6 ms·

I don't know, we carried physical money for millenia. Humans managed that.

• iamthepieman 2y ago
  You didn't lose your entire savings if you lost your wallet, usually.
  • onethought 2y ago
    Perhaps micro wallets should be a thing where your wealth is distributed across many keys mitigating some loss.
    • jakelazaroff 2y ago
      If I’m having trouble juggling a single ball, why would it help to add more balls into the mix?
    • ta_1138 2y ago
      At which point I gained the problem of having to keep track of all of my microwallets securely, hopefully in a way that survives my phone being lost, a house fire, or my untimely death, leaving the wealth to inheritors. All while, at the same time, not ending up behind a single key that has access to all the information to those micro wallets. Quickly you end up in a situation that either starts to look like how financial companies keep their most high risk keys, or end up outsourcing the whole thing to something that quickly starts to resemble your bank. So ultimately it's just like cash: Fine for small amounts. Risky, but maybe livable for somewhat larger accounts, or a giant headache that will probably bite you when you start looking at lifetime savings.
• IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Physical money is physically recoverable after lost
  • onethought 2y ago
    No it isn’t. No more than a wallet key. If I lose $1 note. It’s gone. If I recover it, then it’s no longer lost.
    • MadnessASAP 2y ago
      A $1 note being a macro scale physical object enjoys a variety of benefits such as object permanence which provide a baseline level of recoverability. Whereas a wallet key l, being a number, enjoys no such protections. Of course you may choose to encode your wallet key on paper, metal, or stone granting it properties not unlike a note. However you have now compromised the security of your wallet as well it becomes no mere $1 note, rather it is a note that represents all or a significant fraction of your net worth.
      • zmgsabst 2y ago
        You can encode your bitcoin in wallets of predetermined size, spreading your risk. But you’re reinventing money with extra steps.
        • Djdjur7373bb 2y ago
          > But you’re reinventing money with extra steps. But you gain some desirable properties over traditional money. Without crypto, you don't have frictionless and permissionless transfers of arbitrary value across international borders.
          • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
            There's no fundamental property of the monetary system that prevents transfers of arbitrary value across international borders. There's just a large number of financial regulators, border guards, etc. who will throw you in jail if you carry a big block of gold across the border or accept a large wire transfer without filling out the necessary forms. In many countries, the laws governing those forms don't yet apply to cryptocurrencies, but I'm skeptical it will remain that way forever.
• blahedo 2y ago
  Yes, by evolving banks to solve some of the problems of lugging around lots of cash and/or stuffing it in a trunk in your house. And assuming you are known at your bank and/or can (eventually) prove your identity there, you don't have the same "lost wallet" problem being discussed here.
• lolinder 2y ago
  Money occupies physical space, so for most of history there was a pretty low cap on how much you could bring with you at once, which placed a cap on how much a single mistake could cost you.
  • zmgsabst 2y ago
    That cap has always and still does exceed the median worth.
  • zaphirplane 2y ago
    > cap on how much you could bring Bring to where ? Are you mapping the crypto wallet concept to the physical wallet concept as a mobile storage concept ? All your money is the limit, however you store it.
  • ekianjo 2y ago
    > there was a pretty low cap on how much you could bring with you at once, you didnt need to bring a case of cash to buy anything before the 20th century
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    Currency was traditionally made of precious metals which often gave them a rather high starting point of value. It also made them inflation resistant meaning the real value only grew over time. For instance in the Roman Empire an aureus [1] was worth 25 denarii (prior to inflation) and was about 2cm in size, so roughly the same size as a dime, made of pure gold. And a denarius was worth about a day's wages. So you could comfortably hold decades of wages in a small coin purse. And as inflation ravaged the Empire a single aureus gradually came to be worth thousands of denarii. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus
  • presentation 2y ago
    This is what transit payment cards in Japan at least do, you can tap to pay most places but there’s a cap of 20k yen you can add to your card, so there’s a cap to how much you can lose.
• School-Cotton 2y ago
  Yeah and it sucked which is why we invented better solutions. What most bitcoin fans seem not to understand is that for the vast majority of people, transactions being reversible by authority figures is desirable.
• lelanthran 2y ago
  > I don't know, we carried physical money for millenia. Humans managed that. Yeah, but if I lose the physical 100$ I am carrying, that doesn't prevent me from accessing the rest of my cash stored elsewhere. I've never lost access to the rest of my cash stored elsewhere.
• alkonaut 2y ago
  Yes and people quickly realized that there is an amount they don’t want to carry around. No one carries their life savings and few would even keep it in a safe in their house.
• paxys 2y ago
  Banks have been a thing almost as long as money.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    And the notion of credit has been a thing even longer than both money and banks. You don't need to carry money around for every little transaction if people know you're good for it someday in the the future.
    • verzali 2y ago
      Don't you need an idea of credit for money to work at all? You need to be able to trust that the shiny rock you give me today for my wheat will be worth anything tomorrow when I want some of your meat.