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colesantiago

Good.

May the entire of crypto be brought down with it.

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> May the entire of crypto be brought down with it

Pretty hard to get rid of decentralized systems.

Crypto is pretty centralised thanks to these exchanges and many blockchains running solely on AWS such as Ethereum.

Crypto being ‘decentralised’ is a well known myth.

You don't need exchanges for cryptocurrencies to work, they just make onboarding easier.

Do you mean that, once on-boarded, crypto holders would only need to trade with fellow crypto holders?

Ethereum running “solely” on AWS is a myth. If AWS were shut down, the chain would continue as usual.

Even Vitalik knows that Ethereum is centralised.

> If AWS were shut down, the chain would continue as usual.

Continue laundering money for foreign state actors and narcotics businesses, sounds about right as this is is what crypto is good for.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/united-states-seized-and-...

Do you think it would continue or not? Your comments seem to hold conflicting points.

We both know that crypto is only used for and that the main use case is criminal activities, so it's only right that the whole thing should be shut down by law.

It's already impossible for crypto to become part of the current financial system so the only way to stop this scourge is to make crypto illegal starting with the exchanges down to the blockchains.

Blockchains have absolutely no use case at all.

You're free to hold whatever opinions you want, but I don't see how they're relevant to this conversation.

It's not productive to spread falsehoods about how blockchains are hosted.

I don't see any sources for any of your claims so I've completely ignored it as you have no hard sources.

Okay, then it should be just as fair for everyone to ignore your claim that Ethereum runs "solely on AWS".

No, since there are clearly cited sources on the centrality of Ethereum on AWS and everyone from Vitalik and others knows it.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/3-cloud-providers-accounting-...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/12/morgan-stanley-...

Both your sources show that only 30-35% of nodes run on AWS. They seem to support my point that Ethereum would continue running during an AWS outage, not your point that Ethereum runs "solely" on AWS.

Furthermore, the cointelegraph article misquotes a Messari report as if it's discussing the current state of Ethereum as having central points of failure, when it's really discussing a hypothetical upgrade to Ethereum that was never considered nor built.

Finally, node percentages don't actually matter in terms of chain uptime. What really matters are staking validator percentages, since they are what determine chain building and finality.

And?

This doesn't change the fact that centralisation is still a massive problem with Ethereum and it is still a big enough problem that everyone knows that the crypto infra of choice is to coalesce on AWS.

Infura deploys Ethereum nodes solely on AWS further centralising Ethereum on there thanks to a Consensys and AWS partnership.

The entire opposite of decentralisation in crypto.

Again, you're free to hold whatever additional opinions you want. I'll respectfully pass on discussing those, as my original intent was to correct a particular piece of misinformation.

What misinformation? I think I missed it or it wasn't misinformation in the first place.

You seem to be confusing would with should?

You're right, it must be shut down by law.

That should be much better.

If you could please elaborate, for the free curious spirits of HN.

Crypto has brought good in underdeveloped countries like Venezuela and Argentina. Venezuelans use USDT to purchase real, physical goods. Sometimes groceries.

Have any numbers on this? The only numbers I could find are very modest[1]. IIRC Zeke Faux, the author of "Number Go Up" also noted that adoption is very illusory - like the "Accepts Bitcoin" stickers you see all over the place Canada when there's no functioning bitcoin payment processing inside.

But besides all that, I think it's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of unaccountable central-bank-style institutions like USDT. What will proponents of this crap say if/when USDT collapses? "They knew the risks"? Is the "crypto community" going to bail out people who invested their life savings in this garbage[2]?

[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/latin-america-cryptocurrenc...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/10ovcoo/lost_...

I think it's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of unaccountable central-bank-style institutions like Federal Reserve.

It's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of criminals.

central bankers are indeed criminals!

Reflecting on how crypto once fit with the HN ethos. Hard to say where the community is now, partly because I don't spend as much time here. But it definitely seems to not be the darling it once was.

Don't know if this is because it's mainstreamed in a way that makes it less "hacker"-appealing (quotes intentional), the HN community has changed, or because crypto went full crypto-bro so hard.

May be some combination.

Probably because the brave new world of cryptopunk anonymity and liberation has turned into this mess of fraud and in-your-face centralisation and crime.

I have to admit I do find it pretty funny when the people who have touted blockchain and cryptocurrency as great because of its decentralization have discovered /why/ a central authority is incredibly important in finance. All of the crypto pumpers start crying for government support when they're the ones who get fleeced, when that's literally built into the technology as a feature.

I imagine HN in particular is also quite dominated by traditional US finance.

I honestly don't remember the time you are describing. As far as I can remember, the most prevalent voices about crypto from HN have been from the naysayers by far. The craze just simply isn't there anymore, which is a very good thing. People who refuse to try and understand cryptocurrencies but tout fanciful things about them shouldn't be the ones representing them.

