[howdydoo]

Crypto isn't intented to remove middlemen. It's intended to give people the choice of who to trust. People can choose to trust an exchange, or to self-custody, and deal with the consequences in either direction.

If I choose to self-custody, it's much safer to memorize a seed phrase than to store cash in my mattress. Most people don't bother and use banks. But I think it's good that people now have a choice in the matter.

[acdha]

> Crypto isn't intented to remove middlemen

That isn’t what the sales pitch has been for the last 13 years, with lots of fanciful rhetoric about removing the need for banks (“you can be your own bank!” is basically a cliché by now).

> If I choose to self-custody, it's much safer to memorize a seed phrase than to store cash in my mattress.

Are you sure about this? Lots of people have been phished or compromised, whereas someone breaking in and searching your house is relatively uncommon and limited to people in the same area whereas your cryptocurrency can be stolen by anyone in the world.

[howdydoo]

People give sales pitches for lots of things. You don't have to listen to them.

> Are you sure about this?

Whether I'm sure or not... I think everyone should be given the choice.

[acdha]

> People give sales pitches for lots of things. You don't have to listen to them.

No, but when something has completely failed to live up to the sales pitch and then people try to pretend they'd never made those claims, it's important to remember that track record when deciding whether to trust the new claims. This is especially true in the case of cryptocurrencies which have no value other than social consensus because the same people who were making those original claims stand to gain the most if the new claims convince someone else to buy otherwise worthless tokens.

> Whether I'm sure or not... I think everyone should be given the choice.

Which they have and nobody is saying should be taken away from them. This is about the conflict between the stated goals and actual demonstrated behaviour.

[howdydoo]

Bitcoin is a technology that has various use cases. Just because some person gives a sales pitch, doesn't mean that sales pitch becomes the benchmark by which to measure the technology. Bitcoin is decentralized and does not have one stated goal. Many people use it for many different reasons.

If someone keeps changing their claims or is otherwise acting scummy, just ignore them. There are shysters in every industry.

[acdha]

I realize you have a financial interest in us believing that but this isn’t random strangers but the entire movement dating back to the initial manifesto.

[howdydoo]

I mean... no, the success of this burgeoning asset class does not depend on me convincing a single HN poster in a long-buried thread. And there never was a "manifesto", at least not one that I've ever heard about. But thanks anyway for the discussion I guess

[RichardHeart]

I'll quote the first sentence from the Bitcoin whitepaper. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

[wmf]

Right; it allows not using middlemen but it doesn't force it. Forced decentralization is a mostly unsolved problem.