Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has a lot of problems, but this one confuses me. People steal real money all the time; it's one of the things that makes it real money.

View on HN

Why don't we get these kinds of responses when there's large-scale credit card fraud? "Hey people, it's just money, this shit happens. Go make more and quit crying."

I'll posit it's because the system we inherited—fiat currency insured by governments, poorly secured and handled by credit card companies—works just fine. Nobody would build it this way from scratch, but looking at the endless stream of fiascos with bitcoin, it's obviously better than the alternative. Bitcoin is a bad solution to a non-problem.

With bitcoin, the muggings like this incur a 50% or 100% loss, impacting those who extended trust to the wrong place.

With fiat, the muggings when using a payment card incur a 3% loss each time the currency is used, impacting every person on every transaction.

Because it's completely different? Credit cards are designed to be accountable and refundable. The credit card is sold with a guarantee that it cannot be used to steal money from me. They can do this because credit is not "real" money; it's credit.

Bitcoin is designed to be easy to steal because cash is easy to steal.

It's an amazing technical achievement, it's just not necessary or desirable. There's no music format that replicates vinyl's degradation with each performance. This is not just because it would be hard, but also because it would be undesirable. We just don't need a currency that solves non-problems and brings back solved ones: it's undesirable.

Perhaps we don't, but that is the purpose of Bitcoin: To be digital cash, with all that that entails, for better or worse.

That's why people with significant amount of real money usually store it in properly secured and insured banks and similar institutions, not in a locker rented from some guy they never met. Unless, of course, they can't go into a bank for some reason - like having problems with The Law.

I can only presume that Bitcoin, to what extent it's spent on real transactions, is disproportionately favored by the type of person who would not put their money in a bank account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com