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by seibelj 2574 days ago
It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet, whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted. If not blockchain, certainly there is room for improvement in our current system?

Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt.
3 comments
ceejayoz 2574 days ago
> It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet

That's a bizarre assertion. Both individuals and entire exchanges find their cryptocurrency wallets regularly compromised.

> whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted

For which there are both legal and practical protections in place. If your card is compromised, your liability is strictly limited, and it's typically a fairly easy process to recover from.

> Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt.

This is the "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it." fallacy.

Banking can be improved evolutionarily without throwing out the whole system in favor of a fraud-ridden platform with scaling issues. It's already happening - transfers between banks in Europe are now near real-time via TIPS, for example.

None of these improvements require blockchain, or even bleeding edge computer science of any kind.

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wtmt 2574 days ago
> It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet

That’s a false claim. Have you heard of people losing their wallets or about cold storage for cryptocurrency wallets to prevent others from stealing what one has? A cryptocurrency wallet is not anymore secure than the device it resides on and the security policies and practices used for the device.

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jacques_chester 2574 days ago
> whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted

Which are also regularly reverted without fuss, regardless of whether you can work out who the attacker was.

Banking is more than a ledger system. It's a ledger system and a massive web of institutional protections behind the ledger. By the time blockchain evolves the same norms, institutions, legal precedents, regulatory oversight and so on and so forth it just be a much-slower-than-a-real-database linked list.

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