When designing the iPhone, one of Apple's findings was that majority of people struggle with understanding the concept of the file system (and hence, there's no visible file system in iOS). In such world, only a small minority of people will be interested in decentralized cryptocurrencies, as the bar of technical skills required is too high for most people. This is what led to the success of centralized cryptobanks.

Ding ding ding! Crypto isn’t cool to majority, nor do most want to (or need to) care about it. People want to spend money and if crypto makes that happen so be it. Society had been sending money for awhile without crypto and the edge cases crypto addressed are just that, edge cases.

I’m intrigued by crypto but merely because I’m a nerd. I don’t care about crypto when it comes to my day to day life.

This exactly. I recently came across a tweet explaining how Merkle trees in some new crypto would make it better or something. If with a CS degree I find it hard to understand what this remotely has to do with my money, I don't think my 80 year old granddad is going to fare any better. Which is why I believe crypto is fundamentally doomed for anything but the most niche use cases.

I hate how accurate this comment is. Without going too far with examples, PGP exists, but using it is simply harder so most people default to an easier email sending.

Now.. the question remains as to whether it would be the same, if it tech was not made so accessible ( some people would be forced to learn since the bar was high ). I mostly think that battle is already lost.

>PGP has horrible user experience for experts. Its CLI is incredibly un-intuitive and needlessly complex and integration with mail clients is poor to non-existent.

Thunderbird[0] has pretty good (see what I did there?) PGP integration[1]. The UI is decent and there is discoverability support with various key servers as well.

But that would require folks to break their addiction to web-based email and use an actual email client. As such, I won't hold my breath.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

You were never intended to craft your own blockchain transactions any more than to hand-write your network packets or interbank transfers. Wallets are/were expected to advance and handle this for users and mostly have.

The issue is that the problem cryptocurrencies solve is not a real problem.

The blockchain, being a public ledger, ensures that transactions are accurately recorded and can be publicly verified as such.

But it’s been centuries since the actual accurate recording of transactions has been an issue. The real problems are far removed from this. When was the last time you heard about people complaining that they paid off their Visa but it did not credit them for the payment?

Meanwhile, real problems that people do face, such as a vendor not providing you the goods or services that you paid for, are still a problem with blockchain.

The fundamental problem with cryptocurrencies are that they add a whole lot of complexity to solve a problem which is a trivial issue in practice at best, without providing any tools to solve the actual problems people face and in many cases making it harder to find solutions for those problems.

> real problems that people do face, such as a vendor not providing you the goods or services that you paid for, are still a problem with blockchain.

Not just still a problem. Far worse off a problem. Chargebacks exist for credit cards and most bank transactions including wired funds. Send the crypto the wrong way at the wrong time or to the wrong place? Poof. Bye bye money.

You ignore the other big benefit which is impossibility of censorship. When was the last time you heard about people complaining that they can't do lawful and legitimate business because Visa or MasterCard (basically a duopoly) don't like them?

This problem is not trivial, and as far as I can see crypto is the only scalable solution to it outside of legislation that isn't ever going to happen.

What about the privacy implications of having nearly every payment on the planet go through 2 megacorporations?

And I can see the response now, while every crypto transaction is public, it's a lot harder to tie identities to wallet addresses than it is to tie a name to a credit card number.

> You ignore the other big benefit which is impossibility of censorship.

That's a silly claim. Ethereum forked because of a hack and enough people wanting to undo it. Tether regularly freezes funds (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/tether-freezes-...). Ownership of a cryptocurrency can be made a crime. Developers can be sanctioned and arrested.

A fork implies 2 diverging lines. Nobody's hand was forced in the ether versus ether classic fork.

Tether is centralized and a scam (and arguably a scam because it is centralized) and irrelevant to the discussion. Anyone can make any token they want and run it according to whoever's rules; this logic would indict the entire internet based on the existence of badly moderated websites.

And cryptography can be made a crime as well. Meanwhile, in the world we inhabit today rather than infinite hypothetical ones, no such thing is happening outside of totalitarian governments, and despite their effort, not one single crypto currency transaction has ever been successfully censored.

> A fork implies 2 diverging lines. Nobody's hand was forced in the ether versus ether classic fork.

The two diverging lines were very much unequal.

