The EU created and deployed instant zero-cost 24/7 bank transfers while crypto was twiddling its thumbs talking about “early days” and puffing out PoW carbon.

If even the European Union moves faster than your cutting-edge decentralized system, maybe you have a problem.

You're comparing a centralized approach with the force of law to a decentralized approach which requires buy-in by the masses without any coercion.

Of course the two approaches will be different.

TCP/IP was standardized in 1983. Nine years later I had an email address. Two years later I had full IP access (telnet, Usenet, ftp, web). I never stopped using it, even though specific protocols like ftp faded away.

In contrast, I bought some cryptos five years ago and dabbled in Solidity too, but there was just nothing to do with it because it’s so clunky and wasteful. I don’t expect to ever touch that stuff again.

That’s obviously anecdotal, but it’s clear by now it’s nothing like the early Internet. That organic buy-in isn’t happening.

I understand your argument but it’s disingenuous to say TCP started in 83. It was widely published in 74 with implementations in 75.

Forgive me, but I think you misread my grandparent comment's intended meaning. The assertion was that TCP/IP was standardized in 1983, and this is, in fact, technically correct. The unwritten subtext was that TCP/IP was standardized as the protocol in use on ARPANET, with the cutover from NCP to be concluded on 1 January 1983.

"It is really very important for everyone to notice the deadline for completing the cutover to IP/TCP and the elimination of NCP from use in the ARPANET." https://groups.google.com/g/fa.tcp-ip/c/HDoq18adT2Y/m/HwoFGx...

“Clunky” crypto resonates perfectly with me. I spent a couple weekends reading up on bitcoin and ethereum, working through a couple simple blockchains implementations, and getting familiar with building for web3. I found the development experience severely lacking. Clunky.

Maybe blockchains tech will graduate beyond coins, NFTs, speculation, and rug-pulls. I look forward to that day. However, over a decade in, everything about cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech, from development to application, deployment and function, feels clunky.

I can’t understand how anyone has any confidence in crypto after the current Ukraine/Russia situation. I thought that crypto was decentralized and no-one could place restrictions on who could own it, and what they could do with it.

This also turned out to be total BS as Russian crypto accounts keep getting frozen. Funnily enough, I haven’t heard the “crypto community” make a single peep about this. Hilarious..

People use custodial wallets which is a bad idea anyway; but it supports the original point; people generally do not understand or care about the basic premise of decentralisation (and, as such, have no interest in the added inconvenience, although with enough tech that can be solved). They use crypto because ‘get rich quick’ and ‘no taxes’ and they do not know or care about how it works. Their coins are in centralised wallets or exchanges . Adoption of the decentralised might (but probably not at all) come slowly over time. You need to read up on things before shouting BS though; there is a lot wrong with all the blockchain stuff but one good thing is; they cannot freeze your wallet if you have it locally; if you do not have your crypto currencies in your locally wallet, you do not own them as such is what any crypto pundit will tell you.

But rarely anyone is capable of securing local wallets, especially when it concerns serious amounts of money. So back at trust we are.

I wouldn't say it's rare for those actually entrenched in the crypto community. Hardware wallets are fairly easy to secure and if you really want no trace of ownership, you can just memorize your 12 word seed phrase.

Noone’s crypto wallets have been frozen, afaik. Custodial services have frozen people’s accounts, but those are websites which hold your crypto for you. Not your keys, not your crypto.

What I understand is that Hardware wallets cannot be "frozen", but they are much harder to maintain than an online account you can log into with a single click, so people prefer that.

> I can’t understand how anyone has any confidence in crypto after the current Ukraine/Russia situation. I thought that crypto was decentralized and no-one could place restrictions on who could own it, and what they could do with it.

You do realize that their are capital controls self-imposed by the Ukrainian National Bank, right? And that Bitcoin has been legalized in Ukraine [0] after the influx of Bitcoin donations (and other alts) which were used to fund supplies, logistics, military efforts, as well as the formal Ukrainian Government to continue the war effort.

If anything I'd say it proves that what we have said all along was the case, Bitcoin isn't going to matter to functional economies in the developed World, but will excel most in crisis situations in mainly developed nations.

Lastly, the only one to 'restrict' accounts was the YC-backed Coinbase [1] (the bane of the Bitcoin community as they hold so much BTC despite being vocal opponents of it since Segwit).