Anyone in the variety of South American countries experiencing massive inflation would have been worlds better if they had just parked their money in BTC. Crypto is full of scams but there is also a world of positives and opportunity there.

They would've also been worlds better if they had parked their money in Gamestop, or honestly even in a casino, but that doesn't make it a sound investment

why does orange reddit always have comments like this whenever coins get mentioned

“Orange reddit” was one of the first places that Bitcoin was discussed. Consequently there’s an awful lot of people here who know exactly how much they missed out, and express this by being saltier than dead sea whenever the topic comes up. The accepted wisdom on HN, when the bitcoin price was in the single digits, was that it was a “tulip bubble” and you should absolutely not buy it under any circumstances.

The accepted wisdom is still that it's a bubble and you should not buy it, the price going up does not necessarily mean that the price isn't higher than it should be. Projecting everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint as somebody who is angry they missed out is simply a quick way to hand-wave away people who disagree with your crypto-is-the-future dogma. I wasn't in the early adopters per-say but I did do some crapcoin trading back in the day and made a decent sum at the time, and yet I still hold crypto and blockchain technology as a whole as almost entirely pointless. I have still yet to hear any real valid use of the technology that is better than existing/alternative solutions. It speaks volumes that the people who would know the most about the technology (software engineers, who are prevalent here), are the ones who (outside of the general public) believe that the technology is largely pointless, if not downright idiotic.

I find it really hard to reconcile this viewpoint with reality. I personally know businesses who use stablecoins for international money transfers because it’s just faster and cheaper.

Also, every month or so an article pops up here where either some business is rekt because their payment processor’s automated process kicked them off, or someone’s bank account got closed in a similar way screwing them.

Yet the only way to self custody electronic money and transact without intermediaries is somehow ‘pointless and idiotic’.

The key differentiating factor in your hypothetical reasons why traditional finance is inferior to defi is that there are systems to remediate the exact issues you mentioned, whereas if you send your crypto to the wrong address- it's gone. If you lose your seed words to your wallet and can't access it, or someone else gets access to them- it's gone. If you get scammed- it's gone. Literally all of these things (which are a /feature/ of the tech!) make it essentially unusable for any business that isn't looking for an adrenaline rush. What I love most about all of these shortcomings of the technology is how much people who push it minimize all of these issues by saying that it's user error, and people who utilize good practices won't have these issues. It's almost as if all of these people have literally never talked to a real person. No regular person cares or would ever want to care about hard wallets versus alternatives, seed words, verifying addresses, and avoiding phishing scams. All of these issues which can be mitigated by being technically inclined fall flat on their face with any person who just wants to send money to their grandson or pay a friend for dinner.

The reasons are really not hypothetical. That being said though, I don’t personally believe that crypto will or necessarily needs to totally replace all fiat usage. It’s more along the lines of the realization that the possibility to have electronic money kept and transmitted outside of the fractionally reserved banking system is immediately useful.

Given the state of crypto adoption now, I can’t imagine a non-dystopian future a century from now where what we now call crypto or digital assets haven’t become a very boring and non-remarkable part of the civilizational fabric.

I can imagine dystopian futures where that’s the case though. One would be where the infrastructure we use to run crypto on (the internet, telecommunications) doesn’t exist. Another is where all the regulatory environments for digital assets that currently exist (UK, EU, Canada, etc) have been totally rolled back, and self-custody has been made a criminal offense. Probably some type of society straight out of hunger games.

To be fair, people get scammed over wire transfers in traditional finance all the time

What kind of businesses?

One is a run of the mill software engineering consultancy, the other a startup making a development as a service platform where they link companies needing work with engineers in the developing world.

And many people were scammed and lost their savings to BTC and other crypto schemes. It's funny how the Ponzi promoters always forget that part when touting whatever cooked-up reason they promote crypto for.

But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.

These people were scammed by humans, not by bitcoin.

The nigerian prince scam has been running on fiat for decades

I first read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. I thought it was a stupid idea back then, and I think it's a stupid idea now. Buying bitcoin in 2008 would have been a terrible investment decision regardless of whatever result it might have produced. If you don't understand that an investment decision can't be evaluated after the fact on the basis of the outcome of single random event you know nothing about investing.

If you would have looked at the geopolitical landscape and what they've been doing to our money for 100 years it would have been an easy investment to make. Geopolitics and monetary policy is your due diligence.

downvoting just makes everyone on orange reddit seem saltier

but keep commenting the same dialogue prompt the salt is pretty entertaining

And why would that be?

