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You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easi

You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Fundamentally though it isn't about the technology it's about the transition. It's about money transitioning to a purely digital form which people will use. In the past entire industries have been revolutionised multiple times by such transitions. Music moved to digital via mp3. TV, Movies via efficient video codecs and streaming. In both cases those shifts caused massive and unpredictable changes to how we consume and buy music/tv. Now that money is making the same transition, people are jumping on it hoping to profit from it and money is much much more important a technology than music or tv/movies, it's the fundamental technology of society.

tsimionescu 5y ago
People were using money online just fine well before Bitcoin, and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority. What exactly makes a dollar or euro less "online/digital" than a bitcoin?
- dageshi 5y ago
  Speed of iteration/development/experimentation. You can't fork EUR/USD, experiment with it and see if it works better than the existing EUR/USD. You can with online currencies and people are doing just that. Most will be failures in the same way that most new businesses/startups are ultimately failures. BUT the difference is there is actual experimentation with money now in a way that there never was before.
  - dangerwill 5y ago
    None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. 99.9% of this "experimentation" is simply companies tying ownership of a token to a permission to access a web service. And the remainder of it are clueless tech brained morons finding ways to re-invent financial instruments (like residuals, profit splitting, and derivation) that have been around for hundreds of years. You don't have any new insights into financial systems, you just want to be at the top of the financial system and collect rents
    - lui8906 5y ago
      > None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. How involved are you in the space to make this claim? Are you staying informed? What is your highly confident language based on? Can you tease out how you come to "1000x worse"? You are incredibly confident, it leads me to believe you have some big blind points.
    - dageshi 5y ago
      Yeah and mp3 didn't fundamentally change the fact that you still listen to music with your ears. Video codecs didn't change the fact you watch moving pictures with your eyes. But they did change an awful lot about existing industries and invented new ones. I personally have never been involved in crypto or bought anything crypto related. I have no incentive either way in its success or failure. I've just lived long enough to see what happens when stuff suddenly goes 100% digital, the pace of iteration, exploration and adoption rapidly speeds up while the costs of doing all three decreases. I think something interesting will come of it, even if I cannot say what that will be.
      - dangerwill 5y ago
        For the average person there is no difference between entering credit card info into a web page and using a wallet manager to enter your crypto info into an app, except that the wallet manager is infinitely more insecure and much more cumbersome. Going from a walkman to an ipod/itunes was an actual improvement in storage capacity, usability, accessibility etc. As for holding out hope something will come out of crypto, using your example of mp3s and digital video, as soon as those were available to the general public they were RAPIDLY and enthusiastically adopted by the entire public. In the last 10+ years the crypto audience has gone from libertarians and fans of illicit drugs to libertarians, gambling addicts, and developers hoping to skill into the "next big thing".
        dangerwill 5y ago
        And before I get a response about the insecurity of metamask: https://twitter.com/wakaflocka/status/1475709903184412675 https://twitter.com/wakaflocka/status/1475709903184412675
- lawn 5y ago
  Fiat aren't less "online/digital" than crypto, they're less "cash" than crypto in the sense that no third party can prevent you from receiving or sending it. If you use something like Monero it's also much less traceable than digital fiat.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > Fiat aren't less "online/digital" than crypto, they're less "cash" than crypto in the sense that no third party can prevent you from receiving or sending it. That's not what the GP was claiming, but even this is debatable. With in-person cash, it's generally impossible for anyone to prevent your from doing a transaction. But with BTC, it's not that hard to prevent a vendor from shipping the item to you, even if they can't prevent the transfer from going through. Perhaps Monero is indeed untraceable, but as long as your buying physical goods, those need to be delivered to some physical address, and can be traced that way.
- kebman 5y ago
