I don't see why a data-backed currency wouldn't completely flip the economy. I mean, the definition of fiat currency is basically: "it has value because you say so"
Money _is_ trust. I really wonder if people trust a traditional banking system less than an algorthm implemented by a group of programmers whose code they either can't read or can't understand or both.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/technology/south-korea-bitco...
You don't need 1 government to do this. You need EVERY government to do this.
This is useful, in the sense that someone in venezuela is at serious risk of the government taking their money if it is in a bank, but they really couldn't do that to their Bitcoin.
Yes, if it is the US government doing the banning, you are significantly less likely to get around the ban.
But the world is not US centric. There are many governments would try to oppress their population by using the power of the banks, but would be significantly less effective against crypto transactions.
People are using crypto right NOW to get around many currency control laws implemented by governments. So they are successful getting around financial censorship that is already happening.
It also sounds completely unlike the naive framing above alleging that bank employees are able to take your money
Customers will get "full compensation" of what was in their accounts, eventually but their consequential losses for not having money in the meantime are unlikely to be covered.
> That seems a lot better than “everything is irreversibly gone” failure mode of Bitcoin which hopes that the victims will successfully track down and sue the culprits, as seen in the many failures so far.
I don't really disagree, but bitcoin does give you more control over your own destiny. If you're smart and hardworking enough to store your own bitcoin securely, you can do so, and no-one can take it away from you.
> It also sounds completely unlike the naive framing above alleging that bank employees are able to take your money
That was those customers' experience - someone at the bank pressed a button, and now they can't exchange their money for goods and services. Eventually the wheels of law will grind away the bank and return those people's money, but that doesn't necessarily help them right now.
Which is so far beyond what normal people will ever be capable of doing!
> That was those customers' experience - someone at the bank pressed a button, and now they can't exchange their money for goods and services.
No, the claim was that it was 'gone', it's not.
If their balance is showing negative and they try to withdraw money and fail, I think it's fair to say their money is gone in every meaningful sense. Likely they'll get it back sooner or later, but at the moment it's gone.
It seems very unrealistic to assume to 0.5% security and operational expertise for anything pitched as a general solution.
And any number of developers have done exactly what the other poster said with bitcoin - exchanges have gone bust or just scammed an 'exit', wallet services get compromised or scammed, people's computers get infected, all sorts of stuff.
Tell me honestly, should I prefer a system where if it's gone, it's really gone forever and completely unrecoverable? One where the security advice tells me to keep multiple computers, one of which has never been networked, and perform laborious procedures with USB keys to use my money? And one in which the community will tell me I was wrong, sorry for my loss, and move on?
Yeah, they're in a bad place right now, they won't be forever. This is better than Bitcoin.
Visa and mastercard and all the banks banned transactions to Wikileaks even though no laws were broken.
They successfully censored transactions to them, without going through the court system.
The police did not force visa and mastercard to allow transactions to these places.
It is worse then that actually. The police PARTICIPATE in taking away money from people who haven't been convinced of any crimes.
Did you know is that if the police merely suspect you of "money laundering" or drug crimes or whatever, that they can just take your assets? They don't need a court order. They can just take the money that you are carrying, and in order to get it back you have to prove your innocence.
It is literally guilty until proven innocent with regards to police asset forfeiture. It is possible that you will never get that money back, even if you are never charged with a crime.
This is just one example though. The banks censor financial transactions ALL the time, even though no laws are being broken. You know, private company that can do whatever they want, and all that.
Or for other examples, just Google PayPal horror stories, of some administrator arbitrarily freezing people's money.
And I am talking about people who have broken zero laws, or have been convicted of anything in a court.
Someone at PayPal can just freeze your money, and who knows when or if you will get it back, without a court order. And this really does happen to people all the time.
Clearly it didn't because someone at the bank didn't press a button and make your money disappear, which was the original claim.
> Did you know is that if the police merely suspect you of
US problems, you need to sort out your laws.
> This is just one example though. The banks censor...
I don't know what you're involved in, I've never, ever had this issue, and it wasn't the issue we were talking about either.
> PayPal horror stories
Also not what we were talking about.
To be fair: How many people do actually understand the fiat money system that's going on, with all of its finer points and at scale?
I wouldn't be too surprised if quite many people only understand the "Government prints money" part but nothing else about it, which is pretty much my extent of understanding.
Compared to that something like BC seems actually rather simple and straightforward to wrap your head around (at least for me): A finite amount of coins, coins need to be farmed, once they are all farmed people will make money through transaction fees.
Don't need to understand all of the math to understand the basic principles at work. Just like you don't need to understand everything about the fiat money system to use it.
Especially given the counterintuitive results behind fiat currencies and the relatively low correlation between all the moving parts, it's difficult to even say if the simpler model is better because the complicated model has so many side effects.
I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike.
That's an interesting comparison:
- The car might work better by certain metrics (speed, distance, force) but the bike can still outperform it in some situations (high traffic, cost efficiency on shorter distances, terrain)
- If the car breaks I'd need help fixing it, with the bike, I could probably fix most issues myself.
That's why both, cars and bikes, do coexist as each of them fills a specific need/niche. Trying to apply this to monetary systems sure seems difficult to imagine, but maybe something like that might be the actual solution?
A simpler solution is better in cases where you want many participants to operate the "backend" (the printing of money/distribution of money, so to speak). The biggest issue is that if your model is too simple there could be an easy way to game the system.