No, this is usually (apologies if not in your case) a straw man, and representative of the usual HN blind spot for cryptocurrency. Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets do protect against this class of attack. We are rapidly approaching a world in which those with significant assets or job responsibilities should be carrying physical 2FA tokens, which can allow use of private keys while protecting them (a hardware wallet).

This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution.

The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.

Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys.

There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts.

The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.

> The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.

And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).

> The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.

That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.

> And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).

Rollbacks being impossible doesn’t mean the government cannot legislate.

This is a double edged sword - the benefit and the drawback are inextricably linked. Caveat emptor. Do you want absolute control of your funds? If so, you can memorize 12 words and travel the globe. If not, look to custodial partners, ETFs, or multi-signature wallets.

> That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.

What? I assume by “this” you mean people who don’t have quality trustworthy financial institutions?

This is Hacker News. We brainstorm technological solutions to real world problems all the time. This particular problem can only be solved be “society” at large, not technology, because you say so?

You want to disparage those trying as “tech-bro peddlers” - do you simply mean any technology inclined entrepreneur who doesn’t present female? This is an absurd emotional invective.

I’d bring up Monero RingCTs and stealth addresses as an intermediate step and the offramp of direct purchases which that community has been building, as well as tools like Bisq, but I doubt the utility of continuing to reply.

>That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.

People escaping oppressive regimes don't have time for their society to solve it, they need to leave to a different, less messed-up society. And this is one of the few ways that they can bring a decent fraction of their assets with them in a form that's not very easily stolen from them.

> The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins”

This is because blockchains have no way of enforcing laws, including property rights. Therefore it comes down to this. Imagine that whoever got hold of your car keys, automatically became the owner. This is what "not your keys, not your coins" means.

“Enforcing laws” with regard to what? Censoring transactions? Freezing accounts?

If people want a system where this as well as excessive inflation are close to impossible, they now have an option, with the clear caveat of that ownership.

It’s not like there aren’t other options to choose - custodial services and multi-signature wallets. Banks are custodial services too, and that’s fine.

> “Enforcing laws” with regard to what? Censoring transactions? Freezing accounts?

Fraud. Transaction rollbacks. Consumer protection laws.

Those should be applied at a higher layer than the base one, and the vast majority of people should be using custodial services if they have access.

A much smaller fraction should be using open source and audited hardware wallets as well as offline paper wallets.

People will have the option to shoot their foot off with real, direct control, yes. That option or ‘genie’ doesn’t go back in the bottle, not permanently.

If you want lawlessness go ahead, but don't come crying when someone steals your riches or punches you in the face.

Yes. The option now exists to have private digital means of exchange, free from direct government devaluation. There are absolutely drawbacks; it is not for everyone.

It's a bit more like 'possession is 9/10 of the law'.

The "not your keys, not your coins" is more the fact that someone else holding your stuff happen to them and your stuff goes away. Or they never had it to start with. i.e. Counterparty risk.

`Cash` doesn't inherently have any mechanism for enforcing rights either. The difference is that real-world identities are easier to establish in situations where cash transactions go awry.

Indeed, physical cash has similar limitations. Everybody understands that it's inherently unsafe. Yet crypto-currency advocates are advising people to keep a large part of their savings as an asset that's even less safe than physical currency, which is absolutely crazy.

> It's a bit more like 'possession is 9/10 of the law'.

Common mistake. The original saying was "Possession is nine points of the law". Over time it's been bastardized to "nine-tenths".

Early days… 15 years later. To quote spaceballs, When exactly will “then” be “now”?

In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 20 years for the true power of packet-switched networks to be realized, in the form of mobile Internet.

In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days.

It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.

Crypto-currency isn't about the technology.

It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system.

And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.

I don’t think it’s a battle. At least one government has adopted cryptocurrency to a small extent. No technology is “about” the technology, the other poster mentioned the Internet, very few care about how it works, they care about what they can with it.

How long will it take before cryptocurrency finds a use case that isn’t illegal activity? When do you think it will happen?

It’s happening right now.

Can you elaborate on this?

From a prior thread that didn’t get any constructive engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762

Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.

> You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves.

how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it?

I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.

You can even run a conventional database if you don't trust each other.

The only party requiring trust us the one managing the database.

Wirks pretty well in the real world.

It doesn't. Let's take that comment.

> You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves.

Who is this you, why would this group of houses trust you and not their established providers. And how will this group of houses verify that your contract even works (forget about "works correctly", start with just "works").

> Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.

No it can't. These are not contracts. These are programs written in esotheric programming languages that work only as long as there's a connection to the things they "manage". They are unenforceable, have significant issues with versioning and bugs (once deployed, its deployed forever), have no bearing on the physical world etc.

If anything, a technology demonstrating its capacity to continue to function normally in the face of illicit use cases is an indication of its viability for inclusion in the next human chapter.

If you tell us that a technology seems to preclude love, or creativity, or good health... sure, that warrants examination and possibly intervention. But illicit behavior? In an environment where some perfectly sociable and laudable behavior is illicit? Who cares?!

It's been crystal clear since the first whiffs of what has come to be called the Streisand effect that the internet does not tolerate censorship, including by states.

What good is served by prioritizing consideration of the throes of deprecation of the shitty legacy institutions from which the internet is finally freeing us?

(I'm not trying to cheerlead crypto here per se; I think currency is broadly stupid and subject to eventual deprecation for all the same reasons that fiat currency is leaving first).

This comes up in every discussion, every single time, without qualification or explanation, as if we all understand by default the importance of first adjudicating the legality or illegality (presumably in accordance with each of the tens of thousands of states which claim authority to make this designation) of a use case of a technology before we can celebrate the effort and achievement of the authors.

And I'm concerned that this is demoralizing and counter-productive.

Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one!

Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.

Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.

> Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.

This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Yes, I’m aware of AI winters but that doesn’t affect the point I was making: people knew neural networks were capable of the task since neuroscientists were studying how our own brains used them, but they were computationally daunting. “AI winter” didn’t mean that everyone gave up and assumed the theists were right that some supernatural power was the key part, it meant that developing commercially-viable technologies was harder than hoped.

That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.

the whole idea of an “AI winter” is that people did not feel that AI was capable and worth pursuing, the Wikipedia link makes that sentiment clear. The remaining computer scientists still working in AI space obviously continued developing the technology despite the lack of public interest and major funding, but the same happens in crypto: engineers are still developing new ideas and technologies within blockchain space (ZK proofs, verkle trees, etc). Bitcoin has stagnated but other technologies have not.

> the whole idea of an “AI winter” is that people did not feel that AI was capable and worth pursuing, the Wikipedia link makes that sentiment clear.

Try counting the number of times people mention phrases like “combinatorial explosion” or other limitations like the single/multi-layer perceptron argument, which are the kinds of problems we’re talking about where the issue was feasibility on the hardware available, or things like “expert systems” which were dead ends unrelated to neural networks.

Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems. Different technology and implementations having different results isn’t exactly disproving criticism.

If “nobody doubted” AI, there would not have been an AI winter in the first place.

> Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems.

Practical ZKP and accessible circuit programming is definitely relevant to blockchains; it is one example of technological advancement in crypto that has led to significant advancements. If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.

> If “nobody doubted” AI, there would not have been an AI winter in the first place.

Hint: neural network and AI are not synonyms. You were corrected after conflating the two.

> If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.

This post is about Bitcoin so it’s unsurprisingly discussing that, especially since that’s where most of the usage is. Neither of the things you mentioned solve the underlying architectural problems inherent to blockchains, although the ZK stuff does help with privacy somewhat, but again I would remind you that the comparison to the early internet still runs afoul of lack of demand for blockchains. People didn’t need a FOMO sales pitch to see that going online was useful; for a payment system to become popular it needs to offer an advantage on price, performance, or security – the ceiling for how much most people will pay for a cryptocurrency is whatever it costs to use Venmo or Square so the focus needs to be on outcompeting the status quo and setting realistic expectations for how much shaving a point or two off of a transaction price will really change the world.

IMO, your timelines are way off and the goalposts are totally skewed. In 1980, the Commodore 64 hadn't even been released yet. Even so, 15 years later, in 1995, almost 15% of adults had dialup access to the Internet. The real goalpost here is the advent of the WWW.

TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch".

Even given this modest start, fifteen years later, in 2008, nearly 75% of adults used the internet according to a Pew research study (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-in...). In 2008, we already saw the emergence of the e-commerce market, with upstart Amazon already commanding a 1% share of the entire retail market (to put in perspective, that grew to ~6% by 2019, according to Census and Morgan Stanley data: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-r...). Heck, by 2008, you could watch a movie instantaneously on your TV without renting or buying the DVD! (https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netfli...)

So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.

