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Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

Good luck to them, but this is the "reason" crypto exists. I don't think we need (or can sustain) dozens of payment processors all with their own flavor of politics/dispute resolution quirks.

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The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of consumers, both in terms of quantity and amount of money owned, would rather have a bank be liable when something goes wrong instead of being liable themselves.

Crypto is very much like gold. When it gets stolen, either due to your account getting hacked, your bank's account getting hacked, you being phished, you buying a phone and actually receiving a brick, or even your employee transferring all the money your company has and fleeing to China, there's no recourse.

That's not how traditional finance works. Most financial transactions are, to some degree, reversible, and many of those that aren't will be refunded by the bank / insurance / government in case of fraud. This is something that most banking customers want.

And if you want irreversible, like gold/cash, you can always use Zelle which is supported by most banks in USA

There is no legal supported way to take Zelle payments as a merchant. And it has strict limits on transactions.

Apart from the myriad technical reasons that existing crypto transactions will never be a replacement for existing payment processors, I'm personally not interested in a payment system that makes all of my transactions a matter of public record.

Crypto as in:

- Decentralized finance (not even Coinbase)

- Decentralized internet (everyone has servers)

- New currencies / economies (niche-specific wealth)

- Stop macro exploitation of intl economies

- Information available to all

- Sanity restored to money system / no more theft

- Sanity restored to content / no more censorship

Then sign me up! Or actually don't... I'll sign me up!

Crypto as in:

- Centralized exchanges

- Centralized content hubs and "vaults"

- Crypto twitter celeb ICOs and pump/dumps - NFTs ZKPs PePes and emojis

- More corruption than ever

- More theft than ever

- Information obfuscated by memes and schemes

Then no thanks, I'm good. Crypto was cool in the beginning, just got steered into a mess that nobody wants anything to do with anymore (probably intentionally).

FWIW people are still building in the former list and never stopped. It's the "degen" speculators that got loud enough to overtake the public-facing narratives for their own personal gain.

Fair take. I always thought it was weird to have crypto projects in Discord servers. The dream was corrupted.

Crypto is going no where, as an end user payment option, until consumers can do chargebacks.

There are ways to solve this, but they involve gatekeeping, which of course puts us back at step one.

I'm not sure this is a convincing take on crypto. At the end of the day, you still need an on ramp and off ramp to deal in it, regardless of whether that's a bank or some other third party. We've already seen multiple times that e.g. certain blockchain assets are blacklisted. If you ever tried to move or cash them, the most likely outcome is a SWAT team at your door once there's a link to your name, similarly any financial institutions or corporations mediating it would face severe punishment. So effectively those assets are fenced off, no one wants the risk, and the end result is not different from regular finance.

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