>Just like cash whoever picks it up is there new owner & police can't do anything about it except for locking him in jail.
I hear people saying this, the problem with this thinking is that there is no actual reason for a digital payment system to be like that. It's actually one of the main drawbacks of cash and one of the major reasons not to use it. Intentionally designing a system this way doesn't improve it, it causes it to have the disadvantages of physical money (easily and irreversibly stolen) as well as the disadvantages of electronic money (easily hacked by anyone on the planet). I argue this combination makes it uniquely suitable for cyber crime, and nothing else. Nobody actually wants this combination of properties in a legitimate payment system.
And I should also state that these properties are policy choices and not really related to anything technical about Bitcoin or blockchains. Banks can also just refuse to give your money back if you get hacked, but doing so would obviously be very bad and make their customers angry. It makes no sense to condone this behavior in crypto.
>Ofcourse he will say that, JP Morgan creates money out of thin air by using fractional reserve, just like cryptocurrency. So basically bitcoin is taking away there business.
This doesn't make sense, you're going into conspiracy theories here. Yeah he said that but he also said numerous times he would take customers' money if they wanted to trade crypto, and that's exactly what he does.
>Author also misses important use like voting where we want record to be public, accountable & certifiable.
What you need there is laws, not blockchains. Electronic voting doesn't help with that and just gets in the way. Every blockchain voting system I've seen has been a total failure that's less secure and less accountable than simple paper ballots. On a more fundamental level, you can't have a voting system for ordinary people that requires them to understand how complicated microchips and algorithms and radio signals and network topologies work in order to trust the system. It's just not going to fly.
>And about the criminal part. For criminals, CASH IS STILL THE KING.
For small transactions, yes. Chalk up another failure for crypto. For large criminal transactions like ransomware and sanctions evasion, it's still crypto all the way. But this also is not for any technical reason, it's because of various policy choices to avoid applying any kind of increased scrutiny to large transactions, and also because of crypto enthusiasts having some kind of weird fixation with helping thugs and autocrats: https://news.yahoo.com/virgil-griffith-us-expert-jailed-0759...
If you figured out all those variables, they would have to be legally enforced by a legal authority -- meaning there wouldn't be a purpose to use an NFT as a "blockchain authority" anymore. They're fundamentally useless.
>which is peer-to-peer, permissionless, censorship resistant, borderless, neutral and open
All of this is false. Every word of it. If that's what you heard from an MIT course then what that professor is doing is shameful. Here, let's go through it.
- Bitcoin isn't peer-to-peer or permissionless and it never has been. The network is de-facto run by mining pools who have exclusive permission to determines who gets to write to the blockchain. In order for two users to send payments to each other they must go through the miners and must pay them fees to gain permission. Peer-to-peer would be if the two users directly sent messages to each other to exchange funds, but that isn't how Bitcoin works. The core design of it intentionally has middlemen and gatekeeping built in.
- Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant or borderless. Have some articles:
- Bitcoin isn't neutral. The political leanings of bitcoin have been known for a very long time. Satoshi intentionally put political statements in the whitepaper and the genesis block. The early adoption by wikileaks and silk road wasn't a coincidence, they had a very specific goal they had in mind.
- Bitcoin isn't open. The code itself is available on github but only a small number of people have commit access. A random person can't just go in and start modifying the bitcoin code at will. The best you can do is try to fork the network and launch your own token, which has happened a lot of times but none succeeded at causing the system to actually become open.
>The rest of the applications that are built on this idea may be "useless" as the author believes, maybe not. I don't know that and I don't think anyone can be sure.
I can say for sure that it's useless because every single positive claim I've ever seen about it has been completely false.
I disagree with the comment you're responding to. Please be more aggressive about dismissing crypto and blockchains as a fraud. It's actually shameful how reluctant some engineers are to do this. This isn't just about using them as a currency. They're bad at literally everything else too. There are no actual niche use cases. More software engineers need to be honest and up front about this before the scams continue. The irrational levels of hype must end. Crypto and blockchains are actually just completely useless. It's been 13 years and still every single person I've ever seen who says they're useful can't name a single actual use case that you can't do better with just a normal database. Even you're getting sucked into this trap.
