14 ms·

You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies? None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all led

You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies? None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person. The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger. Which is like, neat and all. But also infuriating. We don't have crypto-currencies, we just have crypto-banks.

darkwater 6y ago
> The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person. > The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger. And what would be, at least intuitively, a solution to the "you can copy bits, give them away but also keep a valid copy for yourself" problem which is a problem for currency but also the default way digital information work? If you had access to a near-perfect money printing machine, you would have just the same problem, we are just "saved" by the implementation difficulty. Just the same as with the ledger approach.
jtsiskin 6y ago
You can do that with the lightning network. The problem is double spend. With cash, it’s hard to copy. With anything electronic, it’s trivial to copy. That’s why it has to be a ledger. Notice visa requires internet connection as wel
Jleagle 6y ago
I'm not an export but i can print off a wallet key and give it to someone, on paper or usb. Sure i can give that same wallet to someone else but it's pretty quick to check the value of a wallet before accepting it. Why do you even need physical cash? I can carry my countries currency around with me easily enough but i generally don't bother as i don't ever need to.
meowkit 6y ago
> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed. No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than controlled by the government.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > No one I know uses physical cash anymore. But physical cash should always be an option. You can't have a truly free society without it. Some intermediary could always have control over your transactions.
  - toolz 6y ago
    It's much easier to imagine a scenario where physical money is controlled by an outside force than crypto. Holding physical zimbabwean dollars, for example, did not ensure you held anything of value. I think arguing that control over crypto transactions is more likely than the devaluing of physical currencies is a little far-fetched since we've seen plenty of the former without much of an example of any centralized power being able to control users actions on the internet. Just think of all the wealth changing hands on the internet today against the will of governments.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  They are having to mandate cash acceptance at stores now as many would prefer to do away with it. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are-going-cashless-but-cities-are-pushing-back https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are...
  - nmz 6y ago
    The possibility of not getting robbed because you have $4000 cash on the till is a damn killer feature. Sure, this would just lead to an evolution in methodology. but for now its worth it.
svachalek 6y ago
With money though there's still someone who needs to make it "money". It's printed, its supply is controlled, its integrity is enforced. Otherwise it's just paper with numbers on it. With crypto all of this is taken care of by the network, and with the truly decentralized networks (not all of them are) anyone can be part of the network. No one "owns" the ledger. In my mind this has successfully created something that is more free (as in speech) than any previous form of "money" other than gold.
jetpackjoe 6y ago
> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. Fiat is also moving in this direction. Credit cards, are just exchanging bits, and in Asia, with Alipay and WeChat pay you are just scanning QR codes. At least with (good) crypto currencies is you can remove the third-party from the equation. There still remains the problem of having your transaction broadcast to the entire network, but I think that is also a solvable problem.
celticninja 6y ago
>Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. That's only true if you discount the US government as the third party (at least for USD$) who are involved in every transaction, by virtue of them needing to exist for the $ to have any value or for the seller to accept the $ in the first place i.e for them to know it will still be worth something in 3 weeks when they want to spend it.
- xkjkls 6y ago
  Eh, it's arguable how much the US Government is determining the worth of dollars rather than cultural consensus. I can guarantee that in the event of a zombie apocalypse where the government falls, USD would be used for a long time after.
  - ruined 6y ago
    the us government is a cultural consensus, just like the dollar. there's not much space between the two.
  - celticninja 6y ago
    I don't think it would. In a zombie (or other type) apocalypse dollars have zero value. You can't eat them or use them as fuel. Gold may have value as a medium of exchange but it would quickly revert to barter system for food, fuel etc. What good is selling food for dollars if you can't spend those dollars next week? Better to swap the food for another good which can be used or exchanged.
    - xkjkls 6y ago
      Gold is a terrible medium of exchange. People would continue using dollars for a long time because they still exist
      - celticninja 6y ago
        Just existing doesn't give them value. After an apocalypse event, even with some sort of US military and US government functioning dollars will lose their fungibility quickly. What could happen is an increased supply of them e.g unprotected banks/vaults could be robbed. But this would have the effect of making more dollars available, so although they exist they are not scarce, if they are not scarce then why would I swap them for 10gallons of fuel? ATMs would be easily looted and are widely located.
FooHentai 6y ago
Hmm. But the ledger is the solution to that problem. You hand someone the sequence of bits, the ledger authoritatively rules that they are now the holder of those bits, and not you.
ruined 6y ago
cash is just a physical distributed ledger there are many problems with bitcoin but this really isn't one of them. most dollars aren't real either. dollar transactions bounce all the time. and there will always be some kind of cash counterpart to any electronic payment system. how else would people buy contraband or work under the table?
melomal 6y ago
> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. This is the same when people's net worth is discussed though. To the average individual that hears a net worth it almost feels like they think it's cash money. But it's on paper, as in sell all the shares of businesses and assets to cash it in. Perception is the mother of all great products and marketing.
zionic 6y ago
There is nothing stopping you from signing a crypto transaction by hand using your private key from memory and handing someone an envelope.
- commiebob 6y ago
  Except that's like giving someone your ATM card and PIN code instead of handing them $5 for said sandwich.
  - mmww 6y ago
    no its not, sign a TX and let the new owner broadcast it whenever he wants to (if ever) Alice has never given Bob her bank account, more like created another account just for Bob
