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Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

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

#141

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.

"can trust my bank... I can’t trust an exchange"

We could make them one and the same thing with a stroke of legislative pen. Just because current laws do not manage X new thing correctly, we should not conclude X new thing is terrible.

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

#142

Post by paulmd »

8note wrote: post #134
anonporridge wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Violence relieves someone of their Bitcoin keys just as easily as it does their dollars or gold. Wrong. It is significantly more complicated to use violence to steal bitcoin from people than it is to use violence to steal dollars or gold. With bitcoin, I need to coerce you to give it to me. That could mean torture, sure, but do exist multisig key structures that make it impossible to steal bitcoin by coercing a sin…

Your multisig partners need to be psychopaths who are willing to let you die to maintain your wealth. Otherwise, they are coerced when you are by violence

you've also (gasp) given veto power over any spending you want to do, to a third party. Which is one of those things crypto was supposed to avoid.

What if mom says no internet heroin this month and won't sign that transaction? Or refuses to sign any transaction at all?

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

#144

Post by tenuousemphasis »

k__ wrote: post #7

Onboarding is really a PITA. Until you found a way to pay for everything in crypto, you have to deal with centralized exchanges to get fiat to pay your stuff. Playing in fiat requires you to convert from a crypto token and that is a taxable event. It's a bit like shooting stuff into space. Getting out of earth's gravity is the hardest part, even if it's just a small fraction of the way.

According to CoinATMRadar, there are more than 36,000 kiosks across the world where you can buy and sometimes sell crypto in exchange for cash. The fees are higher, but it's a much easier onboarding process (sometimes none at all) than a centralized exchange.

https://coinatmradar.com

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

#145

Post by _vvhw »

lkrubner wrote: post #127
_vvhw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single DB corruption and disk failures are more common than you think. "Single master, replicated to another region." Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Is it that hard to spin up something like CockroachDB? In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that Wave are running CockroachDB as their Postgres foundation under the hood.

> Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Call me maybe. This is a newer technology and the growing pains have been dramatic. I assume you've followed Jespen? https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen I use MongoDB all the time, for a lot of projects. But I'm also keenly aware of how many years they have struggled to pass the Jespen tests. I can also recall several times engineers from MongoDB have said…

"I assume you've followed Jespen?"

Yes!

You might also want to check out autonomous deterministic testing, which is like Jepsen, but where you can explore many more state spaces by speeding up time, and where you can replay any distributed bugs instantly, just by replaying a seed.

This is a brilliant talk on these techniques:

FoundationDB — How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Database — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJb8A6h9jQQ

I also work on a distributed database called TigerBeetle [1] where we use these new techniques. You can run our simulation tests yourself even. It's as simple as cloning the repo and running "scripts/vopr.sh", and let me know if you want a tour!

These testing techniques work so well that we've been running a bug bounty challenge with awards up to $8192 for anyone who can find a way to break it or crash it. It comes with the simulation testing all included so it's pretty easy to get started. [2]

[1] https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle

[2] https://github.com/coilhq/viewstamped-replication-made-famou...

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

#146

Post by tablespoon »

miohtama wrote: post #128
diputsmonro wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With crypto you pay the additional overhead of gas fees, which are often unpredictable and may cost more than the item itself.

Can you cite any source for this?

>> With crypto you pay the additional overhead of gas fees, which are often unpredictable and may cost more than the item itself.

> Can you cite any source for this?

It's common knowledge.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...

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

#147

Post by jd_mongodb »

lkrubner wrote: post #127
_vvhw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single DB corruption and disk failures are more common than you think. "Single master, replicated to another region." Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Is it that hard to spin up something like CockroachDB? In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that Wave are running CockroachDB as their Postgres foundation under the hood.

> Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Call me maybe. This is a newer technology and the growing pains have been dramatic. I assume you've followed Jespen? https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen I use MongoDB all the time, for a lot of projects. But I'm also keenly aware of how many years they have struggled to pass the Jespen tests. I can also recall several times engineers from MongoDB have said…

I'm not sure "struggled to pass" is the right characterisation. The Jepsen tests are part of the MongoDB test suite. They have found some bugs in the past and we have fixed them and incorporated into our test suite. Am I about to say Jepsen will never find another bug in MongoDB? No. But if they do we will fix those as well.

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

#148

Post by lottin »

anonporridge wrote: post #129
lottin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, miners are paid in bitcoin but they need to pay the electricity bills with real money. This creates a constant selling pressure that has to be countered with aggressive marketing.

This all changes when miners pay for their electricity in bitcoin and electricity companies pay their employees in bitcoin, and their employees pay for their rent and groceries in bitcoin, etc. Circular economy.

And pigs might fly.

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

#149

Post by anonporridge »

8note wrote: post #134
anonporridge wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Violence relieves someone of their Bitcoin keys just as easily as it does their dollars or gold. Wrong. It is significantly more complicated to use violence to steal bitcoin from people than it is to use violence to steal dollars or gold. With bitcoin, I need to coerce you to give it to me. That could mean torture, sure, but do exist multisig key structures that make it impossible to steal bitcoin by coercing a sin…

Your multisig partners need to be psychopaths who are willing to let you die to maintain your wealth. Otherwise, they are coerced when you are by violence

Is the United States filled with psychopaths because we don't negotiate with terrorists?

If you monetarily reward terrorism and torture, you can expect it to continue happening over and over again, because it's economically viable.

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

#150

Post by randomhodler84 »

knorker wrote: post #124
valcron1000 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just made a 400 USDC transfer. I payed 1 USDC in fees.

I regularly make 5 digit USD transfers with no fees at all. But that's with fiat, so… They're also instant (seconds, maybe single digit minutes between banks), but that's because I'm in Europe.

And you were at the whim of the banks. They could confiscate your funds, lose the tx, reverse the payments, etc.

You are missing what cryptocurrency is about. No banks. No middle man. No censorship. No do-overs. Personal responsibility for wealth. When a person says “but I can do x with bank” they have missed the entire point of the exercise.

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