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Comment by uncletammy | Hacker News Reader

You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.

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:/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream.

I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that.

But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency."

In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?

How do you centralize without having a government requiring KYC?

I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government requiring KYC?

Anonymity of nodes?

If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous operators. (Oof)

Why is that even a real need?

All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there is a problem for a 1$ donation on some random website when they using their real dollars online for literally everything.

Also, there's literally 0 ways other than bartering to get bitcoins really anonymously, and the number of people able to transact while staying anonymous is below 0. You need to take your credit card and pay for it on an exchange, so it's not anonymous.

And the anonymous chains are borderline ignored, because being anonymous is really not what drags people into Bitcoin, but the hope of finding a fool paying more than they did.

It's one thing to be able to track a transaction, but it's a real problem that a name exchange is mandatory for micropayments.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I can't see myself giving my identity for 10c to buy blog articles.

Especially since first and last names are a powerful tracking tool that's not as easy to change as your IP address.

I mean, Solana does 3k tps on a good day (with less electricity than a google search and a fraction of a penny fee). So it’s not un-believable there will be a decentralized ledger that hits visa levels of throughput in the next few years.

I agree though that a centralized solution would be more performant, but it would have to have network effects for it to gain widespread use, which means it would be a monopoly and enshitify and start taking an unreasonable fee. So government should step in and offer something for online micro transactions, but at government speed we might be decades out.

So then we are back to decentralized ledgers…. Not technically better but organizationally, politically, socially better…

say what you want, but iota, out of all of them, actually seems to bring a promising technical solution. @hus_ky on twitter, one of their main devs working on it is a good follow.

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