One of the joys of HN is that on the whole no one knows who anyone else really is nor keeps track of what they've argued previously.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted." - The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson
Stone have low market value while metal can always be melted to do something else (like weapons).
It's one of my main take away of my art history lessons -> most antic art done on metal has been lost, but the stone remains!
Stone is susceptible to cracking/shattering if caught in a house fire right?
I was stunned to see so many of these products on Amazon last time I searched for smartcard stuff. On that note, I hate that you can't search for smartcard products anymore without 80% of your results being crypto wallets.
vs
Give your private key to an exchange, and enrich the shitheads running the exchange when they run away with your money.
First option seems preferable. If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.
I'd quite like an option C
The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?
Yes, yes we can.
The only things that ever justified the use of cryptocurrency were ideological fantasies and speculative gambling. Every other justification is just hype created as a post-hoc rationalization for one of those two things. If you look at any of them closely, they completely fall apart when compared with competitor technologies (such as fiat paper money esp. the US dollar, conventional banking, and even gold).
I look forward to a future where "crypto" again unambiguously means cryptography.
As for legal uses, yeah, there are not many at the moment. Maybe some day there will be a DAO-type org that is worth being invested in or something but not today.
Kinda sorta. Wasn't that back when people assumed cryptocurrency provided the same kind of privacy that cryptography does, which was (in retrospect), pretty dumb?
> as was being able to smuggle wealth out of a country with exit restrictions.
That one doesn't make much sense either. How are you supposed to get your cryptocurrency to smuggle out in such a country? Wire your money to a foreign exchange?
> As for legal uses, yeah, there are not many at the moment. Maybe some day there will be a DAO-type org that is worth being invested in or something but not today.
I agree the "best" actual use cases involve illegal activity, but I think even those are sketchy. Most of the ideas don't actually work unless cryptocurrency is ubiquitous, but that doesn't matter since it will never become ubiquitous without compelling use cases. And given the illegal activity it enables, even if it did have compelling use cases, it would probably be made illegal if it was on its way to becoming ubiquitous (which would instantly marginalize it in a way it could never overcome).
That use case at least makes some sense and isn't illegal, but there are probably only dozens of users who'd ever want to do something like that, which isn't enough to support a payment ecosystem.
There are also probably conventional alternatives that probably work for that. I'm somewhat paranoid about getting doxxed based on some teenage internet experiences. There are a couple of forums out there with paywalls that exist mainly to reduce moderator workload, and (10-15) years ago I was able to subscribe with a combination of Visa gift cards and PayPal. The gift cards let you enter (un-validated) identity information so they could be used like credit cards online, and PayPal didn't seem to like them but there was a long delay before they were detected. So I created a throwaway PayPal account with a small-denomination gift card as a payment source, paid for the membership, and abandoned the PayPal account (which would eventually get locked).
Well, there are currencies that do provide strong anonymity, so no?
But yeah agreed that cryptocurrency doesn't have that many use cases, just as cash has a declining number of them. I hope someone makes an Amazon-like platform for it.
But I have drugs to buy and cannabis to smoke and joints to roll before I sleep.[0]
More seriously, there are use cases for cryptocurrency (smart contracts are a different think, unaddressed here), they're just mostly illegal.
Whether that illegality is appropriate or not is another question.
That said, there are use cases for cryptocurrency.
[0] With apologies to Robert Frost.
Let me address this, then:
- they are not smart
- they are not contracts
- they are programs written in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest and most inefficient VM
- due to esoteric nature their own authors cannot find trivial bugs in their implementations that are exploited at scale which would make any real platform nonviable
- cannot be updated or reverted because blockchain
- have literally no use outside the virtual imaginary world of crypto
- have zero legal standing, and cannot be enforced
- in every single case would be more efficient and better served by Visual Basic running on a single Raspberry Pi from a sqlite database.
Literally everything I wrote applies to Uniswap.
> because somebody has to own and control that database and physical device.
You've missed the point completely.
Where exactly in this comment did I say that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33606218?
> If that is your point, it's a funny one to make in a thread about a CEX collapsing.
What's funny is inventing arguments for other people and valiantly fighting against them.
"Smart contracts" were mentioned as "other uses of crypto currency, as yet unaddressed". I addressed them. I couldn't even care less how you made the illogical leap from that to whatever you accuse me of.
> in every single case would be more efficient and better served by Visual Basic running on a single Raspberry Pi from a sqlite database
Let me rewrite this on point in a single sentence "this ineffecient unenforceable bug-ridden fest that can only use the imaginary tokens can be run more efficiently from a single Raspberry Pi".
Does this help?
But, you are still making the claim that a decentralized smart contract protocol would be better replaced with a centralized traditional database on a Raspberry Pi. We disagree.
Come on. You started with assigning me arguments and thoughts I never said and thought.
> you are still making the claim that a decentralized smart contract protocol would be better replaced with a centralized traditional database on a Raspberry Pi.
