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Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

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201–210 of 227 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are many reasons why particular actors would want to retain that data > data availability is likely to remain incentivized within dedicated sub-protocols > private entities that will have their own external incentives to retain that data A lot of wishful thinking which is presented as fact. Someone somewhere might still retain all that data because someone somewhere might have some incentives, and hopefully s…

History will always exist because I will personally keep a copy of all of it. The chain grows by 140GB/yr, and it's within my budget to buy two new 10TB hard drives every 7 years (two for redundancy).

Ah yes. In a completely "trustless" and "decentralized" environment I'm asked to trust an unknown centralized entity that they will keep all the historical data and have it open for inspection, pinky swear.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History will always exist because I will personally keep a copy of all of it. The chain grows by 140GB/yr, and it's within my budget to buy two new 10TB hard drives every 7 years (two for redundancy).

Ah yes. In a completely "trustless" and "decentralized" environment I'm asked to trust an unknown centralized entity that they will keep all the historical data and have it open for inspection, pinky swear.

Why do you care so much about historical data?

If you really care that much for some reason, store it too. Law enforcement will.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. In a completely "trustless" and "decentralized" environment I'm asked to trust an unknown centralized entity that they will keep all the historical data and have it open for inspection, pinky swear.

Why do you care so much about historical data? If you really care that much for some reason, store it too. Law enforcement will.

> Why do you care so much about historical data?

Literally in my first comment that you keep responding to with handwavy things like "surely someone somewhere will store it perhaps maybe we don't know but you just have to believe"

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think we just witnessed a 7-figure heist from the Ukrainian government in plain view, and nobody is reporting on it? Oh sweet summer child. "A criminal who stole from the government, a heist from the Ukrainian government". How about: someone in the government found a way to profit during the war using tools that are largely unknown to the public, and where "plain sight" is "write a script, the API is…

Okay sure, perhaps we've stumbled onto something big here in the Hacker News comments section. You want to do the honors and alert the media?

Nope

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I can't wire USD anywhere because my government confiscates any foreign currency deposits and only authorizes outbound transfer for specific operations of specific companies. what you have is a financial privilege that you are not aware of.

> what you have is a financial privilege that you are not aware of.

I already said that I'm aware of being in Europe.

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

#206
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha. I'm also excited about the modern distributed databases. They're pretty awesome. But yeah, a HN comment is not the right place to design a resilient DB setup. Like I said it's not terra incognita, but it's also not just "spin up a postgres".

"Gotcha. I'm also excited about the modern distributed databases. They're pretty awesome." Awesome! "HN comment is not the right place to design a resilient DB setup." Why not? In my experience, HN is always the place to talk about building stuff, running stuff, and how to do that better. :)

Well, one reason is "you're posting often, slow down". I tried to reply yesterday, but was blocked.

The gist of my reply yesterday was "depends on requirements, and even they will be huge. And if we just design from made up requirements that's a lot of work to produce a design that nobody will use".

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance, even if you see a scary $0 when you log in during the outage. But I agree it's definitely a thing that can prevent you accomplishing the thing you want to do with your money, during the outage. But if we're talking "outage" then bitcoin fees going over $25 is probably also fair to classify as an outage as a currency. And that happens too.

High fees In 2017 during an explicit attack on the network with spam, such that the spammer doesn’t have much BTC anymore. I haven’t paid over 1sat/vB for years. It’s the cheapest it can be onchain. Negligible. Ethereum on the other hand is broken with it’s gas calculation model with the unit of account being worth so much. Don’t touch ethereum these days, it’s bad.

2017 is not the only time this has happened. It was $62 in Apr 2021, for example.

CC payments and bank transfers are also way faster than bitcoin, even when bitcoin isn't having an outage. In the US bank transfers are slow, for some reason, but in Europe they're not.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High fees In 2017 during an explicit attack on the network with spam, such that the spammer doesn’t have much BTC anymore. I haven’t paid over 1sat/vB for years. It’s the cheapest it can be onchain. Negligible. Ethereum on the other hand is broken with it’s gas calculation model with the unit of account being worth so much. Don’t touch ethereum these days, it’s bad.

2017 is not the only time this has happened. It was $62 in Apr 2021, for example. CC payments and bank transfers are also way faster than bitcoin, even when bitcoin isn't having an outage. In the US bank transfers are slow, for some reason, but in Europe they're not.

Bitcoin has not had an outage since 2013. Actually, you will find settlement time is actually much longer than instant SEPA, and other methods have 1 and 2 and 3 day transfer times too. The instant thing is an illusion granted by centralization.

But of course your are talking about banks because you are missing the point of the exercise.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care so much about historical data? If you really care that much for some reason, store it too. Law enforcement will.

> Why do you care so much about historical data? Literally in my first comment that you keep responding to with handwavy things like "surely someone somewhere will store it perhaps maybe we don't know but you just have to believe"

In other words, you need a copy of everything that's ever happened on Ethereum because it makes you personally feel uncomfortable that the internet eventually forgets things, but you want other people to host it for you for free because you don't feel like buying a new $200 hard drive every seven years to store a copy yourself?

I'm blindly guessing. You didn't actually say in your first comment why you care about having a copy of all historical data. Unless you're implying that in over a year you may need that data to personally mete out vigilante justice to the Axie hacker or something.

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

#210
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that if 90% of stable coin transactions are through tether then they have the general trust of the community. It's as plain as day, and you seek to dismiss it as a "side show" when it's really the main act. Pro crypto arguments these days have come down to basically "You're not allowed to make that argument. It's early days. There are no good critics..." and now "you can't conflate my argument."

You said that you don't trust stablecoins because one particular stablecoin is untrustworthy. That's a classic strawman, plain and simple. You took down the Tether strawman, while pretending that you took down the entire concept of stablecoins. This conversation is going way off track from your original claim that you don't trust stablecoins. Your perception of the community's perception of Tether is neither here nor…

It’s not a strawman argument to point out that at least 90% of stable coin transactions have major issues.

If there where better stable coins then presumably most people would use them, the simple fact that they aren’t is extremely damaging to any argument supporting the idea.

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