"There are a few people in the world who get locked out from banking by an oppressive regime" is just another rather unconvincing argument for crypto. Yes, let's upend the world's financial system, evolving and improving for centuries, for THAT.

Next it will be "but crypto will let you monetize your private data". Yeah no, it won't.

You can get locked out of your bank account due to institutional incompetence (happened to a friend of mine in Spain) or due to being on the wrong side of a political argument (e.g. donating to the protesting truckers in Canada).

I think there's a lot of value in being slightly harder to oppress by the political classes or arse-covering and uncaring bank managers.

And the solution is? Have a system where I can lose ALL my money by forgetting a password? Or when a crypto exchange goes boom and my life's savings are not FDIC ensured? I am sure your friend could get back in into the bank account. Being a random subject to a dumb banking accident is not the reason to upend the financial lives of billions.

It's not a binary decision though.

You can have some money in cash, some amount in real estate, gold, crypto...

Depends on how much you have etc. But it's not a "everything has to be crypto" or nothing may.

If you can loose all your live savings by forgetting one password or one company going down, you made some terrible decision when it came to diversification of investments

The world in which the majority of citizens is financially literate does not exist, and "crypto" is not going to magically fix it. This libertarian free-for-all paradise will result in scores of ruined citizens, who then will have to be taken care of by society anyway. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

Then exercise some personal responsibility and caution. Keep your passwords carefully and don't trust certain crypto insitutions. The crypto world is indeed loaded with cases of fraud, but underneath that, here is a system of systems that lets people who do indeed get locked out of conventional financial systems send and receive funds without the permission of a central regulatory authority or some dysfunctional, corrupt political control mechanism, It doesn't always work at that, but it offers one strong further alternative. Also, how is it upending the lives of billions of people? The two things you compare at the end are not directly related and definitely not in a causative way. Wanting a further means of avoiding being a victim of dumb banking accidents doesn't make you culpable in whatever defects crypto has.

It's not just the rampantly emotional and repetivie crypto hate on HN that's absurd, it's also the sheer narrow follishness of so many of the arguments that's rather galling.

It's okay that it's unconvincing to you, but I think about dissidents and other "malicious" actors.

Apart from that, with a decentralised system it's way more complicated for others (!) to fuck up and lock your bank accounts.

But to be frank: I found the idea intriguing, never was invested at all. I am also not greedy and apart from taxes for my house I could sustain myself for a couple of months, maybe even 1-2 years without access to my bank accounts