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      Signing the transaction does zip to block a double-spend without committing it to the ledger. The buyer could walk around town signing dozens of transactions for the same money and only the first seller to submit the transaction gets the money. There's a similar problem with handing someone the private key to a wallet with a pre-set amount of money as an offline transaction. Besides not being able to verify the amount in the wallet without checking with the central ledger, you also don't know that the other party isn't handing out the same private key to multiple people. Paper money or even metal money can be counterfeited, sure, but in low-counterfeiting environments individuals transacting can verify the authenticity of the script locally with reasonable confidence, without consulting a (distributed, decentralized) third-party to verify.
JAlexoid 6y ago
Other than literal precious metal coins - everything else is a share of existing or future value - it's a credit to acquire material possessions. Take an example of burning $100 bill. You aren't destroying more than the piece of paper, because the destroyed value is instantly shared between every other unit of currency.
nickysielicki 6y ago
> The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tiku 6y ago
With an offline wallet we can just give each other some tokens? The ledger is just to keep track of it. This is why it will be very handy for African countries where no-one has a bank account but they do have cell-phones.
TheCondor 6y ago
Give "Debt the first 5000 years" a read. Not sure it will change your view but it definitely provides a lot of interesting context.
twox2 6y ago
Cryptocurrency solves for the issue of two people that don't trust each other transacting. How do I know the $100 bill you're handing me isn't fake?
TameAntelope 6y ago
You're getting a lot of responses, because this is a pretty common complaint about crypto, and it taps into a great "WELL ACTUALLY" moment, because your concern is close enough to the "at least real money is backed by something" misconception (which, tbh, I'm sure you're aware of at this point if you weren't already). Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can operate regardless of whether or not there are bad actors involved (including and most commonly as the central authority, aka banks). Historically, it's been a lot easier to build systems that don't account for bad actors, and it's been continually problematic for society because that assumption is so obviously and blatantly false. Maybe crypto, as we know it, isn't the solution, and certainly proof-of-work has serious negative drawbacks. However, with the advent of automated computational devices, the possibility of evolving past our many-thousand year old system of bartering is too enticing to just ignore. We know there's a better way, and the odds we'll nail it on the first try are nearly zero, so I personally welcome any attempts that lurch us forward in the meantime, even if they're not the end destination.
- jasonlaramburu 6y ago
  Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.
  - serial_dev 6y ago
    I think it's backed by the hope that on a couple of years it will be worth lot more (instead of looking backwards, people look forward and hope to get rich).
    - aaron_m04 6y ago
      Why can't it be the hope that it's worth something (not necessarily a lot more)?
  - meowster 6y ago
    That sounds like the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Just because something valuable was already wasted, doesn't make the result valuable.
Triv888 6y ago
> None of them are actually money only because the US Gov didn't classify it as money for tax purposes...
0beah 6y ago
There was an article linked on HN talking about exactly this. https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/ https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/
zamalek 6y ago
> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. Many of the other comments have pointed out how money doesn't have this quality either. This comparison is a wash: buy gold if that's your goal (at least until we find/mine a gold-laden asteroid). The other comparison is who you have to trust to insure the value of that currency. In the case of cash, it is your government/Treasury. In the case of cryptocurrency, it is mathematics. I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash... That's why I have a small clutch of proof-of-stake.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash... Have you ever thought about how to boost the economy and thus the ability to exchange zimbabwean dollars for more services and goods? Because that is what is necessary to get the zimbabwean dollar back in order. Anything whose price is going up is scare and its domestic production must be expanded.
  - zamalek 6y ago
    Yes, you have to do the opposite of what the government did (printing more cash): remove money from circulation. The Zimbabwean dollar ceases to exist, regardless. They have adopted forex, usually ZAR and USD. My main point is that fiat currency implies trust in some entity. Zimbabwean vendors have chosen to trust the South African and US governments.
SavantIdiot 6y ago
That's any fiat currency, though. But if you think not being backed by something tangible is bad, wait until you hear about 51% attacks... https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp Kinda like you waking up to a brand-new bank account, with proof! The only thing stopping 51% on BitCoin is the cost of mounting one: were it a smaller crypto currency, it would be at risk. (I'm pretty sure I got that right, but I'll be corrected if I didn't!)
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  A smaller currency would be at risk but the upside would also be smaller. Generally speaking there doesn't seem to be an incentive large enough to justify the enormous costs associated with a 51% attack.
- PhilosAccnting 6y ago
  I'm probably speaking _way_ out of my league here, but I imagine it's somehow spoofable, kinda like how you can generate fake MACs or IPs, so why not? One terrifying/beautiful element of tech is that where there's a will there's a way!
  - wbobeirne 6y ago
    It's spoofable in the same way that a hash collision or guessing a password is "spoofable", given infinite time and / or energy you could. But the chain would move on while you're generating your spoof, and you're limited by the constraints of the physical world and your available computing power.
    - SavantIdiot 6y ago
      Not exactly... You just need the majority to agree that the new manipulated chain is the real chain. You don't need to find a SHA256 collision.
bordercases 6y ago
Banks are what establish what is money, and taking ourselves as individuals, if one doesn't accept that reality, then one gets out of sync with society quickly. Historically the events that caused this mode of exchange to be locked in were out of the hands of anyone but key economic players - world leaders and top advisors and the like. Some of them are still alive and have vested stake in the continuance of their own power. The reset away from this depends on the incompetence and failure of institutions that otherwise permeate every aspect of modern civilization. Financial capitalism's fall will be a very big problem in its own right.
Daegalus 6y ago
You should look into Nano, it covers a lot of this.
mr_woozy 6y ago
>The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person. I mean, you're not wrong, but this is where the cryptographic elements actually take place.
aleksjess 6y ago
There are third parties involved with exchanging cash, even though it might not be obvious. Central banks take part indirectly in these transactions, since they guarantee the value of the money. The double spending problem is not a problem; it was solved already with BTC. You can always have your crypto on a physical drive, which kinda makes it like cash in the sense that you can have it in your hands like cash.

