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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

A lot of cryptography is based on non repudiation, while contract law is built on repudiation. Trading goods for services or even other goods is an implicit or explicit contract.

The people who think cryptocurrency is only for crime are partially right, but not strictly for the reasons they think. Less drugs and more fraud.

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Handing over some bank notes also has the property of "non-repudiation" but that doesn't mean that just because I paid you in cash you get necessarily get away with not upholding your end of our agreement. Bank transfers also have this "non-repudiation" property in practice as well. That hasn't stopped us from using them for payment while also enforcing the terms of contracts.

> Bank transfers also have this "non-repudiation" property in practice as well.

No and that's a nasty, nasty surprise when you find out it's not true. There are plenty of ways for big bank customers to claw back payments made to private individuals, long after you or I would consider the transaction settled. And people get in trouble with their banks when they've spent the money and reversing the charges results in your accounts being overdrawn. The closest thing you have to this power is Visa, which is why the little Robin Hood in my head makes me encourage people to use it whenever they can.

There's the old saying, "I'll believe it when I see it."

There's a cheeky variant, "I'll believe it when the check clears."

There's the experienced, "I'll believe it ten days after the check clears."

And there's the jaded, "I'll believe it 30 days after the check clears."

Yeah, it cuts both ways. I have a friend who lost $2M through a business email compromise. In practice it might as well have been bitcoin, all of that "the banks can just reverse it" is just not true. All of those thefts just become an issue of insurance, if you have coverage for that sort of thing.

With crypto I guess at least you know for sure where you stand.

cryptography is based on non repudiation, but cryptocurrency is just human-written codebases. You can very much fork/modify/influence/introduce bugs in/backdoor/etc. code. It fails to promote cryptography's qualities to a higher sphere, as the more cryptocurrencies become harmful to society, the more they become governed by contract law. This has been the trend for the last decade, at least.

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