[nyolfen]

if i want to send money to a family member in bangalore, i don't have to trust anybody by using crypto. this isn't some nebulous promise, it is intrinsic to the design of the system -- i perform a transaction in my bed room, and the money is transferred to a new ownership address, which nobody else has control over. this trivial use case is profound and there is no parallel for it in the conventional financial system. that isn't to say it has perfect security, but it eliminates the need for middlemen while preserving the benefits of digital systems. it's optimized for autonomy and freedom over safety -- giving someone the power the revoke transactions can also be used against you. "grown and have a ton of security features and is still getting finetuned" is also true of crypto

[paulryanrogers]

> ...which nobody else has control over.

Control may be distributed, though it certainly is there. And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

> ...but it eliminates the need for middlemen...

Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least. And if it's L2 then you're trusting that middleman. Then for the family to get useful fiat from crypto they need an exchange.

[nyolfen]

> And crypto requires no party have too much control over the hash rate or else the advantage over traditional finance is lost.

what is your threat model here? what practical attack do you think is going to happen?

>Not technically. Even crypto-to-crypto trades still involve miners at least.

miners are not middlemen, they have zero control or ability to interfere with the transfer of funds. wiring money involves handing control of the funds to a middleman like a bank, who you have to trust to do what you ask. there are incentive structures but it is ultimately a human system. this is not the case with eg bitcoin -- any individual miner or validator who didn't want to process your transaction would simply be replaced by one of the thousands of others. if you're savvy you can simply run your own node.

[Feriti]

They control the whole network if they want.

You make it out as the miners would not own the Blockchain which is just wrong.

And it's not that you can run a node, you actually should run a node.

After all decentralization doesn't work if only big players own it.

But now you need to be tech savvy as you said it yourself.

And every Blockchain has this problem and the fact that there are many Blockchains makes this eve worse.