  tl;dr: Nothing. But there are some big caveats to that. Sure, we already have tons of currency transactions going on digitally and on-line, but Bitcoin offers something that the centralized entities cannot, and these are (in no particular order): Unconfiscatable: Because nobody can take your bitcoins away from you unless you give away your keys. Regulation resistant: Because nobody can stop you from trading or transacting with your bitcoins at any point if you own the keys. Bitcoin does not care about which borders it goes over, or the regulation therein. (But if you break the laws of your country by making illegal transactions, then you're of course taking a huge risk.) Crime resistance: Granted, you can be coerced into giving up your keys, but then you have the option to flag your own account for all other parties. Since all transactions are public on the ledger, it will prevent criminal parties from using your funds with full anonymity, thus making them a lot easier to catch. Relative privacy (but not 100% anonymity): Because nobody can really know who owns an address or a transaction unless they have access to special intel that they usually will only be privy to if they own a ton of third party hardware, software and skill (i.e. if they're operating for a totalitarian surveillance state). Or if you willingly give it up your anonymity to some central authority that promises to safekeep that information, which most buyers do, btw, which decreases regulation resistance while it increases crime resistance. Corruption resistance: Honestly, if you want to commit crimes or corruption, then cash is a way better vessel for value, since all transactions with cash are near 100% anonymous (barring widespread bank note ID code control which is also limited), and there are several superior ways in which cash may be whitewashed if you have the infrastructure for it. Meanwhile it's surprisingly hard to whitewash Bitcoin given that all transactions are public. I might even have missed a few value propositions, but those are the most important. > and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority This is increasingly untrue. Take the countries now adopting Bitcoin as legal tender (with the Lightning Network), for example, and the many stories of people using it to make bigger purchases.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    None of your examples work as easily as you say. Unconfiscatable: a judge may order you to hand over your bitcoin, or face jail time for contempt of court etc. Regulation resistant: see above. Also, depends crucially on anonimity, which doesn't hold up either. Crime resitance: much worse than digital money, which is insured and much better protected by the state. Relative privacy: only works for btc-to-btc transactions, or if you spend significant effort. Otherwise, the moment you order somethibg at home using BTC, the entity that you ordered from knows exactly whose wallet this is, and everything else they do or have done with their money. Corruption resistance: maybe, since privacy is really bad. And the heyday of people using BTC for actual transactions I think has mostly gone. It used to be that you could buy games on Steam or a Tesla with BTC, but no more. Note as well that Lightning Network is not BTC - it rarely touches the BTC block chain and offers much weaker guarantees than BTC (in particular, it's easy to double spend on LN if your node is unreliable). And lots of people in El Salvador (the only country that has been crazy enough to do this) are not even using the LN, they are using an app which does most transfers on their own servers, and only used LN for interoperation with other apps.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  Serious answer: The supply of the digital currency. For euro/dollars that supply is dictated by a handful of individuals. For Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, that supply is dictated by code and consensus that anybody can participate in.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > For euro/dollars that supply is dictated by a handful of individuals. The supply is dictated by the country's government (or a complex web of governments and the EU, in the case of the euro), which is ultimately controlled by the people who live in that country, at least to some extent. If the US government and the Fed decided to issue 100 new trillion dollars tomorrow, devaluing everyone's money, there would be rioting in the streets. The politicians who participated or allowed it to happen would never see office again. In contrast, the supply of Bitcoin is dictated by the programmers that actually do the work of writing the node software, in collaboration with the largest miners. Currently I believe they are respecting the protocol laid out by Satoshi, but they are free do decide to do otherwise at some point in the future. If they decided to issue new Bitcoin, Bitcoin may or may not collapse, but they would face no personal repercussions. So I would say I personally, and I believe you as well, have a much bigger (though minuscule, of course) say about the supply of euro/dollars than we do in the supply of Bitcoin.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
      To your first point, they haven’t gone to 100 trillion at a time yet but we sure look like we are getting there. To your second point, there are other parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem besides miners and developers that have a say in which version of the code ends up being run. It isn’t as simple as largest miners and it definitely isn’t as simple as issuing new Bitcoin without facing personal repercussions. Look into the block size debate to see how contentious any changes to the core protocol actually are and which players actually made a difference. Let’s agree to agree. The average person has minuscule impact on their chosen money’s supply. To quantify which one would take more impact by the Average Joe in this day and age is going to have to be judged by history in decades - not by us now.
