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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Unless finance institutions and laws can protect wallets and insure crypto, I will never use it. Currency is not just a number you move around, currency is deeply intertwined with how civilization works, and it requires a high amount of trust for people to use it.

Trust is rather a social concept that something you can really prove mathematically. It's collective trust. Unless you can DRASTICALLY reduce mis-use with bitcoin, no one with trust it ever without a lot of expensive protective measures.

A 1 hour lecture from a security professor on crypto currency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q

Something else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo

View on HN

I don't understand why this would be a serious impediment.

Suppose you go to an online exchange or Bitcoin ATM or local man with a crypto wallet, you hand over five $10 bills or transfer some money from your bank account, you get $50 in cryptocurrency.

Now you go to the adult bookstore's website and don't have to give them your name, you send $20 to your friend in a foreign country so she can get a cab to the airport without having to lose another $15+ to a wire transfer fee, or you just use it to pay for parking.

Even if you screw up entirely, the most you're out is $50. But then nobody is tying your literature preferences to your name, you can do your friend a favor more efficiently, and the credit card company doesn't have a database of where and when you park your car.

The trust issues come when you want to be a speculator holding a large amount of wealth in a form someone could steal by breaking into your computer, but what does that have to do with using ordinary amounts day to day as a currency?

$15 to transfer $20 to another country, the US really is a another world sometimes. Transfers are often free to cheap - substantially lower than the costs for transferring crypto in most cases.

US banks commonly charge ~$40 for an outgoing international wire transfer, even for small amounts. There are less expensive alternatives but they may not allow you to withdraw the funds the same day or be available to the recipient in that country.

The average transaction fee for Bitcoin is currently less than $1. For Bitcoin Cash it's less than $0.01.

> Now you go to the adult bookstore's website and don't have to give them your name

And they don't have to give you your book.

But they want to give you your book, because they want your money.

Step 1: You give them your money.

From the seller's perspective, there's no need to bother with step 2.

The seller does not need to be anonymous, and customers would be less inclined to trust them if they are. At which point if they're ripping people off they would be subject to arrest for fraud, not to mention have immediate bad reviews.

More than that, sellers like repeat business, especially in low variable cost digital products. It costs them a tenth of a cent worth of bandwidth to actually send you the book, which is the only way they're going to get your money for the next book.

They want to give you your book, because they want your money.

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