> >The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account"

> I see this as a very naive statement. [words]

Ok, you clearly have a lower opinion on the ability of your government to help than I do, but it doesn’t matter one bit: credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse.

What does matter, is that crypto was designed to avoid needing any of the above, and with it, you have absolutely no recourse whatsoever if things go wrong. The only recourse you have is the government you’re supposedly trying to distance yourself from.

Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.

I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.

As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department.

Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege.

For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets.

None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say.

You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable.

The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid.

You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.

Use a pre-paid Visa gift card purchased with cash.

Just for fun, I’ve paid for my Mullvad subscription with the incredible technology of putting cash in an envelope and sending it.

Go buy eBay gift cards with cash?

No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true.

Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.

I used to mail money orders to people to buy things over the Internet as a kid, before I had access to a bank account.

Before you could just buy Pocky at any old Walmart in the US, I remember mailing Celga[1] a money order to purchase some directly from Japan…

[1] https://www.celga.com/

> the people who depend on it for everyday survival

Oh, my, all those poor people that died prior to 2009.

And the Glock switch is useful for home defense.

That is unfortunately a fairly weak form of anonymity. With a fully public network you can trace even the most meticulously tumbled and laundered tokens. And while they may not exclusively trace back to you, they'll trace into a mixer and out of a mixer with a large majority of the inputs and outputs being tainted.

Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers.

Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.

It takes one OPSEC slip up for someone to link a wallet address to you. So yes, your transactions being public doesn't matter as long as you are cognizant of that 24/7 365 days a year.

It is when people are trying to act like Bitcoin is an enormous source of value to the market like several JP Morgans and not a Hallmark level of value provided

> At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?

The problem is scale. The more widespread is such system, the lower is the barrier to entry and the higher is cost to actually prosecute users to their amount and rate of usage (which we already see today).

Also this whole legal/illegal divide is often presented as if there was approximately same order of magnitude of both users. While I guess that actually the illegal use is way way larger than the legal use, simply because it is so crude and slow and buggy and unsafe by design. (excluding gambling, since that use is kinda derivative, depending on the all other uses making up a base on which to gamble)

And this is why token systems by rights should be heavily restricted, since they are so disproportionate in impact. We can all legally buy a knife in any shop, despite the fact that if used for attack a knife almost inevitably produces at least one body. Small arms are also available almost anywhere but with a lot of restrictions. Big arms are almost never available for purchase, just like explosives. And then the stuff like a canister of zarin is totally out of the question. That's because of the disproportionate effect. Same with financial instruments. Tokens are an Abrams of the finance world, and currently we let anyone have one, which is mindboggling to me.

> In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".

You are correct. Afaik all tries to ban Tornado laundered tokens were eventually dropped. But the mechanism and potential still remains.

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, in the case of BTC specifically we can track tokens from the "dust" attack and separate them from the legal and nice tokens, since they will stay in the different UTXO in the same wallet. Though I'm not very familiar with that, if it possible to pick which UTXO to transfer selectively.

Right. That's a forgery - a lie. No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.

An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.

I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.

I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.

Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.

Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.

I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?

The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital.

It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.

Most states have in fact invented bank transfers for that purpose.

The states (or rather the national banks of said states) are usually the ones running the central clearing system. That's the place where all the different banks report their net change in relation to all the other banks, and settle that change on their account with the central bank.

Believe it or not, banks don't ferry around cash to each other. It's all just numbers in a computer.

That's exactly the point of smart contracts.

The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer.

The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration.

In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close).

Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract.

This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement.

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TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away.

And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.

That’s just a bad contract. Now consider one that mints you an NFT

Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.

What purpose does a bitcoin strategic reserve serve?

That is just an observation, not an argument against building, improving, and using crypto.

Cryptocurrency doesn't need to do everything for everyone at all times to be a useful thing to have in the world. It only needs to be helpful to a subset of people, in a subset of situations, some of the time.

I'm happy paying by card for ~100% of my daily transactions, but I want cryptocurrency to exist should the need arise. The rise of authoritarian governments and policies across the world should've made that obvious by now. What's legal and perfectly moral today can become a crime tomorrow.

