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Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

> And we increasingly have cheaper alternatives that are also censorship resistant.

Such as?

"Web3 crypto projects"[0] he's long on and ready to pump. He's a salesman and his conviction only goes as deep as his lock-up agreements, which thankfully aren't a thing in crypto.

0: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-chamath-paliha...

Bitcoin. "Crypto enthusiasts" and the uninitiated will argue that "Bitcoin doesn't scale to Visa levels", but it does through the Lightning Network.

Most critiques assume that you don't need the graph of liquidity-weighted edges that Lightning Network requires to achieve cheap transactions at high throughput. I seriously doubt this isn't necessary without handing over control to a central third party and thus creating something with the same properties as VISA.

The bitcoin-to-bitcoin transactions may be censorship resistant, but sooner or later you will have to cash out to pay for other things (even if just taxes). We've simply moved the censorship from point-of-sale to point-of-exchange-to-fiat.

I am a Crypto-Enthusiast but people need to realize that "being your own bank" is actually a paranoid nightmare of responsibility. Bitcoin, and other cryptos, are tremendously intimidating to the average person. Even I get nervous when sending any significant amount of crypto and I've been doing this for almost ten years now.

Just look at this: 17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh

Now imagine telling the average person to take note of this and send the Bitcoin equivalent of $1,000 to it. Clearly, you would need to build a system around Bitcoin in order to make it user-friendly enough for the average person to ever feel comfortable using on a regular basis. At which point, though, you've just remade a bank and a payment processor.

What's the difference in scanning a QR code vs swiping a card? Even with CC you have to constantly enter it manually or store it in browser.

This is going to sound odd, but I think the QR code still carries the same level of 'unrecognizable' that a long string of alphanumeric text does. My brain can't really parse or recognize a QR code from memory. As such, I have a sense of unease. However, I am able to roughly recite my credit card number because it is 4 sets of 4 digit numbers.

But you're right that you can offload addresses to browser or app memory just like with credit cards and get rid of some of the trepidation that way.

Oh, cool. How does the lightning network handle stuff like chargebacks?

And reinstating access when cards or other credentials are lost?

And so on, and so forth, etc. The actually hard parts aren't about moving money around.

> The actually hard parts aren't about moving money around

Yes, they are, if you're trying to be censorship resistant and scale transaction throughput. Do you have any examples, or was your original comment about showing us there are no possible alternatives to the full feature set of existing payment processors at their current price point?

With Strike or BlueWallet you can do this today.

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