Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _nhynes 1022 days ago
With the introduction of CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, it's starting to look like TradFi is getting the second-mover advantage. Cryptocurrency introduced programmable money, which is great, but it also came with other features like self-custody, extreme transparency & privacy, and immutability that have ended up being more than average users are willing to accept as a bundle.

TradFi entities now have the ability to pick what they like out of the mix and offer that to customers while also benefiting from the convenience of trust assumptions, something cryptocurrency eschews. TradFi is building atop thousands of years worth of UX improvements in how people can come to trust each other. It's difficult for cryptocurrency to compete there.

I still love the developer convenience of blockchain since it nicely combines serverless with auth with payments. But for the most part, given the existence of trust, these benefits could also come from a system like in TFA having a Wasm runtime and maybe a dash of WebAuthn. Like a mashup of Cloudflare Workers and Stripe.
2 comments
hanniabu 1022 days ago
You can build features like reversibility on top of Ethereum. A draconian government chain that solves none of the important grievances is not needed. I do not need big brother freezing my funds, deciding what I can and can't buy, etc.
link
_nhynes 1022 days ago
Yes, I completely agree. There's plenty of tech available to achieve many of the goals of functionality, affordability, and privacy a motivated team of developers could have. Just that it's often unnecessarily difficult to build and use. Probably things will be much better in a(nother) decade, but the whole thing is still a work in progress. In the meantime, why pay the cost 100% of the time for avoiding a bad thing that happens 1% of the time? Cryptocurrency has its utility, but much less when minimizing trust isn't a requirement.
link
blitzar 1021 days ago
> CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, is getting the second-mover advantage

In the world outside the USA we had the features of these systems for decades before the bitcoin white paper was published.

link