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I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accoun

I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin?

deleted 5y ago
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rchowe 5y ago
Most Bitcoin transactions have a quite high transaction cost, and I would argue that chargebacks are an important consumer protection.
- tommek4077 5y ago
  Only if you do your transaction on the blockchain. Most are done internally. It's like your bank is not sending someone with a suitcase full of money just because you pay your phone bill.
  - jakear 5y ago
    It's strange to me how the only two options are "pay obscene transaction fees" or "just keep your crypto in a centralized exchange and hope they don't go MtGox". Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized? I spent some time researching the best low transaction fee easily accessible crypto for making a sort of crypto Patreon, but the vast vast majority of all crypto information available was folks speculating what was going to go "up", nobody seems interested in what is actually a decent form of money (cheap&easy to exchange, cheap&easy to transfer, and stable). I suppose it makes some sense from a game theoretic standpoint. If we consider the decision making entities in the game to be the massive crypto exchanges and miners, the best way they make money is by transaction fees and exchange fees, so they aren't likely to come up with a great micro-transaction and micro-exchange fee system. Oh well.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      > Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized? Yes. A transaction is a network-scale operation. It needs to be broadcast and confirmed by at least half the network. Otherwise it wouldn't be decentralized. As that network increases in size, the resources required for that operation increase proportionally. "Decentralization" is a bad meme that seems to work at small scales but its adherents refuse to zoom out and accept how technically ridiculous it is at current scales (millions/billions of people).
      - jakear 5y ago
        Why should a transaction need to be a network scale operation in a decentralized scheme? The ultimate decentralized payment mechanism is bartering, in which the transaction only includes the people making the transaction. Now, I don’t know how to translate that to the digital world, but there’s no clear reason why a decentralized network must inform the entire network of everything that happens in it.
        pphysch 5y ago
        In this context we're referring specifically to decentralized finance, currency, etc.
        jakear 5y ago
        Sure, but still I can transact using currency in the real world without (directly) involving a central authority, announcing my transaction to the whole world, or paying any fees. I cannot do that in the digital world.
    - almostkorean 5y ago
      Here are some projects working towards addressing the issues of blockchain scalability: - Lightning network on bitcoin. Super cheap and fast transactions, makes micropayments a reality (this is what Twitter is using) - Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. There are two optimistic rollups currently on main net (Arbitrum and Optimism). Reddit has recently committed to building on Arbitrum. There are also ZK rollups (starkware, zksync) coming in the next year or so. - Less decentralized layer 1 chains like Solana, Avalanche, BSC, Fantom It's unfortunate that people looking to enter the space have a hard time finding real and relevant info. Not sure what the solution is for fixing the information problem, but there are lots of people building real tech in the space
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    So it's just a different institution doing transactions internally with extra steps.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      Not exactly, the "extra steps" are necessary to create separability so that the user can have their choice of institution to deal with.
  - ivalm 5y ago
    > Most are done internally You mean with one centralized authority you have to trust?
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  Tx cost on BTC main layer has been ~7ct for months, what are you talking about?
rawtxapp 5y ago
Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top. As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.
- kmmlng 5y ago
  > easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge This is certainly not the case everywhere in the EU. In Germany for example it usually takes days. Not sure about other countries.
  - bildung 5y ago
    By law it must take at most a single day intra-country, and instant wire transfers are pretty common (though sometimes not free).
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    In Germany there's SOFORT, it takes litterally the time to click through the interface to transfer money. I can get money from Germany to Colombia in under a minute via n26 and transferwise. Maybe we're not talking about the same country.
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      Also amounts > 20000 in a weekend? How much fees do you pay on that?
      - aunty_helen 5y ago
        I've actually never woken up on a Saturday morning and thought shit, I could really use 20000 EUR right now, so I couldn't tell you what the limits are. I've never hit them. Fees however, are around 1EUR
        5y ago
freewilly1040 5y ago
I’m unsure what you mean by “no chargebacks” - chargebacks are provide the consumer recourse in the event of a dispute.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Yeah, that whole no chargebacks concept as a “feature” of cryptocurrency has always been a head scratcher to me. I mean, yes, businesses may like that, but crooks like that even more, and it’s almost purely a negative to the vast majority of people, i.e. consumers. And it’s a core motivation for cryptocurrency, in the original Satoshi paper.
  - tim333 5y ago
    The idea was it would make transacting cheaper. Not sure that worked in practice.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  It's beneficial for consumers because businesses can charge less for their products since they're don't have to account for as much shrinkage. I know at least one business that charges substantially less for crypto transactions because of this.
  - Raineer 5y ago
