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Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo?

Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage their own information? I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.

bushbaba 5y ago
Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute. Try doing that with crypto.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I don't think that the convenience of moving money around has much to do with what the article's talking about. It's more about flexibility when there're more than just one party involved--the kind of stuff that with fiat you'd have to hire lawyers for.
- GVRV 5y ago
  You must live in a developed nation. I'm from one of the tier-2 cities in India. I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system. My relatives in my native village just 100 KMs away don't even have a bank they can walk into (they have mobile phones with data though). Do we just have to wait for regulated, for-profit entities to calculate when it will be profitable for them to provide us with services? What benefit did maintaining the status quo provide for people in countries where inflation wiped out savings overnight? If we have the skills and the opportunity to participate in an alternative, mostly open system, how long should we need to wait for permission?
  - infinityplus1 5y ago
    You can invest in mutual funds which invest in foreign companies. Creating online accounts for direct mutual funds investments is fully digital using Video KYC.
    - GVRV 5y ago
      Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I need to go through a mutual fund and rely on their stock picking strategy and fees (we've had mutual funds default very recently). I want to enter into a position in a specific stock according to my strategy at a price I'm comfortable at. This again leads to the same point: why are we so _comfortable_ with the status quo? I want to think about what could be possible, not what sub-par alternative is available today.
      - soco 5y ago
        Just for the sake of argument, the same can be said about dark web: it offers freedom to do whatever business one pleases, with minor government interference. Is that a great alternative? For some, yes. Could it sell also cancer treatments for people unable to obtain them otherwise? Yes it could, but that doesn't make the dark web a good thing. My point is that what "could be" is very different from what "is". And from what I can see nowadays with crypto we find the positives only in the "could be". I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality, then I guarantee everybody will jump ship, or at least I definitely will.
        nonima 5y ago
        >I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality It's up to people to start utilizing the technology. But some need it more than others, for you it might not be necessary but millions of people are already using cryptocurrencies in countries where government caused hyperinflation of their currencies.
        GVRV 5y ago
        The dark web is a good thing – it's a good utility. Whether someone uses it for a good thing or a bad thing, it's up to the individual, but I'm glad that an investment was made to come up with a more secure, privacy-focused protocols was made (and continuing work is being done to improve it). I'm also glad other protocols exist and the market will ultimately determine adoption based on utility. We mostly used HTTP until FireSheep happened and now use HTTPS very widely and someday, if governments and organisations continue to pry on online activity, we might move to the protocols powering the dark web. It's the same with crypto. I, too, feel a lot of the use cases being talked about right now are just words – but at the same time, I'm glad that people with the skills and the resources are making investments into coming up with these experiments and the experiments that will offer the most utility might get widely adopted in the future.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  "I can get my favorite articles delivered to my door, I can watch my sports games live, I can talk to my parent's across country instantly and cheaply over the phone. Try doing any of that with 'the internet.'" Sometimes you're just early, bud.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    How many more decades until we're there? Scale comparison: Cryptocurrency-based technology has been publicly available for at least 12 years now. If I place initial public availability of the web at about 1992, we're currently in the equivalent of 2004, when two of the three described usecases were already widely available in developed nations. Amazon was maybe not a household name yet, but e-commerce was already an accepted purchasing model for several product categories, and Skype gave the world very cheap international phone calls. Only the video usecase was still terrible because of the available bandwidth.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bidder33 5y ago
      DEXs(uniswap), Auction Houses(zora), Community Voting Systems(snapshot), Reputation and trust networks(circles), public goods funding(clr.fund), self publishing and fundraising(mirror, and now kickstarter), e2ee messaging and chat rooms(status/whisper), ubi and sybil resistance(proofofhumanity). These are all things I and lots of others are interacting with pretty much daily, it doesnt get so much coverage because its not all speculation and imo what people are actually angry about with crypto is more exposure to abusive capitalism games, money is a painful trauma so more of it in new forms is hard to imagine as positive. But there is plenty of useful stuff being built and I think it is progressing pretty well. 5 years ago the ideas of rights management combined with open distribution (rather than DRM that locks down distribution) was a strange idea we didnt know how to make work, now NFTs are mainstream. In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right? > ...there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea... There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political. [1]: I would say this happens a lot with crypto-adjacent technologies -- sometimes it seems like the only two acceptable opinions are "this will revolutionize literally everything, how can you not see it" and "this will destroy the entire world, how can you not see it" -- but I think it happens a lot with everything right now. That's a different rant, though.
