421–430 of 843 posts
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> As I've noted before on HN One of the joys of HN is that on the whole no one knows who anyone else really is nor keeps track of what they've argued previously.
Some of us put out real info in our profiles.
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Can we acknowledge that both of those options are utter trash compared to conventional banking, though? The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?
Have you seen how much wealth was destroyed in 2008?
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As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…
> There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s. I was stunned to see so many of these products on Amazon last time I searched for smartcard stuff. On that note, I hate that you can't search for smartcard products anymore without 80% of your results being crypto wallets.
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Print your private key on paper and lose it all when your house burns down. vs Give your private key to an exchange, and enrich the shitheads running the exchange when they run away with your money. First option seems preferable. If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.
Can we acknowledge that both of those options are utter trash compared to conventional banking, though? The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?
Yes, yes we can.
The only things that ever justified the use of cryptocurrency were ideological fantasies and speculative gambling. Every other justification is just hype created as a post-hoc rationalization for one of those two things. If you look at any of them closely, they completely fall apart when compared with competitor technologies (such as fiat paper money esp. the US dollar, conventional banking, and even gold).
I look forward to a future where "crypto" again unambiguously means cryptography.
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But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? This prompts the question: why are they so centralized? It turns out the advantages of centralization are more significant than the advantages of decentralization, and this is true even in a market with religious orientation toward decentralization . All you've gotta do to…
> But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? What are the advantages of decentralization in this context? Be specific.
So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it. Or is i…
So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it. Or is i…
It's close to just running your own email / fileserver etc. IMHO.
So while possible it's also annoying and not worth it for most people, and I get that.
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As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…
> There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s. "I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted." - The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson
Stone have low market value while metal can always be melted to do something else (like weapons).
It's one of my main take away of my art history lessons -> most antic art done on metal has been lost, but the stone remains!
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>But people do, why? 1. cash is bulky and risky to keep at home 2. inflation eats away at your savings Bitcoin is designed to solve both issues.
except it doesn't solve either, because it's still risky to keep (whether with a 'trusted third party' or at home on some physical device... at the end of the day it can't be better than physical possession.. i.e. cash). volatility is a lot worse than stable inflation, and deflation (just HODL!) is much, much worse to the point of demonstrating the degree to which bitcoin is not useful as a monetary unit of exchange.
I'm not sure how you can conclude that password protected, geographically distributed (eg. 2 of 3 multisignature) storage "can't be better than physical possession.. i.e. cash".
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You do know there are fireproof safes that you can keep in your home right?
FYI, there is a world of BS around "fire proof" anything. It's all about the time it's around fire. If your house burns to the ground and collapses in on itself, the extreme majority of fire proof safes, aren't. If the fire dept shows up and it's out in an hour and it wasn't buried, your things will probably be alright. I dealt with a guy's gun collection stored in his $10,000 "fire proof" safe stored in his garage.…