    I feel this is an overly optimistic view. There's not many situations in the last 50 years where "businesses being able to charge less" have led to them actually charging less. It reeks of Telcos telling congress how much new laws will drop their prices, then they fire half their employees and raise prices anyways. This is a microcosm of most of my issues with crypto discussions. In a (quite naive) vacuum, the arguments sound great. If you wanted to run Earth 2.0 with crypto, have at it. It doesn't fit in alongside the existing systems and, by the time it becomes "the main system", you can be certain that those in power have modified it to have the same issues as the original system we all hated.
JackFr 5y ago
So the US has an antiquated payments system vis-a-vis Europe, but crypto solves none of those problems. I don't see it. I see FOMO, groupthink and greed.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?
  - the_gastropod 5y ago
    It seems like the people most upset by money printing learned to be upset by money printing from crypto propaganda.
    - rawtxapp 5y ago
      Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        How is it true and factual? The inflation rate is set, it is high now and will be lower in the future to account for that. If you are planning to keep millions/billions sitting around in cash for a decade, instead of investing into assets where it works for you and everyone else, you are the reason we have the inflation rate and deserve to lose out to inflation. A set yearly inflation rate incentivizes actual investment instead of currency speculation. Basically the system we have now exists to prevent what crypto enthusiasts are trying to push on us: a return to a super volatile currency that when it crashed wasn’t able to be fixed by just printing more money temporarily. When you hear about things as complex as Monetary Policy, it is best to assume that lots of people have thought about why it is the way it is and why that’s preferable. The “gold standard” and the hoarding of wealth allowed things like feudalism to exist where lords just sat on their land and gold and were richer every year. Yeah you can pull the “the rich get richer today too” card but so do poor people if they invest in assets, and the difference is that every wealthy person has almost all of their wealth invested in the US economy in order to beat the risk free and inflation rate. I really, really am sick of the bullshit around the big L Libertarian party (and the crypto enthusiasts who identify with them.) Spreading lies about the evil fed and the evil inflation rate, both of which are a huge improvement over the constant depressions we had prior to this century. It took thousands of years for people to develop the sophisticated monetary policy we currently have that allows our economy to be extremely stable and continuously grow, generations of very bright people, and anarcho-capitalists want to throw that away to go back to “basics.” At the very least you could do all those people, and the citizens of the world, the courtesy of understanding why were all in favor of yearly inflation (even if we bitch about prices going up.)
ravenstine 5y ago
I think that's certainly a part of it, but it's not the whole story, and I suspect it's perhaps responsible for 1/3 of the story. A bigger motivation, and perhaps the most quixotic one, is financial security. No, I don't mean that cryptocurrencies haven't been highly unstable in value. But the more that the cabal chooses to truly enter the 21st century, the greater the danger of that technology being used as a means of coercion. This has already been seen in the porn industry (both amateur and commercial) and, say what you want about the possible ethical issues with it, but people have the right to produce pornography in the United States and also participate in the same economic system as everyone else. The danger of companies like Visa and Paypal exercising political control over their customers for other reasons is non-zero, and I would even predict that the danger is at least moderate. Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a big push to create the Lightning network. The other part of the desire for crypto, from my perspective, is a desire to be a part of a new frontier. We had the personal computing revolution, the internet, the web, web 2.0... and for those who missed out on those or merely miss them, crypto fills that void and provides a new realm of possibilities to explore.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the whole blockchain thing depend on an uncountable number of middlemen to verify transactions? They just don't have to trust them. Not to mention they have to count on a market existing for the coins to give them value.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I guess the distinction would probably be commoditized middle-men. Read, as distinct from our current champion middle-men, chosen by favor, regulation, and access to capital.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
The problem with bank accounts is the banks. The promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust any institution, such as a bank, to keep track of your money.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Which could be compelling if you lived in a society where the banks were extremely unstable, but looks terrible if you live in one with regulation, deposit insurance and and other account protections.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Banks are the government's instrument of total surveillance and enforcement in the financial sector.
    - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
      How so? Can you explain how it works in detail? I feel like this is the sort of story that would have won somebody a pullizer.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    You weren't here in 2008?
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      I was (if 'here' is the US), and I didn't lose money in my bank accounts?
      - koonsolo 5y ago
        It was a very close call, all because the banks were so reckless. Are you sure next time they will have enough money to bail them out again?
mountainb 5y ago
The technology doesn't really matter that much. If the US banking system wants to compete, it could try paying yield on savings. That's one weird trick that has made banking attractive for well over 1,000 years. A banking system that does not pay yields to savers is just a glorified collection of ledgers.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  A crypto system that pays yields on monopoly money is just a glorified collection of ledgers moving fake money around, no? What are yields a product of with crypto? If not productivity of underlying assets, it must be speculation, which isn't sustainable. You eventually run out of greater fools.
