"real crypto has never been tried"

I dislike cryptocurrency, generally, but plenty of people hold their own keys. It's rarer, now, but that's because mass consumers are generally stupid, not because the technology is flawed. If you can do the correct thing, and you choose not to (or just are ignorant enough to not do the correct thing), it's kind of your fault.

I still think we should legislate it, but let's be honest: Most people who lose, here, kind of deserve it, for not doing the bare minimum of research.

This doesn't have much to do with people being stupid. If you want to trade more than once a month, you pretty much have to keep the funds on an exchange. Otherwise transfer fees would kill any profit you made. If you're not trading often, you may still want to take the risk due to free in-exchange transfers.

Sounds like the problem's with trading, rather than using it like currency. I've used it for legal, in-person transactions just fine. There are also decentralized exchanges, but the peanut gallery and the incompetent masses would hardly know about them.

Shockingly, "get rich quick" schemes are a bad idea. Who would have thought? Oh, wait. Everyone.

I still think most cryptocurrencies should be highly legislated, because most adults in society are more or less children who can't be trusted around shiny objects, but we should really stop pretending the problem is with the technology. It's with the users, trying to shoehorn it into a use-case it's unsuited for (get rich quick schemes).

> Sounds like the problem's with trading, rather than using it like currency.

The context here is an exchange limiting withdrawals, so... Yes, exactly?

Decentralised exchanges have massive fees in practice. If you want to buy in and cash out after a year, sure. But show me one that takes <0.1% for the whole transaction including transfer/signing fees and supports BTC.

That doesn't mean people aren't stupid, in contrast to what you implied in another comment. Unwittingly day-trading cryptocurrency is stupid, and the people who desire to do it are not very smart.

That said, I do know a decentralized exchange that fits your criteria. I'm not going to mention it, because I refuse to enable such incredibly harmful behavior.

I don't believe anyone is "unwittingly" day trading anything. You're quite aware of doing it - it takes time.

Once Ethereum goes to PoS, let's hope those transfers become cheap enough to compete with centralised exchanges.

PoS has nothing to do with fees being high or low.

For competeness, there's also another change planned after pos - sharing. And that one is expected to lower the fees.

i believe eth (just like bitcoin before) has chosen 2nd layers as a primary scaling solution. which obviously affects compatibility of code across different 2nd layers. basically we are talking about futures years ahead.

so, either trade on exchanges with Lighntning or pick the one at least in jurisdiction that gives you some kind of protection like if you held money for any other service / broker.

It has been tried, it's on my computer right now and is irrelevant whether some exchange has paused withdrawals or not.

real crypto works just fine for millions. it is not problem of crypto that there are people falling for ponzis (not refering to Binance now). also, even quality of cefi exchanges like binance, coinbase, kraken, bitfinex has been outstanding in recent years so really, not sure what are we even talking about here. you get much more often blocked by credit card company or bank because of suspicious nonsense they dont explain.

sure they aren't the problem of crypto because they're a feature of the surrounding ecosystem not the underlying implementation, but when the ecosystem gains the reputation of a scam filled hellscape and most of the value and "use cases" is tied up in artificial hype - that has to pose some amount of worry in terms of future regulation and adoption does it not?

i really hate this analogy but if you want to avoid scams avoid internet. crypto, for whatever reason is treated as special while most are commited with all sorts of hacks or social engineering. on the other hand i do recognize this is an issue but imo the only thing you can do is education. crypto has valid unique amazing usecases and it enables things that were not possible before.

crypto is just like banking, which is an already regulated industry

it is absolutely not. removes many inefficiencies. saying this as someone working in investment banking for years.

I'm still waiting for the actual bitcoin infrastructure or algorithm to break. It's been 10 years and a trillion dollar network.

Just because exchanges fail, and there are shitloads of scams, doesn't mean the underlying technology isn't super interesting and can actually grow into something amazing in a few decades.

> I'm still waiting for the actual bitcoin infrastructure or algorithm to break.

It already happened: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

A few decades from now, the underlying technology will still be super interesting and will still have the potential to actually grow into something amazing in a few more decades.

I wonder if BTC will use the communism excuses, given the space is a hyper-capitalist space where everything is made of money.

I'll be looking with great attention to the near future.

Crypto is user hostile then? Got it

"Always has been."

Speaking of Bitcoin;

Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but s/he wasn't quite good at creating GUI and "Crypto" consumer apps that's why s/he open sourced it and left it to the community to build upon it and expand the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Btw at the time Bitcoin was in the experimental phase and Satoshi left the Bitcoin community pretty early that's why "Crypto" was user hostile and maybe still is.

Satosh was NOT an excellent C++ programmer. As someone who heavily dug into bitcoin code, the whole thing was a mess from the beginning. Poorly architected. Insane amount of global variables. It was just a huge mess and still is.

IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).

>Satoshi was NOT an excellent C++ programmer.

I'm not a programmer but that is what Gavin Andresen said[1]; he said something like this "Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but he wasn't a cryptographer" and "Satoshi wasn't familiar with Cryptography 101" in a sense that Satoshi was sometimes mixing up basic cryptographic concepts.

And yea I know Bitcoin had plenty of bugs I heard of notorious Value overflow incident[2].

>IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).

My assumption is someone from the academia e.g. university professor. Maybe someone who was teaching freshmen basics of Computer Science and basic C++ programming then your point might be valid that Bitcoin's codebase was poorly written looking from the practical and from the professional point of view.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

Nope.

The point is you store your crypto on a non-custodial software wallet (Metamask) or a hardware wallet (Ledger Nano) and not on an exchange, so it cannot be 'held hostage'.

It is not your keys, not your coins if it is on an exchange which uses custodial wallets, but doesn't apply if it is on a non-custodial wallet.

Thanks for highlighting the bad UX of crypto currencies, as it provides a nice segue into the financial danger that UX causes, as it creates customer-demand for simplifications that exchanges provide – so every time an exchange does something rugpull-ish we're actually testing how much of crypto's market-cap is based on maybe not-so-sturdy confidence of retail investors...

This statement bugs me because it is a large source of confusion for new people.

Your funds are spendable by your private key. Your private key is stored on Metamask, Ledger or a piece of paper.

It’s an important distinction to make. Your hardware wallet is just a custodian of your private key.

That bugs me too.

Almost every document out there talks about storing coins in your wallet. It’s actually a private key in there.

Maybe with the right language, more people might be tempted to hold their own keys and eschew centralised exchanges.

You either have a healthy ecosystem or you don't.

This is great if I want to store it, or spend it on places that accept Bitcoin (or other coins) but what if I want to exchange it for another currency? Seems to me only two options, an exchange or a face to face trade?

You can use something like https://bisq.network/

So is command line, but that doesn't mean it has no value.