7366241494 t1_j1y8z6b wrote
Reply to comment by asked2manyquestions in This little-known firm with a weird website was central to the misappropriation of FTX customers' money, regulators say by RaiderOfZeHater
Complexities in crypto are getting easier all the time. Interfaces are improving.
True decentralization is only getting started. You are wrong that distributed exchanges have a third party. Many do not and are truly peer to peer.
And transaction fees for things like Lightning Network payments are minuscule. Far far less than using a credit/debit card. Far less than a wire. Far faster than ACH. Perhaps you have old information about transaction fees? I can’t understand why you’d argue that banks are cheaper.
asked2manyquestions t1_j1yiila wrote
Yes, yes, yes, it’s improving all the time. Just getting started. We’re at the beginning.
Any other patently false propaganda slogans I missed?
Bitcoin is 13 years old.
Let that sink in for a bit before you say things like “is only getting started.”
I didn’t say distributed exchanges have a third party. I said the distributed exchange is itself a third party.
Satoshi designed a peer to peer payment platform. It’s literally the first sentence of the white paper abstract.
The only problem is that for it to be a true peer to peer platform, buyers and sellers have to trust each other unless they’re going to show up in a parking lot with cash to exchange for Bitcoin.
So third parties stepped in to perform that function, thus making it no longer a peer to peer payment platform and introducing a form of centralization.
Everything after that, involves centralization.
That’s why I said that calling anything with on-ramps and off-ramps to fiat makes true decentralization impossible.
So it’s a technology doomed to failure. It either has to rely on centralization, meaning calling it decentralized is dishonest, or it requires every transaction in the world to convert to crypto.
Also, let me circle back to your comment about complexities getting easier. That’s not true because the complexities are baked into the product.
The fact that after 13 years of crypto you can still lose money by mistyping a wallet address, with zero chance of ever recovering your funds, is how it’s supposed to work.
Additionally, billions of dollars have been lost/stolen due to hacked wallets, people forgetting their recovery phrase, etc.
And proudly, the crypto world celebrates that as proof of how secure the technology is.
Saying that it’s getting easier is plainly false.
And, ironically, the only real solution I’ve ever heard offered is to have a trusted third party be a custodian for your wallet keys which sounds an awful lot like a bank.
To your last point, it sounds like you are the one with an incomplete view.
I live in Thailand. Last year I had to transfer several hundred thousand dollars from my account to my wife’s account at a different bank (making a home purchase).
Transaction fee was $0.00
Call me when there’s a lightning network that pays me to move money because zero is a small cost.
I also bring money into my Thai bank account from my U.S. bank accounts every quarter.
I’ve done that via Bitcoin a few times and I always end up paying more than TransferWise.
Plus, it’s a bigger pain in the ass.
I have to transfer money to an exchange, buy Bitcoin (fee involved), transfer it to my Thai exchange wallet (fee involved), sell the crypto on the Thai exchange (fee involved), and then have the money sent to my Thai bank.
On TransferWise, I log into my bank and send money to TransferWise (no fee), I tell TW to send it to my Thai bank account (fee involved), and it just shows up.
Just as a real world example, I transferred $3k from the US to my Thai bank last week. The only fee I paid was $19.69 and the exchange rate was dead-on with the official exchange rate so no FX gouging.
I just punched buying $3,000 USD worth of Bitcoin and the fee on just one leg of this multi step process would have been $44.70.
Plus every buy and sell incurs hidden fee called a spread. There’s a price Bitcoin if offered for sale (higher) and a price you can sell Bitcoin (lower).
So, crypto is not fundamentally cheaper.
7366241494 t1_j1zkxrz wrote
The internet took 30 years to go from ARPANET to Facebook and it wasn’t trying to overthrow an entrenched global industry like banking. 11 years after TCP/IP was created, we didn’t even have the World Wide Web yet.
You are somewhat wrong about mistyping addresses. There are checksums which prevent simple errors.
Buyers and sellers absolutely do not need a third party unless there’s fiat involved.. This is a fiat problem not crypto.
Your problems seem to be with on- and off- ramps not with crypto to crypto transactions. I’ve sent large amounts of Bitcoin internationally as well and it was much better than using a bank wire, both in terms of time and cost.
