tatertots1234
tatertots1234 on Hacker News
Because there is a small group of people that care enough to use it. Most anti-crypto people do not want anything to do with it. Neutral-crypto people don't see the reason for enhanced privacy, or are afraid it might put them into trouble with regulators.
Pro-crypto people can be broken into different tribes. Bitcoin maxis feel that only Bitcoin is worth using, and they might think the privacy of Bitcoin is "good enough." Ethereum maxis want to use applications and smart contracts for DeFi, escrow, exchanges, lending, stablecoins, and Monero does not support that. Ethereum maxis also feel that privacy is solvable with ZK proofs and private rollups. Then there are other tribes like Solana users who are looking for scalability for games and apps, and don't care as much about privacy.
It’s really not that hard to build a Patreon style service on crypto and web3. It’s also far easier to build a new payment processing platform on crypto than it is to build an alternative to PayPal or Stripe.
Yes, a theoretical crypto-Patreon would have to be coded in Solidity and frontend interfaces built around it for the web. This might be OSS or just a private enterprise.
But the users of this platform do not need to know how to code.
Theoretically possible but practically impossible, and one of the reasons that NFTs and DeFi will probably never be adopted on Bitcoin L1 unless the protocol changes.
It’s pretty much non-news to anybody who isn’t invested in Solend.
Most of the things that cause these problems, like stolen apes, would not work on Bitcoin as it lacks smart contract functionality.
In crypto creative and art economies the standard is around 2.5%, with various platforms competing on that by offering lower commissions even down to 0%.
Crypto presents a real solution to this problem despite HN’s hate for it. Users who want to achieve Patreon style donations and gated access to digital media can use stablecoin payments on a high-throughput layer two network. Cost per transaction would be minimal, allowing micropayments without cutting into artist profits. The protocol could be fully open source as well.
In a hypothetical crypto Patreon, if you send $1 to an artist, your only recourse to get that back if you are displeased with their art is to ask them politely, or ask the platform or protocol creator. Most likely you will not get your funds back, but this is assumed to be the case.
Many Patreon payments are simple donations, or gated access to digital media. These can be achieved with smart contract functionality to mitigate the need for costly payment processing.
> The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too.
The crypto folks are pretty cognizant of it, which is why they built an entire technology that isn’t reliant on intermediaries, banks, and payment processors to manage transactions.
A crypto Patreon in stablecoin like DAI on an L2 would basically be able to remove most of the high fees creators see in Patreon.
and it will probably continue to fall long term relative to better assets, unless the protocol or tech changes drastically - or if PoS somehow proves to be untenable.
but contrary to a lot of HN commenters in these threads, this is not nearly the death of crypto currencies that they think it is.
If you are an anon dev and you share your real identity with a counterparty, you aren’t doing a great job at staying anonymous.
Anybody can start a new crypto wallet and receive funds into it, and then make transactions and keep that value on-chain to remain anonymous. There are a number of anon devs in the Ethereum ecosystem doing just this.
With enough effort your IP might be traceable if you do something like mint a token from a compromised website. But advanced methods also exist to break anonymity in systems like Tor, VPNs and cash which we often consider to have strong properties of privacy and anonymity, and to this nobody would refute as “bullshit.”
All of their transactions are visible in the ledger, not hard to find. The same tools they used still exist today, except with additional privacy enhancements like some chains using zk-SNARKs.
The only weak points are exchanges. The OP can decide how anonymous they want to be - complete anonymity would imply not exchanging to fiat at all.
Mixers on programmable blockchains like TornadoCash do seem to provide strong anonymity when used correctly. If you have evidence suggesting its cryptography can easily be cracked, feel free to point to that.
> Can we just stop with the "Bitcoin is anonymous" bullshit here?
Care to point to Satoshi’s real identity since anonymity in Bitcoin is bullshit?
Plenty of charges have been laid over the years related to crypto phishing and fraud.
Banned from what?
If somebody sets up a phishing website in the US with intent to steal funds, they are equally as liable whether their target is a crypto wallet or Apple Pay.
there will always be some method of exchange. one exchange goes down, another will take its place.
amount of BTC on exchanges is something like < 14% of its total circulating supply.
Sure. many of those speculators will be forced to wait for Binance to resume BTC orders, or use another centralized exchange, or use a bridge to swap BTC to another crypto asset..
Edit: swapping BTC needs a centralized bridge as child commenter notes
meanwhile anybody who has their own keys is able to transact with it as per usual. “not your keys not your coin.” holding keys are not trivial but far simpler than running a server, better analogy might be to do with people not wanting to stake with a validator because it’s easier to use a centralized staking service.
Not really.
“Everybody is exiting crypto for another type of crypto” wouldn’t be much of a headline.
Regulated banks tend to have protections in place that avoid the possibility of users losing their funds.
“Not your keys not your coins” is a mantra in crypto for a reason. If you deposit your tokens into an unregulated and unaudited bank promising above market returns from their opaque strategy, there is a high likelihood you’ll eventually run into trouble.
Obvious solution is to encourage more regulatory framework around companies that claim to be custodial banks and investments. More audits, stable backings, and all of that.
Users can migrate to USDC and other stablecoins rather than only fiat.
You don’t need to post a message on the chain to ‘login’ to a web3 site. But if you perform a transaction such as changing the state in a smart contract or withdrawing tokens based on your address and message meeting some ZK-SNARK verifiable condition, that is when you might need to post a message to the chain.
You could consider Ethereum addresses and ENS aliases to be a limited form of SSI. MetaMask alone suggests it has several million MAUs not that this should be a metric in determining whether a tech is dystopian or not.
Various web3 platforms already require verifiable attestations through signing messages with private keys such as multi sig wallets, off chain voting, token gated access.
Decentralized doesn’t mean everything is unregulated and out of reach of governments. USDC is pretty heavily regulated despite operating on top of, and featuring composability with, a decentralized network.
The value per watt concern does not apply to all consensus mechanisms.