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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

No it isn’t. No more than a wallet key.

If I lose $1 note. It’s gone. If I recover it, then it’s no longer lost.

A $1 note being a macro scale physical object enjoys a variety of benefits such as object permanence which provide a baseline level of recoverability. Whereas a wallet key l, being a number, enjoys no such protections.

Of course you may choose to encode your wallet key on paper, metal, or stone granting it properties not unlike a note. However you have now compromised the security of your wallet as well it becomes no mere $1 note, rather it is a note that represents all or a significant fraction of your net worth.

You can encode your bitcoin in wallets of predetermined size, spreading your risk.

But you’re reinventing money with extra steps.

> But you’re reinventing money with extra steps.

But you gain some desirable properties over traditional money.

Without crypto, you don't have frictionless and permissionless transfers of arbitrary value across international borders.

There's no fundamental property of the monetary system that prevents transfers of arbitrary value across international borders. There's just a large number of financial regulators, border guards, etc. who will throw you in jail if you carry a big block of gold across the border or accept a large wire transfer without filling out the necessary forms. In many countries, the laws governing those forms don't yet apply to cryptocurrencies, but I'm skeptical it will remain that way forever.

That's true, and the AML laws for crypto are already becoming more strict, especially in Europe. But in practice, it will be much easier to evade those laws than it is with fiat transfers or moving physical cash/gold.

There’s also some weird technicalities:

Eg, if you shard a key into three pieces and each person carries one through security, did anyone actually transport the money through?

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