[overthrow]

> Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems

Sure, but those systems had been sabotaged by a politican/dictator named Nicolás Maduro who rejected the results of an election.

> What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?

A decentralized payments system is one that cannot be shut down by Nicolás Maduro.

Do you think the Venezuelan crisis was just a big conspiracy theory?

[mjburgess]

I think if people have working mobile phones then they're able to be sent electronic cash without a p2p system. Indeed, more easily than having a VPN and relevant skills to received crypto assets.

The state here owns the network, rendering all the premises of peer-to-peer systems invalid and thus all of their guarantees.

If the government there wanted to prevent receipt of USDC it well could, as much as it can completely cutoff the country from arbitary parts of the internet.

Indeed, it would seem much more inclined to do that than cut off the mobile network.

The reason it hasnt done so is preference, not that peer-to-peer systems are magic.

[overthrow]

> I think if people have working mobile phones then they're able to be sent electronic cash without a p2p system. Indeed, more easily than having a VPN and relevant skills to received crypto assets.

Spoken like a true first-world armchair warrior. Maduro shut off the non-p2p systems, as dicussed. He then failed to stop crypto payments. Do you think it was his "preference" all along to fail to control the flow of money?

Don't underestimate people's ability to figure out a VPN. It's not hard, and the prospect of literally starving to death can be quite motivating.

And since you mentioned magic, the real magic would be any country stopping its citizens from accessing the internet. Even in North Korea, there are people with unfiltered satellite internet, because Kim Jong Un has not yet built a Faraday cage around the sky.

[mjburgess]

> He then failed to stop crypto payments

lol..err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(token) -- the government has not tried to "stop" anything.

If any of these systems had any actual utility many states would spend the relatively trivial amounts of money to 51% attack them: https://www.crypto51.app/. Or force take over their miners. Or monpolise half the stake. Or control the (local) mining networks. Or one of a number of trivial actions.

These systems do not work. Their alleged properties are lies. They are not immutable, they are not decentralised, and they are not capable of supporting non-trivial economic transactions.

This is a scam. These stories are lies. They are told by people who are in on the scam. This is a manipulated market, these are manipulated ideas, this entire system is comprised of about 100,000 people around the world, 5% of whom benefit from it.

It is incapable of supporting millions of users, let alone how severely impoverished they'd be at the expensive of the present holders -- thank god such systems cannot scale.

Present holders, no doubt like you, desperate to bring cash into the system, more people in, so your present holdings can increase in value.

I find this reprehensible

[overthrow]

Petro is an attempt at embrace-extend-extinguish. If that "Reception" section is to be believed, nobody is using it willingly. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Look under "NiceHash-able", if the number is less than 100% it means (to an approximation) not enough idle hardware exists on the planet to perform an attack. This means any attack must start with a manufacturing project that must stay secret for a decade+, then outpace growth and eventually surpass the capacity of the private sector. And then you need the energy to actually run the chips - no country would ever consider diverting that much energy away from their population.

If it were possible to compromise a $xxx billion dollar system, with only $x million, don't you think it would have been done by now? Maybe even by some bored billionaire just for fun?

And trust me, I don't think posting in a dead HN thread will speed up or slow down crypto's success in any way, lmao. I just enjoy the banter.

[mjburgess]

States can afford billions. A 5bn attack is cheap.

Also, all these "market cap" numbers are made up. These are heavily manipulated markets. There are about 100k users, and almost no buyers -- this stuff is trivial to bring down.

It's a scam.

[overthrow]

This message is devoid of evidence lol

Look how hard some governments have tried to stop this movement, and none have succeeded. That's real life evidence that they simply aren't capable.

I think this cloud will outlast the old men yelling at it.

Also: I hope one day someone calls my company a failure because it "only" has hundreds of thousands of users