  - mountainb 5y ago
    There are hundreds of fake monies used all over the world, including many countries with dual currency systems in which they use one fake money internally and one fake money externally. Bitcoin and frankly many other random altcoins are more credible than many of those hundreds of moneys. The history of banking is replete with unsustainable arrangements involving the quest for yields deriving from speculative assets. Banking systems are continually expanding, exploding, and then expanding again. If we want to make the normal banking system competitive, it has to pay yields even though doing so means risk. The crypto explosion is best understood as a technologically enabled resumption of the usual cycle of banking despite the industrial west's attempt to suspend that cycle through extraordinary regulatory action.
    - MrMan 5y ago
      The reason yields are low has nothing to do with the denomination of the currency but with the macro economy. Like gravity you can't fight it.
Kaytaro 5y ago
I doubt it, that's what Venmo, PayPal, Cash app, and a thousand other services solve. Crypto isn't nearly as convenient as any of those.
stevebmark 5y ago
Crypto is used as a commodity and for scams, very rarely as a currency. Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- MildlySerious 5y ago
  > Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related. This is partially true, but I think a bad blanket statement. Bitcoin has outperformed all other asset classes over the last decade. You can get crypto credit cards that remove all complexity you aren't forced to deal with anyway. And even if that wasn't the case. Banking is hard, too, so that's a moot argument. Ethereum and others are moving away from proof-of-work. Upgrades like taproot and zkrollups improve privacy and can be used today.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  I don't think you are up to date. There are "cash" crypto's out there such as Nano, with sub second transactions, 0 fees, and can run the network on the power of a single windmill.
- wyager 5y ago
  > Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking Literally none of this is true except maybe "riskier".
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  You're right that our existing digital payment systems are far better than crypto for most transactions, and that crypto (and cold hard cash) dominate black market transactions, but there's a really interesting class of transactions that don't fall into either of these groups: stuff that's technically legal, but sketchy enough that no big corporations want to touch them. Crypto is increasingly being used as a digital payment workaround for areas that Visa and MasterCard try to avoid, like pornography and donations to controversial organizations. It's probably just a sliver of overall crypto transactions, but this is very much the use case that justifies the bitcoin-as-a-currency model. Pornography is to Bitcoin as "Linux ISOs" are to BitTorrent.
CPLX 5y ago
Yes of course they'd be excited about it. It's gambling, and people really like gambling. To be blunt, they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it. An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen. Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it. Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations. Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history. It's an amazing use case for a new technology with billions and billions of dollars in pent-up demand. Crypto (and NFT's) are a gambling fad. People will keep doing it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.
wsc981 5y ago
> If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin? As someone born in the EU (now living in South-East Asia) I am still excited about Bitcoin. Because I feel it's the only safe haven for my honestly earned money out of reach of governments and banks. I feel Bitcoin is a too important technology to fail, especially as the world will slowly move towards Central Bank Digital Currencies that will have the same problems as fiat right now. I view inflation as something bad for society (a hidden tax and form of theft) and CBDCs will be inflationary currencies. I also don't like that governments and central banks will get even more control over people's lives once physical currencies are gone. If you behave bad through the eyes of governments or banks (e.g. using too much electricity, eat too much meat, work as a prostitute, etc...) they might be able to take restrict your earning potential or spending. That is not a world that I'd like to live in.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Why do you consider it a safe haven for your money when the volatility is so high?
  - wsc981 5y ago
    > Why do you consider it a safe haven for your money when the volatility is so high? Because I believe in the long term Bitcoin will always go up, as it has done in the past. Especially if central banks keep printing money at high volume, which -at this point- seems unavoidable for the Fed & ECB. I don't care too much for short term volatility. And as Bitcoin adoption grows, volatility should reduce anyways.
azth 5y ago
Quite a bit of it also comes from the fact that people are tired from the fed printing money at will, devaluing people's hard work they put in for years to save some money. Secondly, people in the EU are also excited about bitcoin regardless of the fact that they have what you mentioned.
koonsolo 5y ago
If PayPal would have realized the vision of Elon Musk, there would be no banks anymore. In that scenario, it would be really hard for crypto to emerge. But right now, that market is fully open.
wyager 5y ago
"Modern" banking systems still suck if you want to move large amounts of money, move money globally, move money without asking for regulatory permission and waiting for regulatory delays, avoid having your assets temporarily seized because the comptroller makes a paperwork error, etc. etc.
Eduard 5y ago
> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU Um, no. I'm not used to that. My latest online German-bank-to-German-bank giro transfer took the usual two-to-three business days.
tim333 5y ago
Not much. The hype is mostly gambling, ponzi schemes and the like.