A person who claims that their opponent makes arguments in bad faith ignores everything their opponent says and keeps pretending their opponent said something he didn't.
There are eight bullet points. Read them. Understand them. However, I'm not going to continue this conversation.
Not that different from what is happening now with the crypto "exchanges", by the way.
I'm talking about how both bubbles were a consequence of all the money being pumped relentlessly by governments. That it was going to pop, we should not have no doubt. If it wasn't for crypto "exchanges", it would be a dot-com v2 (bigger and badder), or it would be something else entirely... but at the end of the day, as long as we have governments addicted to growth, we will have boom and bust cycles.
Banking may well collapse in the US (I'm not betting it will - quite the opposite, to be honest - but historically speaking it's not an impossibility.)
The issue is that if banking in the US collapses... well - we have much, much bigger issues than "crypto". You'd be far better served with a stash of dried/canned products and a gun or three.
Also - it won't be crypto that matters in this case. It will be the new currency of whatever regional nation states pop up in the US after the collapse, or if the federal gov manages to hang on, the new USD.
Side note - last time I bought in bulk (because hedging against this is relatively cheap, all things considered) split peas were the best bang for the buck in terms of cost/calorie. Just slightly beating out plain white sugar.
75 days of food for 4 people at 2000 calories per day cost about $350 (not including storage containers) and will last a very long time if it's composed of dried legumes, flour, oats, sugar, rice, oil, etc... in airtight containers.
If you cook yourself and rotate through, it's actually a fairly cost effective way to eat cheap and healthy (although without any additional inputs - also very bland) while also keeping storage on hand and not feeling like a complete prepper.
If your house burns to the ground and collapses in on itself, the extreme majority of fire proof safes, aren't. If the fire dept shows up and it's out in an hour and it wasn't buried, your things will probably be alright.
I dealt with a guy's gun collection stored in his $10,000 "fire proof" safe stored in his garage. Almost everything was garbage. Saved a handful of parts here and there.
Absolutely no one needs to be putting a private key on paper in their house, that is insanity.
---------------
RE:
>The question is if you can reliably remember it in ten or twenty years without ever using it in the interim.
I check my bank account daily for fraudulent transactions; it would behoove anyone storing any sizeable amount of value to check/refresh on that daily, however that looks like for your form of storage.
The question is if you can reliably remember it in ten or twenty years without ever using it in the interim.
I was about to say this isn't the worst opsec until I realized you mean people are sending businesses their passphrases and not purchasing an etching kit to make the plate themselves.
Say I'd have $100000 in a crypto wallet, I'd etch it too and keep it in a safe instead of giving it to a website with no state backed guarantees.
But a lot of this is too troublesome or adds too many hoops to jump through than is practical for many people.
If it’s risk of customer funds mismanagement, coinbase is just not in the same galaxy as the folks who have blown customer trust.
If it’s securing funds, to prevent hacks, CB offers cold storage. Lumps of crypto can be transferred out of their control as needed to manage risk.
> But nobody has addressed that market.
Au contraire! You've correctly identified an important market! There is both existing work and ongoing development that tries to satisfy exactly what you've asked about (and doesn't involve burying etched steel plates).
Encumbering your bitcoin with the requirement for multiple, M of N threshold signatures ("multisig") is an important way to protect large amounts. Companies like Unchained Capital [0] provide a service wherein the user holds two keys and the company holds 1 key in a 2-of-3 multisig setup; if the company key is needed, video authentication and other procedures are required.
Other, non-company-assisted multisig setups use schemes such as you propose; one example is the Nunchuk wallet [1] which allows you to sign multisig transactions on your own, or request signature(s) from a key held by a family member or friend, passing the PSBT (partially signed Bitcoin transaction) over a secure communication channel.
Finally, two great examples of physical devices to protect your Bitcoin are (1) the Tapsigner [2], which is an NFC-enabled smartcard holding your secp256k1 private key that does on-card signatures; and (2) Jack Dorsey's Block (formerly Square) is developing a hardware wallet that integrates with your smartphone [3] -- one neat innovation here is that policies can be set such that the user may spend small amounts of funds with the phone only; but larger transactions require a thumbprint or pin on a physical device.
You also mentioned time delays -- this is also supported by Bitcoin script; advancements such as miniscript [4] allow you to express complex spending conditions in a tree-like way.
[0] https://www.unchained.com/ [1] https://nunchuk.io/ [2] https://tapsigner.com/ [3] https://wallet.build/ [4] https://miniscript.fun/
Plus funds in a wallet require extra steps when you want to trade on an exchange (extra costs via gas, time, possible errors, etc). The use cases for crypto are so minimal for the general population one could argue it's only survived this long through making trades on exchanges - to what essentially amounts to gambling. You can't gamble with funds in a wallet which defeats the entire purpose of crypto for the vast majority of the "users" in the space.