8 ms·

I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but

I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.

ilaksh 4y ago
The first problem that cryptocurrency solves is, how can to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers. It accomplishes this using cryptographic signatures. Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the banking system generally works, are outdated.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- silisili 4y ago
  There are a plethora of transfer systems in the banking world that do the same, assuming you are talking about ACH info. Venmo, Cashapp, Paypal et al. You could argue the intermediary knows the info, but most crypto buyers also use an intermediary.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    Venmo, cashapp, and PayPal all have geographic restrictions (only one of those works where I live), and also pretty shit reputations - PayPal routinely just dicks its users and freezes their funds indefinitely. Crypto doesn't give a shit about borders, there's no intermediary who can freeze your assets (unless you decide to leave them on am exchange), etc.
    - Melchori 4y ago
      This is not a new feature of crypto. It's ignorance. You can easily do that with other tech. Crypto right now is just to new to have been properly regulated yet. And while you are true that you can run your own wallet, you are depending on the decentralized network, you do need a certain amount of stabity and you need to make sure you can recover and keep your wallet. Enough people demonstrated at least with the last point and millions lost in locked away wallets that there are still fundamental problems.
      - SamPatt 4y ago
        You cannot easily make payments to or from certain places, or based on certain activities, with the dominant payment technologies. Yes, this is due to regulations, but it's also due to the centralized nature of the technology which requires permission to use. Even when more regulation is forced onto cryptocurrencies, the architecture will always be permissionless, as it's a decentralized network. That is a fundamental difference.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        Melchori 4y ago
        You can't do that with crypto either. Because you actually need to convert your Fiat into crypto first. The current limitations are real and the theoretical possibility is equally good of what currently exist: a black market. In Iran everyone took euros or exchanged them on the spot. Even when the currency shop was closed people were waiting outside for us
- asadlionpk 4y ago
  Umm can’t I do the same via paypal, without giving away my password? What feature does cryptography give me here?
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    You might want to ask the folks behind Flipper Zero how relying on PayPal worked out for them: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
    - egeozcan 4y ago
      How can you do any transactions at all without trusted intermediaries? You have to trust government, banks, paypal... something. Or you can start trusting the individuals at the other side of the transaction. Perhaps these folks who do not have experience can also benefit from your exp... Oh wait, you've become an intermediary? Cryptocurrency is just an asset that you can sell nearly everywhere in the world. But it depends on electricity, is volatile in value, and has long transaction times. It's just an inferior cash, except the fact that it's not physical so border control can't take it away from you. If you are optimizing for that... Maybe there can be a simpler solution? Buy art shares? I don't know.
      - grog454 4y ago
        > You have to trust government, banks, paypal... something. In the case of crypto you're trusting that an adversary won't be able to control 50% of the computation power on the network for a substantial amount of time (and cryptographic theories, but you're trusting those whenever you use the internet anyway). Generally you're not even trusting the other party. Yes, it depends on electricity, but so does 95%+ of the modern economy. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-five-years-later https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv...
        egeozcan 4y ago
        You trust in the sense that you will get the services/products that you paid for.
- AgentME 4y ago
  I'm a fan of cryptocurrency but I don't think this is a great description of it. Its primary goal is finding a way to make transactions work, given that you don't want to involve a central authority. Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. It's perfectly possible to create payment systems involving cryptographic signatures involving a central authority (with the downsides a central authority involves).
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    > Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. The word works is doing a lot of work there. Every compromise, hack, scam, theft, and weird "oops I sent the crypto to an address that doesn't exist and now it's gone forever" incident screams for central authority. Even what we call Ethereum is a rage-quit to pretend the DAO thing didn't happen.
- lxgr 4y ago
  > to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers This describes any "push" payment system where you instruct your bank, service provider, wallet, device etc. to transfer funds, rather than providing the payee with your information, as well as any pull-based system with additional verification (such as 3DS and PIN-based payment cards), and isn't unique to crypto at all.
swalsh 4y ago