darkwater 6y ago

> The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person. > The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger. And what would be, at least intuitively, a solution to the "you can copy bits, give them away but also keep a valid copy for yourself" problem which is a problem for currency but also the default way digital information work? If you had access to a near-perfect money printing machine, you would have just the same problem, we are just "saved" by the implementation difficulty. Just the same as with the ledger approach.

jtsiskin 6y ago

You can do that with the lightning network. The problem is double spend. With cash, it’s hard to copy. With anything electronic, it’s trivial to copy. That’s why it has to be a ledger. Notice visa requires internet connection as wel

Jleagle 6y ago

I'm not an export but i can print off a wallet key and give it to someone, on paper or usb. Sure i can give that same wallet to someone else but it's pretty quick to check the value of a wallet before accepting it. Why do you even need physical cash? I can carry my countries currency around with me easily enough but i generally don't bother as i don't ever need to.

meowkit 6y ago

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed. No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than controlled by the government.

triceratops 6y ago
> No one I know uses physical cash anymore. But physical cash should always be an option. You can't have a truly free society without it. Some intermediary could always have control over your transactions.
- toolz 6y ago
  It's much easier to imagine a scenario where physical money is controlled by an outside force than crypto. Holding physical zimbabwean dollars, for example, did not ensure you held anything of value. I think arguing that control over crypto transactions is more likely than the devaluing of physical currencies is a little far-fetched since we've seen plenty of the former without much of an example of any centralized power being able to control users actions on the internet. Just think of all the wealth changing hands on the internet today against the will of governments.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
MattGaiser 6y ago
They are having to mandate cash acceptance at stores now as many would prefer to do away with it. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are-going-cashless-but-cities-are-pushing-back https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are...
- nmz 6y ago
  The possibility of not getting robbed because you have $4000 cash on the till is a damn killer feature. Sure, this would just lead to an evolution in methodology. but for now its worth it.

svachalek 6y ago

With money though there's still someone who needs to make it "money". It's printed, its supply is controlled, its integrity is enforced. Otherwise it's just paper with numbers on it. With crypto all of this is taken care of by the network, and with the truly decentralized networks (not all of them are) anyone can be part of the network. No one "owns" the ledger. In my mind this has successfully created something that is more free (as in speech) than any previous form of "money" other than gold.

