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
#2This post is a fairly good model for the kind of communication that firms should have about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, etc. It's a good counterpoint to this one
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#3Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#4Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.
How do you back that up?
Do you exclude all the fiat currency backed resources sent to help Ukraine?
Do you also exclude the crypto workarounds to sanctions on Russia that can keep the war prolonged?
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#5It's one of the most financially *exclusionary* concepts ever created.
There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices.
The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories.
Aside 1: as big of a joke the original dotcom boom was, it looks serious compared to web3's $200,0000 floor price jpeg apes.
Aside 2: I read this week about a couple of people losing their jpeg apes because they connected their wallet to some scam site. I thought web3 was supposed to be smarter than "connecting one's wallet to a non-scam site in a way that allows the non-scam site to scam you if they wanted." Is this the best they can do? I was told we'd be connecting our wallets to everything in the future.
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#6Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.
How do you back that up? Do you exclude all the fiat currency backed resources sent to help Ukraine? Do you also exclude the crypto workarounds to sanctions on Russia that can keep the war prolonged?
US sent $500 million worth of actual hardware, the value of that is more than the crypto donations received so far.
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#7Onboarding 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.
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#8"We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money."
"At Wave, though, we prefer to use boring technology, and a simple relational database like Postgres does an equally good job at this."
How does Wave ensure multi-region durability for Postgres, high availability, and strict serializability during failover, without risk of split-brain in the presence of network partitions?
I'm also interested in Wave's storage fault model with regards to Postgres? How are misdirected reads/writes, lost reads/writes, corruption in the middle of the WAL, and corruption at the end of the WAL handled? To ensure that account balances and transactions are never lost? As far as I understand, Postgres does not provide too many guarantees when it comes to interesting disk failures?
I don't mean to advocate for cryptocurrency in any way.
I'm genuinely curious, because I would have thought that a more modern distributed database that guarantees strict serializability in the face of network partitions would be the more obvious choice for tracking account balances safely?
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#9Yet another middle man stating that crypto is not the way to go. Of course they are going to say that, they lose their 1% transaction fee.
Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion
#10Dan Luu impact at Wave.com is noticable already. Since he joined in March, Wave is pushing one great blog post per week (in contrast to 1 in 2021, 0 in 2020 and 3 in 2019).
I tried creating this culture of blogging but failed, would love to hear strategies that worked to achieve this.