[JulianHC]

You can also use it to buy goods from oversea retailers without paying exorbitant fees, bad conversion rate. If you live outside of America and Europe, banks charge a hefty amount of fees for international transactions.

The world is volatile. Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, and in the future who know if China and Taiwan won't become a crappy place to be. The needs to store your wealth and get out of the country quickly is very real. You can't just queue for ATM and holding dollars and gold bars come with significant risk of confiscation or being robbed.

[D13Fd]

Which is great, unless the “fees” include taxes. In which case the short version of this comment is “you can use it for tax evasion.”

[yebyen]

We're not talking about tax evasion. If you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, then banks have all sorts of fees that they ding you for just like the phone company when you travel, and they won't waive them as they have no incentive to keep your business. Folks with lots of money who track every penny are often unaware of the landscape for these fees, because banks actually do have an incentive to keep your business and they do waive them without even asking.

If you think there's something illicit about seeking to pay the least in fees and with the broadest reach, or if you think that paying fees to every company who comes along that gets to play middle-man is exactly the same as paying your fair share in taxes then I'm not sure what I can do to dissuade you of this notion.

[tmaly]

You know I would not actually mind seeing all the gov budget spending get tracked on a blockchain. I often wonder where the trillions in budget spending goes.

[yencabulator]

A great example of something that does not need a blockchain. You're just asking for the relevant government departments to publish their books.

[yebyen]

Don't you want some verifiable continuity in those books?

How do you guarantee that continuity breaches are easy to spot when they're "books" and you can publish as many of them as you want, or skip one if it turns out we don't want transparency somewhere because of "national security"?

This argument always seems to start with "there is no application for blockchain" and then moves the goal post to "that application doesn't NEED a blockchain" when we didn't even want ONLY that one application, we came for the whole package.

Do you really trust the government to publish accurate data if there is no transparent mechanism to keep them accountable for their accuracy? What is your alternative proposed mechanism for ensuring that the books are not cooked? (Is it another law, this time that says "books SHALL be balanced" and links to the RFC that provides specific definitions for modal verbs like MUST, SHALL, MAY, COULD?)

We certainly COULD invent another system that all tax money passes through, which ties out and all tax revenue is required to pass through, but how far will you stretch the spec in the opposite direction just to make sure that we didn't use "blockchain" which I'm assuming you consider as "scam tech" and you are apparently convinced that we don't need?

[yencabulator]

What's realistic is a policy of "no backsies". You can't prevent a party from lying (without remaking the world so that everything happens on your favorite blockchain, which ain't gonna happen), so what you do is you catch them in their lies.

This problem is already solved for TLS, with no bitcoin-style blockchain and no climate destruction: https://certificate.transparency.dev/

[blooalien]

So totally very much this, yes!

*spam-click the parent comment up-vote button …*

[moron4hire]

> without paying exorbitant fees, bad conversion rate

What the hell would you call gas fees, then? And if you don't already have assets in the crypto coin of your vendor's choice, you're going to pay conversion fees, too.