Comment on Is cryptocurrency good for anything?
scarabic@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.
Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.
But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.
Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of those shares. They could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.
So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.
Buffalobuffalo@reddthat.com 6 days ago
These are the types of examples used, but I don’t not think it is actually good for these uses. If your account is hacked and someone takes the crypto, there is no way to reverse the transaction, now what the hackers own your company? If you can invalidate the shares and reissue new ones, then owning the crypto is not actually ownership of the company.
Even without theft what do you do when people simply lose access to their wallets. Maybe because they forget their password or they die and they never gave their heirs the information.
scarabic@lemmy.world 6 days ago
That’s all true. There are also risks with other forms of currency too though. Cash is entirely vulnerable to theft (and destruction, and you can even lose it eg: forgetting where you hid it, just like forgetting a password). And other accounts can be hacked and stolen from as well, not always in any traceable way, else there would be no bank fraud or credit card theft. Nothing’s perfect.