> Tether is centralized and a scam (and arguably a scam because it is centralized) and irrelevant to the discussion.

Arguing Tether is irrelevant to the crypto space is absurd. (I agree it's a scam. That's a major problem for the whole ecosystem.)

> And cryptography can be made a crime as well.

Correct. You can censor cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Talk to any business and they will tell you that they don't want to pay %3 to visa or any other credit card. Having a ledger of transactions is how any currency works, it isn't the problem being solved.

Being able to use money electronically without a 3rd party is something that wasn't possible before. Anyone wanting to cut a credit card out of their deal or choose a currency other than their what their country mandates can now do that.

Without a centralized actor of some sort, most 'investors' are not going to be able to get into or out of a crypto position. Vanishingly few people care about using the tokens themselves for anything but gambling.

These institutions can also screw you over by massively inflating the crypto bubble and then crashing spectacularly, tanking your value and poisoning the public perception of cryptocurrency.

The 'point' of cryptocurrency may well be to avoid dependence on centralized institutions, but the effect of cryptocurrency has been to enable all this nonsense. At this point in time you can't say "well it's not crypto's fault!" because it absolutely is. You don't just look at intent when assessing outcomes.

yeah if only a few thousand crypto fanatics trade all these coins there is effectively no ecosystem and thus no upward price pressure to make the nerds rich.

I think most people want a bank that they can trust with their assets. I don't want to store my assets on a hardware wallet that can break or lose and I have to store the backup key in a a safety deposit box. Do you know how hard it is to get a safety deposit box today? Irony is I have to have a bank secure my crypto holdings in case my house burns down.

If you stored your Luna/FTT/whatever on a personal wallet and never touched an exchange, you still lost all your money. The centralized actors run the show whether you interact with them or not.

If you bought BTC before centralized actors became dominant, you didn't lose money. If you bought BTC after, you should have known that could happen.

Crypto has shown that decentralized actors certainly screw you over. All those laws and corporate governance and backup from the govt for banks (which costs something in terms of fees the banks pay) yields people not losing their deposits if banks fail. Occasionally banks still fail today! It doesn't make the news because people don't lose their money.

It's because of these "idiots" choosing to centralize their decentralized crypto, not due to the smart ones holding on to their keys, that the valuation has skyrocketed.

So I'm a nerd interested in this stuff and I have specific ideas -- but I just want to say that I appreciate simply seeing this idea in words in a forum. Lately it's just been positively weird how infrequently I see this very very obvious point of the whole thing.

What idea? The idea of "centralised actor" isn't even an idea, it's gibberish.

It's shorthand for "a possibly unnecessary/overpowered/arbitrary middleman that handles money on behalf of other people and organizations."

This is pretty well established, almost to the point that it doesn't need to be said.

If it is gibberish, why do many people apparently think it makes sense? Are you using 'gibberish' to disparage something you dislike, rather than to describe something as nonsensical?

A lot of people repeat what they hear without giving things any thought. I say it's gibberish because it doesn't mean anything. Try to explain what characteristics set a decentralised actor apart from a centralised actor. Remember that you can't use the word decentralised/centralised, because that's the words we're trying to define.

According to wikipedia, under 'Central Bank': "a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary base. Most central banks also have supervisory and regulatory powers to ensure the stability of member institutions, to prevent bank runs, and to discourage reckless or fraudulent behavior by member banks."

Since the major collapses were by organizations which had a monopoly on creating their own currencies ("tokens") you could call them 'central banks'. Note I am not defending cryptocurrencies -- I am pointing out that you calling something 'gibberish' when people do have an understanding of the meaning is not productive.

Sorry. We were talking about what it means for an "actor" to be "decentralised". Now you're saying that a central bank is someone who has a monopoly on issuing their own currency. So apparently I'm a central bank, you're a central bank, the Chinese restaurant around the corner is a central bank... First of all, none of these people or organisations are central banks. And second, we weren't talking about central banks. I say it again: we were talking about what it means for an "actor" to be "decentralised".

This is one of those 'can't win' situations because no matter how I respond you will find something to pick apart and keep decrying your victory. Good day.

You could give simple, logical, concrete definition of 'decentralised actor' and show the concept isn't gibberish. If you can't come up with anything, maybe you have to concede that it is gibberish.