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> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does

> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be. It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method. You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.

bhickey 11mo ago
> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off Subversive literature printed on blotter paper. Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  Okay, tell me how I buy something over the internet without tying the purchase to my government ID. Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.
  - habinero 11mo ago
    No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      > No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. The argument is right here: > Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling. It doesn't contain the word "primarily" which indeed makes it false, and the rebuttal to your different claim is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260 > Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto. Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
      - yunohn 11mo ago
        Sorry, which web shops demand governmental ID? I have never had to provide them mine in any of the countries I’ve lived in. If your concern is the webshop finding out your address, well I’m unsure how you solve this when you buy with crypto, but again ship to your home. If you have an alternative place to get it delivered for privacy, might as well do that with fiat transactions the same way.
        gr4vityWall 11mo ago
        > which web shops demand governmental ID? Basically all web shops in Brazil require you to give a government ID to buy anything (usually your CPF number).
        mothballed 11mo ago
        Brazil has an insane number of 'illegal' immigrants as well as people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state, so I'm curious how that works. I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID they've registered under the auspice of foreign controlled business.
- gloosx 11mo ago
  >Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In several countries, people use crypto to buy food, medicine, or basic goods because their local currency is collapsing or their banking system is dysfunctional, or their entire nation has been cut off from the global financial system as a decision of few politics persons. Its fine to criticise the scams and speculation — there is plenty of that — but pretending thats the only use case ignores the people who depend on it for everyday survival.
  - bhickey 11mo ago
    And the Glock switch is useful for home defense.
  - FabHK 11mo ago
    > the people who depend on it for everyday survival Oh, my, all those poor people that died prior to 2009.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      Are you disputing that people in impoverished or mismanaged countries die of hunger or preventable diseases when they can't buy food or medicine?
    - gloosx 11mo ago
      Reducing real human struggles to a punchline is exactly the kind of cynical detachment you can afford only if you have never lived through a failed banking system. If you had lived through what people in some countries deal with, you would not be making snarky comments The reality is that crypto became a lifeline in places where the traditional financial system collapsed or simply abandoned people: Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria are good examples of people dealing with real crises, using whatever tools actually work, including crypto currencies.
aloha2436 11mo ago
> It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  > Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.
4ndrewl 11mo ago
Fairly niche things for which the market size nowhere near bears the investment in the technology?
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  The investment in terms of speculation is primarily of interest to the speculators.
blitzar 11mo ago
The blockchain and every transaction being public effectively disproves your entire supposed usecase.
- cowboy_henk 11mo ago
  But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?
  - hypeatei 11mo ago
    It takes one OPSEC slip up for someone to link a wallet address to you. So yes, your transactions being public doesn't matter as long as you are cognizant of that 24/7 365 days a year.
    - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
      You can resolve this issue by repeatedly tumbling your money, using the same tumbling scheme as everyone else. This will reduce the value of your wallet slightly, to pay the mining fees, but it's… hm. That sounds equivalent to inflation or tax, except that the lost money doesn't go towards anything useful: it just goes towards buying ASICs and burning electricity.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
    That is unfortunately a fairly weak form of anonymity. With a fully public network you can trace even the most meticulously tumbled and laundered tokens. And while they may not exclusively trace back to you, they'll trace into a mixer and out of a mixer with a large majority of the inputs and outputs being tainted. Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers. Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
dyauspitr 11mo ago
I’m all for bitcoin but your examples are essentially I want to do all these generally illegal things that I cannot within the current legal framework.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  Some of them are, when the country you're in is oppressive. But having something that can do that is good. And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels. It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.
ninkendo 11mo ago
> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. > That problem already has solutions The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto. The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)
- mothballed 11mo ago
  Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back. A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back. Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
  - ninkendo 11mo ago
    As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department. Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege. For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets. None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say. You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable. The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid. You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.
Yizahi 11mo ago
That (freedom of payments) may have been the idea. But there are two problems with it: 1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate. 2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  > Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. The problem with this argument is that cryptocurrency now exists whether it's legal or not and using it for illegal things is already illegal. Drug dealers are committing a felony by selling drugs and if that hasn't deterred them then neither will making something else they're doing a crime too. So all of the negative uses are going to happen regardless of whether you also ban the positive uses. At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal? > Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. People keep making this claim and it keeps not making sense. You don't need someone's permission to send them Bitcoin. Meanwhile large exchanges keep billions of dollars in a single wallet and have single wallets that do billions of dollars in transactions over a short period of time. So let's consider the two possible ways this can work: First, if you get coins directly from a tainted wallet then you get in trouble, but if it was several steps back then it doesn't matter. This is, of course, useless, because then people would just transfer the coins through a couple of other wallets first. Second, any wallets that receive any tainted coins become tainted forever. Then immediately the vast majority of the chain is tainted because the coins have made the rounds through a large exchange at some point. Worse, it's pointless to try to defend against it by refusing tainted funds, because you can't actually refuse funds. Your billion dollar wallet or freshly mined Bitcoin can be tainted by any troll who sends you a dollar from a tainted wallet without your permission, and trying to treat coins as non-fungible is probably a good way to get someone to troll you like that. Which gives you two alternatives again. The first is that all coins can be tainted by trolls, which will in practice cause exactly that to happen and thereby make the premise meaningless. The second is that you can try to say that it doesn't count if someone sent them without your permission, but now you can't tell if something is tainted by looking at the chain because it can't tell you which transactions were unauthorized by the recipient, and moreover you would then have a mechanism for getting dirty coins into a clean wallet. In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
reducesuffering 11mo ago
> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. What a revolution
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  > So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. "Thing that solves some problems for some people doesn't solve all problems for all people" is not a very useful criticism.
  - reducesuffering 11mo ago
    It is when people are trying to act like Bitcoin is an enormous source of value to the market like several JP Morgans and not a Hallmark level of value provided
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      World GDP is >$100T/year. What percentage of that does something have to be used for before it's worth something?
munificent 11mo ago
> You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying. Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  > But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying. Except that they serve you before collecting payment regardless of which payment method you use. And even if they didn't, having the customer pay at the same time they receive the food isn't a trust problem for the restaurant or the customer, because the customer gets the food before the restaurant gets the money but the restaurant gets the money before the customer eats the food. And if someone comes into your kitchen to steal food without paying, that isn't really a payment system issue to begin with.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]