The history of finance is as long as recorded history, perhaps the reason for it[1]. That said, these kinds of crazes[2] are almost as old.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

I don't recall ever reading about a tulip ETF, though, that could be kind of interesting

Lol. HN is stuck in "CRYPTO BAD BOOO, We don't need no reason. We know", in the voice of HN group think.

No, "crypto bad boo" is precisely because the HN crowd doesn't ignore the history of anything that crypto pretends it's disrupting. Instead all the clueless crypto bros in the crypto space end up slowly, and often painfully, re-discovering all this history and the reasons why things are the way they are.

Let me call you clueless my friend and maybe even other names as you seem to like to.

Things are the way they are because of interests, some people are making money on it. "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything and you seem clueless as to what they want and are repeating old ass tropes you probably learned from others.

I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S, you probably don't, being of short memory and not learning from others. But, guess what, we are using k8s and crypto and you are stuck and soon will be making apologies for your lack of sense and will be tired of repeating others' lies here.

Sorry but not sorry.

> "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything

Yes, most don't discover anything, they just run scams. The tiny percentage who doesn't are busy re-discovering and te-inventing all the institutions and processes the world has.

> I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S

Ah yes. Yet another comparison pulled out of thin air.

Yoi are still clueless and didn't bring anything worthwhile to this conversation. Have fun supporting system built to enslave you. K, TX BYE

Banks are great, and they will exist in the bitcoin world. The central bank is the problem.

Central banks are the government. And governments define the law we all operate in.

And as the crypto industry experiences today they can be vindictive, inconsistent, spurious, aggressive etc. And are highly skilled at resisting efforts to limit their power.

> Central banks are the government

The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is, despite the misleading name, a private corporation. [1] This is true I believe of many central banks. Nevertheless, and perhaps this is what you really meant, central banks can _act as an instrument of government_, or, more cynically, serve to enrich the political class and politically well-connected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank#Legal_sta...

That link does not at all describe "a private corporation" in the sense that people who don't click the link would assume your use of the phrase would imply.

A better summary of that link would be "it is a legally murky thingamajig, which is symbolically private while being governmental in practice".

The section concludes with this quote from a political science professor:

> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." ... Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.

Now, it's very possible that the Wikipedia article is itself misleading. I'm just saying it isn't a good citation to use if what you want to do is casually describe the Federal Reserve as "despite the misleading name, a private corporation". The section you linked is all about how that would be a more misleading description!

The Fed (the central bank in the US) didn't exist before 1914. The government did. They aren't the same

Central banks are also great, though.

If you’re the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, definitely.

I don't know what this means, but I suspect I disagree. Central banks are good for everybody, though certainly some benefit more than others.

You’re arguing with a straw man (or the version of yourself which considered investing in Bitcoin). Nobody presented this argument. Rollbacks?

First world users who have excellent financial services are not the target use case.

The senior citizens you mention are free to invest using ETFs if they want or should have as little responsibility over the wealth as possible.

They could also use a centralized exchange which regularly deposits into a multi-signature wallet controlled by the family.

I always feel like this sort of point is gaslighting me. Or, like, arguing from the perspective of like the third reinvention of the pitch for bitcoin.

When I first read the bitcoin whitepaper well over a decade ago now, there was none of this detailed segmentation of the target use case, it was just gonna be decentralized digital transactions for everybody.

Fine, I get it, people figured out long ago that it is a more niche thing than that. But can we stop pretending that it has always been obvious that its current niche was always obviously the only one intended and that anything else is a "straw man"?

It really has a ring of "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" to me.

No use case is a “straw man”. The parent post had a hand-waving farcical “more systems will solve that”. I’m pointing out the reality of the positives and drawbacks of private key control.

The original whitepaper didn’t describe use cases, you’re right. It’s a technical document explaining a solution to the double-spend problem and defines core rules of the network.

The use cases were always something that developed over time. Andreas Antonopoulos was highlighting the key need as those without financial services in 2011-2012.

It sounds like you were convinced this was going to be of direct use to most people in the near future? If so, what resources have you been reading?

It’s worth noting here also that Bitcoin was co-opted by a censorious minority - Theymos and Blockstream - who have maintained an artificially low block size, ostensibly in order to keep a high number of non-mining but full-history nodes. Bitcoin’s competitors such as Ethereum and Monero did not allow a software or discussion forum monoculture and instead have scaling block sizes, and still hard fork to add new scaling features (https://ethresear.ch). This does make them much more useful for small transfers.