>the value proposition of all the crypto nonsense is that some people don't like trusted entities.
Becoming a trusted entity is hard. Crypto allows for the creation of systems that don't require trusted entites. That's a huge win for the little guy and catalyst for innovation.
> one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.
I don't think it does that, though, at least when used as a currency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.
> crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed
So you think it'd have the same chances of success if it didn't involve crypto? Of course not! Yes the point is it's crypto, it's experimenting with new ways of doing things, and that's what people want to be a part of.
> If crypto was actually a viable alternative they wouldn't be doing this.
Adoption is a thing and takes time. Crypto itself is also a technology still in its infancy with at least a decade+ of engineering remaining to begin to resemble something that everyday people can use, but it's already quite promising.
> So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far.
Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch.
If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances.
The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.
> A critical weakness of crypto is that the actors involved are less trustworthy than government.
If anything, "crypto" is based on the idea that people can't be trusted, and is thus a trustless system, based on an agreed upon protocol with cryptographic controls. It isn't meant as an improvement to an existing system, but as an alternative system, and while we often hear of people who say it is a scam, that it won't work, that it can't work, the unbiased reality is that it is being used for value transactions and has been non-stop for over a decade now.
The phrase "a general consensus on the value of crypto" is equal to "a general consensus on the value of money". Crypto (as in cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets, and, in general, blockchain based digital ledgers) is a vast subject. Nothing stops someone from creating their own paper currency or non-blockchain digital currency (Nectar points, air miles).
There are for sure questions to be asked here about how unregulated, crowd managed currencies can be integrated into existing societies were money is heavily regulated, but that is another subject.
> the purpose of cryptocurrencies is to remove the need for trust. Trust in the math, not the banker
By exchanging trust for energy.
Cryptocurrencies are the best example of trust being a tangible thing - it can be quite literally converted to Kilowatt hours. This shows how incredible trust is as an energy use optimization device. We should be finding ways to be able to safely depend more on trust, not less.
> The important thing that crypto brings is optionality. Without crypto, what option do we have if not to trust the handful of BofAs, Itaús, Deutsche Banks, Santanders and the Goldmans out there?
You can keep nonmonetary stores of value (gold bars, fine art, silos of harvested wheat) and then convert them to cash as needed. If you find the right counterparty, you can even skip the conversion and barter directly.
> Decentralization is a spectrum
We're on this spectrum now. There is no world currency; anybody is free to make their own (the hard part is getting others to accept it). The existence of cryptocurrency is proof of this.
Cryptocurrencies are essential. I don't see this mentioned often enough: We've had distributed systems for a long while before Bitcoin showed up. One of the most significant problems with any distributed system is incentivizing people to run nodes. Cryptocurrency solved this by providing a way to give value back to people who support the network.
> Just because it’s not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash
The converse is also true; just because it’s an improvement over past failures doesn’t mean that it’ll actually work.
My issue with crypto has always been fundamental; I don’t think crypto fans really have a good grasp on what motivates the average person, because most crypto fans[0] are ideologues, and like many ideologues they struggle to recognize that not everyone shares their values. Decentralized and trust-less speaks to engineers, but your average person has no idea what that means and doesn’t really care either. Plus a lot of the consequences of crypto currency design are absolute anti-features from a consumer perspective; nobody wants to find out that losing their password means that they’re broke, or that they can’t reverse a fraudulent charge. Your average consumer wants those features, and is willing to give up decentralization, something they didn’t value, to get it.
0 - At least those fans of crypto that want to see it used as currency. As compared to those crypto fans that want to do whatever it takes to make the number go up.
You're missing the big problems it solves, the main reasons many smart people have bought into it:
Cryptocurrencies are the ONLY liquid assets in the world that you can prove, from first principles, 1) how much of it exists, and 2) that you actually own it.
As long as you know what you're doing, you don't have to concern yourself with 1) fraud, 2) hidden stockpiles, 3) someone stealing it, and 4) political instability.
These are good things for society. Some of us realized these things when we started buying into it, and when we see people poo-pooing it and completely ignoring these benefits, I can see why people tend to get dismissive.
> Everyone with a finance background hates crypto.
This is clearly an exaggeration. There are many people in the finance industry who have put money into cryptocurrencies.
> Name literally one concrete example of a concrete and specific problem better solved by crypto than a classical solution.
