It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

From my experience this is true for bank clients in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Austria and Spain (but the latter only at your own bank).

When I withdraw money with my Belgian debit card in the Eurozone at any ATM (including Berlin), I do not pay any fee. And this is true for all major Belgian banks.

Of course, if your account is not in the Eurozone (US?) or denominated in EUR, or through a basic credit card (visa) then usually a fee would apply.

Regardless of how you want to measure this my point was not about anyone in particular but the general sentiment I see from people who are not experiencing a wide variety of the problems crypto could possibly help ameliorate if things were different for them, be it their economic status, the government they live under, or the cultural norms they live within.

> No. But, it does solve a very real problem, and all of this "waves hands" is part of the process of discovering where it's most appropriate.

It solves a technical problem - the byzantine generals problem - but does it solve a problem people have? I don’t know anyone who’s had the Byzantine generals problem personally.

If you read the whole paper you will see that it scales to more than the 3f+1 participants by randomly selecting a committee (of 3f+1 validators) at each round.

Where to start? It's not my book, but this book has a bunch of arguments:

https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-Contracts-e...

I should have a cut-and-paste answer to this question. I actually do already, but under my real name and I don't want to dox myself.

Search for my username here for some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210604 (some comments are "below the fold" (e.g. this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27219137).

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944659

But I'll try to summarize:

The core things that blockchain stuff tries to solve are not actually the hard problems. The hard part of online commerce is not that customers can reverse credit card transactions. The hard part of contract law is not automatic payments. The hard part about property law is not atomic transactions of money and deed transfers.

So just off the bat, almost everything that is presented as a "solution" is not actually solving anything meaningful.

But it doesn't stop there. It's actually making the actual hard problems worse.

For cryptocurrencies, it makes courts all but impotent. A court can't compel you to pay child support, or return the money you stole. You can just say "no".

It's not trivial to track money, but the stated goals of cryptocurrencies is to make it hard or impossible to trace, and to compel.

It's not easy to find money laundering, or just criminal money being moved around. AML & KYC laws exist. They're not perfect. They can inconvenience legit people, and they can be gotten around. But they do help greatly.

The explicit goals of cryptocurrencies is to get around AML & KYC laws. This is what Pintrest was talking about.

So that's for "anonymous". We don't actually want someone to trivially move $1B anonymously.

We as a society, as a people, don't even want people to be able to send money any way they want. E.g. we don't want people to be able to send money to ISIS. There's a "baby and bathwater" argument that can be made here, but since cryptocurrency people don't even WANT to prevent this use case, it's not what they're making, or selling.

Like airline security, it's not effective because it's perfect, but because there's too much risk that one of the layers will catch you.

And the cryptocurrency dream is to remove all those layers.

Reversibility: People don't want this. One of the main reasons to use a credit card AT ALL is that people want reversibility. If that's all you wanted then you can probably just accept debit cards.

And as for smart contracts: All smart contract systems need a way for a court to interpret the contract. The contract may not be legal, it may have been signed under duress, etc.. So all smart contract systems need this escape hatch.

So how is it adding any value?

And the hard part of contracts was never what's being solved here. The hard part is codifying your intention into legalese, and conflict resolution. The codifying is still there, but now it's computer code instead of legalese. But conflict resolution is removed? Why?

The most ridiculous one is "land ownership registry". You know who ultimately decides who own a piece of land? The government of the country it's in.

Do you think France will bow down to "math" if a French court orders a house to be sold, but the would-be seller is some anonymous "wallet" that refuses?

France would just "fork the blockchain", and the authoritative fork is the one backed by police who will come remove anyone who claims ownership of something they don't own.

In an extreme example, if the ownership of Mona Lisa was "on the blockchain", and a rogue employee sold it, do you think France would hand it over? Of course not. So it means nothing.

I realize this comment is all over the place, and not diving deep into any one argument. It's more like a survey (though not complete) of various arguments, that can then be explored in more detail. This comment is long enough already.

And note that all this is in addition to technical problems like PoW/PoS, electricity use, scalability, transaction speed, 51% attacks, etc... Even assuming all those are solved, the problem is the the very GOAL is a dystopia.