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Reading this, it is bonkers to me that people think cryptocurrencies are ready or appropriate for mainstream use, either as a currency or as an investment. Lin

Reading this, it is bonkers to me that people think cryptocurrencies are ready or appropriate for mainstream use, either as a currency or as an investment. Line could go up, but if you aren’t extremely careful with processes that most people don’t and won’t comprehend—and don’t even realize are something you need to do—you can just straight up lose everything.

RobertRies 3y ago
The claim is that some day innovations, and checks, and some other technologies will fix this and do all of this automatically, somehow. That's why it's still early days.
- ipython 3y ago
  Early days… 15 years later. To quote spaceballs, When exactly will “then” be “now”?
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    The history of finance is as long as recorded history, perhaps the reason for it[1]. That said, these kinds of crazes[2] are almost as old. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
    - cypherpunks01 3y ago
      I don't recall ever reading about a tulip ETF, though, that could be kind of interesting
      - jakupovic 3y ago
        Lol. HN is stuck in "CRYPTO BAD BOOO, We don't need no reason. We know", in the voice of HN group think.
        troupo 3y ago
        No, "crypto bad boo" is precisely because the HN crowd doesn't ignore the history of anything that crypto pretends it's disrupting. Instead all the clueless crypto bros in the crypto space end up slowly, and often painfully, re-discovering all this history and the reasons why things are the way they are.
        jakupovic 3y ago
        Let me call you clueless my friend and maybe even other names as you seem to like to. Things are the way they are because of interests, some people are making money on it. "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything and you seem clueless as to what they want and are repeating old ass tropes you probably learned from others. I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S, you probably don't, being of short memory and not learning from others. But, guess what, we are using k8s and crypto and you are stuck and soon will be making apologies for your lack of sense and will be tired of repeating others' lies here. Sorry but not sorry.
        troupo 3y ago
        > "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything Yes, most don't discover anything, they just run scams. The tiny percentage who doesn't are busy re-discovering and te-inventing all the institutions and processes the world has. > I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S Ah yes. Yet another comparison pulled out of thin air.
        jakupovic 3y ago
        Yoi are still clueless and didn't bring anything worthwhile to this conversation. Have fun supporting system built to enslave you. K, TX BYE
  - legutierr 3y ago
    In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 20 years for the true power of packet-switched networks to be realized, in the form of mobile Internet. In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days. It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.
    - mplewis 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - legutierr 3y ago
        It’s happening right now.
        mtnGoat 3y ago
        Can you elaborate on this?
        TimeBearingDown 3y ago
        From a prior thread that didn’t get any constructive engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
        crummy 3y ago
        > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it? I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kajumix 3y ago
    Banks are great, and they will exist in the bitcoin world. The central bank is the problem.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Central banks are the government. And governments define the law we all operate in. And as the crypto industry experiences today they can be vindictive, inconsistent, spurious, aggressive etc. And are highly skilled at resisting efforts to limit their power.
      - chromatin 3y ago
        > Central banks are the government The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is, despite the misleading name, a private corporation. [1] This is true I believe of many central banks. Nevertheless, and perhaps this is what you really meant, central banks can _act as an instrument of government_, or, more cynically, serve to enrich the political class and politically well-connected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank#Legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank#Legal_sta...
        sanderjd 3y ago