- michaelscott 5y ago
  I think the problem is that blockchain tech has moved far away from the original Bitcoin white paper at this point. The original was a cypherpunk wet dream which was indeed a system for financial transactions resistant to government manipulation/interference. The current strain of NFTs and other junk coins have pushed the tech into a scammy world that has developed an increasingly worse reputation and adds little value.
- soco 5y ago
  I think it's very easy for people to categorize you as "hater" because it makes their argument much easier, no need to argue with "haters" and just easily build a strawman to fight.
- lui8906 5y ago
  > As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right? They are not mutually exclusive. However often retorts to Web3 or DeFi are along the line of "I can receive my salary for free" or "I can send a bank transfer for low fees and it settles in 24 hours" - the implication being, why do we need anything else this is fine. My question to those who roughly hold this position (whether they be haters, skeptics, curious, critical) would be, if we can agree that generically technology is improving many elements of our modern life, isn't it sensible that we should also be trying out new technologies for finance and banking? Banking and credit cards have largely stayed the same for decades, shouldn't we be innovating here? Regardless of whether you consider Web3 to be innovative or not, isn't it better that people are trying other ways to improve? > There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political. There's a line of argument that basically everything is political. But that's often kind of a pointless statement. I would say that Web3 is non-political in the sense that, if you have a credibly neutral trustless global operating system, secured by validators around the world and used by users around the world, this environment is apolitical. It's not Western, Chinese, Russian, no one is gate kept from interacting with it. It is open for all, transparent and unable to be censored. Having you're Paypal account locked because you're from Iran feels intuitively political in a way that the system I described above does not.
mdoms 5y ago
> I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. I really don't think you do get it.
hansonkd13 5y ago
I’m not satisfied by the standard quo and want something better. But the current state of trustless web3 is not it. My bank account is great. If I die there are clear procedures for getting my assets to my spouse. Even if I forget my account number or my password, my lifetime of earnings does not simply disappear. This can’t happen in crypto unless I trust a third party, in which case just using a bank in US dollars is much safer as there are actual laws and insurance covering it. Maybe other countries are different,
- berkes 5y ago
  There are middle grounds here. Sovereignty, like security, is not binary, it's a spectrum. You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions : you, your 'bank' and a notary. Or have such schemes for anything above a value. Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
  - hansonkd13 5y ago
    > You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions So now social engineering hits and someone convinces my ‘bank’ and notary to allow the transaction to a third party. Now my life savings are gone forever. In my real bank (no quotes) you have regulation. Banks are liable for fraud. Blockchains aren’t. Now you could have pre assigned addresses that the notary and bank are allowed to transfer to, but now you have to think about edge cases. Every time i update my will I have to hire a blockchain engineer to update my smart contract and then hire another firm to audit it for errors so a bug doesn’t drain my account. Huge headache and much more expensive compared to the status quo. > Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary). whats triggering the canary? How can I trust that it will be accurate? Also, my spouse can change or die. If my spouse and I died at the same time and my parent’s should get the money if they are still alive. now what happens? You have to map out hundreds of edge cases, like every permutation of my relatives wallets. Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive. Current California State law takes all of that into account. It handles the edge cases in a way that code does not. Probate court is expensive but its better than everything going to zero.
nprz 5y ago
HN readers love to pretend the status quo needs changing, but when anyone puts forth a concrete idea on how to make that change (like the crypto community), they'll agree there's an issue, but say that this solution isn't the right one. They will endlessly repeat this cycle and proclaim frustration when nothing ever changes.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  If a problem actually gets solved then what will everyone complain about? It will make this place completely irrelevant!
- fnoof 5y ago
  HN is basically the “Dad internet”. They’ll instinctively shoot down all your ideas, but their accumulated experience is helpful once in a real discussion.
meheleventyone 5y ago
You can agree with most or all of that and still think the the tokenisation of everything with over expensive compute and storage and infinite middlemen isn’t the win their advocates think it is. You can own your own data, log in using a cryptographic secure identity and do many other awesome decentralised things through that without needing a blockchain. The latter I think does have value if you want to transfer funds without the government stopping you at the time (retrospectively though they might). That’s not very useful for normal people though. The problem is that there is little thought outside of crypto for this digital self-sovereignty when the digital world is effectively post-scarcity. Which makes me think that most care more about the money to be made than the ideals they claim to hold.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Despite its best intentions, crypto is now wave after wave of greedy newcomers trying to landgrab the next currency. As a smarter commenter than I said: crypto is the total privatisation of the money system, sold as democratisation.