deleted 5y ago

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rchowe 5y ago

Most Bitcoin transactions have a quite high transaction cost, and I would argue that chargebacks are an important consumer protection.

tommek4077 5y ago
Only if you do your transaction on the blockchain. Most are done internally. It's like your bank is not sending someone with a suitcase full of money just because you pay your phone bill.
- jakear 5y ago
  It's strange to me how the only two options are "pay obscene transaction fees" or "just keep your crypto in a centralized exchange and hope they don't go MtGox". Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized? I spent some time researching the best low transaction fee easily accessible crypto for making a sort of crypto Patreon, but the vast vast majority of all crypto information available was folks speculating what was going to go "up", nobody seems interested in what is actually a decent form of money (cheap&easy to exchange, cheap&easy to transfer, and stable). I suppose it makes some sense from a game theoretic standpoint. If we consider the decision making entities in the game to be the massive crypto exchanges and miners, the best way they make money is by transaction fees and exchange fees, so they aren't likely to come up with a great micro-transaction and micro-exchange fee system. Oh well.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    > Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized? Yes. A transaction is a network-scale operation. It needs to be broadcast and confirmed by at least half the network. Otherwise it wouldn't be decentralized. As that network increases in size, the resources required for that operation increase proportionally. "Decentralization" is a bad meme that seems to work at small scales but its adherents refuse to zoom out and accept how technically ridiculous it is at current scales (millions/billions of people).
    - jakear 5y ago
      Why should a transaction need to be a network scale operation in a decentralized scheme? The ultimate decentralized payment mechanism is bartering, in which the transaction only includes the people making the transaction. Now, I don’t know how to translate that to the digital world, but there’s no clear reason why a decentralized network must inform the entire network of everything that happens in it.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        In this context we're referring specifically to decentralized finance, currency, etc.
        jakear 5y ago
        Sure, but still I can transact using currency in the real world without (directly) involving a central authority, announcing my transaction to the whole world, or paying any fees. I cannot do that in the digital world.
  - almostkorean 5y ago
    Here are some projects working towards addressing the issues of blockchain scalability: - Lightning network on bitcoin. Super cheap and fast transactions, makes micropayments a reality (this is what Twitter is using) - Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. There are two optimistic rollups currently on main net (Arbitrum and Optimism). Reddit has recently committed to building on Arbitrum. There are also ZK rollups (starkware, zksync) coming in the next year or so. - Less decentralized layer 1 chains like Solana, Avalanche, BSC, Fantom It's unfortunate that people looking to enter the space have a hard time finding real and relevant info. Not sure what the solution is for fixing the information problem, but there are lots of people building real tech in the space
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  So it's just a different institution doing transactions internally with extra steps.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Not exactly, the "extra steps" are necessary to create separability so that the user can have their choice of institution to deal with.
- ivalm 5y ago
  > Most are done internally You mean with one centralized authority you have to trust?
WanderPanda 5y ago
Tx cost on BTC main layer has been ~7ct for months, what are you talking about?