I think there are a few common misconceptions that make people not understand the real value crypto is bringing to the table. Many in tech look at crypto, and blockchain specifically as if it is another technicalogical capability they can integrate into their enterprise architecture. From that perspective blockchain in general doesn't really make sense. As cool as the composability of tokens and smart contracts are, that's not a capability only blockchain can deliver (in fact that's not the blockchain at all... that's the standards that have been built on top of it). Others in tech look at blockchain as a currency to replace traditional currencies issued by governments. A reasonable world view, as that's kind of how it's been sold for a very long time, but it's pretty clear to me at least, that's not really possible. The US Gov is always going to require taxes to be paid for in dollars. The US, EU, China... everyone, they're not going to give up monetary sovereignty. So what does crypto provide then? In my opinion, the sole thing the blockchain provides, when sufficiently decentralized is digital sovereignty... but more importantly an unlimited amount of digital sovereignties. Opt-in self governing communities that can decide for themselves what's fair. An enforcable user bill of rights that's global in nature. This doesn't replace the real-world sovereign nations, it's like a new layer in the digital world for digital applications. I've personally come to realization that Crypto doesn't really work well in the physical world. But in the digital world, it's proving quite adept... Technology is still evolving, ETH2 is a huge leap forward... and glad to see it. Personally, I'm still attached to the Avalanche community because I personally think the technology is still superior. But the technology is kind of not the important part. It kind of just needs a minimunm spec, and then it's not important. It's how you treat the users who are using the stuff built on top of the technology. Libertarians were the first to understand that (though i'd argue they fail to understand that need to have a foreign policy, and real world governments are legitimate trading partners that you need to negotiate with. Their insistence on idelogical purity will be their undoing) But crypto is big enough for all kind of communities to crop up, and you can choose to join or not. That's ultimately the thing, any app you can build in Web 3, you can replicate in Web 2 with a single server. But in Web3, the users can own it, and they can decide for themselves how to govern themselves. That's the value. We live in feudal system, a world dominated by Web 2 companies. Web3 in my opinion is the way we can build a diverse economic ecosystem of free (as in speech, not beer) digital services. One thing I Think a lot about... today, all people in crypto are dual citizens. They have citizenship in their geogrpahic world, and in the digital world. But there's a future where AI can be pure digital citizens (citizens who have needs, such as compute, and they will trade their AI skills for that compute). I view a lot of the debate around crypto as a debate about foreign policy, and that gets really interesting when it's AI on the other end.... maybe a free AI :D
lawn 4y ago
Then I recommend the book "Why Cryptocurrencies?" That focus on use-cases of crypto. https://whycryptocurrencies.com/ https://whycryptocurrencies.com/
irae 4y ago
In otehr words: You have "faith" that cryptocurrencies are a fad, right? Some people spent dozens, maybe hundreds of hours understanding everything behind it, and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today. You can continue to have "faith" in this having no value. But if everyone around you start using Bitcoin, would you rather switch your faith to what the others around you believe? Or you rather chase knowledge of why this is the case?
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today No, rampant speculation made that.
- xenospn 4y ago
  I can promise you that 99.9% of the people trading bitcoin have zero understanding about the underlying technology. I don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to know cars are not a fad. Same way I don't need to know how to reverse-engineer a distributed ledger system to know crypto is.
rkangel 4y ago
I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a niche position in the long term. The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping containers in ports (https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens). This is an international problem with a lot of it happening in countries with a lot of corruption (i.e. you can't rely on legal mechanism). Not being able to forge who is responsible for which container eliminates a lot of problems. Ethereum does something even more interesting, which is that the network can agree on the result of computations (these are called dapps for "distributed apps"). These can be used to implement simple "smart contracts" for financial purposes but they have a much broader applications. To some extent I'm slightly underwhelmed by the things people are doing with them, but the potential is enormous.
- gbersac 4y ago
  I'm on the opposite side of yours. I believe that blockchain has a bright future as a currency, but not in logistic. Blockchain money is great because its inflation is very predictable, everyone can use it without permission (versus the slow banking system). I don't believe in blockchain in logistic because database corruption has never been an issue, the problem has always been that people did not insert any data or corrupted data in the database. Blockchain only insure that the database won't be corrupted (not that the data it uses are correct), so it doesn't solve the main issue of logistic.
  - joppy 4y ago
    The slow banking system? Don't crypto transactions (on bitcoin or ethereum) take 5-10 minutes to complete, whereas I can tap my credit card to make a transaction more or less instantly?
    - zeven7 4y ago
      A transaction on the Bitcoin base layer takes 10 minutes to be confirmed once. There is second layer tech available to allow faster transactions (Lightning). A transaction on the Ethereum base layer takes 12 seconds to be confirmed once. There is a vast variety of second layer tech available to allow faster transactions. There are very different amounts of risk associated with accepting a transaction on the base layer of Bitcoin vs Ethereum after n blocks. For example, Coinbase accepts Bitcoin deposits after 3 confirmations (30 minutes) and Ethereum deposits after 35 confirmations (7 minutes). Compare to traditional banking: Coinbase accepts ACH deposits instantly (up to a limit) and wires of any size can take 24 hours.
stiltzkin 4y ago
- fallat 4y ago
  100% this. They're basically saying "I know nothing about it, but from afar it looks disgusting."