timdaub 5y ago
My theory is that the people who shitpost about blockchain on HN every day do it for the same reasons as crypto people post positive things: We all want more money at the end of the day. Take this with a grain of salt, but I think all of this is about incentives. And so that stephendiehl.com fellow must have the same kind of stake in some technology as a crypto maximalist, but maybe directed elsewhere. There are enough people in this world that are living a happy life without blockchains and for them, it looks like a threat so they belittle it and try to argue it away.
- kall 5y ago
  It‘s a nice theory, but… what would that be? I can‘t really think of much. Sure a lot of us make money as web2 developers but we could switch to web3 without much issue. It wouldn‘t have a serious financial impact. The people who are heavily invested in these technologies, like VCs, Banks, Social Networks, they all seem to love crypto.
lentil_soup 5y ago
Not being happy with the status quo and not liking cryptocurrencies are not mutually exclusive. You can "hate" both. My problem with "crypto" is that the industry is so focused on getting rich, is all about money. That's not changing the status quo, that's wanting to be a part of it. If you TRULY want to change the status quo your focus can't be on how you can get rich quicker. There's been centuries of thought on self-sovereignty, of dictating your own terms, anarchism, freedom, etc. There's been literal wars about this all over the world and I just don't see how some dudes with bitcoins are really adding anything new to the table.
- emerged 5y ago
  I’ve proposed to a crypto company that they explicitly prevent themselves from getting rich off the ICO. They were decidedly completely uninterested. We all know the actual motivation of crypto bros, they want money. They don’t really care about improving the world, it’s all marketing bullshit.
- biztos 5y ago
  I agree but there is one thing -- if enough of the crypto-rich convert enough of their crypto-money to "fiat" then eventually, we may have a class of billionaires even more disconnected from the traditions of society than the Silicon Valley crop has been.[0][1] And these people may found universities, buy politicians, sit on the boards of art museums. So, while I personally don't think it'd be a good thing, I think there's a decent possibility the "crypto people" will someday use the spoils of their business to dabble in large-scale social engineering, and in a roundabout way that's how the dudes with the bitcoins will leave their mark. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philanthropy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philan... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital ...I could go on and on...
corobo 5y ago
> Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? Try, absolutely! New tech is fun tech! The problem is it's not about the tech is it? Lets be honest. It's just people trying to milk it for cash right now. Once they've all got theirs it'll evolve into something useful or just sorta be there now like Bitcoin Web3 tech, from my perspective, is people promoting profile pictures of bored apes, pirates, robots and (new to me) snowflakes with varying accessories on Twitter. It's like a ridiculously expensive version of Pokemon except you can't even fight them against each other. It's a bit of a joke currently, I hope someone finds a decent use case In any case whether I'm right or wrong, NFTs and web3s are something I'm too poor to understand right now. It's like watching an orgy of millionaires taking money from each other and patting themselves on the back if you're on the outside haha. It's so weird to come across an "open" tech you can't afford to learn
kall 5y ago
This is not a convincing argument. Just because I think something should be improved, doesn‘t mean I should applaud any and all attempts to improve it. If my city has a hideous, impractical train station and you just take a wrecking ball to it overnight, I‘m not going to thank you, because I won‘t be able to ride a train for months. Also consumer banking (in Europe) is great, I don‘t know what people are so mad about. If it‘s just "consumer banking sucks in the US" you have a much more straightforward improvement plan in "make it like Europe".
aklemm 5y ago
My skepticism comes from a belief based on observation that messy human collaboration is the name of the game, and our job is to merely move the needle in the right direction. Removing the messiness is not possible, may not even desirable, and so grand theories aimed at fixing the entire problem of politic, financial, and legal work are likely fool's errands.
Jetrel 5y ago
Yes, we're absolutely happy with the current system. I have absolutely no problem with the banking system. Everything has worked, I can transfer money to everyone I know basically for free, and the few weird issues I've had in my life (messed up account credentials) have been easily solved by talking to an authorized person at a bank, and having them hand-edit my data in the system. My bank can be robbed, blown up, or go out of business, and all of my money is safe. I don't want to manage my "financial infrastructure" for the same reason I don't want to host my own website. I want to pay other people with vastly better equipment, training, and around-the-clock availability to do a better job than me. Replacing this with crypto — even a refined endgame version from half a century in the future, is a pure negative. And that's before we consider the people pushing it as a bad-faith ponzi scheme.

