Re:The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers
by wpietri on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @11:56PM
(#17036263)
Exactly. Reversability by a trusted party when things go wrong can be a huge benefit.
Even financial markets will do it as needed. I used to write trading software. Some of our traders were trading on the DTB; being German, they were sticklers for rules. One day our traders jumped on something and made a lot of money. But it turned out that somebody at another company had fat-fingered an order at a very low price for a very large quantity. Large enough that it would have destroyed their company.
The exchange decided there was no point in that, so they unwound all the trades. I thought our guys would be mad. They were a little disappointed to lose the expected profit, but they were otherwise fine with it. They didn't see any sense in that kind of destruction just for a short-term gain.
Frankly, I'd probably rather use smart contracts with regular currency. If there was some kind of scam or theft then the financial institution might be able to reverse some of the charges.
Most of the advantages of cryptocurrency don't really sound like advantages to me.