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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

True decentralisation is part of the problem with cryptocurrencies and why they can't work the way the advocates want them to.

Decentralisation allows trust-less assurance that money is sent, it's just that's not useful because the goods or services for which the money is transferred still need either trust or a centralised system that can undo the transaction because fraud happened.

That's where smart contracts come in, which I also think are a terrible idea, but do at least deserve a "you tried!" badge, because they're as dumb as saying "I will write bug-free code" rather than as dumb as "let's build a Dyson swarm to mine exactly the same amount of cryptocurrency as we would have if we did nothing".

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> Decentralisation allows trust-less assurance that money is sent

That is indeed something it does.

But it also gives you the assurance that a single entity can't print unlimited money out of thin air, which is the case with a centrally controlled currency like Worldcoin.

They can just shrug their shoulders and claim that all that money is for the poor and gullible Africans that had their eyeballs scanned.

> But it also gives you the assurance that a single entity can't print unlimited money out of thin air, which is the case with a centrally controlled currency like Worldcoin.

Sure, but the inability to do that when needed is also a bad thing.

Also, single world currencies are (currently) a bad thing, because when your bit of the world needs to devalue its currency is generally different to when mine needs to do that.

But this is why economics is its own specialty and not something that software nerds should jump into like our example with numbers counts for much :D

> Sure, but the inability to do that when needed is also a bad thing.

When and why would BTC or ETH need to print unlimited money and devalue themselves?

Wrong framing, currencies don't have agency. You should be asking when would you need your currency to be devalued, regardless of what it's called or made from.

And the answer to that is all the reasons governments do just that, except for the times where the government is being particularly stupid and doing hyperinflation.

Not a very convincing answer at all.

What would a convincing answer look like?

Convincing to who? It's not like crypto is widely used as currency anywhere

There's a difference between the answer being unconvincing to people who understand it and not understanding the answer.

When the economy grows, the amount of currency needs to grow as well. Otherwise prices will fall (deflation). That hurts the economy as a whole because e.g. real wages might increase too much

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