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> I can't trust stable coins. Why not?
IIRC, some widespread and notable ones have consistently failed to prove they're backed by the reserves they claim to have.
There are plenty of reputable stablecoins out there that prove their reserves either continuously on-chain or through regular financial audits.
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Seems a bit early to say it has “utterly failed.” Especially when Colombia is consistently the 2nd most active trading country in LatAm. And As Banco De Bogota is piloting crypto programs https://www.portafolio.co/economia/finanzas/banco-de-bogota-...
Not saying crypto has failed in all aspects, just in the use case talked about in the blog post. I don't see crypto competing with e.g. Nequi any time soon. The project you mentioned is interesting, but I see it as something much more for the middle and upper classes. I know plenty of crypto enthusiast in those circles. I tried Buda, which is mentioned in the article as partner. It has been the most tedious experienc…
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> bitcoin is energy money Bitcoin isn't energy anything. The energy required to print bitcoins has been expended in the process of printing the bitcoins.
Right, value has been removed from BTC and sent to the energy companies mostly.
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…
> Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. Uh, what now? They actually do a worse job than traditional finance. What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver? Why I dispute the transaction and get my money back. It's less important that I have absolute trust in the vendor, because I ha…
You are comparing crypto to a service that a third party provides on top of fiat. It's not a fair comparison as there is nothing stopping third parties providing the same service on top of crypto (and the third party does not necessary need human intervention to function when both parties act in good faith).
The more accurate comparison is: "What happens if I pay for a service or good upfront with cash, and get stiffed?"
Answer: If you know who they are, you take them to court and use the existing legal infrastructure. If you don't know who they are or it's too low value to be worth fighting, you leave them a bad review and share your bad experience with others to help them avoid the same.
>The only "trust" problem cryptocurrencies solved was keeping track of stuff like account balances in a distributed ledger, but that's purely a problem created by the ideological choice of a distributed ledger.
Keeping track of balances is a tough problem that did not (and still doesn't) have a good solution for after many decades of operation. Transfers between banks take days to settle (and weeks to finalize), same for payments between users and businesses.
Was it feasible to solve keeping track of balances between semi-trustworthy actors on a faster scale and without DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies)? Sure... but it has not eventuated and there was no sign it ever would. The telling sign for me is that many financial institutions are looking at, developing or rolling out their own implementations based on the demonstrated principles in crypto. That's good news, but I guess doesn't count for anything for some reason?
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No. The energy is expended to create the strongest immutability guarantee and DDOS resistance of any distributed system ever created by humanity. Distribution of new coins and transactions fees are simply the reward for that service.
> The energy is expended It certainly is.
Everything worth doing costs energy.
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Given some of the services you mentioned, are you talking about transferring money in and out of the country? In that case I might agree. It is a huge pain in Colombia as well. I was referring to alternatives to small cash transactions between people in the country. For which there is for example Nequi. Easy onboarding, no service or transaction fees, no minimum amounts, free cash withdrawals, instant transfers. Yes…
Indeed, I guess we were not talking about the same issue. For local transfers, sure, use whatever floats your boat: cash, digital wallets, bank transfers (I would not advise this, but whatever). Here we have several options for that, like Mercadopago, Burbank, Uala, Reba, Naranja X, etc. These are really good for day to day purchases, and you usually don't keep a lot of money on these accounts, so if you happen to ha…
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And that's the most important thing crypto enthusiast always deny or fail to comprehend, it's like famous https://xkcd.com/538/ most enthusiasts do not accept that the blockchain will became unmanageable by most just due to it's ever-growing size. At that point exchange will be mandatory by nature and at that point users will have no more viable means to verify anything. The very same old scam banks have made in the…
> most enthusiasts do not accept that the blockchain will became unmanageable by most just due to it's ever-growing size Some blockchain protocols like Bitcoin make the silly argument that in order for a chain to be worthwhile, a full history of all transactions needs to be maximally available on the network. Other chains either drop, or plan to drop data that's been on the network for over a year or so (EIP-4444, fo…
You don't need to rely on such a weak assumption.
You can use Incrementally Verifiable Computation to verify the entire blockchain history in constant time. See e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/11/05/halo.html
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.
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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 trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. Trust them to keep your money – yes, you can absolutely rely on that. Trust them to have “your” money back – that’s a taller order. But it it will be safe, sure. At least with cryptocurrency you don’t have to keep it at an exchange, while the governments are pushing for abolishing cash and keeping all the money in banks.