9 ms·

Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentra

Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet. Though for most of my life internet has been getting more and more centralized. At least everything outside of China is centralized almost entirely in US these days. Rather sad reality of things, but what can we do heh...

anon191928 1y ago
why we don't have neutral transaction has many reasons. tech might not be there to scale millions of transactions without central server. other reasons are heavy payment regulations, human habits, fraud, network effects and more. tech does not fully solve it.
numpad0 1y ago
Transaction throughput is nonexistent for cryptos. The money arrives when it arrives. Some frameworks within crypto solves it by trusting known signatures skipping the oft mentioned consensus building, I suppose that has its downsides considering they're not so popular.
drdaeman 1y ago
It was supposed to be a decentralized digital cash, but we collectively turned it into some weird abomination. Nowadays, if you say "crypto" people will think of investments, scams, transfers that sidestep various sanctions and regulations, risks - anything but a decent payment method. It's sad, but that's what happened.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  Crypto was always a stupid name anyway because people confuse it with cryptography. Come up with a different name for the thing where you use it as a digital payments system instead of a speculative bubble machine.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    cryptocurrencies involve cryptography
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      To begin with, no they don't. They use hashing and signatures, which are mathematically related to cryptography and often packaged in the same libraries or used together to construct cryptographic protocols, but cryptography (literally "secret writing") is specifically about making information indecipherable, which is the thing cryptocurrency typically doesn't do. More to the point, it's still misleading to call a ship the water.
      - beeflet 1y ago
        This is an absurd definition of cryptography. Are you going to say that zero-knowlege proofs are not cryptography? Are pedersen commitments not cryptography? Are ring signatures not cryptography (they use symmetric cryptography internally)? Asymmetric key cryptography is all the same thing. Digital signatures are cryptography. The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message. Your definition of cryptography might make sense to someone more than a century ago, but the state of the art has advanced greatly since then. The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Cryptocurrency is just another application of cryptography to solve coordination problems.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message. That's the key, not the message. > For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Isn't the purpose of a cryptographic voting system to keep your vote secret? > The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. Yes, it's because people don't want things like end-to-end encryption associated with scams, and they're not wrong.
joseda-hg 1y ago
You can engage with Crypto and to some degree it's been normalized as a weird investment, but the minute you try to justify usage in a more "normal" setting, to the public eye, you're placing yourself alongside money laundering, drug trafficking and Ponzi Schemes Crypto's been associated with illegality almost since inception, and that associations lends the power that be carte blanche in ignoring or even blacklisting anything surrounding it
xboxnolifes 1y ago
> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? In a purely technical "I can send/receive payments without worrying about charge backs or random middleman restrictions", it has solved it. But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto. Particularly, the last 2 issues go hand-in-hand as an issue. You can get around cash->crypto friction/unreliability by only having to do it infrequently, but that exposes you to the volatility of the crypto price. And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person. It is not a simple process to know how you should create wallets, manage your wallets, what information should you or should you not expose, what networks can/can't you send certain coins over, what coins should you be using, why are there hundreds of different coins, etc, to not fall for scams.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto. The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second? Meanwhile the conversion shouldn't be a hard problem. You have a service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a credit card or bank transfer and then an app that uses that service to buy cryptocurrency and transfer it to a merchant that accepts cryptocurrency, and then any merchants being unfairly targeted by the payment networks can do that. And the cash to cryptocurrency service can be operated by a different party than the app so the former can't be assaulted for having the wrong customers and the later isn't directly interacting with the payment networks. I suspect the real problem is this: The chargeback process for credit cards isn't compatible with anything where the merchant is delivering fungible goods to the customer that they can't feasibly recover if the customer was using a stolen card or issues a fraudulent chargeback, and cryptocurrency is one such thing. So then the service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a a credit card gets screwed, because customers issue a chargeback to them or use stolen cards on their service even though they actually provided the cryptocurrency as promised. Which is a huge existing problem with the payments system. The payment networks dump the cost of fraud onto innocent merchants and then lose the incentive actually prevent it even though they're the only ones in a position to do it, e.g. by issuing chip cards that could be read by any ordinary PC/phone via open standards and therefore enable "card present" transactions to happen over the internet. And then if you expect cryptocurrency to solve that problem, it can't do that on the side of the transaction where the cryptocurrency is the thing you're buying.