bushbaba 5y ago

Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute. Try doing that with crypto.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I don't think that the convenience of moving money around has much to do with what the article's talking about. It's more about flexibility when there're more than just one party involved--the kind of stuff that with fiat you'd have to hire lawyers for.
GVRV 5y ago
You must live in a developed nation. I'm from one of the tier-2 cities in India. I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system. My relatives in my native village just 100 KMs away don't even have a bank they can walk into (they have mobile phones with data though). Do we just have to wait for regulated, for-profit entities to calculate when it will be profitable for them to provide us with services? What benefit did maintaining the status quo provide for people in countries where inflation wiped out savings overnight? If we have the skills and the opportunity to participate in an alternative, mostly open system, how long should we need to wait for permission?
- infinityplus1 5y ago
  You can invest in mutual funds which invest in foreign companies. Creating online accounts for direct mutual funds investments is fully digital using Video KYC.
  - GVRV 5y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I need to go through a mutual fund and rely on their stock picking strategy and fees (we've had mutual funds default very recently). I want to enter into a position in a specific stock according to my strategy at a price I'm comfortable at. This again leads to the same point: why are we so _comfortable_ with the status quo? I want to think about what could be possible, not what sub-par alternative is available today.
    - soco 5y ago
      Just for the sake of argument, the same can be said about dark web: it offers freedom to do whatever business one pleases, with minor government interference. Is that a great alternative? For some, yes. Could it sell also cancer treatments for people unable to obtain them otherwise? Yes it could, but that doesn't make the dark web a good thing. My point is that what "could be" is very different from what "is". And from what I can see nowadays with crypto we find the positives only in the "could be". I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality, then I guarantee everybody will jump ship, or at least I definitely will.
      - nonima 5y ago
        >I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality It's up to people to start utilizing the technology. But some need it more than others, for you it might not be necessary but millions of people are already using cryptocurrencies in countries where government caused hyperinflation of their currencies.
      - GVRV 5y ago
        The dark web is a good thing – it's a good utility. Whether someone uses it for a good thing or a bad thing, it's up to the individual, but I'm glad that an investment was made to come up with a more secure, privacy-focused protocols was made (and continuing work is being done to improve it). I'm also glad other protocols exist and the market will ultimately determine adoption based on utility. We mostly used HTTP until FireSheep happened and now use HTTPS very widely and someday, if governments and organisations continue to pry on online activity, we might move to the protocols powering the dark web. It's the same with crypto. I, too, feel a lot of the use cases being talked about right now are just words – but at the same time, I'm glad that people with the skills and the resources are making investments into coming up with these experiments and the experiments that will offer the most utility might get widely adopted in the future.
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
"I can get my favorite articles delivered to my door, I can watch my sports games live, I can talk to my parent's across country instantly and cheaply over the phone. Try doing any of that with 'the internet.'" Sometimes you're just early, bud.
- majewsky 5y ago
  How many more decades until we're there? Scale comparison: Cryptocurrency-based technology has been publicly available for at least 12 years now. If I place initial public availability of the web at about 1992, we're currently in the equivalent of 2004, when two of the three described usecases were already widely available in developed nations. Amazon was maybe not a household name yet, but e-commerce was already an accepted purchasing model for several product categories, and Skype gave the world very cheap international phone calls. Only the video usecase was still terrible because of the available bandwidth.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bidder33 5y ago
    DEXs(uniswap), Auction Houses(zora), Community Voting Systems(snapshot), Reputation and trust networks(circles), public goods funding(clr.fund), self publishing and fundraising(mirror, and now kickstarter), e2ee messaging and chat rooms(status/whisper), ubi and sybil resistance(proofofhumanity). These are all things I and lots of others are interacting with pretty much daily, it doesnt get so much coverage because its not all speculation and imo what people are actually angry about with crypto is more exposure to abusive capitalism games, money is a painful trauma so more of it in new forms is hard to imagine as positive. But there is plenty of useful stuff being built and I think it is progressing pretty well. 5 years ago the ideas of rights management combined with open distribution (rather than DRM that locks down distribution) was a strange idea we didnt know how to make work, now NFTs are mainstream. In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right? > ...there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea... There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political. [1]: I would say this happens a lot with crypto-adjacent technologies -- sometimes it seems like the only two acceptable opinions are "this will revolutionize literally everything, how can you not see it" and "this will destroy the entire world, how can you not see it" -- but I think it happens a lot with everything right now. That's a different rant, though.