Like, I get people's reluctance to seem biased, but how long are we going to let this charade continue? How long before we can say enough is enough? "Enterprise blockchain" is a marketing buzzword. Nobody actually wants them except to tick a box on a checklist. They never gained any real traction, because they're useless. They have to be managed by a centralized admin anyway, so what's the point? There just isn't one. Part of this is intentional confusion on the part of promoters, people labeling anything that uses paxos or merkle trees as "blockchain" for marketing reasons, but I hope people also start pushing back against that for what they are: obvious attempts to cash in on the crypto hype by using the word blockchain.
>I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments.
That isn't a legitimate use case. Cash is still largely superior at anonymous transactions, and it always will be because every crypto transaction inherently leaves a rather large paper trail. This can be obfuscated with cryptography techniques but can't be totally eliminated, traditional network tracking still goes a long way.
>Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?
No because they largely aren't. Any activist use case you think you have is disproportionately benefiting criminals. The larger the sum of money they're trying to launder, the more they gain from this. The problem with your line of thinking is that "anonymous payments" isn't actually a feature, it's the default state of things. Big corporations and shady governments would absolutely love to not tell anybody anything about what they're spending money on unless they can put a marketing spin on it. The transparency, accounting and reporting requirements are things that society built because we acknowledge that those who have large amounts of money have more power and therefore deserve more scrutiny.
Those defi projects don't require much to dismantle. The entire point of them is to accumulate more crypto. That's it. And since crypto is useless, they also serve no useful purpose.
The only exception you mentioned is ENS, but there isn't anything special about that. It's just a DNS system but centralized into a smart contract instead, and because it's on ethereum you have to pay gas fees in addition to the registrar fess. No actual benefit to using it versus real DNS.
I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil. People use oil, or ETH as the gas token in this example, to drive the car, or drive the DeFi apps. You can hold DAI without holding any more ETH than is needed for transfers.
“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
>I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil.
No, I understand it perfectly. The only purpose of stablecoins is to provide liquidity in the crypto markets for these defi apps where all the trading action happens. They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them. If it wasn't for the crypto markets you would just be using USD and trading against that directly. Seriously, if you go to the DAI website and you click the big "Use DAI" button it literally just takes you to another crypto investing app.
In the future please avoid falling for this trap that web3 tech pushers set. They claim there is "innovation" in the space but almost all of it is just clones of existing financial services with crypto instead of real money. The fact that there's even something call "stablecoins" should demonstrate to you how bogus this all is. The rest of cryptos are so volatile the only way they can make anything resembling a market out of it is by pegging other cryptos to the USD and doing all their trading against that. It's just adding more middlemen to reach the ultimate goal which, as always, is to eventually cash out into USD. Because everybody knows cryptos by themselves are useless for anything besides speculative gambling.
>“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
Nope, you're wrong about this in the context of most things implemented in smart contracts. You should be extremely wary of anyone making these claims. Since the "smart contract" is actually just a piece of code, typically the smart contract will have an update mechanism that only a centralized actor can use to upload patches and updates to the code. IIRC this is still how ENS works last time I checked. Like almost everything in crypto, it's a centralized service that the authors lie about and masquerade it as decentralized.
Sometimes they'll do an even worse thing by having "governance tokens" that grant you powers to update the smart contract, and someone with a lot of money can just come in and buy all the tokens and take it over. So these "smart contracts" are not really decentralized in any sense. If anyone says "we are making this thing that can't be controlled, censored or manipulated" then that's a massive red flag.
There's also the question of why anyone actually wants that. What other industry would this be ok in? If someone had a company that made self-driving cars advertised as being "uncontrollable and uncensorable by driving laws", nobody would want that. We'd recognize that company is actually just selling unstoppable killing machines. So why do people for some bizarre reason think this is a good thing in financial markets where the super-rich already have extreme power consolidation? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
> They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them.
A claim that is easily refuted. Send 1000 DAI to an individual and they can now hold a USD pegged asset non custodially, without a USD bank account, and transfer any amount to other individuals.
Smart contracts can be made immutable and locked. The ENS root multisig owners have locked .eth TLD and have minimal ability to affect any existing .eth ENS name. Since the contracts are open source, if the ENS team went rogue and against the community’s wishes, the protocol could be forked. You can read about it here:
https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions
>they can now hold a USD pegged asset non custodially
Nope, this is wrong. Any stablecoin is necessarily centralized in order to maintain the peg, in the case of DAI it has a "custodian" in the form of MakerDAO. Look it up, this is how they all work. When they say the words "non-custodial" it's a blatant lie. Everything in crypto has a custodian, some projects are just aggressive about trying to conceal them.
