Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

> Hacking/phishing/social engineering into private bank accounts is quite common, probably more than into cryptocurrency wallets.

They are not common and you don't lose any money, if they are stolen from banks.

> It's easy and highly encouraged by every cryptocurrency wallet to backup your wallet seed

That's not protection, that's just preparing for the worst, hoping for the best.

> I don't, I have them split into multiple wallets, sort of like my fiat money.

You are not an average user then

And that's why you show symptoms of survival bias

> That stays home just like the debit card for my main bank account.

You debit card cannot easily be used to steal money from you even if someone steals it physically

Don't get me wrong. Cash is great. But how do I quickly and securely do a long distance transaction in cash? Do you except people to wait for the postal service to deliver an envelope before they receive whatever they've payed for?

>It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous I understand it, but it's still a very hard requirement

In your example you are paying 4chan. You already have a computer with an internet connection.

>But most of all, what do I do with the crypto if the baker doesn't accept them?

You could sell the cryptocurrency for cash using localbitcoins. Or you could sell it for a gift card. Or you could anonymize the funds and give them to a trusted party to sell at a KYC exchange. Then the cash is withdrawn from the bank and delivered to your organization. As far as I'm aware, there isn't anything illegal about this.

And of course, you could just spend the cryptocurrency as is if the merchant accepts it.

The HN community is millions of people all over the world, many of whom identify strongly against SV, startups, or whatever they imagine YC stands for. So it's complicated.

> You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate

FWIW this is rapidly improving. The main thing we need to implement Zcash-style private payments is a Merkle proof in a zk-SNARK, so that we can prove ownership of an account in the Merkle tree without revealing the account. So the proving cost depends heavily on our choice of hash function.

Since most SNARKs operate over large finite fields, traditional bit-oriented hashes are a poor fit, but the designers originally went with SHA-256 anyway to be on the safe side. More recent versions of the Zcash circuit use Pedersen hashes, which are much cheaper and still provably collision-resistant (assuming discrete log hardness).

Future versions will probably use more specialized hashes designed to minimize field operations, like Rescue [1]. There's also the idea of using an embedded GKR protocol to verify gMIMC hashes with a very low incremental cost [2], although it might be overkill for Zcash-style circuits.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/426

[2] https://hackmd.io/@uCHu_NMSQ4mIUvA8i4qAyg/rkxBcmvcI

> 1

Well clearly someone cares

>2 How about Harvard putting your genome on the blockchain in such a way where you retain full control over it's rights?

I've never understood how the argument of putting private data on the blockchain is "good". To me this has seemed to be one of the worst ideas that is constantly pushed. It makes one strong assumption: the security of the network is and will always be unable to be decrypted. This seems naive. I am much less concerned with a centralized database where encryption of my data can be updated as new standards are adopted.

> Stablecoins

At the rare times I see people accept crypto as payment the options I see are: Bitcoin and Ether (and maybe bitcoin cash). I've never seen stable coin. Never seen stable. So not only is it not in practice but you're also illustrating my point about

>> You can talk all you want about solutions to some of the (minor) problems addressed here (ignoring the rest of the problems) but unless it is in use then the article's commentary still stands.

Great, you checked off one of the many boxes and created a coin that no one uses. Personally I don't count that as a success. (We can say the same thing about ZKP coins. I've never seen it accepted as payment anywhere) You need to check off ALL the (major) boxes in a single coin.

> 3

Is your comment seriously that "stealing happens, so it doesn't matter if we make it easier?" Seriously? Many people I know, including myself have had CC info stolen (often not our fault, other sites get hacked and dumped). Getting that fixed is pretty simple with a centralized source. I couldn't imagine having a significant chunk of my savings in an account that could be removed and not returned. The FDIC guarantees I'm safe with at least $250k and I'm pretty confident I'm practically safer than that. I get a lot of safety, stability, security, and privacy with fiat currencies. None of those are perfect, but cryptocurrencies need to check all the boxes here (plus fast transactions) to replace it. Better in a single aspect but worse in others does not warrant replacement and that's why we see it.

> 4

Please stop with the lemmings arguments. You also have to consider the utility of the electricity use. Cryptocurrencies aren't providing much utility. They aren't saving lives. The AC in your house has more utility.

> 6 (not a typo)

You ignored one of the most important arguments. Time. That has been a killer feature of cryptocurrencies since the beginning and people have been shouting that it will be solved with POS, POB, whatever. It is still non-viable unless the transaction times are brought down to at least a few seconds.

> It's worth remembering that this area is still incredibly young.

It is, but it is also very much hyped. Many technologies get hyped when young and go bust. In fact, this is more common than the other way around. So read my comment as asking for compelling reasons to think blockchain isn't one of them. Your argument has just been assuming I don't know about all the things you listed. Sorry to break it to you, but I already did. I feel confident many other HN users did as well.