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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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.

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