Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lustforleif 1513 days ago
> trust-less

Trusting a central authority (bank) is not a solution to trust-less prevention of double spending.

2 comments

>Trusting a central authority (bank)

Strawman?

A bank is not a central authority any more than large mining pools are central authorities. Or China (when it controlled enough BTC to double spend at will).

The banking system is vastly distributed. Trust is a giant network of accountants, central banks, regulators, investors, and lots more that help ensure there is no double spending. There are checks all throughout the system, ledgers, reports, audit trails, and, unlike BTC, when something is actually stolen, lots of protections and methods to claw back stolen money.

BTC can be double spent via majority control, so double spend protection is at best a statistical claim, just like real banking.

A large problem with Bitcoin is developers were unaware of modern (or even ancient) banking and money systems and have tried to reinvent simple money with all the same problems that mankind moved from millennia ago.

Then people unaware of the why of modern money systems think crypto solves an important problem that modern economies and users don't care about, while ignoring all the problems modern systems solved as if they don't exist.

And honestly, in all my life, I have never heard of anyone in the normal banking system double spend. So chalk one more up to the Bitcoin make believe event crowd. How many double spend events have you performed in your entire life via normal banking?

Why does it need to be trustless? And why is it worth paying such a premium for it?