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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

This was as much fun to read as some of the classic Eve Online war stories.

Thank God it's just a game.

I know next to nothing of ethereum or how it works, so the whole thing read like a cyberpunk caper that I couldn't put down. I imagine the author on his Ono-Sendai deck.

I see I'm not the only one. Most blockchain stuff seems like an incredibly dull game of Fantasy Stock Exchange, but this was more like Eve Online.

They have nothing on the current financial system, like banks being able to block you because you sell adult sex toys or someone being able to pull money from your account whenever they want because you once gave them your card details to buy a $5 sandwich or having to find a merchant relationship just for people to send you money. These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today.

You're just used to the stupidity, so it's easier to scrutinize the new things. But there are people out there who take those downsides seriously. And sure, you're always trading old problems for new, different problems, but it's nice to have the choice between those trade-offs for once.

As an outsider looking in, though, it seems that banks are getting better at this, while crypto is getting worse.

There's a bajillion fintechs helping the banks sort out their UI issues and make it friendlier/better.

Bitcoin is still basically unusable for everyday transactions, and the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure. As TFA says, the hazards for normal folks playing in this pool are getting worse. If the miners are frontrunning your transaction every time you want to get paid, what's the point?

The fundamental problem of ownership still isn't (and won't be) solved by the existing banking system. Money that you actually own, that you can do whatever you want with (for better or worse).

this isn't a fundamental problem for anyone who isn't caught up in this weird ideologically libertarian crypto cult.

Virtually nobody wants to 'actually own' money or do whatever they want with it, they want to buy groceries, pay rent, or put it in their bank account.

If people wanted to actually own stuff they'd buy pinephones instead of samsung galaxies.

Well until a few centuries ago nobody wanted to have electricity sent into their houses. The masses don't care until it becomes part of life. It's always the quirky pioneers that care first.

> basically unusable for everyday transactions

Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?

> the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure

Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?

> Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?

No, because my credit card company gives me my money back when there is fraud.

Crypto promoters always paint the irreversibility of blockchains as a feature, but it always seems like a risk to me.

It's just a different approach with different tradeoffs. Credit cards push the fraud risk and fees on the merchant. Crypto can push it to the user (and in the process reduce the fees incurred).

I would be happy to have a way to pay merchants I trust online with and remove the ability to reverse the charge if I was financially incentivized to do this (with the money the merchant saves on fees).

The ability to reverse a charge isn't just about helping you if you are cheated by a merchant, though. It is also about if your credentials are compromised and used by someone else.

Sure, you might be happy to give up your ability to get a chargebacks against a particular merchant.... but what about against a thief?

It's a tradeoff - in a number of cases, I would be willing to accept that risk. I already do with cash.

Sure, but the more articles like this I read about crypto, the more it sounds like carrying cash at 3am in the worst part of town....

What about when someone creates a loan in your name or steals your tax refund or your real estate down payment?

You can remedy all of those things in the current system.

Mine doesnt. I can only block my card and sue. No chargebacks possible. For me any crypto is basically just as good, yet even more secure.

Or get a different credit card?

The banking system deals with it by just reversing the transaction so the end user of the system, the consumer, doesn't care. This ends up screwing the merchant most of the time, causing the price to be paid by higher prices, but people don't seem to care.

And most people don't store value in currency long term, they typically store value in assets such as precious metals, securities, or real estate. Cash has a purpose of exchanging value in the modern economy, nothing more. It is manipulated by design to bring stability to the economy to allow for a more favorable business environment.

I think crypto has a place in the world... but it's not as a general purpose currency. Using anything but a fiat currency for commerce is way too unstable for long term sustainability.

> Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?

Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?

There's finance stuff which is mostly large organization to large organization. Everything from escrow, loans invoices, to things like RFPs and supply chain management.

Then there's the NFT/Unique items section which is for gaming (God's Unchained/Magic the Gathering where each card is owned digitally and can be traded freely with others or used as collateral for a loan), media (You own a movie but can use it on any service), and art (Tokenized art is a big craze right now).

The big ones down the line are new methods of organizing and collaborating. DAOs allow for decentralized corporations and governments. There's a lot of cool stuff here.

