You say tomato I say removing the levers of power from world governments who have proven time and time again that they can't help but pull them to help themselves

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j2kun 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The frequency with which people involved in cryptocurrency "pull the levers themselves" has far outpaced government manipulation of currency.

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent [-]

Has it? You're not really providing much evidence of that. If it so far outpaces, it should be easy to give several examples.

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yunwal 5 days ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitget-lawyer-letters-account... https://bitnewsbot.com/us-judge-unfreezes-57-6m-usdc-tied-to... https://ambcrypto.com/avalanche-based-protocol-reportedly-ru... https://cointelegraph.com/news/polymarket-trump-ukraine-bet-... https://x.com/BinanceWallet/status/1904352541615554611 https://x.com/JMilei/status/1890606683291779195

I could pretty much go on forever…

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not a single one of these examples is trustless, decentralized crypto. Of course people are going to steal your money if you don't own your keys and put faith in protocols that are not permissionless. That's the problem with people who paint 'crypto' with one giant brush. It's like saying 'websites' will steal your money. Statistically it's probably true, but anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together isn't giving money to realbankwebsite.ru/chasebank

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yunwal 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, so at the very least we can both agree that what stripe is doing here is sketchy, since it’s not permissionless at all.

The second question is, once you take away anything that’s not permissionless, what’s left in crypto?

- Buying a physical good? You’re trusting the person manufacturing it, storing it, shipping it. If it comes to your door and it’s defective, they’ve already got your money, and it turns out your trustless system actually makes this impossible to resolve.

- Buying some skin for a game or something? Unless the game is also run in a decentralized fashion, they can just choose not to render that particular skin.

So, like, can you give me an example of a single transaction that is rendered trust-less because of cryptocurrency? It seems to me like whenever anyone actually tries to do anything useful with crypto, it ends up being what you would describe as an obvious scam.

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idiotsecant 3 days ago | parent [-]

You're doing strawman shotgun here. You're pasting a bunch of examples that basically fall into two categories and then asking me to defend them:

1) people who put their money into custodial 'banks' and then get it stolen

2) people rely on protocols whose consensus protocol is controlled by a small committee of appointed VIPs

None of which is germane to my original point. I'm simply saying that Im advocating for central banks not having the power to manipulate the currency supply at a whim And somehow you're forcing me into the position of spending an hour reading every trash crypto scam you can find. Not terribly interested in discussing how you can get ripped off with crypto or fiat cash.

	▲	yunwal a day ago \| parent [-]
		> people rely on protocols whose consensus protocol is controlled by a small committee of appointed VIPs Once again, this is what Stripe is doing here in this very announcement. > Not a single one of these examples is trustless, decentralized crypto You brought up trustless, so surely you can find an example. I didn’t pull that out of nowhere.

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troupo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's always funny to me how "we're decentralized ledgers running in lack of trust environments that don't need government regulation" always run to centralized trusted government institutions every time there's trouble.

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paintbox 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's a push to bring international financial systems up to date, there is no need to reinvent judiciary and executive institutions in this step.

	▲	troupo 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It's a push to bring international financial systems up to date It's not a push in any sense of the word. And outside of the US quite a few of financial institutions are "up to date" in most of the areas that matter to people. > there is no need to reinvent judiciary and executive institutions in this step. Strange how "up to date" inevitably involves rediscovering all the reasons those exist in the first place and why the "outdated" institutions do the things they do.

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munificent 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> removing the levers of power from world governments

A lever of power is never removed unless the act itself can no longer be performed. All you can do is take someone's hand off the lever and hope that whoever grabs it next is better than the last hand that had it.

I find it very unlikely that wresting power away from government—which at least has some level of citizen participation—will end up with it in better hands. The most likely scenario is that some billionaire will end up owning it.

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idiotsecant 6 days ago | parent [-]

No, it's possible. Imagine, for example, that you are concerned about growing political control of the central bank in your country and you want to remove the ability of central banks to set an inflation rate for the currency you use. That's quite easily achieved if ownership of the currency system is distributed among all users of that currency.

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munificent 6 days ago | parent [-]

> is distributed among all users of that currency.

Right. What you propose is that you take government's hand off the lever and a million users will all equally get to gently rest their pinky on it and distribute the power equally.

I have never seen anything in the history of the world or my understanding of sociology to indicate that such a power structure has any stability. If you give out power in a free-for-all, what tends to happen is:

1. All of the participants already have some unequal distribution of power going in.

2. Those who have more are able to use that to claim a little more of the new resource.

3. Once they do they, they are able to use the increased inequality to claim even more.

4. Go to 2.

The natural tendency is towards increasing inequality. It takes a ton of work to build and maintain structures that encourage any level of egalitarianism.

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent [-]

You're over abstracting a very simple thing. No user can, for example, change the inflationary rate of a decentralized cryptocurrency. It requires network consensus. The party making the change would need to control the vast majority of the consensus power, whether than is ASICs for pow or base currency for pos, at which point they have massive incentive to not do that on account of the loss of power destroying all their wealth would represent.

Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible.

	▲	munificent 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It requires network consensus. No, it requires network control. Consensus among a large number of independent participants who agree on a change is one way to have that control. But another way is to have a minority of participants that control a disproportionately large fraction of mining decide what to do. The history of crypto shows that over time, miners tend to consolidate until eventually you have a small number of miners who significant leverage over the ledger. None of that should be surprising: economy of scale is economics 101 and certainly applies to miners who buy and run hardware in bulk. > Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible. Egalitarianism is a property of human behavior and social systems, not the hardware that humans may or may not be using as intended.