FabHK 5y ago
> It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Sorry, EUR and USD and KES (Kenyan shilling, uses a great cheap payment system on mobile phones called M-Pesa) and XRP (Ripple, a "crypto currency" with a central authority) don't work? I hadn't noticed.
- kebman 5y ago
  XRP is special in that it's distributed, but I wouldn't call it decentralized (so you're completely correct in calling it a crypto with a centralized authority). For instance it's possible for nodes to block other nodes at their whim. This is a very attractive trait for banks or groups of banks. But similarly it's a very bad trait for any smaller actor. So sure, it works, but it also gives up huge amounts of control to central authorities. I mean, if you're OK with giving up your freedom to uncontrollable inflation, then go right ahead and use it!
- kikimora 5y ago
  And then US government prints trillions of dollars and inflate your savings. Or Russian government locks you USDs while Visa, Mastercard and sanctions make it impossible to move money out of the country. Or ask Belorussians and Argentinians how much they like double digit inflation that goes year after year after year while government limits ability to buy a more stable currency. Above is just about money but there is another perspective. Think about a car sale and how would you automate it. To date most car sales require some paperwork to register the right transfer. This happens behind the scenes and you may not know but it happens and occupies some people. You simply cannot automate a car same with just a database. There must be a trust component in the system and a way to maintain it. Trust maintenance typically means audits, licensees, etc and they do not come for free.
dangerwill 5y ago
No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times. "You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power." Credit cards run 100% of online transactions and do a fantastic, quick, and cheap job of it. Crypto isn't creating something wholly new, it is attempting to compete with a network that charges 1-2% fees, works in seconds, and handles 1 BILLION transactions a day. With BTC you can't predict the fees or the transaction time and the network handles ~40k transactions a day, at extreme cost. Crypto currencies get more inefficient as more nodes come online (hence the proliferation of "side-chains" for games that need to actually, you know, make a non trivial number of transactions per second) and so they fundamentally break at scale. And don't try to spout some line about Proof of Stake, Ethereum will continue to push back the migration until the heat death of the universe. Now you will probably respond that credit cards use existing currencies and the fundamental shift here is that this is an "online currency" vs "online payments". To the average person this is a distinction without a difference. Really this is fundamentally political, an (openly stated!) war on the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, etc and the associated governments by anarcho capitalist Libertarians who want to trade bureaucratic government services with profit-driven corporate services
- mritchie712 5y ago
  1. 2% is not low. 2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted. 3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation. 1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
  - dangerwill 5y ago
    1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed. 2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. The projects have made little meaningful technical improvements and no actually-useful-outside-of-the-crypto-sphere projects have been launched on top of them. Open source software that is attempting to solve real problems move so much faster than crypto. This attempted justification is simply embarrassing 3. What more is there to say about POS? It isn't actually happening. It has been talked about forever, put on the official roadmap for eth in 2020 and has had been delayed every couple of months since then, including literally last week https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-delayed-once-again/ https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-de....
mmcnl 5y ago
Money is just accounting. Making sure balances are in sync on sender and receiver's end. People don't have problems sending money from A to B. I fail to see the application here. I don't think money is going through a transformation at all.
- aeschylus 5y ago
  > People don't have problems sending money from A to B. Respectfully, this is a deeply ignorant and factually incorrect sentence. This indicates to me that: you have never travelled outside a limited set of highly-developed countries; never met anyone from a developing country; never had to send anyone more than $10,000; never had to send or receive money from another country; never met anyone who sends or receives remittances; never done any cross-border business transaction requiring FX conversions. In some of the above instances, it is technically possible to send money from A to B, but only at very high cost, slowly, and with serious privacy and, at times, physical safety tradeoffs. I would encourage you to look into how those usecases currently function, in a nuts-and-bolts way. It is ugly. A decent book on this subject is "Check Your Financial Privilege", by Alex Gladstein.

