Imagine you have a home on Airbnb , your guest sends you a payment, but its not directly to you, the payment goes through the payment rails stipulated and controlled by airbnb. This amounts to what is often 25-35% of your listening fee (payment charges, visa network, listing fee, etc, etc.) This is the middle men crypto is supposed to replace.
Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.
People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.
In your example crypto would only replace the visa network. Most of the fee you are playing is to Airbnb for getting you the client in the first place.
Correct, but these fees are trending up and not down, its not uncommon in this space to see payment fees hitting 15%. Removing the primitives of payment requirements, rails which are hard to build and practicably a monopoly, would free the state, this would power end-users instead of building more monopolies.
Actual payment fees are hitting a couple % max, all the rest is platform fees which are orthogonal to how you are paying. If you sell something through airbnb, they will get a cut no matter how you pay.
Credit card fees are a great deal for consumers even when they are added as a surcharge or there is a cash discount. Not having to deal with cash AND being able to dispute transactions are significant benefits.
Agree, also the logging is very limited across the board,, database functions are impossible to debug without good logging, I think a lot of people don't realize its not a direct copy of Postgres, for the cloud version several Postgres functions are disabled by default.
This isn't obvious, 99% of apps make multiple calls to multiple services, and these SDK's are embedded into the app. How can you tell whats legit outbound/inbound? Doing a fingerprint search for the worst culprits might help catch some, but it would likely be a game of cat and mouse.
99.9% of app on app store connect to the network for a multitude of reason, do you really think only browsers connect to the internet? Do you not have an app on your phone?
I feel like this could be automated. Spin up a virtual device on a monitored network. Install one app, click on some stuff for awhile, uninstall and move onto the next. If the app reaches out to a lot of random sites then flag it
Google could do this. I'm sure Apple could as well. Third parties could for a small set of apps
This is being done by a couple of SDKs, it'd be much easier to just find and flag those SDK files. Finding apps becomes a matter of a single pass scan over the application contents rather than attempting to bypass the VM detection methods malware is packed full of.
It's just a private key. You don't "connect" private keys to the Internet. You just have poor processes keeping it hidden while not losing it. I'm surprised you think El Salvador can do that.
In order for transactions to be signed with the private key, the device holding them has to be connected to the internet, or at least be able to interface with another device that is. It is highly likely that anything involving their BTC reserves requires someone to be physically present at some sort of facility and it is 100% not available for hackers to just siphon whenever they wish with a virus. If possible, it would at least require physical infiltration.
What Certik did will be a case study in how to not disclose bugs, this was so poorly done it's been handed over to the authorities for possible illegal activity.
https://x.com/c7five/status/1803403565865771370
The comparison to George Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is apt, but zooming out, I think Canada is paving the way to "Brazil", the Gilliam movie which was originally called 1984½. The dystopian future is totalitarian, but ruled through inept bureaucracy. The Ministry of Information controls everything and is responsible for nothing. This shift in control structures can be seen in the Hate Speech Bill, Bill S-210, the CRTC Streaming bill, and the massive increase in government jobs and roles.
Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.
People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.