Again, it sounds like mostly you have an issue with your Bhat on and off ramps and the local Thai Bitcoin exchange, not with crypto transfers themselves. Please never pay $40 to move Bitcoin. Lightning would be 1¢.
asked2manyquestions t1_j220ix9 wrote
Wow, it’s like just hearing the same stuff being regurgitated.
Please, if you’re going to be an advocate for crypto, at least be a good one.
These BS talking points might work on weak minded people desperate to get rich quick but some of us actually know quite a bit about this topic and aren’t buying it.
ARPANET was a government sponsored program that was mainly used by researchers and academics.
It caught on as people outside that community began to realize the potential.
Your argument is completely disingenuous (as are many crypto arguments) because in the 1980s and early 1990s a home computer was quite rare.
People couldn’t adopt a technology they had no idea existed and that they had no way to access.
The big difference between the internet and crypto is that as soon as people did become aware of the internet, usage grew and, really, has never stopped growing as more and more devices are still being added to the internet.
Crypto, on the other hand, constantly goes through boom and bust cycles based almost entirely off the premise that newbies can get rich.
It’s more like a perpetual pyramid scheme than it is anything like the internet, which has actual utility people almost can’t live without.
> Buyers and sellers absolutely do not need a third party unless there’s fiat involved.. This is a fiat problem not crypto
And I have now made this point for the third time because you keep ignoring it.
Crypto decentralization is doomed to failure unless 100% switch to crypto because as long as people exchange fiat for crypto, crypto isn’t decentralized.
That’s why crypto is such a farce. Satoshi created Bitcoin right around the time of the great financial crises in 2008.
One of the underlying assumptions is that the world will spiral into a period of massive hyperinflation rendering most fiat worthless.
That was the whole reason for decentralization.
I have a friend who wrote two books about crypto at that time and his books are filled with making the case that when people are bartering bullets and guns for food, crypto will be king. Easy to travel with, can’t be stolen, etc.
But when that didn’t happen. And, the crypto community, as it always does, simply changed the definition of success.
> Your problems seem to be with on- and off- ramps not with crypto to crypto transactions.
No, my problem is with calling something that is centralized, decentralized because too many people in the crypto community are too ignorant of what decentralized means to understand the vast majority of crypto is actually very centralized.
Basically, the entire DeFi space is just a bunch of people that are telling their marks that things are decentralized when, really, the true objective is replacing who is control of the centralization.
Every time crypto touches the physical world, it has to be centralized.
And that just means that all you’re doing is changing the name of the people that profit.
It doesn’t solve any new problem, it’s just a wealth transfer.
In 13 years, tell me even one thing that crypto does that’s easier, less complicated, or is superior to the existing system.
Even transferring money from my US bank to my Thai bank involves half the number of steps and is cheaper.
And that was the premier use case for crypto, moving money across borders.
It can’t even do that better.
> You are somewhat wrong about mistyping addresses. There are checksums which prevent simple errors.
You were smart to caveat that with the word “somewhat” because you welll know that this isn’t true. Just go to any crypto sub on Reddit and you’ll see plenty examples of people losing their coins by sending them to a wrong address.
But, you know, it’s only been 13 years and they haven’t solved this basic problem. The future must seem so bright to people like you. Imagine one day, crypto being as safe and easy to use as . . . What we already have. LOL.
> I’ve sent large amounts of Bitcoin internationally as well and it was much better than using a bank wire, both in terms of time and cost.
A bank wire? You’re comparing Bitcoin to a bank wire?
This is what we call using a selective example.
Is it easier and cheaper than using TransferWise? Or local solutions like DeeMoney?
No, it’s not. And if you go around the expat community, you’ll find very few expats that use crypto for transferring money across borders.
Hell, most don’t even use bank wires. Bank wires aren’t really intended for small transactions.
So, you’re using the wrong tool and then declaring it inferior to crypto. Nice one. LOL.
> Again, it sounds like mostly you have an issue with your Bhat on and off ramps and the local Thai Bitcoin exchange, not with crypto transfers themselves. Please never pay $40 to move Bitcoin. Lightning would be 1¢.
Please check what I said, I quoted the $40 fee for Coinbase, you know, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world.
I didn’t even bother checking the price of what it would cost me on the sell side because the buy side was already more expensive.
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