tsimionescu 5y ago

People were using money online just fine well before Bitcoin, and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority. What exactly makes a dollar or euro less "online/digital" than a bitcoin?

dageshi 5y ago
Speed of iteration/development/experimentation. You can't fork EUR/USD, experiment with it and see if it works better than the existing EUR/USD. You can with online currencies and people are doing just that. Most will be failures in the same way that most new businesses/startups are ultimately failures. BUT the difference is there is actual experimentation with money now in a way that there never was before.
- dangerwill 5y ago
  None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. 99.9% of this "experimentation" is simply companies tying ownership of a token to a permission to access a web service. And the remainder of it are clueless tech brained morons finding ways to re-invent financial instruments (like residuals, profit splitting, and derivation) that have been around for hundreds of years. You don't have any new insights into financial systems, you just want to be at the top of the financial system and collect rents
  - lui8906 5y ago
    > None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. How involved are you in the space to make this claim? Are you staying informed? What is your highly confident language based on? Can you tease out how you come to "1000x worse"? You are incredibly confident, it leads me to believe you have some big blind points.
  - dageshi 5y ago
    Yeah and mp3 didn't fundamentally change the fact that you still listen to music with your ears. Video codecs didn't change the fact you watch moving pictures with your eyes. But they did change an awful lot about existing industries and invented new ones. I personally have never been involved in crypto or bought anything crypto related. I have no incentive either way in its success or failure. I've just lived long enough to see what happens when stuff suddenly goes 100% digital, the pace of iteration, exploration and adoption rapidly speeds up while the costs of doing all three decreases. I think something interesting will come of it, even if I cannot say what that will be.
    - dangerwill 5y ago
      For the average person there is no difference between entering credit card info into a web page and using a wallet manager to enter your crypto info into an app, except that the wallet manager is infinitely more insecure and much more cumbersome. Going from a walkman to an ipod/itunes was an actual improvement in storage capacity, usability, accessibility etc. As for holding out hope something will come out of crypto, using your example of mp3s and digital video, as soon as those were available to the general public they were RAPIDLY and enthusiastically adopted by the entire public. In the last 10+ years the crypto audience has gone from libertarians and fans of illicit drugs to libertarians, gambling addicts, and developers hoping to skill into the "next big thing".
      - dangerwill 5y ago
        And before I get a response about the insecurity of metamask: https://twitter.com/wakaflocka/status/1475709903184412675 https://twitter.com/wakaflocka/status/1475709903184412675
lawn 5y ago
Fiat aren't less "online/digital" than crypto, they're less "cash" than crypto in the sense that no third party can prevent you from receiving or sending it. If you use something like Monero it's also much less traceable than digital fiat.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > Fiat aren't less "online/digital" than crypto, they're less "cash" than crypto in the sense that no third party can prevent you from receiving or sending it. That's not what the GP was claiming, but even this is debatable. With in-person cash, it's generally impossible for anyone to prevent your from doing a transaction. But with BTC, it's not that hard to prevent a vendor from shipping the item to you, even if they can't prevent the transfer from going through. Perhaps Monero is indeed untraceable, but as long as your buying physical goods, those need to be delivered to some physical address, and can be traced that way.
kebman 5y ago
tl;dr: Nothing. But there are some big caveats to that. Sure, we already have tons of currency transactions going on digitally and on-line, but Bitcoin offers something that the centralized entities cannot, and these are (in no particular order): Unconfiscatable: Because nobody can take your bitcoins away from you unless you give away your keys. Regulation resistant: Because nobody can stop you from trading or transacting with your bitcoins at any point if you own the keys. Bitcoin does not care about which borders it goes over, or the regulation therein. (But if you break the laws of your country by making illegal transactions, then you're of course taking a huge risk.) Crime resistance: Granted, you can be coerced into giving up your keys, but then you have the option to flag your own account for all other parties. Since all transactions are public on the ledger, it will prevent criminal parties from using your funds with full