>Without a USD bank account, and transfer any amount to other individuals.
But this isn't a reason to hold them nor is it an innovation. You could also just do that with moneygram or a similar service, no blockchains required. The only thing you can meaningfully do with this that you can't do with another cash-only service or a bank is to trade other cryptos with it, but that also isn't even for any technical reason. If the banks decided to start exchanging cryptos directly, they could. And that would totally remove the reason for any stablecoins to exist.
This is coming back to the same problem with any of these questions like "but what about the web3 tech?" There isn't any new tech here. You just described an existing thing you can do (send money) but with some buzzwords attached. If you dig into it there's never any actual explanation as to why the "web3 tech" makes it better, because it doesn't. So please just don't ask those types of questions, find some better ones.
>Smart contracts can be made immutable and locked.
Well that isn't how ENS works. And that's a universally bad idea anyway because that means it can never get any upgrades or bug fixes ever again. It's like saying your data center is "decentralized" and therefore better because you encased it in a block of concrete so one can get in to upgrade the servers ever again. Well no, it's not, it's still centralized, you just made it worse for no reason.
>if the ENS team went rogue and against the community’s wishes, the protocol could be forked
This is exactly how DNS works as well. There is no practical difference, and yet no one forks the DNS root because doing so would be extremely expensive and pointless. Because it's not just about forking the protocol, you also need to fork the whole network and overcome network effects, and that's the actual hard part. ENS offers absolutely nothing to fix this compared to DNS. It's the same thing. I should also point you to this sentence in the FAQ:
>The root node is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community
Which is a random, centralized group of people hand picked by the ENS founder, acting similarly to a corporate board of directors. There's absolutely nothing "decentralized" about it in any way. I'm completely serious when I say this whole thing is a blatant scam built on lies. If you find yourself trying to look for positives in this system, you're doing something wrong. It's literally all bad.
MakerDAO has no ability to block individual holders' DAI tokens. ENS DAO and ENS root multisig owners have no way to revoke your registered ENS .eth name address or take control of its records. You and I have a different idea of "custodial." Banks, CeFi lenders, payment processors can and do regularly eject and censor customers on a per-transaction basis, even building automated flagging systems to do this.
> But this isn't a reason to hold them.
The person now has DAI, an asset that has value, and that they can send to another person. They received the DAI in 30 seconds, without needing a bank, and can send it to another person in 30 seconds, also without them needing a bank. The closest comparison is cash, but you cannot securely send cash around the world in 30 seconds without a bank.
There are many contracts and protocols that are designed to be immutable-only with forking as the only mode of governance, I would advise doing a little more research into the development practices.
> This is exactly how DNS works as well. There is no practical difference
Except that domain name registrars are centralized entities with complete custody over their owned domains, unlike .eth names which are not owned by any central party, and cannot even be revoked or controlled by the root node multisig owners.
A lot of your writing seems like a sort of zealotry against crypto, which is understandable as we are on HN, but it does not mean it is accurate.
>MakerDAO has no ability to block individual holders' DAI tokens. ENS DAO and ENS root multisig owners have no way to revoke your registered ENS .eth name address or take control of its records.
Nope, they actually can do all of this by just updating the smart contracts. And even if this were true, it would be an anti-feature. I don't want to use a system where the illegitimate transactions of thieves and hackers can't be blocked. Just look at how many smart contracts get hacked to see what a bad idea it is to say "we never block any bad actors". It just makes no sense at all to try to spin that as a selling point. It's not in any way a good thing.
>The person now has DAI, an asset that has value, and that they can send to another person. They received the DAI in 30 seconds, without needing a bank, and can send it to another person in 30 seconds, also without them needing a bank. The closest comparison is cash, but you cannot securely send cash around the world in 30 seconds without a bank.
Yes you can, I already addressed this. Moneygram and similar services literally does this, without cryptos or blockchains. All you need to do in order to accomplish this is to have someone else who has some funds (or a bank account) that is offering to make the transfer for you and gives you a code (or lets you use your own personal code, like a private key) to redeem the funds on the other end. No blockchains are required at all to do this, adding blockchains to this only makes it worse because it unnecessarily adds more extra steps.
>There are many contracts and protocols that are designed to be immutable-only with forking as the only mode of governance, I would advise doing a little more research into the development practices.