jetpackjoe 6y ago

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. Fiat is also moving in this direction. Credit cards, are just exchanging bits, and in Asia, with Alipay and WeChat pay you are just scanning QR codes. At least with (good) crypto currencies is you can remove the third-party from the equation. There still remains the problem of having your transaction broadcast to the entire network, but I think that is also a solvable problem.

celticninja 6y ago

>Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. That's only true if you discount the US government as the third party (at least for USD$) who are involved in every transaction, by virtue of them needing to exist for the $ to have any value or for the seller to accept the $ in the first place i.e for them to know it will still be worth something in 3 weeks when they want to spend it.

xkjkls 6y ago
Eh, it's arguable how much the US Government is determining the worth of dollars rather than cultural consensus. I can guarantee that in the event of a zombie apocalypse where the government falls, USD would be used for a long time after.
- ruined 6y ago
  the us government is a cultural consensus, just like the dollar. there's not much space between the two.
- celticninja 6y ago
  I don't think it would. In a zombie (or other type) apocalypse dollars have zero value. You can't eat them or use them as fuel. Gold may have value as a medium of exchange but it would quickly revert to barter system for food, fuel etc. What good is selling food for dollars if you can't spend those dollars next week? Better to swap the food for another good which can be used or exchanged.
  - xkjkls 6y ago
    Gold is a terrible medium of exchange. People would continue using dollars for a long time because they still exist
    - celticninja 6y ago
      Just existing doesn't give them value. After an apocalypse event, even with some sort of US military and US government functioning dollars will lose their fungibility quickly. What could happen is an increased supply of them e.g unprotected banks/vaults could be robbed. But this would have the effect of making more dollars available, so although they exist they are not scarce, if they are not scarce then why would I swap them for 10gallons of fuel? ATMs would be easily looted and are widely located.

FooHentai 6y ago

Hmm. But the ledger is the solution to that problem. You hand someone the sequence of bits, the ledger authoritatively rules that they are now the holder of those bits, and not you.

ruined 6y ago

cash is just a physical distributed ledger there are many problems with bitcoin but this really isn't one of them. most dollars aren't real either. dollar transactions bounce all the time. and there will always be some kind of cash counterpart to any electronic payment system. how else would people buy contraband or work under the table?

melomal 6y ago

> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. This is the same when people's net worth is discussed though. To the average individual that hears a net worth it almost feels like they think it's cash money. But it's on paper, as in sell all the shares of businesses and assets to cash it in. Perception is the mother of all great products and marketing.

zionic 6y ago

There is nothing stopping you from signing a crypto transaction by hand using your private key from memory and handing someone an envelope.

commiebob 6y ago
Except that's like giving someone your ATM card and PIN code instead of handing them $5 for said sandwich.
- mmww 6y ago
  no its not, sign a TX and let the new owner broadcast it whenever he wants to (if ever) Alice has never given Bob her bank account, more like created another account just for Bob
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    Signing the transaction does zip to block a double-spend without committing it to the ledger. The buyer could walk around town signing dozens of transactions for the same money and only the first seller to submit the transaction gets the money. There's a similar problem with handing someone the private key to a wallet with a pre-set amount of money as an offline transaction. Besides not being able to verify the amount in the wallet without checking with the central ledger, you also don't know that the other party isn't handing out the same private key to multiple people. Paper money or even metal money can be counterfeited, sure, but in low-counterfeiting environments individuals transacting can verify the authenticity of the script locally with reasonable confidence, without consulting a (distributed, decentralized) third-party to verify.

JAlexoid 6y ago

Other than literal precious metal coins - everything else is a share of existing or future value - it's a credit to acquire material possessions. Take an example of burning $100 bill. You aren't destroying more than the piece of paper, because the destroyed value is instantly shared between every other unit of currency.

nickysielicki 6y ago

> The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tiku 6y ago

With an offline wallet we can just give each other some tokens? The ledger is just to keep track of it. This is why it will be very handy for African countries where no-one has a bank account but they do have cell-phones.

TheCondor 6y ago

Give "Debt the first 5000 years" a read. Not sure it will change your view but it definitely provides a lot of interesting context.

twox2 6y ago

Cryptocurrency solves for the issue of two people that don't trust each other transacting. How do I know the $100 bill you're handing me isn't fake?