Because he's salty about it, the comment doesn't point at anything else

I don’t understand why they care so much. If crypto is so bad, just leave it alone and let it die.

Name any positive valid use case that crypto does better than the current financial system.

Visa are using it for cross-border settlements between issuer and merchant banks: https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

This is surprising.

But it might not be as pro-crypto as crypto-boosters think. Crypto was supposed to replace orgs like Visa. Now Visa is co-opting crypto.

Crypto bros harp on about that they don't need the legacy financial system or it needs to be decentralised away from the big banks and duopolies.

It turns out that these entities are only getting into crypto for hiking up fees and centralisation, defeating the point of crypto in the first place.

Projects such as UPI in India doesn't use Visa or Mastercard and is rolling out worldwide, the exact solution crypto was supposed to solve, yet 15 years later no progress whatsoever has been made on the crypto front.

So crypto proponents have just been screeching for nothing but price speculation which isn't a use case at all.

This feels like moving the goal posts a bit.

>>Name one thing good about crypto

names it

“Welllll that doesn’t count.”

Ethereum has negative inflation, unlike many fiat currencies.

I have used Bitcoin to donate money to organizations the state would prefer me not to, such as Ukrainian defense, or Wikileaks (famously blockaded by banks without/before criminal charges).

There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.

NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)

Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).

It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.

> I have used Bitcoin to donate money to organizations the state would prefer me not to, such as Ukrainian defense, or Wikileaks (famously blockaded by banks without/before criminal charges).

So?

You can do all of this without crypto, there is nothing new or novel that crypto has done here.

> There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.

Same again, and in fact we have PayPal, Xoom, Wise, etc.,

Instead, you are asking normal people to rely on crypto exchanges to convert their crypto into fiat (with extra costly fees) through a complicated process in order to receive money.

This is neither innovative or novel, it just adds more needless complexity and is a regression from what already exists in the current financial system.

> NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)

This highly wash traded 'market' is down big, so by using NFTs you're not really supporting artists at all, you are driving down the 'value' of the collectible down to 0.

> Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).

The reason why we have the current system is to reduce the amount of bad actors trying to defraud people, crypto just blows this right open to create a wild west of fraud.

How would the privacy preservation work with businesses, It wouldn't as no business would want to touch crypto and it is not worth the accounting hell for them.

> It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.

This is called cash.

You can't send cash over the internet, but anyone who thinks you get privacy on blockchain transactions (other than Monero) has been mislead.

Your comment presupposes every human exists in your current, healthy, financial system.

lol that's not an answer.

It isn’t? Seems like one to me.

Uncensorable money across borders

This is a perfect use case for criminals and ransomware gangs which is certainly why crypto is popular for these groups.

Especially for funding the North Korean regime.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-18/how-north-korea-makes...

Cool, but that’s not what you asked, and you’re moving the goalposts. I suggest you slow down and think about the pros/cons/tradeoffs instead of automatically going down the decision tree of this argument.

What you've suggested is not a positive use case at all but sure it's perfect for criminals.

Great job.

Any authoritarian state will label dissidents as "criminals". If you want to flee Russia or Venezuela today without forfeiting all your property, crypto can come in handy.

This is very much a positive use case if you value individual freedom. Remember that any wall and border has 2 sides.

Hmmm. Interesting.

I can only name 1 person who is in this position you describe yet they are not fleeing Russia any time soon.

So according to your logic the North Korean hackers who borrowed $2BN in crypto are not criminals in North Korea's eyes despite the US government calling them criminals?

You might want to come with real world examples with a larger impact instead of tiny selective scenarios where almost nobody other than that 1 person would get themselves into.

You so realise that cash and gold are used by those groups as first choice?

Except crypto is way easier for criminals to move funds around better than what you've suggested.

The fact that it is useful to criminals does not mean it is not useful to non-criminals. You asked for examples of utility; it was provided.

Firearms and cryptography are two additional examples of things that provide a lot of utility to their users, both innocent and criminal.

> "Name any positive valid use case that crypto does better than the current financial system."

This isn't a positive use case. It is a negative one.

So unless you are a criminal or you're sending ransomware to Joan from Nebraska for 0.5 BTC...

Nope.

Domestic and international settlement speed

Wrong. Wise does this better than crypto.

Even Wise's own website says it can take days.

Bitcoin and others can be officially settled in minutes to hours

https://wise.com/help/articles/2977951/why-is-my-transfer-ta...

Ironically the only way Wise would be faster to withdraw money to my (foreign) account is via crypto, for which they quote three digits (yikes!)

It won't though

How does this in any way deter crypto, if anything it strengthened it. Binance continues to operate, Zhao won't face any actual penalty and continues to be a billionaire.

Seems to me like Binance and crypto is the winner here.

"This is good for Bitcoin"

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