I've done plenty of research and I'd say that's a universally bad idea, and whoever is saying that has no idea what they're talking about and should be discredited. Forking is an extreme method of last resort that has a lot of friction, it isn't something you want to encourage people to do just because of some small easily-fixable bug. Especially when people stand to lose a lot of money because of those bugs. This is just another instance where this stuff is like the wild west with no regard for normal development practices used in financial software.
>Except that domain name registrars are centralized entities with complete custody over their owned domains, unlike .eth names which are not owned by any central party, and cannot even be revoked or controlled by the root node multisig owners.
Ok but you just said some other party could fork and replace the protocol as governance, which one is it? If there turns out to be some nasty bug in that contract the developers will just say "whoops, everyone use this new contract instead" and then everyone will be frustrated but will still switch over to it because they have no other choice. Or for the nuclear option, if the ethereum developers really wanted to, they could just change the ethereum code itself to mess with that smart contract, just like they already did in 2016 and they could easily do again if they decided to. "Non-custodial" in crypto is a complete lie. I'll say it again, there is always custody. This is still inherently a network service that has to run on physical computers and has to get updated by humans who need to perform customer service and all that jazz. In crypto it's just intentionally obfuscated who actually controls what.
Even assuming for a moment that all this works like you say it does, it still would be a bad thing that isn't innovative at all, it's just lazy! I would absolutely not use a domain name service that refuses to block terrorists and criminals and refuses to come up with any way to effectively block them. I don't want to be on the same network as them at all, everything you're saying is an anti-feature.
>A lot of your writing seems like a sort of zealotry against crypto
It's not. What I actually do have zealotry against is liars and thieves. Crypto just happens to be overloaded with those types. The entirety of it is a fraud based on faulty technology that can't actually do any of what is promised in any meaningful way that is different from existing systems. The core of your comment seems to be saying "if you don't like it then just fork" but this is the whole problem cryptos were pitched to solve in the first place! They wanted to "fork" the banking system because they were angry about bank baliouts but now they've gone and done the exact same stuff over and over again!
Each one of your posts has exponentially more tangents and problems than the last so it is hard to reply to it all, but
> if the ethereum developers really wanted to, they could just change the ethereum code itself to mess with that smart contract
Forking is a user activated decision. If an honest majority users of the chain wanted to point to a new ENS contract to resolve names to addresses, they could come to that consensus regardless of the will of core devs or root multisig owners.
If an honest majority of users would like GoDaddy to stop censoring X.com domain, or PayPal to stop blocking funds, they cannot fork the centralized private protocol. If a dishonest MakerDAO actor manages to push an unwanted change in DAI contracts to block a user’s funds, the honest majority could easily reject the change by following the old protocol.
>Each one of your posts has exponentially more tangents
Is this not what you were asking for though? I'm addressing all the concerns about these random web3 and defi projects, yes they're tangents but so is the whole conversation as it relates to the original article. None of that fundamentally changes the game, crypto is still a big fraud.
>Forking is a user activated decision. If an honest majority users of the chain wanted to point to a new ENS contract to resolve names to addresses, they could come to that consensus regardless of the will of core devs or root multisig owners.
Ok, with DNS you could also just do this by spinning up some new DNS root servers and trying to get everyone to use that. People have already tried to do this multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Again you're not saying anything new here. None of this changes just because someone decided to write the name resolution code in ethereum solidity instead of C++.
>If an honest majority of users would like GoDaddy to stop censoring X.com domain, or PayPal to stop blocking funds, they cannot fork the centralized private protocol.
I'm sorry what? This whole sentence makes no sense. DNS is an open protocol, and Paypal isn't a protocol. No you can't convince Paypal to do business with someone they don't want to do business with (unless you force them legally) but the same is also true of the big crypto companies like Binance. If they decide some customer is bad for business they can just block their wallet and force them to go somewhere else. It's the same exact thing. Also I should remind you, Paypal is now literally a crypto company that offers crypto services.
>If a dishonest actor manages to push an unwanted change in DAI contracts to block a user’s funds, the honest majority could easily reject the change by following the old protocol.
How would they do this when their tokens are already gone because the original smart contract was looted? This isn't a theoretical, this stuff happens constantly all the time, another big one just happened last week: https://www.investopedia.com/mango-markets-got-hacked-675007...
