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Comment by voidspark | Hacker News Reader

This is an exchange problem, not a crypto problem. You don’t need an exchange to hold crypto.

You need an exchange to do some core things that people want to use cryptocurrencies for.

It may not be a crypto-as-a-theoretically/ideologically-pure-construct problem, but it absolutely is a crypto-as-a-real-world-asset problem.

But they need exchanges to get real money to flow in and out of cryptocurrency easily. Without it, cryptocurrency by itself would likely be worth far less than it is today.

Yes that's true, but no need to hold your crypto there as a permanent storage. Once your fiat is exchanged to crypto, immediately transfer the crypto to your private wallet.

This just trades the unsolved exchange hacking problem for the unsolved lost/stolen keys problem.

That problem is trivially solved by backups.

Backups don't solve seed phrase phishing for example.

As opposed to the bank's ...? Or your other account's ..., what exactly, passwords? Phising is everywhere. How many times have you heard the elderly have their money stolen, both online and in real life? It happened to my grandma. The mailman is bringing her own pension as cash, and guess what, he has scammed my grandma for years! The food delivery guy who has been delivering lunch for my grandma, guess what he did? He scammed my grandma out of her money! We are talking about cash, right now, and no phising involved, just good old "lying".

Hence why cryptocurrency would never replace regular banks for regular people. The situation with scams and thefts has only gotten worse. Not your keys, not your coin.

I definitely cannot imagine my grandma making use of crypto, or PayPal, or her bank's online site. :)

LOL. Point taken.

Theft or loss has always been a problem since life evolved on Earth.

I don't think anyone claimed that crypto was un-losable or un-stealable. It's not magic.

https://cryptosteel.com

Yes, I think I’m familiar with the crypto enthusiasts defenses that all boil down to looking at a single aspect of their system in a vacuum and not realizing that if anyone wants to functionally use crypto as a currency and not as a speculative asset or tool in crime, then all these aspects actually have to work and work together

I don't really care about crypto personally (volatile shitcoins) but I think that's a straw man argument. They all know it gets troublesome when it comes to dealing with fiat transactions. The hardcore crypto enthusiasts want to avoid fiat entirely.

If only hardcore crypto enthusiasts who didn't want any fiat had cryptocurrency bitcoin would be worth a couple dollars a piece and 99% of other cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist. The vast vast majority of people who have crypto are doing it because they think they can get rich from it and that's why anytime it's talked about it's talked about in terms of fiat values

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