bhickey 11mo ago

> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off Subversive literature printed on blotter paper. Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
Okay, tell me how I buy something over the internet without tying the purchase to my government ID. Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.
- habinero 11mo ago
  No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    > No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true. The argument is right here: > Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling. It doesn't contain the word "primarily" which indeed makes it false, and the rebuttal to your different claim is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260 > Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto. Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
    - yunohn 11mo ago
      Sorry, which web shops demand governmental ID? I have never had to provide them mine in any of the countries I’ve lived in. If your concern is the webshop finding out your address, well I’m unsure how you solve this when you buy with crypto, but again ship to your home. If you have an alternative place to get it delivered for privacy, might as well do that with fiat transactions the same way.
      - gr4vityWall 11mo ago
        > which web shops demand governmental ID? Basically all web shops in Brazil require you to give a government ID to buy anything (usually your CPF number).
        mothballed 11mo ago
        Brazil has an insane number of 'illegal' immigrants as well as people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state, so I'm curious how that works. I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID they've registered under the auspice of foreign controlled business.
gloosx 11mo ago
>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In several countries, people use crypto to buy food, medicine, or basic goods because their local currency is collapsing or their banking system is dysfunctional, or their entire nation has been cut off from the global financial system as a decision of few politics persons. Its fine to criticise the scams and speculation — there is plenty of that — but pretending thats the only use case ignores the people who depend on it for everyday survival.
- bhickey 11mo ago
  And the Glock switch is useful for home defense.
- FabHK 11mo ago
  > the people who depend on it for everyday survival Oh, my, all those poor people that died prior to 2009.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    Are you disputing that people in impoverished or mismanaged countries die of hunger or preventable diseases when they can't buy food or medicine?
  - gloosx 11mo ago
    Reducing real human struggles to a punchline is exactly the kind of cynical detachment you can afford only if you have never lived through a failed banking system. If you had lived through what people in some countries deal with, you would not be making snarky comments The reality is that crypto became a lifeline in places where the traditional financial system collapsed or simply abandoned people: Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria are good examples of people dealing with real crises, using whatever tools actually work, including crypto currencies.

aloha2436 11mo ago

> It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.

