Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.

IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.

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method_capital 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.

I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.

	▲	idlewords 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.
	▲	gizajob 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
	▲	quickthrowman 6 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist. There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution. 0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
	▲	lxgr 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> giving the individual complete control of their financial resources This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
	▲	jsty 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
	▲	10111001 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. > ... > I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better. It "solved" inflation by being deflationary (and then you have the massive volatility layered on top of that). I think it's probably impossible to have a stable currency without some kind of dynamic governance, like a central bank.

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littlecranky67 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while

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ux266478 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, I think that's approaching a strawman. Speaking as somebody that doesn't give a shit about cryptocurrency.

It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?

To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.

	▲	10111001 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.