Software developers should universally reject payment in crypto, but especially monero. I know I would if you tried to pay me with that. It's the same situation as tornado cash. By using it you're providing cover for north korea and other sanctioned entities to launder money: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/02/12/north-korea-is-e...
It has no other real legal or legitimate use case, it otherwise works the same as other cryptos. You could just pay those developers in cash. Most developers I've known that aren't hardcore crypto zealots prefer to get paid in cash.
No, that paragraph is correct. You may be either missing some context or using a different definition of blockchain that doesn't apply to crypto and web3. All the selling points that crypto people have said about blockchains are completely false. It is just a hashed data structure but that's the point -- how is a hashed data structure going to solve inequality, minimize global energy usage, stop wars and feed the hungry? Of course it can't, but you can still see plenty of those outrageous claims floating around on crypto twitter from people who should know better. As far as hashed data structures go, it's not even a good one. It's universally bad at everything for a number of reasons. This is a database system intentionally designed so that writing to the database becomes increasingly and artificially expensive and/or wasteful, for no actual benefit. There's nothing interesting about them.
There doesn't need to be a single person collecting the dollars for it to be a ponzi-esque scheme. The reason people call it a ponzi is because there is no actual profit anywhere in the system nor is there any reasonable mechanism for any typical investors to get stable profits. It's all speculation. The only way you can make a profit from "investing" in crypto is by selling to someone else at a higher price. Yes, ponzi schemes can continue indefinitely if people keep dumping money into it and nobody shuts them down.
Gold bars sitting there also don't produce anything and investors rely on other investors buying for a profit. Does that mean gold is also a Ponzi scheme?
No, gold actually has a real demand derived from legitimate commercial uses. If it didn't, and the only reason you were buying it was to try and dump it off on other investors for a profit, then it would have the properties of a Ponzi. Make sense? It isn't exactly the same as Charles Ponzi's scheme, but it is similar enough that the layperson understands what it means when you say Ponzi. There isn't any actual profit in the system, all the "profit" comes from other investors.
Bitcoins and blockchains aren't giving anyone a chance to create a new financial system. It's the same system. Ever notice how the goal of every prominent crypto company is to just accumulate real hard dollars, not crypto? You still can't meaningfully buy anything legal with crypto without exchanging it for dollars first. There's no reason for this ever to change either. Bitcoin was never even intended to be anything beyond a payment system, that idea that it was going to be "a new form of money" was pushed later by people who didn't understand the system but were attracted to it for ideological reasons. It was pretty obvious by the early 2010s that it was going to fail as a payment system, so a host of new narratives were created and people just ran with it despite none of them making any sense.
There is absolutely nothing to stop fractional reserve banking from re-occurring in crypto. In fact it's already happening on a massive scale with stablecoins, which are pretty much doing all the same things as banks, but even less regulated. If you think the current capitalistic system is a fraud then it makes no sense why you would search for solutions in the form of unregulated "tokens" minted by random people and backed by nothing and it all can vanish in the blink of an eye. It's all the same scams but somehow worse.
You can just mint your own token and then lie to people about how much bitcoin/dollars/euros/pesos/whatever is backing it, or not disclose it at all, which is exactly what they already do. At least central banks require lenders to have minimum reserves and you can know that regulated banks aren't going below that limit. No such thing exists in crypto, it's the wild west.
One could also create their own gravel pebble based token and state that it is backed by something valuable. I don’t see how the existence of crypto changes much in this regard.
Yes, that's my point. Crypto doesn't change anything. It's just more of the same.
And FYI there is nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking when it's done in the right way with some mechanism (like regulation) to stop the banks from lending out too much and becoming insolvent or causing runaway inflation. It is not a big scam for the banks to take your money. Central banks all over the world are using it successfully to finance their economies. It actually works and occurs naturally in any banking system, including those in crypto. Except in crypto there is no central bank to cover for bank failures, the only option crypto lenders have in the case of a bank run is to just halt withdrawals or go bankrupt like old times. Which has happened extremely often in crypto to every prominent crypto company I can think of, like the one that just caused the crash earlier this year.
In my experience, people loudly saying on social media that fractional reserve banking doesn't work are trying to sell you a narrative of conspiracy theories, likely to promote their alternative "investments" that often seem to include, surprise surprise, selling you crypto.