gryn 1y ago
> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet. because people like having the ability to dispute charges when they get scammed. they also like the ability to access their account by speaking to someone at the bank when they forget their credentials. (the dude that lost his bitcoin hard drive in a dumpster only recently gave up is search of landfills) if you see all these crypto companies end up creating layers that create shittier banks with extra steps. that's also the reason payment processors don't like certain fields like nsfw/sex work, gambling , etc because a lot of fraud happens in them and therefore they cost more for them, At least that what their stance is, and I have no reason not to believe them because if you try to take online payment that's what you will see with time when your platform get targeted by shady individuals. also governments like control. how do you freeze crypto like you freeze a bank account ? their wet dreams is people to stop using cash and only use electronic payments, that way they can freeze your whole life with a single order. (the official stance is to stop criminals, but they decide who get designated as such. said something they don't like ? welcome to the list) to make thing worse, crypto has been almost exclusively used for shady things like gangs money laundering, scams, etc. and in the end the blockchain does not solve any real problem. it's a technical solution in search of a problem.
kiicia 1y ago
If you can get crypto currency, maybe yes in some cases. Currently available currencies are not anonymous, but pseudonymous. You can track who transacts with whom. To help with that new laws were passed. If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to. There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
timbowhite 1y ago
> never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems BTCPay Server[0] seems to be the most popular way to accept crypto payments on self-hosted hardware with no third party processors. [0] https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/
jgilias 1y ago
The future is not evenly distributed. I invite you to install Primal (a social network app), and send a 50 cent payment to Jack Dorsey just because you can. Can you let me know in this thread how it goes and what are your thoughts after doing it?
michaelt 1y ago
You can hear Steam's experience with bitcoin straight from the horse's mouth here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... > transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week [...] The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically. > [...] the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different. > The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the [$20] Bitcoin network transaction fee again.
- ronsor 1y ago
  In practice, Bitcoin transaction fees are much lower nowadays. I've never spent more than $1.00 in fees on relatively large sums. Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    Transaction fees are lower because no one really uses the L1 network for commerce anymore. It goes back to the 2017 block size war. >Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin. They are faster because they are not very decentralized. The entry costs for vendors to independently audit and verify payments the blockchain is greater.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      Are there currencies you would actually do something with other than it being a way to move $local_currency by means of exchanges? Because I'm not sure it really solves anything when exchanges find themselves with the same regulations as Visa.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
altairprime 1y ago
Cryptocoins are primarily a solution to avoiding taxation of wealth and arrest by government authorities for illegal purchases/transfers; otherwise Visa/MC would simply have lobbied for regulations that electronic payments must be operated as purpose-neutral platforms, which would significantly increase their revenue (and shielded them against the puritans demanding they prohibit porn) while neutralizing a potential competitor’s value to electronic payments. The stored-value bubble hinges on this as well; if cryptocoins weren’t effective for evading taxation and arrest, then generating and spending them would have compelled tax payments out of one’s currency reserves and arrests for black market purchases and cross-border transfers. That they provide what resembles a neutral payment platform is a side effect of those goals, and that neutrality hinges on regulated banks being willing to provide accounts to those excluded by Visa/MC in order to convert cryptocoins to legal tender. Banks are largely just as unwilling as payment processors, for the same regulatory and political reasons as payment processors, which is why this is ultimately a problem of neutrality regulation rather than of crypto.