I'm gonna first of all disagree with the notion that our entire democracy rests on control of the financial system, secondly point out that you seem to make some wild leaps about how decentralized currencies work, and thirdly ask how the hell you're getting the idea that early adopters would need to be "cashed out at a profit many times exceeding inflation"(Participation in the new system is the point of adopting it, how is this unclear).

Finally:

  We, the people, make the rules.

> We, the people, make the rules.

Since when? We merely vote for politicians who promise to enact laws and regulations that are beneficial for us but they almost universally fail to do that, succumbing to self-interests and corruption.

If a government implements authoritarian measures that curb our freedom in an unpopular manner, "we the people" can't do anything about it. In a few years we may or may not vote them out, and the people who replace them may (or may not) do what we, the people, want.

You might have formulated things a bit unclearly, but I fundamentally agree that money, like everything else, should be under democratic control of the people. Not controlled by some crypto bros that are happy to interfere with the protocol if it suits them (The DAO hack, two 20+ block rollbacks of Bitcoin), but not if massive crime happens on it.

It is extremely easy to convince yourself that the current system works. Numerous people volunteer to work in election monitoring every year, and any person who is not sure can take a day or two off work to do so at their next election.

Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.

The "current election system", in the US, is not one single system. It is much closer to 50 separate systems with their own differences that range from quirks to wildly different fundamentals.

You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.

> Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.

In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.

> cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman

what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.

You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.

Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )

Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)

> Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system

Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.

That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.

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> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.

And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.

> make up required parameters for one to have a valid voting ID in order to have a bunch of fake people issue fake ballots

I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler.

Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web.

I mean sure you _could_ print 20 million IDs/SSN/Drivers license, then pay a few hundreds of thousands of people to go and vote illegally. But thats expensive, take time, and leaves a massive massive paper trail back to you. its much easier to buy access to a dipshit billionaire and get them to force the bullshit down their network.

> Decentralization is empowerment

In some instances yes, but for things that backstop identity, its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)

> it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency,

transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal.

No, because each participant can check its contribution in the log.

Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote.

The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).

> giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous)

Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.

And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.

With the Lightning network, L2 is basically a database between only 2 parties that are required to be online during the transaction. It's not possible to double spend in that situation.

There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

More details here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67141/how-is-a-d...

>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos

This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.

how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?

That's only true if they observe the channel being fraudulently closed in the right time window. You have to actively monitor the BTC chain to see if your Lightning network partner might steal from you. If you don't (e.g. There is some network or power issue and they take this opportunity to steal), tough luck.

Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and only settle later. No one would say that you're using Visa when you tell the bartender to put some drink on your tab, even though at the end of the day or week or whatever, the transaction will go through Visa.

Except I can literally pull up a full node and see a wallets current balance - which is because it traces all the transactions through the blockchain, verifying all of them.

Literally the only way anyone can see their wallet balance is by doing this.

Because it's attached to the bill itself, not the owner or the wallet.

If I give you a dollar bill with the serial number 100100, it's impossible for you to prove that bill came from me (unless you have forensic evidence of me giving it to you, of course - but that's equivalent to having photo evidence of me typing in my private key to a BTC wallet) . If you find a dollar bill on the street, it's now yours, you can't know anything about its previous owner.

In contrast, a BTC address is a unique identifier for someone who owns the BTC. The blockchain stores all addresses that it ever interacted with, so even if you create thousands of wallets, they can all be-anonymized quite easily if one is, as you can track how money was sent between them.

Dubai is the Bitcoin of cities, so I guess the example fits.

Fine, let's just give up civilization and praise the disneyland for oligarch and rich brats, build and maintained by slave like labor.

Only one of those things is a state enforced requirement (the deed) and everything else are system requirements that do not get solved with bitcoin. What mortgage company is going to loan you a million dollars ("in btc" whatever) without figuring out if you're a good risk? That's not the currency of choice making you get cross examined, it's the nature of the thing you are trying to do.

Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.

It's incredibly common in Argentina to buy a property with a suitcase of cash. In fact I think it's about the only way it's done. Argentina has a tax on bank transfers, plus by various measures the tax on profit of business can be above 100% so no one actually uses the traditional finance system for more than a minority fraction of their use.