4ndrewl 11mo ago

Fairly niche things for which the market size nowhere near bears the investment in the technology?

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
The investment in terms of speculation is primarily of interest to the speculators.

blitzar 11mo ago

The blockchain and every transaction being public effectively disproves your entire supposed usecase.

cowboy_henk 11mo ago
But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?
- hypeatei 11mo ago
  It takes one OPSEC slip up for someone to link a wallet address to you. So yes, your transactions being public doesn't matter as long as you are cognizant of that 24/7 365 days a year.
  - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
    You can resolve this issue by repeatedly tumbling your money, using the same tumbling scheme as everyone else. This will reduce the value of your wallet slightly, to pay the mining fees, but it's… hm. That sounds equivalent to inflation or tax, except that the lost money doesn't go towards anything useful: it just goes towards buying ASICs and burning electricity.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
  That is unfortunately a fairly weak form of anonymity. With a fully public network you can trace even the most meticulously tumbled and laundered tokens. And while they may not exclusively trace back to you, they'll trace into a mixer and out of a mixer with a large majority of the inputs and outputs being tainted. Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers. Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago

dyauspitr 11mo ago

I’m all for bitcoin but your examples are essentially I want to do all these generally illegal things that I cannot within the current legal framework.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
Some of them are, when the country you're in is oppressive. But having something that can do that is good. And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels. It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.

ninkendo 11mo ago

> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. > That problem already has solutions The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto. The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)

mothballed 11mo ago
Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back. A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back. Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
- ninkendo 11mo ago
  As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department. Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege. For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets. None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say. You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable. The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid. You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.

Yizahi 11mo ago

That (freedom of payments) may have been the idea. But there are two problems with it: 1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate. 2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. The problem with this argument is that cryptocurrency now exists whether it's legal or not and using it for illegal things is already illegal. Drug dealers are committing a felony by selling drugs and if that hasn't deterred them then neither will making something else they're doing a crime too. So all of the negative uses are going to happen regardless of whether you also ban the positive uses. At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal? > Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. People keep making this claim and it keeps not making sense. You don't need someone's permission to send them Bitcoin. Meanwhile large exchanges keep billions of dollars in a single wallet and have single wallets that do billions of dollars in transactions over a short period of time. So let's consider the two possible ways this can work: First, if you get coins directly from a tainted wallet then you get in trouble, but if it was several steps back then it doesn't matter. This is, of course, useless, because then people would just transfer the coins through a couple of other wallets first. Second, any wallets that receive any tainted coins become tainted forever. Then immediately the vast majority of the chain is tainted because the coins have made the rounds through a large exchange at some point. Worse, it's pointless to try to defend against it by refusing tainted funds, because you can't actually refuse funds. Your billion dollar wallet or freshly mined Bitcoin can be tainted by any troll who sends you a dollar from a tainted wallet without your permission, and trying to treat coins as non-fungible is probably a good way to get someone to troll you like that. Which gives you two alternatives again. The first is that all coins can be tainted by trolls, which will in practice cause exactly that to happen and thereby make the premise meaningless. The second is that you can try to say that it doesn't count if someone sent them without your permission, but now you can't tell if something is tainted by looking at the chain because it can't tell you which transactions were unauthorized by the recipient, and moreover you would then have a mechanism for getting dirty coins into a clean wallet. In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".

reducesuffering 11mo ago

> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. What a revolution

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. "Thing that solves some problems for some people doesn't solve all problems for all people" is not a very useful criticism.
- reducesuffering 11mo ago
  It is when people are trying to act like Bitcoin is an enormous source of value to the market like several JP Morgans and not a Hallmark level of value provided
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    World GDP is >$100T/year. What percentage of that does something have to be used for before it's worth something?

munificent 11mo ago

> You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying. Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying. Except that they serve you before collecting payment regardless of which payment method you use. And even if they didn't, having the customer pay at the same time they receive the food isn't a trust problem for the restaurant or the customer, because the customer gets the food before the restaurant gets the money but the restaurant gets the money before the customer eats the food. And if someone comes into your kitchen to steal food without paying, that isn't really a payment system issue to begin with.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]