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So what exactly is the point of holding BTC if it can be held hostage like this? Crypto continues to fail at its most basic premises.
by wfhordie 4y ago
So what exactly is the point of holding BTC if it can be held hostage like this? Crypto continues to fail at its most basic premises.
- naraga 4y agonot your keys not your coins. nothing to see here
- wfhordie 4y agoCrypto is user hostile then? Got it
- rvz 4y agoNope. The point is you store your crypto on a non-custodial software wallet (Metamask) or a hardware wallet (Ledger Nano) and not on an exchange, so it cannot be 'held hostage'. It is not your keys, not your coins if it is on an exchange which uses custodial wallets, but doesn't apply if it is on a non-custodial wallet.
- dhsysusbsjsi 4y agoThis statement bugs me because it is a large source of confusion for new people. Your funds are spendable by your private key. Your private key is stored on Metamask, Ledger or a piece of paper. It’s an important distinction to make. Your hardware wallet is just a custodian of your private key.
- benjaminwootton 4y agoThat bugs me too. Almost every document out there talks about storing coins in your wallet. It’s actually a private key in there. Maybe with the right language, more people might be tempted to hold their own keys and eschew centralised exchanges.
- namaria 4y agoYou either have a healthy ecosystem or you don't.
- woodpanel 4y agoThanks for highlighting the bad UX of crypto currencies, as it provides a nice segue into the financial danger that UX causes, as it creates customer-demand for simplifications that exchanges provide – so every time an exchange does something rugpull-ish we're actually testing how much of crypto's market-cap is based on maybe not-so-sturdy confidence of retail investors...
- lvturner 4y agoThis is great if I want to store it, or spend it on places that accept Bitcoin (or other coins) but what if I want to exchange it for another currency? Seems to me only two options, an exchange or a face to face trade?
- barnabee 4y agoYou can use something like https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
- kmac_ 4y ago"Always has been."
- mrkramer 4y agoSpeaking of Bitcoin; Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but s/he wasn't quite good at creating GUI and "Crypto" consumer apps that's why s/he open sourced it and left it to the community to build upon it and expand the Bitcoin ecosystem. Btw at the time Bitcoin was in the experimental phase and Satoshi left the Bitcoin community pretty early that's why "Crypto" was user hostile and maybe still is.
- mempko 4y agoSatosh was NOT an excellent C++ programmer. As someone who heavily dug into bitcoin code, the whole thing was a mess from the beginning. Poorly architected. Insane amount of global variables. It was just a huge mess and still is. IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).
- mrkramer 4y ago>Satoshi was NOT an excellent C++ programmer. I'm not a programmer but that is what Gavin Andresen said[1]; he said something like this "Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but he wasn't a cryptographer" and "Satoshi wasn't familiar with Cryptography 101" in a sense that Satoshi was sometimes mixing up basic cryptographic concepts. And yea I know Bitcoin had plenty of bugs I heard of notorious Value overflow incident[2]. >IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code). My assumption is someone from the academia e.g. university professor. Maybe someone who was teaching freshmen basics of Computer Science and basic C++ programming then your point might be valid that Bitcoin's codebase was poorly written looking from the practical and from the professional point of view. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
- koonsolo 4y agoSo is command line, but that doesn't mean it has no value.
- colpabar 4y ago"real crypto has never been tried"
- caslon 4y agoI dislike cryptocurrency, generally, but plenty of people hold their own keys. It's rarer, now, but that's because mass consumers are generally stupid, not because the technology is flawed. If you can do the correct thing, and you choose not to (or just are ignorant enough to not do the correct thing), it's kind of your fault. I still think we should legislate it, but let's be honest: Most people who lose, here, kind of deserve it, for not doing the bare minimum of research.
- viraptor 4y agoThis doesn't have much to do with people being stupid. If you want to trade more than once a month, you pretty much have to keep the funds on an exchange. Otherwise transfer fees would kill any profit you made. If you're not trading often, you may still want to take the risk due to free in-exchange transfers.
- naraga 4y agoso, either trade on exchanges with Lighntning or pick the one at least in jurisdiction that gives you some kind of protection like if you held money for any other service / broker.
- koonsolo 4y agoOnce Ethereum goes to PoS, let's hope those transfers become cheap enough to compete with centralised exchanges.
- naraga 4y agoPoS has nothing to do with fees being high or low.
- 4y ago
- shawabawa3 4y agoYou should be asking "what exactly is the point of holding BTC on Binance"
- ParksNet 4y agoWe should be asking "what exactly is the point of holding BTC"
- coldpie 4y agoPeople like gambling. It's a fact of humanity that's never going away.
- namaria 4y agoPeople like free money. They get addicted to gambling because of that.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoHolding BTC for the long term has historically been a lucrative investment. Just not holding it on one of the many centralized exchanges that always seem to get hacked or go bust.
- doliveira 4y agoPrices went up exactly because of these centralized exchanges.
- once_inc 4y ago[citation needed]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoHolding tulips in the long term was historically a good investment, too, until it wasn't.
- 4y ago
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoHolding crypto on an exchange is like giving money to a guy on the corner who knows a broker to put in the stock market and telling them you don't need the account numbers, you trust them. If you're going to do crypto, get a wallet setup where you have the keys to it.
- seanw444 4y agoApparently that's too hard for the layman. Even though there are wallet apps that literally walk you through it...
- SilverBirch 4y agoThere's two counter points to this. The first is that in terms of day to day likelihood of losing the bitcoin, you're probably generally safer with an exchange than holding the crypto yourself. Secondly, if the exchanges actually do collapse, then whilst you won't lose your BTC if you're not on the exchange, your BTC are probably going to be worth a lot less anyway, so you're still exposed to the risk of exchanges collapsing. If you're the average joe who has bitcoin (you probably shouldn't have bitcoin) but using an exchange isn't crazy.
- oneoff786 4y ago> The first is that in terms of day to day likelihood of losing the bitcoin, you're probably generally safer with an exchange than holding the crypto yourself. The word you’re looking for is bank
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoUse exchanges for just that, exchanging it, but don’t let a central exchange hold it in their wallet.
- Petersipoi 4y agoThis reply completely ignores everything GP said. You didn't address either of the (seemingly very valid) points they made.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twox2 4y agoCorrect, there is no point in holding crypto on an exchange. If you hold your own crypto, you don't have this problem.
- shadowgovt 4y agoSo crypto is fine for transactions that I can wait a few tens of minutes to a few hours to resolve, but not ones that I want to make at the rate of every fiat currency I hold. I can see how other people would have that use-case.
- koonsolo 4y agoThere are cryptocurrencies with sub second transactions and zero or almost zero transaction fees. Welcome to the world of Proof of Stake.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoYou do understand that proof of stake has absolutely nothing to do with transaction speed or fees -- speed depends on how many nodes you want to agree on any transaction (decentralization) while the fees depend on how congested the network gets in an open pricing model for fees? Unless you are a crypto expert in it for the technology, that you happened to learn from random shiller YouTube videos.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- koonsolo 4y agoSorry, I classified DAG under PoS, my mistake.
- twox2 4y agoI don't see how this relates to my comment above at all.
- vishnugupta 4y agoYou need to hold the keys in your own wallet. Holding it in a centralized exchanges like Binance, Coinbase etc is at best just DB entries.