Most token holders use exchanges, where freezing accounts and just keeping the tokens is a daily occurrence.

That's not something solved by cryptocurrency in its current form.

In the places it would work fine, so would a traditional transfer, though. Again, Bitcoin hasn't solved any issue here.

Ah yes. And everyone in a country that suffers a banking collapse lives in a wilderness with solar power and a sattelite uplink.

++1

Do Venezuelans _actually_ have much documented usage of crypto, or are they simply using foreign fiat like the USD and Euro?

Isn't git most of the time used centralized? And that offers better user experience than doing it some decentralized way? It seems to me like most prefer centralized use of git. Be it private server or some large server.

If we compare the traffic of Github vs Bitcoin, Github is likely doing 1,000+ writes per second and Bitcoin is doing what, 5-7 maybe higher with specialized stuff?

Github is nowhere near the world's "central and only" service for Git, so what am I missing to not laugh about?

The downside of a global distributed database (no matter what) is the speed of light, if you need ordering in any transaction you are in trouble, and no classic service requires that for all transactions in its scope, we figured out partitions, row locks, and shards a long time ago.

That's the thing about blockchain/"distributed". They are such vauge terms they can apply or not apply to anything depending on what point you need to make in your argument.

Also, it should be obvious that sources from the cryptocurrency industry have a conflict of interest. If there are better sources than something like Binance, then those should be used. If there aren't better sources, well...

Lightning isn't Bitcoin. It's an L2. It helps implement actual practical payments for Bitcoin, and doesn't (afaiu) manage account balances. In other words, you cannot seriously compare it to Mastercard; you've gotta include Bitcoin itself.

I would benefit enormously from people buying crypto to keep the price going up. I've owned bitcoin for 9 years. I bought it when I realised that the narrative was strong enough to overcome any technical arguments and I wanted to profit from that. One day I'm assuming it help me retire.

(I just wish I'd bought more)

check your numbers with a purchase date of 1971.

> I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard

Let me introduce you to the wonders of Discover.

Few years ago I needed to transfer a big sum from a Scandinavian country into Euro. The official bank exchange rate plus fees was worse than Wise’s. But I asked the bank and the bank gave me an exchange rate that was like 0.1% better than one from wise.

> what are your thought on nano. It has zero fees

I repeat:

> Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.

Ok you seem to be pretty outdated I won't blame you for that so I'll catch you up to speed and when I refer to bitcoin I generally refer to any tier 1 crypto currency:

There is actually a BitcoinToUSDPipeline. The real problem is that the exchange crypto transactions are NON REFUNDABLE as you know, that means once it leaves the banking system (via making victim register a coinbase or kraken account, or register it for them using their credential information and compromised webcam for liveliness checks) you have an unlimited amount of time to do whatever. There are also various real life ways of bitcoin atm, using card to buy <1k giftcards (no kyc).

Okay you have your money in bitcoin, now what? Well, welcome to dex - decentralized exchanges. Using smart contracts you can wrap your btc into eth-btc, using etc-btc you can now trade it to any other crypto currency no strings attached and the most popular currently is tron.

Tron has tons of merchants which will simply swap from a to b from two different liquidity pools and those transactions are done off-chain and exist only on their database, since there are usually dozens of transactions mixed it becomes increasingly difficult to continue your investigation without having to use the slow legal route which is especially difficult if the merchant is offshore often ending up in a dead-end, at that point only INTERPOL really has the power and resources to trace it. Liquidity pools are used for perfectly legal reasons and it is not like tornado cash.

Now you have two choices: just spend the money directly (in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto), buy giftcards or if you don't really care and aren't doing anything interpol would be interested in just deposit to binance and withdraw to your bank account, depending on your local government they might not even care.

criminals are not always bad people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrFs2_uhz-o

and to break it down lawfully or/and morally bad:

  lawfully bad, morally bad = bad and crypto is one of the major tools in your arsenal

  lawfully bad, morally good = neutral, but you are a prosecuted criminal, crypto is helpful for you but there are alternatives

  lawfully good, morally bad = bad, but not a prosecuted criminal, crypto is not that useful for you

  lawfully good, morally good = you are not a criminal, crypto is not that useful for you