Any time a friend or relatives asks me to explain what cryptocurrency is, the trust aspect must be front and center, axiomatic to the entire ecosystem. There is not a single thing in the implementation that makes sense without first assuming a lack of trust amongst every single party.

This is also why cryptocurrencies can never be made efficient, and will be a blight for as long as they exist. They are the logical extreme of the inefficiencies imposed by a low-trust society[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

It seems to me like all societies are trending towards low trust. Technology that can work in a low trust environment though can alleviate some of the pain that comes with that though.

Since cryptocurrency was already mentioned recent examples of that can be seen in Ukraine. The traditional financial system there has been disrupted; you can’t get cash out of an ATM. If you have cryptocurrency you can still transact. I think I saw something earlier where a journalist was able to get out of the country by using crypto to buy a used car.

Sometimes inefficiencies are still worth it, especially when dealing with worst case scenarios. Just-in-time manufacturing and global supply chains are very efficient, but when they are disrupted the cost is enormous. Winterizing the energy grid in Texas is expensive and inefficient/expensive, but if they don’t you are accepting that people will freeze in a severe winter storm.

I want to charitably assume that you're not being fatalist, but

>It seems to me like all societies are trending towards low trust.

is quite a starting point to make the rest of your points.

Your example of Ukraine is insightful and valid, but I imagine crypto fans and opponents alike would rather we not descend globally into a state of permanent war, where crypto would presumably be the only tool available to transact.

>I want to charitably assume that you're not being fatalist, but

I think he's being a realist.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/590117-tru...

This is a video outlining why the greek financial crisis happened, and why it's mainly due to it being a low-trust society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404IeUzGNZ4

i think this low-trust is actually a root cause of many problems in society.

First paragraph I follow, but how do you get to the point of the second paragraph? Cryptocurrencies are an update on the current system to remove some of that trust.

many PoS distributed slowish databases are currently deployed and process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks while emitting less carbon.

> process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks

Please cite your sources.

edit for people finding this later: Visa and MasterCard do on the order of one billion transactions per day combined. As far as I can tell, Ethereum (proof of work as of today) does about a million per day and Avalance (one of the top 3 proof of stake networks according to Wikipedia) does about a million per day. That's literally one thousand times fewer transactions than the top two card networks. Three orders of magnitude.

Visa's fact sheet[0] says that they processed about 6500 transactions per second on average for a recent 12-month period. A Solana dashboard[1] says that Solana processed about 2700 transactions per second on average for a recent period of a few hours.

If we would like to pick nits, we could say that the Visa transactions are not comparable to the Solana transactions because Solana transactions let users run complex programs that Visa does not, or that Solana transactions are not comparable to Visa transactions because nobody accepts SPL USDC and everyone pays out the nose to accept Visa, or that 2700 is a lot less than 6500, or that the 6500 number is misleading because the load should have peaks, and do we really know how much peak load Solana can handle, or that only about 1/3 of the Solana transactions are actual useful stuff for users and the rest are consensus messages. But my point is that these things are only "too slow compared to Visa" by a reasonably small factor now, like 6500 vs 900. Thanks.

0: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/ab...

1: https://solanabeach.io/

Other networks can achieve up to 50,000 TPS nowadays. The thing is they're still not very mature, technology wise.

But it's been proven to be technically feasible to replace OldFi with blockchain, at least in terms of TPS.

Protocols like fastpay, at2, bullshark, have all claimed hundreds of thousands of transaction/s

With lightning you can have infinite tx per day while having final settlement. In contrast Visa and Mastercard have delayed settlement and operate on many layers of trust

With lightning you can send many txes per day to people who already have as much bitcoin as you want to send them, have their wallet online as you send them the funds, and regularly check in to contest fraudulent channel closes.

1. Ethereum is probably one of the slowest cryptocurrency

2. You’re citing avalanche numbers that are not at peak traffic

3. Avalanche is not far from being the fastest crypto

> Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.

Not a native English speaker, so I may miss some nuances, but can you explain how you do not need trust that you find tomorrow someone fool enough to give you something valuable against your token? Where else does the "store of value" come than trust that there are greater fools tomorrow?

Surely this can only be true if a blockchain based currency can replace fiat currency end-to-end. The moment any part of your economy is reliant on the exchange of (say) BTC back to fiat, all the attributes and constraints of fiat come back into play.

It requires trusting code instead of humans.