I wasted years of my life in crypto

I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.

It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.

You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.

> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

> That problem already has solutions

The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto.

The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)

Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back.

A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back.

Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?

As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department.

Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege.

For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets.

None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say.

You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable.

The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid.

You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.