[ben_w]

> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.

"I am good at numbers, money is just numbers" https://xkcd.com/1570/

I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.

Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you read £2.49 becoming £4.29.

Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not understanding compound interest.

Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.

Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in at the same time.

If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the return of my money — up to a certain threshold, but that guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.

[meiraleal]

> I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.

well done, you just did it again.

> Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics

What a great way to defend the status quo as if every possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail. The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too big to fail or impossible to go against.

[ben_w]

> What a great way to defend the status quo as if every possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail. The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too big to fail or impossible to go against.

That's not even close to what I was saying and I have no idea how you've misapprehended me so badly.

I will however offer this aphorism:

Who is the bigger fool, the one who messes up, or the one who upon seeing the first one fail says "what an idiot, this is easy, I will do it myself"?

[meiraleal]

Funny that you mention that. I was just reading about Luiz André Barroso, the guy that invented the cloud computing.

> “Wait, wait, wait, but why are we doing it this way?” Barroso said on the podcast. “And it just turns out that the people who had been living in that area hadn't really thought about questioning that. And sometimes it's something that was based on a good reason three years ago, and that reason had a sell-by date, and it's time to do something else.”

Good thing for the world, guys with the mindset like you doesn't prevent guys like Barroso great work.

"Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing."

[ben_w]

> Good thing for the world, guys with the mindset like you doesn't prevent guys like Barroso great work.

You're reading non-existent intent between the lines.

Look at what I quoted in my original comment:

> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.

Criticising this point doesn't require me to deny the possibility that smart people can't come up with new things; to use your own example here, I'm saying normal people won't run their own cloud computing infrastructure.

Not even because it immediately stops being "the cloud" if they did — most people don't have the time nor inclination to understand RAID numbers, let alone cron jobs or keeping TLS libraries up to date.

Can you name the equivalent of those in finance? I can't, but I have tried reading the T&Cs of bank accounts so I do recognise the patterns that tell me they exist.

That's what we pay the middleman for, and why we still would even if there was a cryptocurrency that actually did what it's biggest fans all say it does.