michaelscott 5y ago
I think the problem is that blockchain tech has moved far away from the original Bitcoin white paper at this point. The original was a cypherpunk wet dream which was indeed a system for financial transactions resistant to government manipulation/interference. The current strain of NFTs and other junk coins have pushed the tech into a scammy world that has developed an increasingly worse reputation and adds little value.
soco 5y ago
I think it's very easy for people to categorize you as "hater" because it makes their argument much easier, no need to argue with "haters" and just easily build a strawman to fight.
lui8906 5y ago
> As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right? They are not mutually exclusive. However often retorts to Web3 or DeFi are along the line of "I can receive my salary for free" or "I can send a bank transfer for low fees and it settles in 24 hours" - the implication being, why do we need anything else this is fine. My question to those who roughly hold this position (whether they be haters, skeptics, curious, critical) would be, if we can agree that generically technology is improving many elements of our modern life, isn't it sensible that we should also be trying out new technologies for finance and banking? Banking and credit cards have largely stayed the same for decades, shouldn't we be innovating here? Regardless of whether you consider Web3 to be innovative or not, isn't it better that people are trying other ways to improve? > There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political. There's a line of argument that basically everything is political. But that's often kind of a pointless statement. I would say that Web3 is non-political in the sense that, if you have a credibly neutral trustless global operating system, secured by validators around the world and used by users around the world, this environment is apolitical. It's not Western, Chinese, Russian, no one is gate kept from interacting with it. It is open for all, transparent and unable to be censored. Having you're Paypal account locked because you're from Iran feels intuitively political in a way that the system I described above does not.

mdoms 5y ago

> I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. I really don't think you do get it.

hansonkd13 5y ago

I’m not satisfied by the standard quo and want something better. But the current state of trustless web3 is not it. My bank account is great. If I die there are clear procedures for getting my assets to my spouse. Even if I forget my account number or my password, my lifetime of earnings does not simply disappear. This can’t happen in crypto unless I trust a third party, in which case just using a bank in US dollars is much safer as there are actual laws and insurance covering it. Maybe other countries are different,

berkes 5y ago
There are middle grounds here. Sovereignty, like security, is not binary, it's a spectrum. You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions : you, your 'bank' and a notary. Or have such schemes for anything above a value. Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
- hansonkd13 5y ago
  > You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions So now social engineering hits and someone convinces my ‘bank’ and notary to allow the transaction to a third party. Now my life savings are gone forever. In my real bank (no quotes) you have regulation. Banks are liable for fraud. Blockchains aren’t. Now you could have pre assigned addresses that the notary and bank are allowed to transfer to, but now you have to think about edge cases. Every time i update my will I have to hire a blockchain engineer to update my smart contract and then hire another firm to audit it for errors so a bug doesn’t drain my account. Huge headache and much more expensive compared to the status quo. > Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary). whats triggering the canary? How can I trust that it will be accurate? Also, my spouse can change or die. If my spouse and I died at the same time and my parent’s should get the money if they are still alive. now what happens? You have to map out hundreds of edge cases, like every permutation of my relatives wallets. Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive. Current California State law takes all of that into account. It handles the edge cases in a way that code does not. Probate court is expensive but its better than everything going to zero.

nprz 5y ago

HN readers love to pretend the status quo needs changing, but when anyone puts forth a concrete idea on how to make that change (like the crypto community), they'll agree there's an issue, but say that this solution isn't the right one. They will endlessly repeat this cycle and proclaim frustration when nothing ever changes.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
If a problem actually gets solved then what will everyone complain about? It will make this place completely irrelevant!
fnoof 5y ago
HN is basically the “Dad internet”. They’ll instinctively shoot down all your ideas, but their accumulated experience is helpful once in a real discussion.

meheleventyone 5y ago

You can agree with most or all of that and still think the the tokenisation of everything with over expensive compute and storage and infinite middlemen isn’t the win their advocates think it is. You can own your own data, log in using a cryptographic secure identity and do many other awesome decentralised things through that without needing a blockchain. The latter I think does have value if you want to transfer funds without the government stopping you at the time (retrospectively though they might). That’s not very useful for normal people though. The problem is that there is little thought outside of crypto for this digital self-sovereignty when the digital world is effectively post-scarcity. Which makes me think that most care more about the money to be made than the ideals they claim to hold.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Despite its best intentions, crypto is now wave after wave of greedy newcomers trying to landgrab the next currency. As a smarter commenter than I said: crypto is the total privatisation of the money system, sold as democratisation.