There's more but payments are really just a tiny use case of crypto. The big stuff like decentralized applications which might replace Google and Facebook with privacy preserving neutral platforms built for everyone to use.

> neutral platforms

Most internet platforms used to be "neutral" - or significantly more so than today. The current discussion in society is about the problems that too much neutrality can cause.

However your stance may be on those topics, this very same discussion will extend to decentralised communication networks as well, should they ever go mainstream.

> The big ones down the line are new methods of organizing and collaborating. DAOs allow for decentralized corporations and governments.

Ok, dumb question: How would such a decentralised government keep itself from being overrun by, say, the Russia troll army, or any other actor with enough resources to take over a majority of it?

Identity is a huge topic itself with lots of projects doing fundamental research and experiments but essentially if it's a traditional physical government then it would work like it does today where you would use your government secured ID to vote. Not much would change. If it's a digital government then it would probably be using an identity based on built up history of actions and financial settlements and connections to other highly verified accounts. Ethereum has a project called POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) which is a way of identifying that a real person attended a specific event or performed some important action. These POAP badges can't be faked and are already being used for things like being able to vote on certain dev polls if you've attended a Devcon.

> If it's a digital government then it would probably be using an identity based on built up history of actions and financial settlements and connections to other highly verified accounts.

Not sure if I understand this correctly. You mean, an account will be considered "genuine", if it had a long enough history of activity?

Sort of like a credit score matched with landlords who vouch that you rented from them before. The longer that history the harder it is to fake and also the harder it is to just be the same person with multiple accounts. These systems usually have some component of a social graph where people will interact with and vouch for other people and having more and higher quality connections (more verified, connected to someone you know personally is real) gives you a higher legitimacy rating. It's usually up to the organization to set the minimum bar of how verified someone is to be considered unique.

Except you don't need a cryptocurrency to have decentralized applications or neutral platforms.

Blockchain addresses the fundamental societal concern of trust. It addresses accountability and transparency, removes middlemen, and maybe down the road will provide a currency use case. Yes, it can act as currency but that is the use case with the worst odds.

When it comes to currency, your coffee is not the target right now. Getting rid of entrenched monopolistic behavior is the best first step: wire transfer fees, Western Union, transfers that take days to process, objectionable government-defined illegality, banks freezing your funds, etc.

Have you ever used a browser wallet? I have yet to see a banking ui that is even close as fast and comfortable as metamask is. And i regularly try more modern banks.

> the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure

Does the endless theft of money through central banks' intentionally inflating the money supply increase your faith that government fiat is secure? Hacks against centralized wallet providers don't count as security weaknesses in decentralized protocols such as bitcoin.

Perhaps the current danger with Ethereum-based DeFi is that its far too centralized, and typically (but not necessarily) contracts deployed on it are also far to centralized in their design, governance, and security reviews before deployment.

You can as easily blame the previous generations of sex toy sellers for their shady practices as you can banks for responding to it by separating those industries for special treatment. Higher processing fees or outright blocking is just a response to risk.

It's not some moral pillar that crypto is taking a stand against at all, it's just removing all the processes that protect both sides of transactions and distributing those trust mechanisms to those parties instead.

Except that it's not "shady practices" that caused it. It's, man buys porn on credit card, wife questions the man about it, man denies it was him, wife has the charge reversed. Then the bank stops wanting to deal with anything related to the adult industry.

What you need is a payment system that can handle transactions where the seller is honest and the buyer is flaky when the existing one is built around the opposite assumption. And if the banks can't provide that (or the existing regulatory environment doesn't allow them to) then it's good when something else fills the gap.

> You're just used to the stupidity

Those examples you listed are at least an explainable, understandable flavor of stupid. "Hello, bank? I'm disputing this charge" or "Yes, I really bought that stuff".

It's no accident that TFA has Cthulhu in the header -- we're crossing into a malevolent and incomprehensible dimension of stupid. "Hello, void? Robot monsters ate my contract" and you hear nothing but echoes in your marrow.

> They have nothing on the current financial system

Ok, so you have some grief with how the banking system works

> These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today.

How is this related? No one is pitching building a KYC government regulated financial banking system?

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