        That link does not at all describe "a private corporation" in the sense that people who don't click the link would assume your use of the phrase would imply. A better summary of that link would be "it is a legally murky thingamajig, which is symbolically private while being governmental in practice". The section concludes with this quote from a political science professor: > the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." ... Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates. Now, it's very possible that the Wikipedia article is itself misleading. I'm just saying it isn't a good citation to use if what you want to do is casually describe the Federal Reserve as "despite the misleading name, a private corporation". The section you linked is all about how that would be a more misleading description!
- TimeBearingDown 3y ago
  No, this is usually (apologies if not in your case) a straw man, and representative of the usual HN blind spot for cryptocurrency. Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets do protect against this class of attack. We are rapidly approaching a world in which those with significant assets or job responsibilities should be carrying physical 2FA tokens, which can allow use of private keys while protecting them (a hardware wallet). This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution. The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage. Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys. There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts. The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage. And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions). > The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services. That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
aeternum 3y ago
Ah yeah clearly not ready in fact neither is traditional finance: https://www.aura.com/learn/i-got-scammed-on-venmo-what-do-i-do https://www.aura.com/learn/i-got-scammed-on-venmo-what-do-i-... https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235171088-Cancel-Payment https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235171088-Cancel-Pa... A fool and their money..
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  Do you not see the difference between a Venmo transaction and Bitcoin transaction? With Bitcoin, a small mistake or oversight and you money is gone, and unrecoverable. So you can point and laugh at people getting scammed on Venmo, but you need "normies" to adopt BTC.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    It's the same with Venmo, I have a few friends that have sent money to random people never to see it again. There's really very little crypto-specific here, convincing someone to transfer funds to a scammer-controlled account is one of the oldest financial tricks in the book. It's still very common with bank wires.
  - mratsim 3y ago
    Venmo, CashApp, Paypal "Friends or Family" and gift cards (Apple, Google Pay, Steam, ...) are all irreversible.
crystaln 3y ago
Few people think they are ready. If they were ready btc would be $1m and they would be widely used.
- crystaln 3y ago
  The time to invest is when things are not ready.
csomar 3y ago
> you can just straight up lose everything. The story is not much different in Traditional Finance; though in some cases you can recover your money. The US (and to some extent EU) have some protection, but for the rest of the world it's not much different than crypto.
- acdha 3y ago
  > The US (and to some extent EU) have some protection, but for the rest of the world it's not much different than crypto. Do you have any citations to your survey of global consumer protection laws? Examples would be especially relevant if you know of cases where a bank granting access to a scammer left the victim with no recourse.
  - csomar 3y ago
    Beyond being an anecdotal point myself, you do read other people's experience online. I don't have concrete statistics; however, I do know that even big institutions get scammed with no recovery (ie: I recall the Bangladeshi central bank being swindled for tens of millions of dollars because of SWIFT and not being able to recover that money. If the Central Bank of a nation doesn't have a recourse for such an amount, I don't think the average person have that much protection either).
    - acdha 3y ago
      This is a great example: most of the fraudulent transactions were blocked by the NY Federal Reserve – $850M – and of the remaining $101M, a significant amount was recovered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169 Not perfect, but 90-something percent better than no recourse. More importantly, it’s also not a given that individuals lose everything as opposed to higher operating costs for a bank. The kinds of crimes we see in the cryptocurrency world tend to leave individuals with no recourse other than very expensive private investigations, whereas a major financial institution at least had the resources to go after the money without going bankrupt.
justajot 3y ago
