| >What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver? You are comparing crypto to a service that a third party provides on top of fiat. It's not a fair comparison as there is nothing stopping third parties providing the same service on top of crypto (and the third party does not necessary need human intervention to function when both parties act in good faith). The more accurate comparison is: "What happens if I pay for a service or good upfront with cash, and get stiffed?" Answer: If you know who they are, you take them to court and use the existing legal infrastructure. If you don't know who they are or it's too low value to be worth fighting, you leave them a bad review and share your bad experience with others to help them avoid the same. >The only "trust" problem cryptocurrencies solved was keeping track of stuff like account balances in a distributed ledger, but that's purely a problem created by the ideological choice of a distributed ledger. Keeping track of balances is a tough problem that did not (and still doesn't) have a good solution for after many decades of operation. Transfers between banks take days to settle (and weeks to finalize), same for payments between users and businesses. Was it feasible to solve keeping track of balances between semi-trustworthy actors on a faster scale and without DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies)? Sure... but it has not eventuated and there was no sign it ever would. The telling sign for me is that many financial institutions are looking at, developing or rolling out their own implementations based on the demonstrated principles in crypto. That's good news, but I guess doesn't count for anything for some reason? |
You're missing the point: the GGP said "cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust" but they clearly haven't in any practical sense.
It also a fair comparison, because I don't share the ideological obsessions that motivate cryptocurrency, nor have I made a speculative bet on it where I feel the compulsion to shill for it to save my own skin. As a practical matter, cryptocurrency is stupid and compares poorly to non-cryptocurrency alternatives in nearly all use caseses. It may make sense in some unusual ridiculously contrived use case, but that proves my point.
> Keeping track of balances is a tough problem that did not (and still doesn't) have a good solution for after many decades of operation.
That's not true: it has a sufficiently good solution that nearly the entire economy runs off of it. Meanwhile, the supposed "better" solutions are less scalable and use more electricity than Argentina to perform operations that a typical desktop PC is powerful enough to do.