ilaksh 4y ago

The first problem that cryptocurrency solves is, how can to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers. It accomplishes this using cryptographic signatures. Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the banking system generally works, are outdated.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
silisili 4y ago
There are a plethora of transfer systems in the banking world that do the same, assuming you are talking about ACH info. Venmo, Cashapp, Paypal et al. You could argue the intermediary knows the info, but most crypto buyers also use an intermediary.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Venmo, cashapp, and PayPal all have geographic restrictions (only one of those works where I live), and also pretty shit reputations - PayPal routinely just dicks its users and freezes their funds indefinitely. Crypto doesn't give a shit about borders, there's no intermediary who can freeze your assets (unless you decide to leave them on am exchange), etc.
  - Melchori 4y ago
    This is not a new feature of crypto. It's ignorance. You can easily do that with other tech. Crypto right now is just to new to have been properly regulated yet. And while you are true that you can run your own wallet, you are depending on the decentralized network, you do need a certain amount of stabity and you need to make sure you can recover and keep your wallet. Enough people demonstrated at least with the last point and millions lost in locked away wallets that there are still fundamental problems.
    - SamPatt 4y ago
      You cannot easily make payments to or from certain places, or based on certain activities, with the dominant payment technologies. Yes, this is due to regulations, but it's also due to the centralized nature of the technology which requires permission to use. Even when more regulation is forced onto cryptocurrencies, the architecture will always be permissionless, as it's a decentralized network. That is a fundamental difference.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Melchori 4y ago
        You can't do that with crypto either. Because you actually need to convert your Fiat into crypto first. The current limitations are real and the theoretical possibility is equally good of what currently exist: a black market. In Iran everyone took euros or exchanged them on the spot. Even when the currency shop was closed people were waiting outside for us
asadlionpk 4y ago
Umm can’t I do the same via paypal, without giving away my password? What feature does cryptography give me here?
- yellowapple 4y ago
  You might want to ask the folks behind Flipper Zero how relying on PayPal worked out for them: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    How can you do any transactions at all without trusted intermediaries? You have to trust government, banks, paypal... something. Or you can start trusting the individuals at the other side of the transaction. Perhaps these folks who do not have experience can also benefit from your exp... Oh wait, you've become an intermediary? Cryptocurrency is just an asset that you can sell nearly everywhere in the world. But it depends on electricity, is volatile in value, and has long transaction times. It's just an inferior cash, except the fact that it's not physical so border control can't take it away from you. If you are optimizing for that... Maybe there can be a simpler solution? Buy art shares? I don't know.
    - grog454 4y ago
      > You have to trust government, banks, paypal... something. In the case of crypto you're trusting that an adversary won't be able to control 50% of the computation power on the network for a substantial amount of time (and cryptographic theories, but you're trusting those whenever you use the internet anyway). Generally you're not even trusting the other party. Yes, it depends on electricity, but so does 95%+ of the modern economy. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-five-years-later https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv...
      - egeozcan 4y ago
        You trust in the sense that you will get the services/products that you paid for.
AgentME 4y ago
I'm a fan of cryptocurrency but I don't think this is a great description of it. Its primary goal is finding a way to make transactions work, given that you don't want to involve a central authority. Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. It's perfectly possible to create payment systems involving cryptographic signatures involving a central authority (with the downsides a central authority involves).
- Tao3300 4y ago
  > Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. The word works is doing a lot of work there. Every compromise, hack, scam, theft, and weird "oops I sent the crypto to an address that doesn't exist and now it's gone forever" incident screams for central authority. Even what we call Ethereum is a rage-quit to pretend the DAO thing didn't happen.
lxgr 4y ago
> to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers This describes any "push" payment system where you instruct your bank, service provider, wallet, device etc. to transfer funds, rather than providing the payee with your information, as well as any pull-based system with additional verification (such as 3DS and PIN-based payment cards), and isn't unique to crypto at all.

