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Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

wave.com

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Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#21

Post by _vvhw »

lkrubner wrote: post #17
_vvhw wrote: post #8

"We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money." "At Wave, though, we prefer to use boring technology, and a simple relational database like Postgres does an equally good job at this." How does Wave ensure multi-region durability for Postgres, high availability, and strict serializability during failover, without risk o…

> multi-region durability Why is this important? Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync, plus failover when the main server goes down? It seems to me that all of your questions are issues that have been often discussed over the last 20 years, and they all have well known answers, except perhaps "multi-region durability". Leave that out, and you've well known answers for you…

"Why is this important?"

Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire.

"Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync"

Because without distributed strict serializability, Wave would also be risking the loss of data back to the last backup.

However, I'm assuming here that Wave are running consensus around Postgres. That they're not taking any of these chances.

But if they're doing it right, then Postgres just doesn't seem like the most boring way to get distributed failover safely, especially when the data is as valuable as account balances, where so much compliance is at stake. Why not simply use a distributed database to begin with?

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#23

Post by [deleted] »

_vvhw wrote: post #8

"We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money." "At Wave, though, we prefer to use boring technology, and a simple relational database like Postgres does an equally good job at this." How does Wave ensure multi-region durability for Postgres, high availability, and strict serializability during failover, without risk o…

[deleted]

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#24

Post by k__ »

verdverm wrote: post #18
anonporridge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency…

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

Yes.

I'm excited for the next steps of stable coins.

People always ask "What if Tether isn't 100% backed by Dollar?!"

The more interesting question is "What if the Dollar is shit?!"

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#25

Post by verdverm »

loceng wrote: post #14
valcron1000 wrote: post #9

Yet another middle man stating that crypto is not the way to go. Of course they are going to say that, they lose their 1% transaction fee.

Isn't the cost generally substantially higher than 1% if directly using the blockchain [depends on transaction size and urgency/timeliness I suppose]? But yes, you are right there is a competitive pressure/force at work here.

Some of that cost is externalized onto the environment and future, much like we don't pay the actual cost of fossil fuels at the pump.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#26

Post by anonporridge »

verdverm wrote: post #18
anonporridge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency…

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

I think this is a problem until it isn't.

The first country that starts pricing its oil exports in bitcoin will a) cause the price to initially skyrocket, and b) create a stabilizing force on the price that percolates to all other goods and services.

And the interesting thing, is that because bitcoin is energy money, there is a very direct and explicit correlation to the amount of bitcoin you can earn from using your energy to mine, which can then allow an exporter to trivially calculate the price they are willing to sell their energy for (slightly more than they can net from mining).

The dollar is the stable global reserve currency largely because the US has used its military might to violently coerce oil exporters to price their oil in dollars. Once that happens peacefully with bitcoin, the US dollar will regress back to a local currency used to control its own population and bitcoin will be the fair, global reserve asset used for international trade.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#27

Post by anonporridge »

k__ wrote: post #24
verdverm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

Yes. I'm excited for the next steps of stable coins. People always ask "What if Tether isn't 100% backed by Dollar?!" The more interesting question is "What if the Dollar is shit?!"

"But Tether's not backed by anything and they can arbitrarily print more of it!!!!"

"...do...do you not know how the actual dollar works..."

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#28

Post by dmitriid »

seibelj wrote: post #3

Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.

> Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did.

No. Crypto sent a bunch of meaningless novelty coins to a country that has no chance in hell of converting them into food, water, transportation etc.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#29

Post by rattlesnakedave »

verdverm wrote: post #18
anonporridge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency…

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

I don’t think this matters. Wallets can convert between the two trivially. Acceptance as a method of payment is what matters.

What matters more is acceptance as a method of savings.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#30

Post by adamsmith143 »

reactspa wrote: post #5

It's one of the most financially *exclusionary* concepts ever created. There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. Aside 1: as big of a joke the ori…

The smartest system still can't protect the dumbest users from themselves. Not a bug imo
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