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Comment by justifier | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this response before, but do you really feel it addresses the issue? Or are you just utilising whataboutism to cloud the issue?

This is a matter of people refinancing their homes, and funds putting money into futures of an asset that has potentially always been valueless

But to answer your question: yes, that bothers me too;

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If things like SHA-256, RSA or ECDSA go down, we will have a much more serious trouble than the broken Bitcoin. This is the foundation of the internet security, it protects not only Bitcoin, but also online banking, email and HN.

Agree that there would be far-reaching consequences but remember that banking existed prior to the invention of electricity. We could go back to the old system even though it would be immensely inefficient by comparison. The same can’t be said of crypto currencies.

Banking did exist, but not in a form that is likely to be at all palatable to modern society. The breakdown of currency would have devastating impacts on social trust.

Btc 'goes down' that's, at the time of writing this, ~300B of who knows what vanishes

Hn 'goes down' and we have to worry about mitm attacks while we information dope?

seriously though, I am concerned about 'online banking, email and hn' too, but I'm also concerned about btc

I wonder what percentage of people invested in btc are unaware of the complexity consequence of their investment?

Perhaps similar to the percentage of people who read hn without understanding https?

I would like to see this be information everybody knows because it is recited to them repeatedly

Especially if we are going to be 'talking about cryptocurrency risks'

What do you propose? Just not doing anything that matters over a wire? Seems like we're back to 1850 for little evident benefit.

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