rawtxapp 5y ago

Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top. As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.

kmmlng 5y ago
> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge This is certainly not the case everywhere in the EU. In Germany for example it usually takes days. Not sure about other countries.
- bildung 5y ago
  By law it must take at most a single day intra-country, and instant wire transfers are pretty common (though sometimes not free).
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  In Germany there's SOFORT, it takes litterally the time to click through the interface to transfer money. I can get money from Germany to Colombia in under a minute via n26 and transferwise. Maybe we're not talking about the same country.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    Also amounts > 20000 in a weekend? How much fees do you pay on that?
    - aunty_helen 5y ago
      I've actually never woken up on a Saturday morning and thought shit, I could really use 20000 EUR right now, so I couldn't tell you what the limits are. I've never hit them. Fees however, are around 1EUR
      - 5y ago

freewilly1040 5y ago

I’m unsure what you mean by “no chargebacks” - chargebacks are provide the consumer recourse in the event of a dispute.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Yeah, that whole no chargebacks concept as a “feature” of cryptocurrency has always been a head scratcher to me. I mean, yes, businesses may like that, but crooks like that even more, and it’s almost purely a negative to the vast majority of people, i.e. consumers. And it’s a core motivation for cryptocurrency, in the original Satoshi paper.
- tim333 5y ago
  The idea was it would make transacting cheaper. Not sure that worked in practice.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
It's beneficial for consumers because businesses can charge less for their products since they're don't have to account for as much shrinkage. I know at least one business that charges substantially less for crypto transactions because of this.
- Raineer 5y ago
  I feel this is an overly optimistic view. There's not many situations in the last 50 years where "businesses being able to charge less" have led to them actually charging less. It reeks of Telcos telling congress how much new laws will drop their prices, then they fire half their employees and raise prices anyways. This is a microcosm of most of my issues with crypto discussions. In a (quite naive) vacuum, the arguments sound great. If you wanted to run Earth 2.0 with crypto, have at it. It doesn't fit in alongside the existing systems and, by the time it becomes "the main system", you can be certain that those in power have modified it to have the same issues as the original system we all hated.

JackFr 5y ago

So the US has an antiquated payments system vis-a-vis Europe, but crypto solves none of those problems. I don't see it. I see FOMO, groupthink and greed.

