[brianf0]

This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

[onionisafruit]

A lot of us earned our right to be curmudgeons by getting excited about it ten years ago only to see it play out very differently from our expectations.

[deweller]

There was a lot of change-the-world ideology around bitcoin ten years ago. No it has not lived up to those perfect visions.

I don't think it is irrevocably broken. I for one think there is still a lot of potential in cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. I believe a credibly neutral store of value not in the control of any nation state is something that benefits the world.

Why can't we celebrate what is good and try to fix what is bad?

[V__]

I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.

[mjburgess]

Sorry, but can we just stop repeating the wildly unevidenced claims of the gullible and frauds?

Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions?

There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors.

I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. They all make these insane claims in passing. NONE provide any evidence, any argument, anything at all.

None provide an analysis of the current systems in question, the various alternatives, and so on -- none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem.

This is a profoundly manipulated market: all the numbers are fake, all the ideas are fake, all the people are fake.

[ursuscamp]

Bitcoin, specifically, is improving society in many ways, especially in Nigeria, Argentina, the Congo, etc. Even in the West, where our money is more stable and the benefits of it are less obvious, Bitcoin mining offers great benefits to energy grids.

[taeric]

"Trick people with ____ talk and then scam them" is just a financial thing. See the recent Bed, Bath, and Beyond news.

[arcticbull]

> I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked.

The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking.

The problem is a social one, for congress to solve.

It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.

[dragonwriter]

> Wish Hacker News wasn’t so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

Is it curmudgeonly to be uninterested in searching for problems for an overhyped solution than is sadly lacking in them? Well, fine, then I’m happy to be a curmudgeon.

[pookha]

in my mind centralized banking that can turn off your finances for societal reasons (Jinping style) and fiat-currency-backed-by-drone strike are problems that need some kind of solution. Bitcoin has persisted through multiple dips and seems to be a competitor (solution).

[PretzelPirate]

Exactly. The idea of cash is great: we can pay each other without intermediaries and we know that the payment we're receiving has the value it appears to.

Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.

Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.

[ephbit]

> Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.

As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system.

https://taler.net/en/

[ElevenLathe]

I'll bite: What are some of the multitude of ways that cryptocurrency can improve society if adopted?

[tphyahoo]

If bitcoin is adopted as reserve currency, it would innoculate against the existential risk of regional or even global hyperinflations.

Forever.

[Yizahi]

Which society it would improve? No extradition offshores, with Giancarlo, Czao, Paolo, Machinski, Sun, Bankrun-Fraud and many others? Maybe so. The problem is that I belong to a different society.

[ufo]

We can also imagine the ways that Bitcoin can make society worse. Satscard already gives some suggestions in their proposed designs, several of which reference El Salvador.

[zinekeller]

Maybe it's because most of those people have actually sincerely thought about it but saw cryptocurrencies to be a worse solution than the current ones? Most cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies (just not derived from government trust) after all, and most currency problems stems from those questions of trust (so let's assume that everyone adopts one: it won't solve any societal problem).

[arcticbull]

> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.

That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1]

[1] https://kong.cash/

[ephbit]

> I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.

You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking.

I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society.

One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time.

The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before.

Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes.

No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect.

But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.

[CrampusDestrus]

>it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger.

a dollar is a voucher for the US economy and the actual value was transferred on an immutable ledger, i.e. append-only physical reality of the universe

[mbesto]

> but it's more like a voucher

Vouchers already exist - they're called cashier checks.

> transferred on an immutable ledger.

Which isn't universally a good thing. If someone steals your voucher, there is no recourse. If someone steals a cashier's check, I can call the bank (and sovereign authorities).

Said differently, one is not equivocally better than the other. There's a tradeoff.

> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

I wish crypto advocates would stop being such apologists on HN. It's not productive. Make your statement, explain your rationale and defend your position.

[taeric]

Stated this way, though, we reinvented credit/gift cards?