It would be quite incredible to be able to lend out and charge interest on $1000 when only having $100. On the surface, that's pretty dumb and it's history has entirely fraudulent roots. However, it ultimately provides the needed entropy in the system to appropriately incentivize participants in the economy to produce goods and services at the lowest possible cost (in other words, optimize quality of life - or at least starvation avoidance).
It isn't at all clear to me however that the current system is optimal as it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value. The size of the financial services sector of an economy is likely a reasonable proxy for how suboptimal the system is.
>On the surface, that's pretty dumb and it's history has entirely fraudulent roots.
This is again a conspiracy theory typically promoted by adherents of the long discredited pseudoscience known as Austrian Economics. Don't fall for this. The fact that it's working at the set interest rates is proof that the system is not a fraud, because the bank should absolutely be able to make more good loans when it knows it can. It's only a fraud if it there are no regulations or safety nets and the banks become insolvent and everybody loses their money. Which right now is mostly a problem that crypto has. Central banks have become increasingly good at preventing it from happening with their own currencies.
>it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value
Well this isn't true. Providing liquidity and assuming risks are actual valuable financial services that the current system gives. The demand for these services won't go away if you change how the banks work. And the alternative is even worse anyway, where banks wouldn't be able to make money from loans at all, and they would just charge everyone mandatory increasing deposit/withdrawal fees. Hey this is starting to sound a lot like crypto.
The "rich get richer by doing nothing" effect is just a common feature of capitalism. In that aspect crypto is again, even worse. It provides no goods or services either, the entire thing is a waste, built on a technological fraud and propped up by "whales" who don't want to lose their investment.
By "fraudulent roots", I'm talking about Wisselbank in the 1600s.
>> Providing liquidity and assuming risks are actual valuable
Liquidity is another name for creating measures of value. A bank is a group of people that have magic wands to create these measures. The magic wand becomes less magical with defaulted loans - this is the risk that you mention.
Banks used to also provide a safe way to store things (vaults and so on). Now, a bank is a centralized database + magic wand.
In any case, it seems you are convinced that the current system is optimal and cannot be improved. I'm less convinced but that's fine. I encourage you to free your mind a bit. The first step is to use language that triggers no emotional responses. For example, "organization" is a set of people - nothing more. Money (massive emotional trigger) is a measure of value. If you know how to code, I encourage you to implement Bitcoin from the whitepaper (or just read it - it is very simple). This helped me infinitely more than listening to various Bitcoin maximalists/minimalists on YouTube. This understanding hasn't motivated me to own any crypto of any kind thus far however.
I hear people saying this, the problem with this thinking is that there is no actual reason for a digital payment system to be like that. It's actually one of the main drawbacks of cash and one of the major reasons not to use it. Intentionally designing a system this way doesn't improve it, it causes it to have the disadvantages of physical money (easily and irreversibly stolen) as well as the disadvantages of electronic money (easily hacked by anyone on the planet). I argue this combination makes it uniquely suitable for cyber crime, and nothing else. Nobody actually wants this combination of properties in a legitimate payment system.
And I should also state that these properties are policy choices and not really related to anything technical about Bitcoin or blockchains. Banks can also just refuse to give your money back if you get hacked, but doing so would obviously be very bad and make their customers angry. It makes no sense to condone this behavior in crypto.
>Ofcourse he will say that, JP Morgan creates money out of thin air by using fractional reserve, just like cryptocurrency. So basically bitcoin is taking away there business.
This doesn't make sense, you're going into conspiracy theories here. Yeah he said that but he also said numerous times he would take customers' money if they wanted to trade crypto, and that's exactly what he does.
>Author also misses important use like voting where we want record to be public, accountable & certifiable.
What you need there is laws, not blockchains. Electronic voting doesn't help with that and just gets in the way. Every blockchain voting system I've seen has been a total failure that's less secure and less accountable than simple paper ballots. On a more fundamental level, you can't have a voting system for ordinary people that requires them to understand how complicated microchips and algorithms and radio signals and network topologies work in order to trust the system. It's just not going to fly.
>And about the criminal part. For criminals, CASH IS STILL THE KING.
For small transactions, yes. Chalk up another failure for crypto. For large criminal transactions like ransomware and sanctions evasion, it's still crypto all the way. But this also is not for any technical reason, it's because of various policy choices to avoid applying any kind of increased scrutiny to large transactions, and also because of crypto enthusiasts having some kind of weird fixation with helping thugs and autocrats: https://news.yahoo.com/virgil-griffith-us-expert-jailed-0759...