Yeah, it's definitely not ready. I agree with everything you are saying. Though, the industry is aware of this and working on it. There is at least one company (Chia Network) where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp) is both capable and secure enough to allow for the sort of management needed to allow for self-custody to happen in a safe, sane manner. GUIs for this sort of thing aren't ready for the general public yet, but are definitely on the way.
- Quiark 3y ago
  What's the name of the function in ChiaLisp that returns true if this is an illegitimate transaction initiated by a hacker and false if it's being done by the real owner of the funds?
- loveparade 3y ago
  Solutions have been on the way for more than five years, but literally nothing has changed and all we've gotten is pyramid schemes and gambling. Chains and protocols have exploded in complexity and technical debt to the point where nobody fully understands the attack vectors. By now I am convinced that anything beyond pyramid schemes is never going to happen.
  - danuker 3y ago
    Do you also consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme?
    - loveparade 3y ago
      No, I don't. But Bitcoin also isn't particularly interesting because it's not (very) programmable and not useful for mainstream use anyway. I don't consider Ethereum itself a pyramid scheme, just useless. The protocols on top of these chains though, nearly all pyramid schemes. The best way to describe Ethereum is that it provides a platform for pyramid schemes.
      - reactordev 3y ago
atraac 3y ago
People(old and young) give away their entire life savings to scammers every day, everywhere in the world. You don't hear about it on the internet all the time because we either got used to it or they don't want the publicity. You hear about big cryptocurrency scams more often because people invested are more into tech and spend time on the internet. Do you say that cash is not ready or appropriate for mainstream use? What about that cashier that never has that 1c of change back? Clearly a sign of not being appropriate for mainstream. Those generic arguments can be applied to literally everything we already have. People get scammed via their bank accounts every day too, people literally get scammed by the phone. You have to use your brain when it comes to _anything_ that involves a real world value these days, saying 'crypto bad cause scams' is pointless as there are way more scams involving real world money everywhere.
- FabHK 3y ago
  The difference is that you need cash and bank accounts and phones to run a modern economy. They're useful for many many things, and you can't do without, and we our best to police and minimise scams. Crypto, on the other hand, is specifically designed to evade regulation (permissionless setting), is useful for very little else, and you can do easily without it.
npoc 3y ago
Not really - it's simply that a lot of people are safer trusting a custodian to hold their bitcoin for them (e.g. an ETF)
- FabHK 3y ago
  Poor Satoshi. Vision: > purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required [...] Reality: The world's biggest financial institutions hold BTC as an intermediary for clients through trusted third party custodians for speculative purposes (rarely payments).
  - npoc 3y ago
    I'm sure he'd recognise that most of the population was not going to using bitcoin directly - what he has provided is a way for a population to a) digitally pay peer to peer if they so choose b) escape the enslavement caused by central banks' unlimited money printing if they so choose, hence the message in the genesis block Of course bitcoin is rarely used for payments yet. Why would you sell the hardest money in existence, when you can sell junk dollars instead. And why would you price goods in something that's growing so quickly that its price changes dramatically month to month? It makes no sense. Stage 1: prove ability to store value once the value has grown to the point that it's stabilised enough to be a unit of account we will naturally move to Stage 2: medium of exchange The fact is we never even have to move to stage 2 for bitcoin to still be worth millions of dollars per bitcoin. Even if bitcoin only matches the market cap of gold, it will be worth ~$600,000/BTC and bitcoin has way better store-of-value fundamentals than gold.
judith48 3y ago
The world has evolved, lot of phishing and scam on cryptocurrencies . its very important to know that a source is legit before investing and most importantly safe guarding and upgrading security concerning your crypto like two factors authenticators and all necessary precautions .. although there are lot of good coders and hackers like recovering ATusa com that make it easier to recover stolen cryptocurrencies and of course only few are able to get theirs in full......
ketrymercy 3y ago
[dead]

