How many, or what percentage, of crypto owners/holders actually have their crypto in their own custody? I would hazard to say somewhere south of 1%.
So what benefit is it? Everyone has only traded one form of vendor lock in to another (that is deserving of vastly less trust, as evidended by the Wild West of scams, rug pulls and outright frauds)
That's not a fault of the technology. Many people want to pin the flaw of human behavior on Bitcoin but there's nothing inherent in the technology that forces people to do that. The literal "quickstart" of Bitcoin is to hold it in your own custody (running the Bitcoin software on your computer gives you a wallet you 100% control).
If your tech exhibits bad results due to "flawed human behavior" that's a usability concern, which is absolutely a fault of the technology. Tech doesn't exist in a bubble without humans.
The tech doesn't exhibit anything. Bitcoin has continued to run, as intended, since 2009. The market for Bitcoin however exhibits exactly what I've suggested above: human behavior.
I know how it works, and I’d argue it is a flaw of the technology.
Money works because I can hand $10 to a 5 or a 95 year old and they know what to do with it. Very few people do anything other than speculate in crypto, and even fewer hold it in their own wallets as opposed to on exchanges. If the friction of getting started in the future of money requires IT support, then it isn’t going to work
This perspective is far from universal. Obviously, HN readers are a super-technical strata of society, and people here have little trouble understanding the concept and usage of cryptocurrency. The vast majority of the general population is nowhere near this level of technical proficiency. Just downloading and installing a software is firmly out of grasp for lots of people, probably more than half of them if I had to guess.
It doesn't need to be universal. The need for personal computers wasn't universal when Steve Jobs was running around Silicon Valley selling the Apple I in the 70s. They didn't even understand email in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg.
Look at us now.
> The vast majority of the general population is nowhere near this level of technical proficiency.
Right. Just like all technology, that's our responsibility as "the nerds." We take something that's complex and distill it down into something that's easily digested by people with limited or no technical aptitude.
---
I find it deeply alarming that the supposed technical elite that wander this site are so averse to something that can liberate and help so many people, worldwide. Even if they have the capacity to understand it, it's clear that many here haven't done their homework and are relying on second or third-hand knowledge (or at best, outdated information) to form their opinions.
Despite their hubris and narcissism, they're no better than "the general population" on understanding this.
Just because you support an alternative money system doesn't mean you have to be against the concept of a bank altogether. Bank exists because people suck at protecting their money. You don't keep cash in your house because you get breaked in. And same goes for crypto. You could get your key stolen. You could forget your passphrase. You could get hacked. And so on. Bank aren't invulnerable, but they sucks much less than average people at protecting their assets, and this is why people uses them.
Right. No argument from me, except that isn’t the post I’m replying to, there the poster has said that a key safeguard is having custody of it. And without this magic piece, which as op points out is quite revolutionary, you’re literally at the mercy of opaque organisations that are able to screw you over with none of the protections of the current financial system (not to say people don’t get mercilessly screwed today, but default or bank run protection is a pretty sweet deal)
So what benefit is it? Everyone has only traded one form of vendor lock in to another (that is deserving of vastly less trust, as evidended by the Wild West of scams, rug pulls and outright frauds)