anonymity, thus making them a lot easier to catch. Relative privacy (but not 100% anonymity): Because nobody can really know who owns an address or a transaction unless they have access to special intel that they usually will only be privy to if they own a ton of third party hardware, software and skill (i.e. if they're operating for a totalitarian surveillance state). Or if you willingly give it up your anonymity to some central authority that promises to safekeep that information, which most buyers do, btw, which decreases regulation resistance while it increases crime resistance. Corruption resistance: Honestly, if you want to commit crimes or corruption, then cash is a way better vessel for value, since all transactions with cash are near 100% anonymous (barring widespread bank note ID code control which is also limited), and there are several superior ways in which cash may be whitewashed if you have the infrastructure for it. Meanwhile it's surprisingly hard to whitewash Bitcoin given that all transactions are public. I might even have missed a few value propositions, but those are the most important. > and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority This is increasingly untrue. Take the countries now adopting Bitcoin as legal tender (with the Lightning Network), for example, and the many stories of people using it to make bigger purchases.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  None of your examples work as easily as you say. Unconfiscatable: a judge may order you to hand over your bitcoin, or face jail time for contempt of court etc. Regulation resistant: see above. Also, depends crucially on anonimity, which doesn't hold up either. Crime resitance: much worse than digital money, which is insured and much better protected by the state. Relative privacy: only works for btc-to-btc transactions, or if you spend significant effort. Otherwise, the moment you order somethibg at home using BTC, the entity that you ordered from knows exactly whose wallet this is, and everything else they do or have done with their money. Corruption resistance: maybe, since privacy is really bad. And the heyday of people using BTC for actual transactions I think has mostly gone. It used to be that you could buy games on Steam or a Tesla with BTC, but no more. Note as well that Lightning Network is not BTC - it rarely touches the BTC block chain and offers much weaker guarantees than BTC (in particular, it's easy to double spend on LN if your node is unreliable). And lots of people in El Salvador (the only country that has been crazy enough to do this) are not even using the LN, they are using an app which does most transfers on their own servers, and only used LN for interoperation with other apps.
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
Serious answer: The supply of the digital currency. For euro/dollars that supply is dictated by a handful of individuals. For Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, that supply is dictated by code and consensus that anybody can participate in.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > For euro/dollars that supply is dictated by a handful of individuals. The supply is dictated by the country's government (or a complex web of governments and the EU, in the case of the euro), which is ultimately controlled by the people who live in that country, at least to some extent. If the US government and the Fed decided to issue 100 new trillion dollars tomorrow, devaluing everyone's money, there would be rioting in the streets. The politicians who participated or allowed it to happen would never see office again. In contrast, the supply of Bitcoin is dictated by the programmers that actually do the work of writing the node software, in collaboration with the largest miners. Currently I believe they are respecting the protocol laid out by Satoshi, but they are free do decide to do otherwise at some point in the future. If they decided to issue new Bitcoin, Bitcoin may or may not collapse, but they would face no personal repercussions. So I would say I personally, and I believe you as well, have a much bigger (though minuscule, of course) say about the supply of euro/dollars than we do in the supply of Bitcoin.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    To your first point, they haven’t gone to 100 trillion at a time yet but we sure look like we are getting there. To your second point, there are other parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem besides miners and developers that have a say in which version of the code ends up being run. It isn’t as simple as largest miners and it definitely isn’t as simple as issuing new Bitcoin without facing personal repercussions. Look into the block size debate to see how contentious any changes to the core protocol actually are and which players actually made a difference. Let’s agree to agree. The average person has minuscule impact on their chosen money’s supply. To quantify which one would take more impact by the Average Joe in this day and age is going to have to be judged by history in decades - not by us now.