timdaub 5y ago

My theory is that the people who shitpost about blockchain on HN every day do it for the same reasons as crypto people post positive things: We all want more money at the end of the day. Take this with a grain of salt, but I think all of this is about incentives. And so that stephendiehl.com fellow must have the same kind of stake in some technology as a crypto maximalist, but maybe directed elsewhere. There are enough people in this world that are living a happy life without blockchains and for them, it looks like a threat so they belittle it and try to argue it away.

kall 5y ago
It‘s a nice theory, but… what would that be? I can‘t really think of much. Sure a lot of us make money as web2 developers but we could switch to web3 without much issue. It wouldn‘t have a serious financial impact. The people who are heavily invested in these technologies, like VCs, Banks, Social Networks, they all seem to love crypto.

lentil_soup 5y ago

Not being happy with the status quo and not liking cryptocurrencies are not mutually exclusive. You can "hate" both. My problem with "crypto" is that the industry is so focused on getting rich, is all about money. That's not changing the status quo, that's wanting to be a part of it. If you TRULY want to change the status quo your focus can't be on how you can get rich quicker. There's been centuries of thought on self-sovereignty, of dictating your own terms, anarchism, freedom, etc. There's been literal wars about this all over the world and I just don't see how some dudes with bitcoins are really adding anything new to the table.

emerged 5y ago
I’ve proposed to a crypto company that they explicitly prevent themselves from getting rich off the ICO. They were decidedly completely uninterested. We all know the actual motivation of crypto bros, they want money. They don’t really care about improving the world, it’s all marketing bullshit.
biztos 5y ago
I agree but there is one thing -- if enough of the crypto-rich convert enough of their crypto-money to "fiat" then eventually, we may have a class of billionaires even more disconnected from the traditions of society than the Silicon Valley crop has been.[0][1] And these people may found universities, buy politicians, sit on the boards of art museums. So, while I personally don't think it'd be a good thing, I think there's a decent possibility the "crypto people" will someday use the spoils of their business to dabble in large-scale social engineering, and in a roundabout way that's how the dudes with the bitcoins will leave their mark. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philanthropy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philan... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital ...I could go on and on...

corobo 5y ago

> Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? Try, absolutely! New tech is fun tech! The problem is it's not about the tech is it? Lets be honest. It's just people trying to milk it for cash right now. Once they've all got theirs it'll evolve into something useful or just sorta be there now like Bitcoin Web3 tech, from my perspective, is people promoting profile pictures of bored apes, pirates, robots and (new to me) snowflakes with varying accessories on Twitter. It's like a ridiculously expensive version of Pokemon except you can't even fight them against each other. It's a bit of a joke currently, I hope someone finds a decent use case In any case whether I'm right or wrong, NFTs and web3s are something I'm too poor to understand right now. It's like watching an orgy of millionaires taking money from each other and patting themselves on the back if you're on the outside haha. It's so weird to come across an "open" tech you can't afford to learn

kall 5y ago

This is not a convincing argument. Just because I think something should be improved, doesn‘t mean I should applaud any and all attempts to improve it. If my city has a hideous, impractical train station and you just take a wrecking ball to it overnight, I‘m not going to thank you, because I won‘t be able to ride a train for months. Also consumer banking (in Europe) is great, I don‘t know what people are so mad about. If it‘s just "consumer banking sucks in the US" you have a much more straightforward improvement plan in "make it like Europe".

aklemm 5y ago

My skepticism comes from a belief based on observation that messy human collaboration is the name of the game, and our job is to merely move the needle in the right direction. Removing the messiness is not possible, may not even desirable, and so grand theories aimed at fixing the entire problem of politic, financial, and legal work are likely fool's errands.

Jetrel 5y ago

Yes, we're absolutely happy with the current system. I have absolutely no problem with the banking system. Everything has worked, I can transfer money to everyone I know basically for free, and the few weird issues I've had in my life (messed up account credentials) have been easily solved by talking to an authorized person at a bank, and having them hand-edit my data in the system. My bank can be robbed, blown up, or go out of business, and all of my money is safe. I don't want to manage my "financial infrastructure" for the same reason I don't want to host my own website. I want to pay other people with vastly better equipment, training, and around-the-clock availability to do a better job than me. Replacing this with crypto — even a refined endgame version from half a century in the future, is a pure negative. And that's before we consider the people pushing it as a bad-faith ponzi scheme.