swalsh 4y ago

I think there are a few common misconceptions that make people not understand the real value crypto is bringing to the table. Many in tech look at crypto, and blockchain specifically as if it is another technicalogical capability they can integrate into their enterprise architecture. From that perspective blockchain in general doesn't really make sense. As cool as the composability of tokens and smart contracts are, that's not a capability only blockchain can deliver (in fact that's not the blockchain at all... that's the standards that have been built on top of it). Others in tech look at blockchain as a currency to replace traditional currencies issued by governments. A reasonable world view, as that's kind of how it's been sold for a very long time, but it's pretty clear to me at least, that's not really possible. The US Gov is always going to require taxes to be paid for in dollars. The US, EU, China... everyone, they're not going to give up monetary sovereignty. So what does crypto provide then? In my opinion, the sole thing the blockchain provides, when sufficiently decentralized is digital sovereignty... but more importantly an unlimited amount of digital sovereignties. Opt-in self governing communities that can decide for themselves what's fair. An enforcable user bill of rights that's global in nature. This doesn't replace the real-world sovereign nations, it's like a new layer in the digital world for digital applications. I've personally come to realization that Crypto doesn't really work well in the physical world. But in the digital world, it's proving quite adept... Technology is still evolving, ETH2 is a huge leap forward... and glad to see it. Personally, I'm still attached to the Avalanche community because I personally think the technology is still superior. But the technology is kind of not the important part. It kind of just needs a minimunm spec, and then it's not important. It's how you treat the users who are using the stuff built on top of the technology. Libertarians were the first to understand that (though i'd argue they fail to understand that need to have a foreign policy, and real world governments are legitimate trading partners that you need to negotiate with. Their insistence on idelogical purity will be their undoing) But crypto is big enough for all kind of communities to crop up, and you can choose to join or not. That's ultimately the thing, any app you can build in Web 3, you can replicate in Web 2 with a single server. But in Web3, the users can own it, and they can decide for themselves how to govern themselves. That's the value. We live in feudal system, a world dominated by Web 2 companies. Web3 in my opinion is the way we can build a diverse economic ecosystem of free (as in speech, not beer) digital services. One thing I Think a lot about... today, all people in crypto are dual citizens. They have citizenship in their geogrpahic world, and in the digital world. But there's a future where AI can be pure digital citizens (citizens who have needs, such as compute, and they will trade their AI skills for that compute). I view a lot of the debate around crypto as a debate about foreign policy, and that gets really interesting when it's AI on the other end.... maybe a free AI :D

lawn 4y ago

Then I recommend the book "Why Cryptocurrencies?" That focus on use-cases of crypto. https://whycryptocurrencies.com/ https://whycryptocurrencies.com/

irae 4y ago

In otehr words: You have "faith" that cryptocurrencies are a fad, right? Some people spent dozens, maybe hundreds of hours understanding everything behind it, and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today. You can continue to have "faith" in this having no value. But if everyone around you start using Bitcoin, would you rather switch your faith to what the others around you believe? Or you rather chase knowledge of why this is the case?

KptMarchewa 4y ago
>and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today No, rampant speculation made that.
xenospn 4y ago
I can promise you that 99.9% of the people trading bitcoin have zero understanding about the underlying technology. I don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to know cars are not a fad. Same way I don't need to know how to reverse-engineer a distributed ledger system to know crypto is.

rkangel 4y ago

I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a niche position in the long term. The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping containers in ports (https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens). This is an international problem with a lot of it happening in countries with a lot of corruption (i.e. you can't rely on legal mechanism). Not being able to forge who is responsible for which container eliminates a lot of problems. Ethereum does something even more interesting, which is that the network can agree on the result of computations (these are called dapps for "distributed apps"). These can be used to implement simple "smart contracts" for financial purposes but they have a much broader applications. To some extent I'm slightly underwhelmed by the things people are doing with them, but the potential is enormous.

gbersac 4y ago
I'm on the opposite side of yours. I believe that blockchain has a bright future as a currency, but not in logistic. Blockchain money is great because its inflation is very predictable, everyone can use it without permission (versus the slow banking system). I don't believe in blockchain in logistic because database corruption has never been an issue, the problem has always been that people did not insert any data or corrupted data in the database. Blockchain only insure that the database won't be corrupted (not that the data it uses are correct), so it doesn't solve the main issue of logistic.
- joppy 4y ago
  The slow banking system? Don't crypto transactions (on bitcoin or ethereum) take 5-10 minutes to complete, whereas I can tap my credit card to make a transaction more or less instantly?
  - zeven7 4y ago
    A transaction on the Bitcoin base layer takes 10 minutes to be confirmed once. There is second layer tech available to allow faster transactions (Lightning). A transaction on the Ethereum base layer takes 12 seconds to be confirmed once. There is a vast variety of second layer tech available to allow faster transactions. There are very different amounts of risk associated with accepting a transaction on the base layer of Bitcoin vs Ethereum after n blocks. For example, Coinbase accepts Bitcoin deposits after 3 confirmations (30 minutes) and Ethereum deposits after 35 confirmations (7 minutes). Compare to traditional banking: Coinbase accepts ACH deposits instantly (up to a limit) and wires of any size can take 24 hours.

stiltzkin 4y ago

fallat 4y ago
100% this. They're basically saying "I know nothing about it, but from afar it looks disgusting."