Rugpulls and ponzi schemes
Crypto really feels like a speed run of human monetary history.
Which money are you talking about? Most monies are driven substantially by monetary policy and other direct government intervention. The very reason fiat is no longer finite is due to government intervention in the 1930s (going off the gold standard).
Bitcoin (e.g.) is actually much more like gold in that the amount of it in circulation isn't determined by any law, policy or intervention.
This is even more true if one considers that after we defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods, we almost immediately transitioned to the petro dollar, making the USD the only way to obtain the most in-demand commodity in existence. So it still kind of had a backing. We've only really started to become 'free floating' extremely recently as more major oil producers turn against the petrodollar. And it doesn't seem to be leading to happy places.
...Except for all the other major fiat currencies that are not USD.
If you look at countries by debt to GDP, the US is peers with economies like Laos, Sudan, Italy, Venezuela, and so on. [1] The unique position of the dollar alongside being the largest consumer economy gives the government immense room to absorb economic blunders. At least until the house of cards collapses, which will make 1929 look like the good ole days. This is one of the many reasons people are interested in currencies that cannot be manipulated outside of normal market forces.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
It's quite interesting in an economic sense too because, unlike our USD2 analogy, in the Bitcoin world users actually keep all their money in both forks (so if you have $1000 in USD, you'd also have $1000 in USD2) yet disproportionately favor one currency to the point that e.g. Bitcoin Cash is worth $217 per coin, while BTC mainline is worth $26,000 per coin.
The forks were the result of a split in the community. Not every change actually results in a fork.
If someone alters the amount of bitcoins out there, my wallet software won't recognize those bitcoins as legitimate.
What it is, as a project, is being extremely conservative, but that's a human political value, not a property of a technical system.
How so? Bitcoin is a set of political/economic ideas about money encoded into software by a group of humans, who are historically known to sometimes change their minds over time.
Every fork happens in order to effect some change – and whether that change is beneficial or not is the matter of policy, not technology.
Voting against a fork (with your mining power or wallet) is also a policy decision. You can't escape human nature in a system built and used by humans, not even in a very conservative/change-averse one, because conservatism is, once again, a human value, not a technological one.
Through backwards-compatible soft forks.
Nobody removed the ability to make non-segwit transactions. SegWit did not change the existing transaction format or change the chain, it repurposed the "anyone-can-spend" transaction space.
Unlike with a lot of other cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin dev team bends over backwards to try to make sure their protocol updates extend the existing protocol rather than changing it.
And most critically neither issuance nor balances have been changed, with the exception of the isolated value overflow error that was corrected during Bitcoin's infancy in 2010.
> Every fork happens in order to effect some change – and whether that change is beneficial or not is the matter of policy, not technology.
It's a matter of individual opinion. And with Bitcoin, every individual user can assert their own opinion by running the protocol version that aligns most with their own opinion. You can't opt out of your bank's software update.
> Voting against a fork (with your mining power or wallet) is also a policy decision. You can't escape human nature in a system built and used by humans, not even in a very conservative/change-averse one, because conservatism is, once again, a human value, not a technological one.
I can't argue with that. Being a bitcoin user is inherently a policy decision.
Everyone makes a policy decision by clicking the "download" button. It's part of Bitcoin's strength and it's part of Bitcoin's weakness.
Therefore the point of faster settlement and less burocracy doesn’t stand unless you are selling weapons, which proves that Bitcoin is only useful for criminal schemes.
> (instead of the awful SWIFT)
SWIFT is a real-time messaging network.
International transactions being slow has almost nothing to do with legacy technologies – it's partially outdated processes (batch processing facilitates netting, and netting preserves liquidity!), but overwhelmingly that we (or at least the regulators making the rules) want them to be slow enough to be able to intervene in case of financial crimes.
> my phrases on paper and USB locked in safes separated by 2000 miles
That's nice (unless you lose access to both or make some other operational mistake), but literally the opposite of central crypto custody, which is what this thread is about.
> Banks are here to stay, even in crypto imo
Crypto, perfect, as long as you don't have too much money.
"Be a small target and hope for the best" is about the weakest form of security and does not instill a lot of comfort or confidence.
Maybe that takes smarts, but not a kind I value.