Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

wave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 227 posts

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

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

anonporridge wrote: post #26
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.

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…

> because bitcoin is energy money

This is mostly nonsense. Energy provides a consistent price floor for mining Bitcoin. That has little relevance to its traded price. If energy prices triple, that doesn't mean Bitcoin prices have to triple as well. It just makes mining at lower prices unprofitable. If nobody wants to buy Bitcoins at the breakeven price, mining just stops--it doesn't magic demand into existence.

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

#52

Post by oblio »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #30
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

It couldn't protect freaking Ethereum creators from themselves.

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

#53

Post by bb88 »

Retric wrote: post #37
mkdirp wrote: post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.

I can't trust stable coins.

I can't trust the price of BTC to drop to $0 when speculators panic.

I can't trust that my BTC will be accepted if it was once tied to a money laundering (mixer) address.

I can't trust that I will not be rug pulled on any new coin unless I read the fine grained software contract, first.

I can't trust a software contract from being hacked unless I can hire a software contract expert to peruse it, and hope he's ethical, and won't exploit any holes in the contract for his own gain.

[...]

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

#54

Post by JumpCrisscross »

shafyy wrote: post #16
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.

Nonsense. Sending USD or EUR (or any other currency) to Ukraine is very simple. You can go to their funding page, enter your credit card, and you're done. Then they've got money they can actually use. What are they doing with all the crypto? Did they convert it to fiat? Is it just sitting there? The only reason so many cryptos were sent is because there a lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, th…

> lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass

I'm also assuming those donors will try to write off their crypto at imaginary prices and hope the IRS doesn't notice.

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

#55

Post by kleinsch »

_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…

You seem to be vastly overthinking this. People have been building applications (including banking applications) using boring old relational databases for decades without losing data. Single master, replicated to another region. If relational databases were as faulty as you describe, every web app you use would be losing data all the time. Not everything has to be an overthought system design interview question.

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

#56

Post by anonporridge »

verdverm wrote: post #44
anonporridge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does China largely banning crypto, promoting its own currency (particularly in trying to get it used as the oil pricing from Saudi Arabia), and being one of the biggest importers... play into this hypothetical future?

a) China's new digital yuan isn't a novel competitor to bitcoin. It's just the same old fiat in a new, more authoritarian enabling form.

b) China, while increasingly powerful, is not the whole world. If the rest of the world decides that bitcoin is the only viable fair global reserve currency that doesn't disproportionately benefit some global empire, then they'll eventually be forced to come along for the ride, and will be hurt from their decision to take themselves out of the game in the early days.

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

#57

Post by rvz »

mkdirp wrote: post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

I'm sure many critics are finding it extremely difficult to ignore the certain inevitable failure of cryptocurrencies everyday since, the same arguments presented are once again refuted by yourself.

They were crying over HN when Stripe jumped in for crypto payments due to regulatory clarity and they are crying over it again because it still hasn't died faster than they expected to.

The simple reality is, it isn't going away; even after regulations.

I challenge them to continue to ignore it, as we all know it will collapse real soon. /s

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

#58

Post by bb88 »

TekMol wrote: post #50
Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.

Which country do you live in? My Government abused my trust big time. Over the last 10 years, it doubled the amount of money. And thereby halved my stake in the countries buying power. And regarding trusting a bank: In my country there was a bank with a $15B market cap that did not really posess the money they claimed they posses.

Then: "BTC cause money printer go brrrr"

Now: "Tether printer go brrrr and we still shill crypto"

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

#59

Post by jfk13 »

mkdirp wrote: post #48
Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.

Right, I never said you can trust exchanges. You do not have to use an exchange. That's the whole point of the decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies.

The idea that ordinary people will (reliably, securely, safely) manage their own cryptocurrency holdings without using an exchange (or similar service) is ludicrous. This is blind techno-utopianism at its worst, and does nothing for humanity or society.

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

#60

Post by verdverm »

anonporridge wrote: post #56
verdverm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does China largely banning crypto, promoting its own currency (particularly in trying to get it used as the oil pricing from Saudi Arabia), and being one of the biggest importers... play into this hypothetical future?

a) China's new digital yuan isn't a novel competitor to bitcoin. It's just the same old fiat in a new, more authoritarian enabling form. b) China, while increasingly powerful, is not the whole world. If the rest of the world decides that bitcoin is the only viable fair global reserve currency that doesn't disproportionately benefit some global empire, then they'll eventually be forced to come along for the ride, and…

Bitcoin is too volatile, when will it become stable enough to be used for pricing IRL goods?
Post reply on HN