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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

There are two very important advances that cryptocurrency bring to money in the digital age:

1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers

2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system

These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.

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EMV/tap to pay doesn't expose credit card or account numbers. This is sufficient for most user's banking needs.

Bank ledgers generally provide better integrity for people than blockchains, because they allow fraud remediation.

The two primary advantage of cryptocurrencies in my view is semi-anonymous payments for grey/black market transactions, and international money transfers.

"Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."

I agree that those are both significant advances but having transactions and wallets reside on exchanges nullifies those benefits entirely. The fear early on was that you’d never be able to achieve mass-adoption due to the upfront cost of setting up a wallet and waiting on transactions. Despite crypto’s popularity today, that fear has never truly been overcome.

There are several proven cryptocurrencies with negligible setup costs and fees. For example, I have over 200,000 microtransactions on Algorand on my account. The cost is less than 1/10th of a penny each.

And yeah, we should not rely on exchanges because it does defeat the purpose.

This is not what happens. Trust is moved from institutions to code and math. General public has no chance to evaluate the trustworthiness of either while there is a mechanism to certify the first and not the latter.

That's what I thought I was saying.

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