So, all I have been able to gather from all of this is that YC/HN remains incredibly ignorant of what Bitcoin and crypto avails, and will draw conclusions based more on that ignorance then take the time to actually look into what is actually taking place.

0: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ukraine-legalises-bitcoi...

1: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coinbase-bloc...

> So, all I have been able to gather from all of this is that YC/HN remains incredibly ignorant of what Bitcoin and crypto avails, and will draw conclusions based more on that ignorance then take the time to actually look into what is actually taking place.

And yet, you people think crypto is seriously going to "catch on" for the average person? I'm sorry, but "you need a certain IQ to understand Rick and M- I mean crypto!" isn't going to magically make crypto useful at all. The fact that crypto people have to go into long tirades full of technical jargon just to answer the question "Why?" tells the whole story.

The average user doesn't need to 'get it,' they need to be incentivized to use it, believe me I had a startup that targeted a demographic that you'd never suspect would ever use it, that is until they had to because they were unable to hold a bank account and were subject to financial censorship and had thier accounts frozen or seized: the average age of said demographic was in the mid 60s.

Personally speaking, I think Bitcoin won't get 'mass adoption' in the developed World until they are using it without actually realizing: think a GUI and UX similar to that of online banking, and unfortunately, custodial services and wallets.

The idealist crypto-nerd in me wished everyone would be running their own mainchain and LN node and would be securing their funds on hardware wallets, and only communicated over End to End or PgP encrypted platforms with keys they swapped in person: but after over 10 years in this space I have come to realize that the average person will gravitate towards convince in orders of magnitude much more than security.

It's a harsh reality that I have long accepted when it comes to the 'average user' and it helps explain the prevalence of why the leaks, hacks and data breaches using these leaky services continues.

Personally speaking, this isn't 2011, you don't need to learn how to use Linux to download the blockchain and synch up to the network using QT and create wallets in the terminal, thus the IQ factor isn't relevant anymore... all you need is a relatively modern smart phone and an internet connection (and when that is down a Blockstream satellite or access to Starlink as has been proven to be the case in Tonga and Ukraine this year) to plug into this inclusive financial system: it's very telling that 3G/4G availability is more prevalent in the developed World than running water is.

Is the difference in the approaches that one is actually successful and useful?

Maybe they both are, but in different ways, like mocroservices vs a monolith. Some applications are just better on one platform than another, and vice versa.

I'm in the EU, doing a lot of bank transfers. I would love to see 24/7 instant bank transfers. The theory is nice, the practice however is very poor.

With nano, I do actually have instant, 0 fee, 24/7 money transfers.

Sorry, but your claim is just not true in practice.

> 0 fee

Every time I look at a no fee platform in the cryptocurrency world, it turns out that it's subsidized somehow. If you want to make a fair comparison with e.g. SEPA transfers, you have to assess where this comes from. For a lot of these networks, it's just a way to gain adoption and it doesn't reflect whether it's sustainable for them in the longer-term.

The compromise I have to make as a user is to use their cryptocurrency with all the drawbacks it has. But it doesn't matter if it takes me no time to send $CRYPTO if I need to wait hours before I can convert it back to fiat money and actually use it. That will remain the case as long as these cryptocurrencies remain niche, it's a bootstrapping problem.

Just FYI, Algorand and StellarLumens are very low fee and super-fast blockhain alternatives.

> Sorry, but your claim is just not true in practice.

Of course it isn't, but they clearly have an axe to grind against things they do not understand at all and they will remain oblivious to the the very obvious fact that SEPA is pretty broken--EU nations and non-Euro nations (within the EU) do not transfer directly or instantly either. It can take days and the expenses, transfer rates, and exchange rates are not 0 either.

But, hey... this is Hacker news, where if you repeat a lie enough times about something you do not like, it will become true enough to be accepted.

> they will remain oblivious to the the very obvious fact that SEPA is pretty broken--EU nations and non-Euro nations (within the EU) do not transfer directly or instantly either

You're aware that SEPA is for the eurozone only, right? SEPA is slow-ish (2-3 days) and free, and now there's SEPA Instant, supported by many banks ( I don't think there are stats, but all of the 5 banks i use have it) which is fast and works 24/7, and usually free ( some old banks are trying to monetise it at 1€ per transaction). It's still better than in crypto land or the US. Of all similar cases, the only one I've heard of that is probably better is the Indian UPN(?).