RobertRies 3y ago

The claim is that some day innovations, and checks, and some other technologies will fix this and do all of this automatically, somehow. That's why it's still early days.

ipython 3y ago
Early days… 15 years later. To quote spaceballs, When exactly will “then” be “now”?
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  The history of finance is as long as recorded history, perhaps the reason for it[1]. That said, these kinds of crazes[2] are almost as old. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
  - cypherpunks01 3y ago
    I don't recall ever reading about a tulip ETF, though, that could be kind of interesting
    - jakupovic 3y ago
      Lol. HN is stuck in "CRYPTO BAD BOOO, We don't need no reason. We know", in the voice of HN group think.
      - troupo 3y ago
        No, "crypto bad boo" is precisely because the HN crowd doesn't ignore the history of anything that crypto pretends it's disrupting. Instead all the clueless crypto bros in the crypto space end up slowly, and often painfully, re-discovering all this history and the reasons why things are the way they are.
        jakupovic 3y ago
        Let me call you clueless my friend and maybe even other names as you seem to like to. Things are the way they are because of interests, some people are making money on it. "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything and you seem clueless as to what they want and are repeating old ass tropes you probably learned from others. I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S, you probably don't, being of short memory and not learning from others. But, guess what, we are using k8s and crypto and you are stuck and soon will be making apologies for your lack of sense and will be tired of repeating others' lies here. Sorry but not sorry.
        troupo 3y ago
        > "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything Yes, most don't discover anything, they just run scams. The tiny percentage who doesn't are busy re-discovering and te-inventing all the institutions and processes the world has. > I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S Ah yes. Yet another comparison pulled out of thin air.
        jakupovic 3y ago
        Yoi are still clueless and didn't bring anything worthwhile to this conversation. Have fun supporting system built to enslave you. K, TX BYE
- legutierr 3y ago
  In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 20 years for the true power of packet-switched networks to be realized, in the form of mobile Internet. In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days. It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.
  - mplewis 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - legutierr 3y ago
      It’s happening right now.
      - mtnGoat 3y ago
        Can you elaborate on this?
        TimeBearingDown 3y ago
        From a prior thread that didn’t get any constructive engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
        crummy 3y ago
        > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it? I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.
kikokikokiko 3y ago
[flagged]
- kajumix 3y ago
  Banks are great, and they will exist in the bitcoin world. The central bank is the problem.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Central banks are the government. And governments define the law we all operate in. And as the crypto industry experiences today they can be vindictive, inconsistent, spurious, aggressive etc. And are highly skilled at resisting efforts to limit their power.
    - chromatin 3y ago
      > Central banks are the government The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is, despite the misleading name, a private corporation. [1] This is true I believe of many central banks. Nevertheless, and perhaps this is what you really meant, central banks can _act as an instrument of government_, or, more cynically, serve to enrich the political class and politically well-connected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank#Legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank#Legal_sta...
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        That link does not at all describe "a private corporation" in the sense that people who don't click the link would assume your use of the phrase would imply. A better summary of that link would be "it is a legally murky thingamajig, which is symbolically private while being governmental in practice". The section concludes with this quote from a political science professor: > the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." ... Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates. Now, it's very possible that the Wikipedia article is itself misleading. I'm just saying it isn't a good citation to use if what you want to do is casually describe the Federal Reserve as "despite the misleading name, a private corporation". The section you linked is all about how that would be a more misleading description!
TimeBearingDown 3y ago
No, this is usually (apologies if not in your case) a straw man, and representative of the usual HN blind spot for cryptocurrency. Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets do protect against this class of attack. We are rapidly approaching a world in which those with significant assets or job responsibilities should be carrying physical 2FA tokens, which can allow use of private keys while protecting them (a hardware wallet). This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution. The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage. Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys. There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts. The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage. And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions). > The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services. That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.

aeternum 3y ago

Ah yeah clearly not ready in fact neither is traditional finance: https://www.aura.com/learn/i-got-scammed-on-venmo-what-do-i-do https://www.aura.com/learn/i-got-scammed-on-venmo-what-do-i-... https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235171088-Cancel-Payment https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235171088-Cancel-Pa... A fool and their money..

itsoktocry 3y ago
Do you not see the difference between a Venmo transaction and Bitcoin transaction? With Bitcoin, a small mistake or oversight and you money is gone, and unrecoverable. So you can point and laugh at people getting scammed on Venmo, but you need "normies" to adopt BTC.
- aeternum 3y ago
  It's the same with Venmo, I have a few friends that have sent money to random people never to see it again. There's really very little crypto-specific here, convincing someone to transfer funds to a scammer-controlled account is one of the oldest financial tricks in the book. It's still very common with bank wires.
- mratsim 3y ago
  Venmo, CashApp, Paypal "Friends or Family" and gift cards (Apple, Google Pay, Steam, ...) are all irreversible.

crystaln 3y ago

Few people think they are ready. If they were ready btc would be $1m and they would be widely used.

crystaln 3y ago
The time to invest is when things are not ready.

csomar 3y ago

> you can just straight up lose everything. The story is not much different in Traditional Finance; though in some cases you can recover your money. The US (and to some extent EU) have some protection, but for the rest of the world it's not much different than crypto.

acdha 3y ago
> The US (and to some extent EU) have some protection, but for the rest of the world it's not much different than crypto. Do you have any citations to your survey of global consumer protection laws? Examples would be especially relevant if you know of cases where a bank granting access to a scammer left the victim with no recourse.
- csomar 3y ago
  Beyond being an anecdotal point myself, you do read other people's experience online. I don't have concrete statistics; however, I do know that even big institutions get scammed with no recovery (ie: I recall the Bangladeshi central bank being swindled for tens of millions of dollars because of SWIFT and not being able to recover that money. If the Central Bank of a nation doesn't have a recourse for such an amount, I don't think the average person have that much protection either).
  - acdha 3y ago
    This is a great example: most of the fraudulent transactions were blocked by the NY Federal Reserve – $850M – and of the remaining $101M, a significant amount was recovered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169 Not perfect, but 90-something percent better than no recourse. More importantly, it’s also not a given that individuals lose everything as opposed to higher operating costs for a bank. The kinds of crimes we see in the cryptocurrency world tend to leave individuals with no recourse other than very expensive private investigations, whereas a major financial institution at least had the resources to go after the money without going bankrupt.

