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I fail to see how crypto alleviates the problems with fiat that exist under failed regimes. If anything I feel like it would exacerbate them given that crypto operates on a public, append-only ledger that gives disproportionate power to those that leverage their existing influence and are able to interact with the ledger in bad faith/deceptively. Empowering the unbanned is a common talking point but I don’t see it actually becoming real outside of a few niche cases that tend to be exaggerated in crypto spaces. And even then I’m not sure those will stick around in the long run.

I will believe in initiatives like the lightning network when they actually see mass adoption. I personally don’t see that happening because of the aforementioned problems. Scalability and practicality compared to existing standards being the primary ones.

Power is still an issue considering BTC uses as much electricity as a small nation despite being the hobby of a few hundred thousand people, versus the entire global banking industry which is a million times more efficient as things stand currently. I don’t think “but it’s worth it because BTC is good” is really a good counter to that. It’s not sustainable.

Also “it’s too complicated to explain” isn’t a particularly persuasive argument lol.

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Euphorazine@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To add to this concern, centralized currency has its pros. Because it’s centralized, it can be governed. If I wire some money to an unintended target, sometimes that money can be recovered. There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.

Then there’s the Seth Green incident where he got phished and someone stole his IP rights to his bored ape. If the ape NFTs were centralized, Seth could have reported the fraud and had it returned.

How would this work at scale? Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss? What if your grandma gets her account stolen, she just loses her retirement with no recourse?

I’m quite happy that the legal system backed by the police and military are backing up my fiat.

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- chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
  
  This sort of thing basically happened to me once with crypto and I literally just kept it, was great, minor miracle since I didn’t know how I was gonna pay rent that month and it was basically the full amount.
  
  Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss?
  
  Yes. Realistically though big companies wanting to custody large amounts of crypto are outsourcing this to reputable third parties like Coinbase specializing in secure crypto storage. Probably have insurance on it also.
  
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