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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually converting to believing in bitcoin, and that usa politicians/financiers have used the dollar as a way to side step wide ranging problems in the USA, at the expense of currency devaluation. Bitcoin is a backstop, a way to step outside manipulated currency.

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Just remember, the same things that make Bitcoin attractive are what make it really easy to steal. Namely that it has no "men with guns" to back it up and no government bank to make you whole.

It's also easy to declare it illegal, which will stop it being used for anything most people want to use currency for.

Bitcoin is not treated like a currency anymore, given recent trends. It's acted upon more like an equity. In short, it's seemed to tend to follow the stock market. Whatever that means to you, YMMV.

Bitcoin is a backstop, a way to step outside manipulated currency.

This seems like a phenomenally ironic claim to me. You're giving up government manipulation in favor of rampant individual manipulation and theft.

How are we supporting or encouraging theft? When the state increases inflation and the supply of money on a whim, they directly steal value from the little people and funnel it to the big people.

That's not possible with crypto.

That's just ignorance. In crypto "little people" is literally everybody, the "currency" is run by a handful of whales (largely quasi-criminal exchanges and casino mobsters), who have a track record of colluding to manipulate the market and hike up fees. And no, you cannot vote those people out of office. How is that _any_ better?

People frequently lose a significant amount of money due to hacking, fraud, or extortion with no legal recourse. This is not where you want your grandparents parking their life’s savings.

If someone said literally the same thing op said, but about cash, would you have the same response?

My credit card was skimmed and charged $2000 in the US a couple of months ago. I blocked the card from my phone, files a dispute and the charges were reversed.

The most annoying part was updating all my linked services, but I lost no money.

If someone literally robs the bank I have an account with, I also lose no money even if they actually steal some from the physical vault.

Is there a reason you're responding to this post about cash with a corporate credit anecdote?

What is the equivalent website to https://web3isgoinggreat.com for banks, and what is the relative %age lost/stolen on a daily/weekly/monthly basis? I'll bet it's WAY higher for crypto.

Crypto just has pump and dump schemes on a practically regular basis, but I guess that's completely different because the way it funnels value is slightly different.

It drives me nuts how many people support crypto for the right reason, and then miss the last step and support Bitcoin instead of Ethereum. Bitcoin is an enormous resource sink, on the scale of fiat system inflation. It doesn't have to be! The system works without it!

In the world right now, how many transaction per second in $USD are ongoing? 1000? 100,000? Visa can handle 20K/s, IIRC. Bitcoin can handle what, 3-7 per second?? Yeah, that'll scale up to "the world currency".

Bitcoin becoming the world reserve currency does not necessarily imply it also becoming the primary payment currency, nor would it somehow imply fully reserved banking.

Satoshi would probably shudder at the thought of Bitcoin-backed fractional reserve currencies, but that's about the only thing he could do about it.

There are many reasons to poo-poo on Bitcoin, but, please pick a valid one. The transactions-per-second problem has been solved for over a decade and is widely implmented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

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