TameAntelope 6y ago

You're getting a lot of responses, because this is a pretty common complaint about crypto, and it taps into a great "WELL ACTUALLY" moment, because your concern is close enough to the "at least real money is backed by something" misconception (which, tbh, I'm sure you're aware of at this point if you weren't already). Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can operate regardless of whether or not there are bad actors involved (including and most commonly as the central authority, aka banks). Historically, it's been a lot easier to build systems that don't account for bad actors, and it's been continually problematic for society because that assumption is so obviously and blatantly false. Maybe crypto, as we know it, isn't the solution, and certainly proof-of-work has serious negative drawbacks. However, with the advent of automated computational devices, the possibility of evolving past our many-thousand year old system of bartering is too enticing to just ignore. We know there's a better way, and the odds we'll nail it on the first try are nearly zero, so I personally welcome any attempts that lurch us forward in the meantime, even if they're not the end destination.

jasonlaramburu 6y ago
Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  I think it's backed by the hope that on a couple of years it will be worth lot more (instead of looking backwards, people look forward and hope to get rich).
  - aaron_m04 6y ago
    Why can't it be the hope that it's worth something (not necessarily a lot more)?
- meowster 6y ago
  That sounds like the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Just because something valuable was already wasted, doesn't make the result valuable.

Triv888 6y ago

> None of them are actually money only because the US Gov didn't classify it as money for tax purposes...

0beah 6y ago

There was an article linked on HN talking about exactly this. https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/ https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

zamalek 6y ago

> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. Many of the other comments have pointed out how money doesn't have this quality either. This comparison is a wash: buy gold if that's your goal (at least until we find/mine a gold-laden asteroid). The other comparison is who you have to trust to insure the value of that currency. In the case of cash, it is your government/Treasury. In the case of cryptocurrency, it is mathematics. I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash... That's why I have a small clutch of proof-of-stake.

imtringued 6y ago
>I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash... Have you ever thought about how to boost the economy and thus the ability to exchange zimbabwean dollars for more services and goods? Because that is what is necessary to get the zimbabwean dollar back in order. Anything whose price is going up is scare and its domestic production must be expanded.
- zamalek 6y ago
  Yes, you have to do the opposite of what the government did (printing more cash): remove money from circulation. The Zimbabwean dollar ceases to exist, regardless. They have adopted forex, usually ZAR and USD. My main point is that fiat currency implies trust in some entity. Zimbabwean vendors have chosen to trust the South African and US governments.

SavantIdiot 6y ago

That's any fiat currency, though. But if you think not being backed by something tangible is bad, wait until you hear about 51% attacks... https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp Kinda like you waking up to a brand-new bank account, with proof! The only thing stopping 51% on BitCoin is the cost of mounting one: were it a smaller crypto currency, it would be at risk. (I'm pretty sure I got that right, but I'll be corrected if I didn't!)

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
A smaller currency would be at risk but the upside would also be smaller. Generally speaking there doesn't seem to be an incentive large enough to justify the enormous costs associated with a 51% attack.
PhilosAccnting 6y ago
I'm probably speaking _way_ out of my league here, but I imagine it's somehow spoofable, kinda like how you can generate fake MACs or IPs, so why not? One terrifying/beautiful element of tech is that where there's a will there's a way!
- wbobeirne 6y ago
  It's spoofable in the same way that a hash collision or guessing a password is "spoofable", given infinite time and / or energy you could. But the chain would move on while you're generating your spoof, and you're limited by the constraints of the physical world and your available computing power.
  - SavantIdiot 6y ago
    Not exactly... You just need the majority to agree that the new manipulated chain is the real chain. You don't need to find a SHA256 collision.

bordercases 6y ago

Banks are what establish what is money, and taking ourselves as individuals, if one doesn't accept that reality, then one gets out of sync with society quickly. Historically the events that caused this mode of exchange to be locked in were out of the hands of anyone but key economic players - world leaders and top advisors and the like. Some of them are still alive and have vested stake in the continuance of their own power. The reset away from this depends on the incompetence and failure of institutions that otherwise permeate every aspect of modern civilization. Financial capitalism's fall will be a very big problem in its own right.

Daegalus 6y ago

You should look into Nano, it covers a lot of this.

mr_woozy 6y ago

aleksjess 6y ago

There are third parties involved with exchanging cash, even though it might not be obvious. Central banks take part indirectly in these transactions, since they guarantee the value of the money. The double spending problem is not a problem; it was solved already with BTC. You can always have your crypto on a physical drive, which kinda makes it like cash in the sense that you can have it in your hands like cash.