No, this is usually (apologies if not in your case) a straw man, and representative of the usual HN blind spot for cryptocurrency.
Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets do protect against this class of attack.
We are rapidly approaching a world in which those with significant assets or job responsibilities should be carrying physical 2FA tokens, which can allow use of private keys while protecting them (a hardware wallet).
This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution.
The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.
Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys.
There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts.
The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
> The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins”
This is because blockchains have no way of enforcing laws, including property rights. Therefore it comes down to this. Imagine that whoever got hold of your car keys, automatically became the owner. This is what "not your keys, not your coins" means.
It's a bit more like 'possession is 9/10 of the law'.
The "not your keys, not your coins" is more the fact that someone else holding your stuff happen to them and your stuff goes away. Or they never had it to start with. i.e. Counterparty risk.
`Cash` doesn't inherently have any mechanism for enforcing rights either. The difference is that real-world identities are easier to establish in situations where cash transactions go awry.
Indeed, physical cash has similar limitations. Everybody understands that it's inherently unsafe. Yet crypto-currency advocates are advising people to keep a large part of their savings as an asset that's even less safe than physical currency, which is absolutely crazy.
“Enforcing laws” with regard to what? Censoring transactions? Freezing accounts?
If people want a system where this as well as excessive inflation are close to impossible, they now have an option, with the clear caveat of that ownership.
It’s not like there aren’t other options to choose - custodial services and multi-signature wallets. Banks are custodial services too, and that’s fine.
Those should be applied at a higher layer than the base one, and the vast majority of people should be using custodial services if they have access.
A much smaller fraction should be using open source and audited hardware wallets as well as offline paper wallets.
People will have the option to shoot their foot off with real, direct control, yes. That option or ‘genie’ doesn’t go back in the bottle, not permanently.
Yes. The option now exists to have private digital means of exchange, free from direct government devaluation. There are absolutely drawbacks; it is not for everyone.
> The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.
And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).
> The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
>That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
People escaping oppressive regimes don't have time for their society to solve it, they need to leave to a different, less messed-up society. And this is one of the few ways that they can bring a decent fraction of their assets with them in a form that's not very easily stolen from them.
> And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).
Rollbacks being impossible doesn’t mean the government cannot legislate.
This is a double edged sword - the benefit and the drawback are inextricably linked. Caveat emptor. Do you want absolute control of your funds? If so, you can memorize 12 words and travel the globe. If not, look to custodial partners, ETFs, or multi-signature wallets.
> That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
What? I assume by “this” you mean people who don’t have quality trustworthy financial institutions?
This is Hacker News. We brainstorm technological solutions to real world problems all the time. This particular problem can only be solved be “society” at large, not technology, because you say so?
You want to disparage those trying as “tech-bro peddlers” - do you simply mean any technology inclined entrepreneur who doesn’t present female? This is an absurd emotional invective.
I’d bring up Monero RingCTs and stealth addresses as an intermediate step and the offramp of direct purchases which that community has been building, as well as tools like Bisq, but I doubt the utility of continuing to reply.
In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 20 years for the true power of packet-switched networks to be realized, in the form of mobile Internet.
In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days.
It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.
Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one!
Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.
Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.
> Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.
This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities.
Yes, I’m aware of AI winters but that doesn’t affect the point I was making: people knew neural networks were capable of the task since neuroscientists were studying how our own brains used them, but they were computationally daunting. “AI winter” didn’t mean that everyone gave up and assumed the theists were right that some supernatural power was the key part, it meant that developing commercially-viable technologies was harder than hoped.
That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.
the whole idea of an “AI winter” is that people did not feel that AI was capable and worth pursuing, the Wikipedia link makes that sentiment clear. The remaining computer scientists still working in AI space obviously continued developing the technology despite the lack of public interest and major funding, but the same happens in crypto: engineers are still developing new ideas and technologies within blockchain space (ZK proofs, verkle trees, etc). Bitcoin has stagnated but other technologies have not.
It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system.
And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.
I don’t think it’s a battle. At least one government has adopted cryptocurrency to a small extent. No technology is “about” the technology, the other poster mentioned the Internet, very few care about how it works, they care about what they can with it.
IMO, your timelines are way off and the goalposts are totally skewed. In 1980, the Commodore 64 hadn't even been released yet. Even so, 15 years later, in 1995, almost 15% of adults had dialup access to the Internet. The real goalpost here is the advent of the WWW.
TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch".
So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.
No, "crypto bad boo" is precisely because the HN crowd doesn't ignore the history of anything that crypto pretends it's disrupting. Instead all the clueless crypto bros in the crypto space end up slowly, and often painfully, re-discovering all this history and the reasons why things are the way they are.
Let me call you clueless my friend and maybe even other names as you seem to like to.
Things are the way they are because of interests, some people are making money on it. "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything and you seem clueless as to what they want and are repeating old ass tropes you probably learned from others.
I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S, you probably don't, being of short memory and not learning from others. But, guess what, we are using k8s and crypto and you are stuck and soon will be making apologies for your lack of sense and will be tired of repeating others' lies here.
This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution.
The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.
Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys.
There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts.
The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.