5 ms·

On a per-value basis, what I have claimed is entirely true. The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves

On a per-value basis, what I have claimed is entirely true. The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves in bank-to-bank transfers that indeed do take days or even weeks, and further have an up to 10% failure rate. It may well be that through the use of caveats you don't see or think about, you are able to execute small transactions quickly with fiat, but it is the counterparty to your transactions who is bearing the burden of fiats shortcomings in these cases. For example, if we're comparing digitally, in most cases, you are able to arbitrarily reverse the transaction up to or even over a month later, claiming it as fraudulent, or rejecting it for some other reason justifiable to you, but for which the vendor has little recourse. This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. With cash a similar problem exists with counterfeit money, a vendor may collect up a weeks earnings, only to take them to the bank and have a percentage of them rejected. All of these problems are solved by crypto, it improves on money in many key ways (these are just a couple), that's its point, and why people are excited about it enough to drive its collective value up to the region of Apple's stock value, around 4x faster than Apple took to do so.

viraptor 6y ago
> This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.
- argvargc 6y ago
  As we've seen with the development of centralised exchanges, institutional and retail custodial solutions, many of which are backed by various forms of insurance, the fact that the base layer provides for transactional finality (along with many other things), in no way prevents the development of custodial and insurance-backed solutions on top of it. That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    With the big difference that you can evaluate transactions on current cards and halt future ones preventing damage. If you lose a wallet key, you lose all of it. The insurance solution for that would be extremely high compared to the current network.
    - argvargc 6y ago
      Sure but it's trivial to split funds across accounts to mitigate that (even dynamically), unlike with cards where getting/activating a new one is a major hassle.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        In theory yes. In practice: 1. those keys will be accessible from the same place/machine 2. people won't do it correctly or will ignore the issue. (if developers can't reliably manage PGP keys, general population balancing multiple wallets is just not happening)
        argvargc 5y ago
        Yes, these are concerns, but anything like this will not ultimately be left to consumers to deal with. As part of the process of crypto becoming widely-adopted, this class of problems is in the process of being solved in ways that are transparent to the user, and that will continue. The fact we are still speaking in terms of the base layer at all in terms of many projects, reveals the stage of development we are at. It's a bit like worrying about how internet users will deal with IP packets that don't arrive, in the context of thinking about about how smooth an experience they're going to have surfing the web. It's not, and won't be, their problem to deal with. The fact adoption has rushed ahead such that many multi-millions of users are faced with the base layer is analogous to if millions had rushed into using the internet when it was command-line only. Sure, if that had happened, many people would make mistakes and delete their drives or whatever - and this illustrates how wanted and overdue crypto is. There are tremendous consequences of using this tech at the base layer incorrectly, but it doesn't appear to be dissuading adoption.

viraptor 6y ago

> This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.

argvargc 6y ago
As we've seen with the development of centralised exchanges, institutional and retail custodial solutions, many of which are backed by various forms of insurance, the fact that the base layer provides for transactional finality (along with many other things), in no way prevents the development of custodial and insurance-backed solutions on top of it. That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.
- viraptor 6y ago
  With the big difference that you can evaluate transactions on current cards and halt future ones preventing damage. If you lose a wallet key, you lose all of it. The insurance solution for that would be extremely high compared to the current network.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    Sure but it's trivial to split funds across accounts to mitigate that (even dynamically), unlike with cards where getting/activating a new one is a major hassle.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      In theory yes. In practice: 1. those keys will be accessible from the same place/machine 2. people won't do it correctly or will ignore the issue. (if developers can't reliably manage PGP keys, general population balancing multiple wallets is just not happening)
      - argvargc 5y ago
        Yes, these are concerns, but anything like this will not ultimately be left to consumers to deal with. As part of the process of crypto becoming widely-adopted, this class of problems is in the process of being solved in ways that are transparent to the user, and that will continue. The fact we are still speaking in terms of the base layer at all in terms of many projects, reveals the stage of development we are at. It's a bit like worrying about how internet users will deal with IP packets that don't arrive, in the context of thinking about about how smooth an experience they're going to have surfing the web. It's not, and won't be, their problem to deal with. The fact adoption has rushed ahead such that many multi-millions of users are faced with the base layer is analogous to if millions had rushed into using the internet when it was command-line only. Sure, if that had happened, many people would make mistakes and delete their drives or whatever - and this illustrates how wanted and overdue crypto is. There are tremendous consequences of using this tech at the base layer incorrectly, but it doesn't appear to be dissuading adoption.