FabHK 5y ago

> It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Sorry, EUR and USD and KES (Kenyan shilling, uses a great cheap payment system on mobile phones called M-Pesa) and XRP (Ripple, a "crypto currency" with a central authority) don't work? I hadn't noticed.

kebman 5y ago
XRP is special in that it's distributed, but I wouldn't call it decentralized (so you're completely correct in calling it a crypto with a centralized authority). For instance it's possible for nodes to block other nodes at their whim. This is a very attractive trait for banks or groups of banks. But similarly it's a very bad trait for any smaller actor. So sure, it works, but it also gives up huge amounts of control to central authorities. I mean, if you're OK with giving up your freedom to uncontrollable inflation, then go right ahead and use it!
kikimora 5y ago
And then US government prints trillions of dollars and inflate your savings. Or Russian government locks you USDs while Visa, Mastercard and sanctions make it impossible to move money out of the country. Or ask Belorussians and Argentinians how much they like double digit inflation that goes year after year after year while government limits ability to buy a more stable currency. Above is just about money but there is another perspective. Think about a car sale and how would you automate it. To date most car sales require some paperwork to register the right transfer. This happens behind the scenes and you may not know but it happens and occupies some people. You simply cannot automate a car same with just a database. There must be a trust component in the system and a way to maintain it. Trust maintenance typically means audits, licensees, etc and they do not come for free.

dangerwill 5y ago

No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times. "You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power." Credit cards run 100% of online transactions and do a fantastic, quick, and cheap job of it. Crypto isn't creating something wholly new, it is attempting to compete with a network that charges 1-2% fees, works in seconds, and handles 1 BILLION transactions a day. With BTC you can't predict the fees or the transaction time and the network handles ~40k transactions a day, at extreme cost. Crypto currencies get more inefficient as more nodes come online (hence the proliferation of "side-chains" for games that need to actually, you know, make a non trivial number of transactions per second) and so they fundamentally break at scale. And don't try to spout some line about Proof of Stake, Ethereum will continue to push back the migration until the heat death of the universe. Now you will probably respond that credit cards use existing currencies and the fundamental shift here is that this is an "online currency" vs "online payments". To the average person this is a distinction without a difference. Really this is fundamentally political, an (openly stated!) war on the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, etc and the associated governments by anarcho capitalist Libertarians who want to trade bureaucratic government services with profit-driven corporate services

mritchie712 5y ago
1. 2% is not low. 2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted. 3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation. 1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
- dangerwill 5y ago
  1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed. 2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. The projects have made little meaningful technical improvements and no actually-useful-outside-of-the-crypto-sphere projects have been launched on top of them. Open source software that is attempting to solve real problems move so much faster than crypto. This attempted justification is simply embarrassing 3. What more is there to say about POS? It isn't actually happening. It has been talked about forever, put on the official roadmap for eth in 2020 and has had been delayed every couple of months since then, including literally last week https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-delayed-once-again/ https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-de....

mmcnl 5y ago

Money is just accounting. Making sure balances are in sync on sender and receiver's end. People don't have problems sending money from A to B. I fail to see the application here. I don't think money is going through a transformation at all.

aeschylus 5y ago
> People don't have problems sending money from A to B. Respectfully, this is a deeply ignorant and factually incorrect sentence. This indicates to me that: you have never travelled outside a limited set of highly-developed countries; never met anyone from a developing country; never had to send anyone more than $10,000; never had to send or receive money from another country; never met anyone who sends or receives remittances; never done any cross-border business transaction requiring FX conversions. In some of the above instances, it is technically possible to send money from A to B, but only at very high cost, slowly, and with serious privacy and, at times, physical safety tradeoffs. I would encourage you to look into how those usecases currently function, in a nuts-and-bolts way. It is ugly. A decent book on this subject is "Check Your Financial Privilege", by Alex Gladstein.