anon191928 1y ago

why we don't have neutral transaction has many reasons. tech might not be there to scale millions of transactions without central server. other reasons are heavy payment regulations, human habits, fraud, network effects and more. tech does not fully solve it.

numpad0 1y ago

Transaction throughput is nonexistent for cryptos. The money arrives when it arrives. Some frameworks within crypto solves it by trusting known signatures skipping the oft mentioned consensus building, I suppose that has its downsides considering they're not so popular.

drdaeman 1y ago

It was supposed to be a decentralized digital cash, but we collectively turned it into some weird abomination. Nowadays, if you say "crypto" people will think of investments, scams, transfers that sidestep various sanctions and regulations, risks - anything but a decent payment method. It's sad, but that's what happened.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
Crypto was always a stupid name anyway because people confuse it with cryptography. Come up with a different name for the thing where you use it as a digital payments system instead of a speculative bubble machine.
- beeflet 1y ago
  cryptocurrencies involve cryptography
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    To begin with, no they don't. They use hashing and signatures, which are mathematically related to cryptography and often packaged in the same libraries or used together to construct cryptographic protocols, but cryptography (literally "secret writing") is specifically about making information indecipherable, which is the thing cryptocurrency typically doesn't do. More to the point, it's still misleading to call a ship the water.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      This is an absurd definition of cryptography. Are you going to say that zero-knowlege proofs are not cryptography? Are pedersen commitments not cryptography? Are ring signatures not cryptography (they use symmetric cryptography internally)? Asymmetric key cryptography is all the same thing. Digital signatures are cryptography. The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message. Your definition of cryptography might make sense to someone more than a century ago, but the state of the art has advanced greatly since then. The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Cryptocurrency is just another application of cryptography to solve coordination problems.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message. That's the key, not the message. > For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Isn't the purpose of a cryptographic voting system to keep your vote secret? > The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. Yes, it's because people don't want things like end-to-end encryption associated with scams, and they're not wrong.

joseda-hg 1y ago

You can engage with Crypto and to some degree it's been normalized as a weird investment, but the minute you try to justify usage in a more "normal" setting, to the public eye, you're placing yourself alongside money laundering, drug trafficking and Ponzi Schemes Crypto's been associated with illegality almost since inception, and that associations lends the power that be carte blanche in ignoring or even blacklisting anything surrounding it

xboxnolifes 1y ago

> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? In a purely technical "I can send/receive payments without worrying about charge backs or random middleman restrictions", it has solved it. But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto. Particularly, the last 2 issues go hand-in-hand as an issue. You can get around cash->crypto friction/unreliability by only having to do it infrequently, but that exposes you to the volatility of the crypto price. And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person. It is not a simple process to know how you should create wallets, manage your wallets, what information should you or should you not expose, what networks can/can't you send certain coins over, what coins should you be using, why are there hundreds of different coins, etc, to not fall for scams.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> But it hasn't solved the issue of having the vast majority of merchants accepting crypto, the issue of crypto price volatility (or associated risk of stable coins), or the friction/unreliability of turning cash into crypto. The price volatility seems like a red herring. If you're using it as a currency then you're not holding it for significant periods of time and the entire point is to make it an automated process, so you're buying some cryptocurrency for cash and then immediately spending it. How much volatility do you really expect in the timespan of a fraction of a second? Meanwhile the conversion shouldn't be a hard problem. You have a service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a credit card or bank transfer and then an app that uses that service to buy cryptocurrency and transfer it to a merchant that accepts cryptocurrency, and then any merchants being unfairly targeted by the payment networks can do that. And the cash to cryptocurrency service can be operated by a different party than the app so the former can't be assaulted for having the wrong customers and the later isn't directly interacting with the payment networks. I suspect the real problem is this: The chargeback process for credit cards isn't compatible with anything where the merchant is delivering fungible goods to the customer that they can't feasibly recover if the customer was using a stolen card or issues a fraudulent chargeback, and cryptocurrency is one such thing. So then the service that allows you to buy cryptocurrency with a a credit card gets screwed, because customers issue a chargeback to them or use stolen cards on their service even though they actually provided the cryptocurrency as promised. Which is a huge existing problem with the payments system. The payment networks dump the cost of fraud onto innocent merchants and then lose the incentive actually prevent it even though they're the only ones in a position to do it, e.g. by issuing chip cards that could be read by any ordinary PC/phone via open standards and therefore enable "card present" transactions to happen over the internet. And then if you expect cryptocurrency to solve that problem, it can't do that on the side of the transaction where the cryptocurrency is the thing you're buying.