There are people who believe that digital asset ownership (including money) via the blockchain is superior to classical solutions of centralized custodians/governments controlling those assets (while still having chargebacks, recovery from lost private keys, and all the things people think you can’t have on blockchains even though you can).
Many people also trust large companies/their government not to freeze/confiscate their assets and think this is a silly use case. Those same people have likely never had their account closed and lost thousands of dollars of digital assets, and have never had to flee their homes for safety from their own governments.
Having different trust models is why people fundamentally disagree on whether blockchain is valuable.
> If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services.
You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?
I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.
One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.
Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.
That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.
Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?
>Crypto will succeed because the rich...corrupt...liberarians want it to
Just because you want something to happen doesn't mean it will. Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted and everything has to be done outside the influence of government (i.e. illegally) so we have to use a decentralized append-only database where nothing can be reversed because while you can trust nobody you also can trust people to not do decisions which need to be reversed.
>Crypto will succeed because it makes exit a reality
What does this even mean?
>Smart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases
these are all buzzwords or further tech that actually needs explaining as to what it's useful for (hint: it's nothing)
> On top of that there is crypto that could genuinely work under certain circumstances (ie have a use-case that provides value to its users without significantly adversely affecting others).
To me personally, this is the biggest lie there is about crypto/ blockchain. To this day no application has been identified that could not be better solved with existing tech.
The whole crypto space seems to be a solution in search of a legitimate problem to solve. (Plenty of illegitimate use cases sure)
> IMHO, crypto is like a new car with the revolutionary new feature of not having seat belt technology.
Crypto is like that new car that can have a seat belt but you don't need to. The fact that it still doesn't have that seat belt doesn't means much, just that you need to be aware of it.
For sure any new paradigms will takes time to solve every indirect issues that comes with it, Rome wasn't build in one day.
> Of course, when that happens someone in that community will call it a seat-strap and claim its a revolutionary new invention.
Oh seems like you acknowledge that... but twist it like a bad thing? For sure it will be a great thing to add to cryptos, you just said it yourself that it's something lacking in cryptos...
What's amazing about crypto is the flexibility, the openness, the accessibility. Anyone can join theses networks, thus it can be done anywhere too, and because of the financial incentive, it's gonna happen anywhere. You'll probably say, but there's Western Union, Paypal, Visa, banks, etc... for all that... but check the Chikaordery story from Pleasant Green (as a Canadian I often laugh when the list include Venmo, or any US exclusive service, that just show how so many forget that the US isn't the world).
So yeah, some people will makes mistakes from time to time in their smart contract, it will happens, but we will get better each time to avoid that, when it's needed, just like we did with the previous ways of doing things. We will accept the risk when it can't be done, and that will be it (never heard of fraud using credit card, or bouncing checks? We are just used to them and accept the risks.)
>Whether cryptos are a fad or not is based on believe. If we believe cryptos are worthless their value will drop. Same for real currencies
The value of individual currencies is based on trust in the institutions backing those currencies. The value of cryptocurrency as a technology (and currency in general), is not based on belief but on their real world utility, i.e do they function in some general way to satisfy some real need. (Exchanging value, storing value, and so on).
If crypto-currency can solve all the issues it has concerning speed, stability and so on it might be there to stay, if it can't it's just going to exist on the fringes.
> The reality is most people outside of the HN bubble trust billion dollar companies. Crypto or otherwise.
I’m not sure about this. Most people I know outside of tech and finance do not trust crypto at all. They inherently mistrust the concept.
“How is it worth anything at all?” is a common question. “It’s just little things on a computer. It’s not real money.” These people would not trust a company that takes your real dollars and gives you bitcoin.
I would be willing to guess that a large portion of the country shares this attitude, especially older people and less technical people.
> yeah trust and crypto don't go together ideologically, that's a purity problem crypto needs to get over itself
The first white papers I read about crypto emphasized the "trustless" part of it. It's a selling point. They exchanged human trust for computational trust, only now people are realizing the limits of computer trust (namely, anything that isn't digital isn't covered).
What we're looking for now is a way to actually entangle digital assets with physical assets (hence the rise of NFTs, which purport to be a physical thing, or at least the closest thing to).
Becoming a trusted entity is hard. Crypto allows for the creation of systems that don't require trusted entites. That's a huge win for the little guy and catalyst for innovation.
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