> You're aware that SEPA is for the eurozone only

Yes, I live there as a US citizen without access to EU banking, do you? It also worth noting that it is utilized by non EU member-nations, too. (See link below.)

I also happen to live in a country that hasn't adopted the Euro, it will soon but hasn't yet. I also pay my rent to somoene who lives and works in a Euro based country.

Thus direct transfer with Euro to non-Euro accounts (and vice-versa) requires fees, transfers, and conversion costs. And it doesn't operate 24/7, and they never have; weekends always have delays--I paid a friend from Switzerland in BTC to pay someone in a SEPA non-euro EU member nation for a deposit on an apartment before a flight on US time on a weekday (weekend in their time zone) and the funds arrived in less than 10 mins for 17 cents via BTC, the payment to arrive to from a Swiss bank account to a non-euro bank account took 3 days to arrive and clear. SEPA is what Switzerland uses, even though its not a EU nation [0]. And I used to live there when the CHF was pegged to the EUR and was accepted just like the CHF: there are payment rails that never changed as a result.

What I'm saying is things are more complex tan you are making it out to be when it comes to fintech and unless you work in it you will never truly understand that--what some deem edge cases are quite typical if you work in this Industry.

I think your POV is still based on the idea that things are working under ideal conditions (or near them), where as the Bitcoin network was designed to bypass and rout around all those inconsistencies and all the constraints when it doesn't operate as it should. Which is typical for the vast majority of the World's population.

I'm sure your measure of 'functional' vastly differs to someone who operates a legal and legitimate business, but because they are deemed someone who is either high risk or simply persona non-grata for working in an Industry the State doesn't like they cannot gain access to a bank account.

I think this is really the best 'check your privilege' moment we will ever have in the tech space, and most people on HN (mainly affluent tech workers) have as you expected failed in remarkable manner; instead of the woke BS that it's often used to explain people's insulated existence, this usecase clearly exposes how naive and coddled citizens of the developed World are to what are common and typical issues in the rest of the World, but since it has had almost no impact on their own day to day they not only ignore it but will go out of there way to criticize they have a glib understanding of at best.

I can make more sweeping generalizations, but I'm not sure it will be of any use.

0: https://gocardless.com/guides/sepa/countries-sepa-zone/

"Decentralized systems by nature suffer for slow adoption"

I don't see why that's self-evident. Decentralized applications get fast and wide adoption all the time, e.g. Napster.

Indeed. Another example I have in mind is MIRC but both filled a void. I think there is little room for crypto to fill. Most of the world doesn’t have a need for it.

Torrents, P2P file sharing in general. I really don't get the argument that technology doesn't get adopted fast.

Or git.

Or one could easily say on the inverse, Crypto is like Chuck-E-Cheese tickets... All promise big possibilities, and it looks flashy at the top, but then you realize you've invested $1000 to make $100...

Social media is the last thing left in pushing this lottery brigade... Social platforms have already demonstrated that most frankly can't succeed in their large oceans of popularity and in competing with wealthy influencers, the same holds true for crypto. It is far too easily influenced by tweets, wealthy influence, and popularity to make everyone socially climb the ladder, and far too volatile for people who can't afford to risk money to play with...

Just like regular money.

> You're comparing apples to oranges.

No, we couldn't be. i mean, every time in these crypto threads cyptobros compare crypto to the Internet, and to cars, and to the wheel, and to..., and it's fine.

But when we compare it to something, it's apples to oranges? You don't say.

> Crypto is just too big to be adopted quickly

It's not big.

You can’t say a social network is objectively better when all of the people you consider to be cool don’t use it.

Yeah, there's nothing at all objectively better in any way on Mastadon.

of course there is! It's ad free and fully customizable. Isn't that objectively better?

> fully customizable

Not really? I'm pretty happy with the Twitter UX as it is.

> ad free

Meh.. I don't really care one way or the other.

Decentralized systems, like the internet?

It was pretty damn big after it was 13 years old.

There was 16 years between the launch of ARPANET and the specification of the DNS.

It took more than 20 years for a website to exist on the internet.

The Internet is a poor comparison, as it required a significant investment in hardware out in the world at large for it to be a practical consideration.

> I really don't know any other financial systems that we're adopted quickly

WeChat pay

> Decentralized systems by nature suffer for slow adoption

What about Git, or Napster, or filesharing in general, or Tor?