rawtxapp 5y ago
You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?
- the_gastropod 5y ago
  It seems like the people most upset by money printing learned to be upset by money printing from crypto propaganda.
  - rawtxapp 5y ago
    Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      How is it true and factual? The inflation rate is set, it is high now and will be lower in the future to account for that. If you are planning to keep millions/billions sitting around in cash for a decade, instead of investing into assets where it works for you and everyone else, you are the reason we have the inflation rate and deserve to lose out to inflation. A set yearly inflation rate incentivizes actual investment instead of currency speculation. Basically the system we have now exists to prevent what crypto enthusiasts are trying to push on us: a return to a super volatile currency that when it crashed wasn’t able to be fixed by just printing more money temporarily. When you hear about things as complex as Monetary Policy, it is best to assume that lots of people have thought about why it is the way it is and why that’s preferable. The “gold standard” and the hoarding of wealth allowed things like feudalism to exist where lords just sat on their land and gold and were richer every year. Yeah you can pull the “the rich get richer today too” card but so do poor people if they invest in assets, and the difference is that every wealthy person has almost all of their wealth invested in the US economy in order to beat the risk free and inflation rate. I really, really am sick of the bullshit around the big L Libertarian party (and the crypto enthusiasts who identify with them.) Spreading lies about the evil fed and the evil inflation rate, both of which are a huge improvement over the constant depressions we had prior to this century. It took thousands of years for people to develop the sophisticated monetary policy we currently have that allows our economy to be extremely stable and continuously grow, generations of very bright people, and anarcho-capitalists want to throw that away to go back to “basics.” At the very least you could do all those people, and the citizens of the world, the courtesy of understanding why were all in favor of yearly inflation (even if we bitch about prices going up.)

ravenstine 5y ago

I think that's certainly a part of it, but it's not the whole story, and I suspect it's perhaps responsible for 1/3 of the story. A bigger motivation, and perhaps the most quixotic one, is financial security. No, I don't mean that cryptocurrencies haven't been highly unstable in value. But the more that the cabal chooses to truly enter the 21st century, the greater the danger of that technology being used as a means of coercion. This has already been seen in the porn industry (both amateur and commercial) and, say what you want about the possible ethical issues with it, but people have the right to produce pornography in the United States and also participate in the same economic system as everyone else. The danger of companies like Visa and Paypal exercising political control over their customers for other reasons is non-zero, and I would even predict that the danger is at least moderate. Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a big push to create the Lightning network. The other part of the desire for crypto, from my perspective, is a desire to be a part of a new frontier. We had the personal computing revolution, the internet, the web, web 2.0... and for those who missed out on those or merely miss them, crypto fills that void and provides a new realm of possibilities to explore.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the whole blockchain thing depend on an uncountable number of middlemen to verify transactions? They just don't have to trust them. Not to mention they have to count on a market existing for the coins to give them value.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I guess the distinction would probably be commoditized middle-men. Read, as distinct from our current champion middle-men, chosen by favor, regulation, and access to capital.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

The problem with bank accounts is the banks. The promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust any institution, such as a bank, to keep track of your money.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Which could be compelling if you lived in a society where the banks were extremely unstable, but looks terrible if you live in one with regulation, deposit insurance and and other account protections.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Banks are the government's instrument of total surveillance and enforcement in the financial sector.
  - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
    How so? Can you explain how it works in detail? I feel like this is the sort of story that would have won somebody a pullizer.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  You weren't here in 2008?
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    I was (if 'here' is the US), and I didn't lose money in my bank accounts?
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      It was a very close call, all because the banks were so reckless. Are you sure next time they will have enough money to bail them out again?

mountainb 5y ago

The technology doesn't really matter that much. If the US banking system wants to compete, it could try paying yield on savings. That's one weird trick that has made banking attractive for well over 1,000 years. A banking system that does not pay yields to savers is just a glorified collection of ledgers.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
A crypto system that pays yields on monopoly money is just a glorified collection of ledgers moving fake money around, no? What are yields a product of with crypto? If not productivity of underlying assets, it must be speculation, which isn't sustainable. You eventually run out of greater fools.
- mountainb 5y ago
  There are hundreds of fake monies used all over the world, including many countries with dual currency systems in which they use one fake money internally and one fake money externally. Bitcoin and frankly many other random altcoins are more credible than many of those hundreds of moneys. The history of banking is replete with unsustainable arrangements involving the quest for yields deriving from speculative assets. Banking systems are continually expanding, exploding, and then expanding again. If we want to make the normal banking system competitive, it has to pay yields even though doing so means risk. The crypto explosion is best understood as a technologically enabled resumption of the usual cycle of banking despite the industrial west's attempt to suspend that cycle through extraordinary regulatory action.
  - MrMan 5y ago
    The reason yields are low has nothing to do with the denomination of the currency but with the macro economy. Like gravity you can't fight it.

