useful if it were wholeheartedly adopted by the government of a medium-sized country. The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat; the problem is that no one pays their taxes in it so no one uses it as a real currency. Likewise, NFT’s could be used to implement property titles if a government ever agreed to enforce them. Then things like smart contracts and whatnot start to look a lot more interesting. The problem is that the entire crypto economy is a fake play-money ecosystem with no power over physical reality.

This went from +2 to -1 overnight, and I'm not complaining; I'm just curious if I got downvoted by the crypto haters or by the crypto supporters. Such is the risk of expressing a nuanced opinion on Hacker News I suppose.

The thing you're missing is there are no incentives for a sovereign nation to give up the ability to mint their own currency and control its supply (monetary policy).

There’s a reason I said “medium-sized country”. The US, EU, and apparently now China wouldn’t be interested because they are world reserve currencies, or aspire to be in China’s case. On the other hand, you could probably make a case to voters for cryptocurrency to replace something utterly dysfunctional like the Argentine peso. Crypto doesn’t really do much for a country with functioning and trustworthy governing institutions, but not every country has that.

> The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat

The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.