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Do you think decentralization is not actually that desirable, or that there are just very limited avenues for buying/selling? Cryptocurrencies are scary enough

• PeterisP 8y ago
  I think that decentralization as such is not an "end goal" for pretty much everyone. Decentralization is one of ways that can enable some particular features (e.g. untraceability or censorship resistance) that can be valuable but the value of these features is different highly situational and can be low or even negative for many people; so it could be more constructive to talk about the benefits those particular features and not centralization in general. E.g. in my opinion most people don't want irrevocable untraceable transactions from their account as that increases fraud risk and (in their particular case) doesn't bring much benefit. Some do benefit from that, but it's a minority in the general population (but a large portion of early cryptocurrency adopters). Most people actually want something like a credit card payment that has a clear benefactor and the ability to recall the payment in case of fraud or other dispute. In other cases, the value is so low people are not willing to "pay" even very low price of convenience to gain them. There are some people (and locations!) where there is large motivation to avoid various capital controls and possibility of government control, but for most people in first world countries it's preferable to have their money in the reach of local legal system rather than outside, as they'd expect (and need!) the legal system to protect them in case of disputes and have a low risk of it working against them. Of course there are all kinds of exceptions where people might desire a way to get undeclared money (say, to avoid making child support payments) but that's usually a sufficiently large motivation only if you want to defraud someone and most people actually are honest and pay what they're due. Also, there are all kinds of trivial reasons why you'd want an institution to handle the trade - e.g. if you're investing, you'd need proper documentation for the crypto purchase so that it'd be tax deductible for the crypto sale, otherwise the whole sale could be treated as taxable income.
  • tmh88j 8y ago
    Decentralization doesn't have to mean anonymization. The real benefits lay in the lack of a middle man to take a cut and possibly slow down processing times.
    • Marazan 8y ago
      Decentralisation increases the number of middle men! Unless you are talking g pure peer to peer with no discovery service.
      • colordrops 8y ago
        Not really. Pure peer to peer is always an option with truly decentralized systems, so you can always completely bypass the middle man. It's not really decentralized if it's not "pure" peer to peer.
        • Marazan 8y ago
          Bitcoin with only you and one other person is pretty useless. It's entire utility is predicated on a entire network of middlemen doing the mining.
          • colordrops 8y ago
            Just because there are different roles on the network doesn't make it centralized. Furthermore you can set up a mining node yourself.
            • Marazan 8y ago
              Which adds a middleman! I think there is some serious misunderstanding of the relationship of middlemen and centralisation here.
    • PeterisP 8y ago
      Given the current Bitcoin processing fees and time, a decent centralized middleman could plausibly offer off-chain bulk transactions within their "network" that are faster and cheaper, and only periodically settle the totals on-chain.
• simias 8y ago
  >I think the desire for decentralization is very real Ideology aside, as a random human being, why would I care about that? I need to buy bread at the bakery, I can use cash, my "centralized" Visa or my Bitcoin wallet, all other things being equal what difference does decentralization make? And if it's solely about principles then I have bad news. I think most people would agree that ideologically speaking if you value privacy it makes more sense to use Duckduckgo rather than Google search, yet even though DDG now offers a quality of service comparable to the big G it still remains extremely confidential. The friction to get from one service to the other is like 3 clicks in your browser's UI, yet most people don't care. If 99% of people can't be bothered to ditch Google search in favor of something else even though there's very little friction, how can you ever hope to convince people to switch from Visa to a bitcoin wallet which is significantly less convenient and makes it easy to irrevocably lose your money? That's a pipe dream IMO.
  • Fnoord 8y ago
    What is interesting is some kind of way to measure in percentages why people use cryptocurrencies. Speculation? Privacy reasons? Security reasons? Ideological reasons? Careless about environment?
    • CamTin 8y ago
      My sense is that it's mainly speculative, with a strong base of "honest" demand from people with security concerns (ransomware, drugs, money laundering, other crime) that preclude them from using the regular banking system. This is all on top of the initial users, Usenet-style "cryptoanarchists" who actually got the whole network running in the first place, but who are now a tiny minority of actual users, though perhaps a majority of the people who have already made a fortune on this stuff, and thus are now leading investment in the space. In a way, these are just speculators who bought early for reasons other than money (like for example, that it seemed like a cool conceit from a William Gibson novel).
      • erikpukinskis 8y ago
        What about maybe technically illegal money moving not otherwise tied to criminal enterprise? The model example for me was someone in the U.S. sending money to their grandmother in Iran. Although perhaps that’s become legal again now.