If you actually look at how the software work it's clear they're not doing that - they are just having the passport encrypt a nonce. Then they decrypt it with the passport's public key to confirm that the passport is authentic.
Informed skepticism is the opposite of “blindly anti-crypto”: hawkers have had years to make the case for their systems but most of them have failed to produce anything of value. If you can talk knowledgeably about a system and a real problem which it solves, you won't have a problem.
But it's rarely informed. The US has very outdated, insecure and absurdly expensive retail banking and most people seem to be completely oblivious to it, which is why they fail to the potential of settlement systems like Ripple. Financial transactions are just small pieces of information, no different than funny GIFs or instant messages. It costs virtually nothing to move them around instantaneously across the globe in a secure way, and yet here we are, discussing if that has any value over snail-mail type of experience.
Europe stands out somewhat and we can argue that cryptocurrencies don't bring much improvement onto the table. Banking fees are already very low and Europe is currently rolling out instant credit transfer. I can open a bank account for free and without any recurring fees, and make up to 5000 payments a month for free to anyone in Europe, arriving in less than 20 seconds, available 24/7/365, automatable through APIs. But the rest of the world... my God what stone age you're living in, people with paper checks and overdraft fees imagine they're "informed skeptics" against modern settlement systems. Feels like early 1990s with people saying that email is pointless and they'll never use it.
Agree on all counts (I am in the US), but what does it have to do with crypto? And with this coin in particular?
Whatever the solution we end up with, it won't be decentralized. No one wants to lose their money because they lost some token or paper, and their computer broke.
It will be great new distributed world -- but it would also be licensed, insured, centrally approved, KYC'd, and free of chinese cryptominers and people stealing your passport numbers.
I am left puzzled by the strong skepticism and even downright hostility I often see. I don't think any current cryptocurrency will take over the world and replace existing financial systems like fanboys argue, but they are trying out highly desirable features in real-world environment. I am certain many of them will eventually become widely adopted.
Even the basic requirement of all transactions being digitally signed is a huge step forward, especially when paired with hardware wallets[1]. It's crazy that we're still typing plain-text credit card numbers into inherently insecure computers, hoping that we'll be charged the correct amount (I recently wasn't), and that no keylogger or sketchy merchant steals or accidentally leaks the information.
Sure, dealing with digital keys and long hex addresses is clunky like sending email in 1984[2], but I feel there's a lot of real innovation thrown out with the bathwater when the whole sphere is called pointless Ponzi and so on, which is particularly odd to see in a forum dedicated to startup culture.
I have been dealing with the computers for a long time, and I know they fail. The hardware breaks, my computer gets malware, vendor's computer gets malware, I get nothing, I get wrong item and vendor is unresponsive, software makes errors, I type the wrong thing and click the wrong button.
I think it is a terrible idea to keep any significant amount of money in any place where it is easy to lose, like a cryptocurrency. And if you are recommending cryptocurrency as a safe storage to someone who is not an expert, you should feel bad, because you are lying to them.
And the worst part of all, is cryptcoiners _never_ _listen_. In fact, directly in the message you are replying to, I wrote: "No one wants to lose their money because they lost some token or paper, and their computer broke." And what was your response? You point me to hardware wallet.
The hardware wallets are great if you are a crypto expert. If you are a regular person, you are going to be lose your recovery words and forget your password after vacation, and then you'll (almost) lose $30K like Mark Frauenfelder did [0]
Telling people to use crypto for significant amounts of money is like encouraging them to juggle live grenades. Yes, it looks cool and pretty safe if you know the trick. But if everyone starts doing this, someone will get killed.
So, I rarely see people saying that the U.S. financial system doesn’t have tons of room for improvement. The problem is when someone comes in pushing something which features at least one of {costs more, no consumer protections, harder to use, slower}, especially when it’s something like Bitcoin where they have an obvious financial stake in getting you to buy in even if it’s not good for you.
I realize the appeal of it: it's just complicated enough it makes normal people think there's something to it. It's just full enough of tough technical challenges engineers have something to bite into. It's just futuristic enough to make everyone believe it's the future. And it's just ancap enough to inspire those fearful of the government and the world. Then it made a handful of people wealthy and inspired fomo.
But at the end of the day it's just a negative-sum solution in search of a problem, riddled with holes big enough to drive a dump truck through, wasting the world's resources, likely created by a Bond-villain-esque racist narcotics trafficker to move his money around [1]. And all the "pricing" of every single coin is controlled by a giant fraud perpetrated by Bitfinex and Tether that bagholders are intrinsically disincentivized from exposing -- all to avoid anti-money laundering / AML/KYC regulations.
It's twelve years of solution in search of problem, with nothing legal to show for it. Except Sia, I guess, I dunno, that's what some people have told me, but that still seems better solved by AWS to me.
I have never seen someone dismiss the ideas behind cryptocurrency or the failings of modern banking as blindingly as this post. Your criticisms are a tautology - any defense put against it will be disarmed by your pre-rejection of anarchism, decentralization, applied cryptographic research, or real-world improvements to banking and the exchange of currency.
Some of your assertions could even be correct (who invented it, problems with architecture, energy consumption) and you would still be out of line with the wholesale dismissal of all its concepts.
I can take another stab at it if you like, but just because my defense is irrefutable doesn't make it a tautology ;)
> decentralization
Decentralization of currency is provably less efficient than centralization. Trust is a huge optimization, as you can see by the sheer overwhelming inefficiency of proof of work algorithms. It's tens of thousands of times less efficient. With reference to [1] a single BTC transaction releases 332 KILOGRAMS of CO2, consumes 700kWh of power and generates 87 GRAMS of e-waste. That's enough to drive a Tesla Model S from San Francisco to New York, and throwing half an iPhone out the window en route. And that's without paying for the fill-ups on the way.
Then there's the pragmatic: every stumble down the timeline winds up with all coins lost. We're at 20% of BTC lost already, since there's nobody to appeal to, you're just SOL.
> anarchism
Anarchy is not an effective way to ... anything. If there are some proven successes of anarchy at scale please do cite them.
But without that, the entire "anarchist" crypto space has shown as soon as you open the door to the architecture, scammers and schemers follow through immediately. [2] The entire pricing structure of all cryptocurrencies has centralized thanks to anarchy and is centrally controlled via Bitfinex' totally oversight-free generation of billions of dollars in fake money in Tether. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
> applied cryptographic research
Doesn't matter if they're pointing in the wrong direction.
> real-world improvements to banking and the exchange of currency
Everything crypto does can be done better, faster and cheaper with traditional currency since it's not boat anchored to the inefficiency of decentralization.
Not to mention, it fails at even the most basic aspects of modern currency theory by being deflationary.
I am not anti-crypto, but I am anti- stupid ideas and get-rich quick schemes that are incredibly prevalent in the "blockchain" space. I am for one or two cryptocurrencies/tokens, and that's about it.