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Comment by only-one1701 | Hacker News Reader

You could also do this with any other kind of API a bank might expose? Why is crypto necessary here?

One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity.

Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.

crypto isn't necessary... it's just that no bank wants to take on the risk of exposing an api to the regular consumer.

Crypto doesn't require 3rd party permission to send money or verifying anyone's authenticity, real name, or legal compliance. So it's much easier to build APIs around. If you created banking APIs you'd need very extensive controls and monitoring for anti-money laundering and so on.

Sure, you could technically wire something together that does this, but maybe the other party wants a strong reassurance that the payment will actually go through. They don't want to rely on your server making the right API call.

E.g. Automatic bill pay to a VPN. Now you have very good anonymity.

If you’re making regular payments from a known wallet on a public ledger, where is the anonymity coming from?

A known pseudonym doesn't destroy anonymity?

It puts you one mistake or bit of misplaced trust away from permanent de-anonymization. In our example, you have to avoid ever using that wallet for anything else, scrupulously fund it using mixers, and hope that your VPN provider never does something which makes it possible to link your activity to that wallet.

This is not realistic for the average person.

I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."

In roughly the same way there's no such thing as "very good cybersecurity for the average person."

> I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."

I know HN skews hard for electronic payments but cash is still heavily used. One nice trait is that its weaknesses are highly intuitive: there’s no retroactive de-anonymization or tracking across unrelated transactions, and people are familiar with how physical objects are stolen.

In this scenario, imagine that “you” are in a different country or perhaps you don’t have a bank account. Or maybe you don’t want to pay $10+ or X% to receive funds.

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