gryn 1y ago

> Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet. because people like having the ability to dispute charges when they get scammed. they also like the ability to access their account by speaking to someone at the bank when they forget their credentials. (the dude that lost his bitcoin hard drive in a dumpster only recently gave up is search of landfills) if you see all these crypto companies end up creating layers that create shittier banks with extra steps. that's also the reason payment processors don't like certain fields like nsfw/sex work, gambling , etc because a lot of fraud happens in them and therefore they cost more for them, At least that what their stance is, and I have no reason not to believe them because if you try to take online payment that's what you will see with time when your platform get targeted by shady individuals. also governments like control. how do you freeze crypto like you freeze a bank account ? their wet dreams is people to stop using cash and only use electronic payments, that way they can freeze your whole life with a single order. (the official stance is to stop criminals, but they decide who get designated as such. said something they don't like ? welcome to the list) to make thing worse, crypto has been almost exclusively used for shady things like gangs money laundering, scams, etc. and in the end the blockchain does not solve any real problem. it's a technical solution in search of a problem.

kiicia 1y ago

If you can get crypto currency, maybe yes in some cases. Currently available currencies are not anonymous, but pseudonymous. You can track who transacts with whom. To help with that new laws were passed. If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to. There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

timbowhite 1y ago

> never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems BTCPay Server[0] seems to be the most popular way to accept crypto payments on self-hosted hardware with no third party processors. [0] https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/

jgilias 1y ago

The future is not evenly distributed. I invite you to install Primal (a social network app), and send a 50 cent payment to Jack Dorsey just because you can. Can you let me know in this thread how it goes and what are your thoughts after doing it?

michaelt 1y ago

You can hear Steam's experience with bitcoin straight from the horse's mouth here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... > transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week [...] The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically. > [...] the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different. > The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the [$20] Bitcoin network transaction fee again.

ronsor 1y ago
In practice, Bitcoin transaction fees are much lower nowadays. I've never spent more than $1.00 in fees on relatively large sums. Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin.
- beeflet 1y ago
  Transaction fees are lower because no one really uses the L1 network for commerce anymore. It goes back to the 2017 block size war. >Besides that, there are other cryptocurrencies (Solana? Stellar?) which have effectively zero fees and are much faster than Bitcoin. They are faster because they are not very decentralized. The entry costs for vendors to independently audit and verify payments the blockchain is greater.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Are there currencies you would actually do something with other than it being a way to move $local_currency by means of exchanges? Because I'm not sure it really solves anything when exchanges find themselves with the same regulations as Visa.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

altairprime 1y ago

Cryptocoins are primarily a solution to avoiding taxation of wealth and arrest by government authorities for illegal purchases/transfers; otherwise Visa/MC would simply have lobbied for regulations that electronic payments must be operated as purpose-neutral platforms, which would significantly increase their revenue (and shielded them against the puritans demanding they prohibit porn) while neutralizing a potential competitor’s value to electronic payments. The stored-value bubble hinges on this as well; if cryptocoins weren’t effective for evading taxation and arrest, then generating and spending them would have compelled tax payments out of one’s currency reserves and arrests for black market purchases and cross-border transfers. That they provide what resembles a neutral payment platform is a side effect of those goals, and that neutrality hinges on regulated banks being willing to provide accounts to those excluded by Visa/MC in order to convert cryptocoins to legal tender. Banks are largely just as unwilling as payment processors, for the same regulatory and political reasons as payment processors, which is why this is ultimately a problem of neutrality regulation rather than of crypto.