[giaour]

Users might think to themselves, I give my credit card number to all kinds of sites; how is this any different?

The internet has kind of conditioned all of us to be OK with passing around complex payment instruments without paying too much attention. If you're a hardcore believer in cryptocurrency as a political project, you almost certainly understand the difference and see the "code is law" dark forest as a feature, not a bug. But if you started buying crypto and NFTs because Matt Damon and Larry David told you to, then you're in for a world of hurt.

[jensvdh]

Because credit cards have consumer protection and laws and regulations. Crypto has none of that.

[Gigachad]

The crypto space is rediscovering the financial system from first principals. At least by the end they can hopefully appreciate that the original government controlled system actually works the way it does for a reason.

[rodgerd]

> At least by the end they can hopefully appreciate that the original government controlled system actually works the way it does for a reason.

"A religion cannot fail, it can only be failed"; I admire your optimism, but I expect that the true believers will not question whether the premise of cryptocurrencies is wrong, but rather will twist themselves in knots to find new scapegoats as to why it doesn't work the way they expected.

[cowtools]

Huh? Cryptocurrencies operate just as expected, basically the same as they did ten years ago. Crypto never changed, the users did.

[cowtools]

The crypto space isn't rediscovering anything. Speculative investors and other noobs are discovering cryptocurrency for the first time.

[Gigachad]

All of these scams, crashes, and exploits are things that happens previously with regular currencies and have since been regulated away. Now crypto comes in with unregulated currency and runs in to every issue the regulations existed to prevent.

[SilasX]

Scams … have been regulated away?

[cowtools]

These scams, crashes, are exploits are non-issues to anyone with a reasonable degree of competence and skepticism. The solution is not to "fix" the system by removing user agency so that even an idiot can use it safely, but to educate users so that an idiot doesn't need to use cryptocurrency in the first place.

This criticism of cryptocurrency would be analogous to criticizing the concept of fiat currency by pointing to the inflation of the deutsche mark as an example. The cryptocurrencies being discussed here are real cryptocurrencies, they are bloated and useless shitcoins. Any credible project would not have all the bloated crap that enables the "exploits" mentioned in the article in the first place.

[majormajor]

You can't both want crypto to have a real, material future and also simply blame the user for everything they get wrong or don't bother to educate themselves on.

If it's harder and riskier then the user isn't going to care if it's their fault or not.

Do you want a world where crypto is common and useful, or do you want it where it's the web equivalent of casinos, with some sharks making money off suckers but most people not taking it seriously as a "real" or useful business?

[Gigachad]

It's pretty well known that individuals _do_ need protections against this while institutional investors do not. When crypto gets on the news, regular, uninformed people go and dump their life savings in to it. No matter how much you tut tut and say they should have done their research, they will still do it. And preventing people from losing their life savings on scams is good for society in general.

[cowtools]

Credit cards wouldn't need such stringent "protection" and surveilance if they were secure and dependable in the first place.

Of course cryptocurrencies do not have such regulations. the purpose of cryptocurrency is to facilitate exchange with untrusted parties.

[kahnclusions]

The point is that cryptocurrencies are not secure nor dependable in the way that people actually need them to be, and they don’t solve any of the actual problems that people have with the banking and credit system.

[cowtools]

Cryptocurrencies are secure and dependable in the way that I need them to be and they solve problems that I have with the banking and credit system.

I mean, really. The security of the banking/credit system is not even based on public/private key cryptography. There is no notion of a separate spend address vs a sending address. Anyone with access to your (usually open source or easily findable) information can make a transaction on your behalf. Identity theft is a massive problem which is enabled by the current state of the industry.