justajot 3y ago

Yeah, it's definitely not ready. I agree with everything you are saying. Though, the industry is aware of this and working on it. There is at least one company (Chia Network) where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp) is both capable and secure enough to allow for the sort of management needed to allow for self-custody to happen in a safe, sane manner. GUIs for this sort of thing aren't ready for the general public yet, but are definitely on the way.

Quiark 3y ago
What's the name of the function in ChiaLisp that returns true if this is an illegitimate transaction initiated by a hacker and false if it's being done by the real owner of the funds?
loveparade 3y ago
Solutions have been on the way for more than five years, but literally nothing has changed and all we've gotten is pyramid schemes and gambling. Chains and protocols have exploded in complexity and technical debt to the point where nobody fully understands the attack vectors. By now I am convinced that anything beyond pyramid schemes is never going to happen.
- danuker 3y ago
  Do you also consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme?
  - loveparade 3y ago
    No, I don't. But Bitcoin also isn't particularly interesting because it's not (very) programmable and not useful for mainstream use anyway. I don't consider Ethereum itself a pyramid scheme, just useless. The protocols on top of these chains though, nearly all pyramid schemes. The best way to describe Ethereum is that it provides a platform for pyramid schemes.
    - reactordev 3y ago

atraac 3y ago

People(old and young) give away their entire life savings to scammers every day, everywhere in the world. You don't hear about it on the internet all the time because we either got used to it or they don't want the publicity. You hear about big cryptocurrency scams more often because people invested are more into tech and spend time on the internet. Do you say that cash is not ready or appropriate for mainstream use? What about that cashier that never has that 1c of change back? Clearly a sign of not being appropriate for mainstream. Those generic arguments can be applied to literally everything we already have. People get scammed via their bank accounts every day too, people literally get scammed by the phone. You have to use your brain when it comes to _anything_ that involves a real world value these days, saying 'crypto bad cause scams' is pointless as there are way more scams involving real world money everywhere.

FabHK 3y ago
The difference is that you need cash and bank accounts and phones to run a modern economy. They're useful for many many things, and you can't do without, and we our best to police and minimise scams. Crypto, on the other hand, is specifically designed to evade regulation (permissionless setting), is useful for very little else, and you can do easily without it.

npoc 3y ago

Not really - it's simply that a lot of people are safer trusting a custodian to hold their bitcoin for them (e.g. an ETF)

FabHK 3y ago
Poor Satoshi. Vision: > purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required [...] Reality: The world's biggest financial institutions hold BTC as an intermediary for clients through trusted third party custodians for speculative purposes (rarely payments).
- npoc 3y ago
  I'm sure he'd recognise that most of the population was not going to using bitcoin directly - what he has provided is a way for a population to a) digitally pay peer to peer if they so choose b) escape the enslavement caused by central banks' unlimited money printing if they so choose, hence the message in the genesis block Of course bitcoin is rarely used for payments yet. Why would you sell the hardest money in existence, when you can sell junk dollars instead. And why would you price goods in something that's growing so quickly that its price changes dramatically month to month? It makes no sense. Stage 1: prove ability to store value once the value has grown to the point that it's stabilised enough to be a unit of account we will naturally move to Stage 2: medium of exchange The fact is we never even have to move to stage 2 for bitcoin to still be worth millions of dollars per bitcoin. Even if bitcoin only matches the market cap of gold, it will be worth ~$600,000/BTC and bitcoin has way better store-of-value fundamentals than gold.

judith48 3y ago

The world has evolved, lot of phishing and scam on cryptocurrencies . its very important to know that a source is legit before investing and most importantly safe guarding and upgrading security concerning your crypto like two factors authenticators and all necessary precautions .. although there are lot of good coders and hackers like recovering ATusa com that make it easier to recover stolen cryptocurrencies and of course only few are able to get theirs in full......

ketrymercy 3y ago

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