Kaytaro 5y ago

I doubt it, that's what Venmo, PayPal, Cash app, and a thousand other services solve. Crypto isn't nearly as convenient as any of those.

stevebmark 5y ago

Crypto is used as a commodity and for scams, very rarely as a currency. Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related.

deleted 5y ago
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MildlySerious 5y ago
> Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related. This is partially true, but I think a bad blanket statement. Bitcoin has outperformed all other asset classes over the last decade. You can get crypto credit cards that remove all complexity you aren't forced to deal with anyway. And even if that wasn't the case. Banking is hard, too, so that's a moot argument. Ethereum and others are moving away from proof-of-work. Upgrades like taproot and zkrollups improve privacy and can be used today.
koonsolo 5y ago
I don't think you are up to date. There are "cash" crypto's out there such as Nano, with sub second transactions, 0 fees, and can run the network on the power of a single windmill.
wyager 5y ago
> Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking Literally none of this is true except maybe "riskier".
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
You're right that our existing digital payment systems are far better than crypto for most transactions, and that crypto (and cold hard cash) dominate black market transactions, but there's a really interesting class of transactions that don't fall into either of these groups: stuff that's technically legal, but sketchy enough that no big corporations want to touch them. Crypto is increasingly being used as a digital payment workaround for areas that Visa and MasterCard try to avoid, like pornography and donations to controversial organizations. It's probably just a sliver of overall crypto transactions, but this is very much the use case that justifies the bitcoin-as-a-currency model. Pornography is to Bitcoin as "Linux ISOs" are to BitTorrent.

CPLX 5y ago

Yes of course they'd be excited about it. It's gambling, and people really like gambling. To be blunt, they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it. An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen. Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it. Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations. Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history. It's an amazing use case for a new technology with billions and billions of dollars in pent-up demand. Crypto (and NFT's) are a gambling fad. People will keep doing it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.

wsc981 5y ago

> If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin? As someone born in the EU (now living in South-East Asia) I am still excited about Bitcoin. Because I feel it's the only safe haven for my honestly earned money out of reach of governments and banks. I feel Bitcoin is a too important technology to fail, especially as the world will slowly move towards Central Bank Digital Currencies that will have the same problems as fiat right now. I view inflation as something bad for society (a hidden tax and form of theft) and CBDCs will be inflationary currencies. I also don't like that governments and central banks will get even more control over people's lives once physical currencies are gone. If you behave bad through the eyes of governments or banks (e.g. using too much electricity, eat too much meat, work as a prostitute, etc...) they might be able to take restrict your earning potential or spending. That is not a world that I'd like to live in.

dsr_ 5y ago
Why do you consider it a safe haven for your money when the volatility is so high?
- wsc981 5y ago
  > Why do you consider it a safe haven for your money when the volatility is so high? Because I believe in the long term Bitcoin will always go up, as it has done in the past. Especially if central banks keep printing money at high volume, which -at this point- seems unavoidable for the Fed & ECB. I don't care too much for short term volatility. And as Bitcoin adoption grows, volatility should reduce anyways.

azth 5y ago

Quite a bit of it also comes from the fact that people are tired from the fed printing money at will, devaluing people's hard work they put in for years to save some money. Secondly, people in the EU are also excited about bitcoin regardless of the fact that they have what you mentioned.

koonsolo 5y ago

If PayPal would have realized the vision of Elon Musk, there would be no banks anymore. In that scenario, it would be really hard for crypto to emerge. But right now, that market is fully open.

wyager 5y ago

"Modern" banking systems still suck if you want to move large amounts of money, move money globally, move money without asking for regulatory permission and waiting for regulatory delays, avoid having your assets temporarily seized because the comptroller makes a paperwork error, etc. etc.

Eduard 5y ago

> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU Um, no. I'm not used to that. My latest online German-bank-to-German-bank giro transfer took the usual two-to-three business days.

tim333 5y ago

Not much. The hype is mostly gambling, ponzi schemes and the like.