[nostrademons]

> It's just goes against human nature and how the world operates.

Is that actually true? Or just true for a certain subset of humans?

Human nature isn't actually fixed and immutable. Each generation redefines the world with culture, practices, and institutions that seem totally natural given the environment they grew up in. I remember my mom insisting that I wear a suit to every interviewer and send thank-you notes to every interviewer; I learned later that the former gets you dinged for culture fit at most Silicon Valley companies, and the latter seems creepy. Conversely, several practices that were decried as "entitled Millenials!" when I first entered the workforce, like expecting to change jobs every couple years or expecting your employer to provide lunch, are now fairly standard practice, and the economy has shifted to embrace that new business culture.

When I talk to people who graduated college after 2013, the vast majority of them believe that crypto & DeFi are right, natural, and will inevitably take over the global financial system.

Right now, that's 5 years of working people, in junior positions, vs. 40 years of people in senior positions who think that crypto is an affront to the natural order of things. This site is largely Gen-Xers and Xennials who are deeply embedded in the previous wave (the WWW) of remaking how the economy works; I doubt most of us have close personal friendships with people who graduated college in the last 5 years (I only hear about this through friends' younger siblings, recent alumni of my alma mater, and junior employees hired by my startup-founder friends - that and explicitly seeking it out on Reddit).

But if you look at this situation demographically, change is inevitable for the simple reason that we're going to stop working and die before they are. And even something that appeals only to 18-28 year olds still has the ability to support several billion dollar markets, given that this is the age group whose consumer preferences are still malleable with 50+ years of consumption ahead of them.

[rapsey]

> Is that actually true? Or just true for a certain subset of humans?

The strengths of cryptocurrencies are also exactly why they are unnatural and undesired for most people in the real world.

Who do you turn to when you get scammed, hacked or robbed when it results in lost crypto funds? No one. Everything is final with no recourse. No mistakes are permitted. People are not robots, software is not foolproof and people who write it are not perfect.

Ruthless peer to peer with no central authority or possibility of appeal is not how the world operates and it is not what people are comfortable with. Anyone who is comfortable with it is a short sighted fool.

> When I talk to people who graduated college after 2013, the vast majority of them believe that crypto & DeFi are right, natural, and will inevitably take over the global financial system.

Young people are dreamers and they have a whole lot of energy to pursue dreams. They take inspiration from other successful dreamers who have made it with a lot of hard work and tenacity. They take inspiration from ideas of the past that have revolutionized the world.

What they don't think about is the 90+% of people who have also worked their ass off in pursuit of their dreams or the world changing ideas that showed promise, but went nowhere. That is because those ideas are soon forgotten and the people never made it out of obscurity.

[nostrademons]

> Who do you turn to when you get scammed, hacked or robbed when it results in lost crypto funds?

The same thing has been said about self-checkouts ("Who do you turn to when you can't find an item?"), self-serve purchasing models like AdWords or AWS ("Who do you turn to when you need customer support?"), and self-employments platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, etc. ("Who do you turn to when you want time off or career development?")

The actual response to all of these is "Well, I'll figure it out myself." People who use self-checkouts generally know how the aisles are laid out in their favorite supermarkets, or they just walk until they find things. People who use low-volume AdWords, AWS, or SaaS vendors turn to forums & StackOverflow when things go wrong. People who drive for Uber just stop working when they want to. Similarly, people who want to avoid getting scammed, hacked or robbed with cryptocurrency do their research on vendors; they do Google image searches on headshots of ICOs and look up founders on LinkedIn to see if they're fakes; they keep their crypto on a hardware wallet in their physical possession; they use strong passwords and 2FA that they don't re-use for any other sites; and they don't talk about their Bitcoin holdings on the Internet.

All of these developments are controversial, because you actually are losing a human interaction that some people found helpful. That hasn't stopped them from growing quickly, because they take the human (and their associated salary) out of the loop. This lets firms offer a service to groups of people that it wasn't previously able to afford it. If you wanted to buy ads for a global, targeted audience before Google, you just couldn't do it. If you wanted to host software before AWS, you went to a colo or dedicated hosting provider and put in a lot more effort than their self-serve solution. If you wanted a side-hustle before the gig economy, it generally wasn't worth the search costs of trying to get an additional job.

If you have less than $10K in deposits (which is the majority of people these days), the bank is not your friend. They try to get you on little fees for everything, and pay you effectively zero interest, and occasionally go down for maintenance when it's exceptionally inconvenient for you (aside from many of their services only being available from 9:00-4:30). When the alternative is that, then the idea of a global, decentralized system that charges a flat fee per transaction and no fee to hold your wealth gets pretty attractive.

[numtel]

There's no reason a cryptocurrency cannot be paired with judicial institutions that provide recourse for lost or stolen funds.

The innovation of cryptocurrency is simple and undeniable.

Fiat money requires armed forces to secure its supply against counterfeiters.

Cryptocurrency uses math to defeat counterfeiting.

[rapsey]

> The innovation of cryptocurrency is simple and undeniable.

Yes but does the innovation have market value? For the amount of investment, there has been no real demand for the innovation.

> Fiat money requires armed forces to secure its supply against counterfeiters.

Yes fiat money lives in the real world. This is why it is used in the real world.

> Cryptocurrency uses math to defeat counterfeiting.

Counterfeiting is a minor issue in the real world at best.

[numtel]

Counterfeiting is a minor issue in our daily lives because so much resources have to be devoted to keeping it that way.

"By 1865, up to one-third or even one-half of American money in circulation was fake." [0]

Governments regularly have to redesign their bills in order to prevent counterfeiting.

Extreme punishments are given for the crime of counterfeiting.

It's not just private actors to worry about. Opposing nations could destabilize an economy.

When counterfeiting is not a concern and a currency system can be created with very little effort, we can make currencies that we have more agency over.

The demand isn't for a cheaper way to combat counterfeiting but for greater agency over how the money supply is formed.

There is a massive, global call for reduced wealth inequality that existing governments have not been able to address. I'm not certain that cryptocurrency can do it either but it does seem like a possibility.

[0] https://time.com/3774327/lincoln-history-secret-service/