Which is why we have laws, FDIC insurance, etc.

Crypto seems like it's all of the bad stuff, unrealized potential good maybe if you think a certain way but generally not useful.

Laws only work if you are in a first world country though. And you have to be not poor.

Deliberately abandoning even the possibility of legal oversight can't help solve this problem.

I don't understand why the two cannot cohexist.

Legal oversight is still required. If you come in my house and $5 wrench my BTC out of me, legal oversight is still required to make it right, just as it would have happened with fiat, with banks, or barter, or whatever else.

If I run a scam, legal oversight is going to whoop my ass, even if the "legal oversight" is people that had their money stolen doing justice themselves.

Meat space still exists, but at least with crypto you're still minimizing the amount of trust required to digitally operate your own finances. "But then crypto is pointless" is a dumb take, because while not perfect it's still a massive, MASSIVE improvement over the "trust me bro" that financial istitutions are running on today.

How many billions need to be lost to crypto scams before we all agree that crypto's "trust me bro" is actually worse than having auditors, the SEC, FDIC, and greenbacks worth their face value with the full faith and confidence of the US Gov?

So far crypto seems worse on every account.

How many billions does retail need to lose to scams that are perpetrated by the auditors and the SEC before you admit that the phrase "with the full faith and confidence of the US Gov" is an unfunny joke?

I do not get why it's so hard to conceive that you can use crypto to build a system where you don't have to trust that people are doing the correct thing, as it's mathematically ensured by the system itself that no shenanigans are occurring.

The only "trust me bro" that is occurring in crypto comes from CENTRALIZED entities (such as CEXs, Tether, etc) and from people running scams where money appears out of thin air.

We don't even know how pin down a precise set of rules to always make people feel that justice was served in English. This is why we pay humans who, as a full time job, work out what people mean to do and whether what actually happened was what was intended; and who can negotiate and arbitrate between aggrieved parties. How do you expect us to encode in mathematics "common sense" we do not actually understand well enough to describe in plain English? Come back when we've solved AI alignment; I have no doubt we eventually will, but that day is not today, and tomorrow isn't looking good either.

...but crypto is not even attempting to solve that problem. Not even vaguely. The rules in this space are "finders keepers, no takesie backsies", and the participants like it this way (until someone does something that makes them feel aggrieved and suddenly they don't and there is no recourse, by design). No negotiation, no arbitration, no common sense, no human element at all: "you snooze, you lose", and this is the entire selling point.

If you make me choose between having the financial freedom to handle my money without having to trust anyone and only needing to pay attention to what I do with it, or having a nanny that oversees all my finances and coddles me in case I hurt myself but could possibly steal my money, I'll choose the former.

I can understand why one would disagree, though.

What's wrong with having the option to do away with the nanny, again?

"where money appears out of thin air"

This is an odd statement from someone who, I'm guessing at one point or another, said that "value depends on what everyone agrees it is"?

This is an odd statement from someone who, I'm guessing at one point or another, has used fiat currency.

Oh but wait, the dollar has "the full faith and confidence of the US Gov" backing it, right? lmao

Until it doesn't. See you there.

What's more likely: Tech bro Chuck E Cheese tokens suddenly become worthless... or the US Government suddenly becomes insolvent (despite it's ability to not only print money, but field the world's most powerful military)?

How many more FTX disasters do we need until we've decided crypto is clearly the worse option?

You already forgot the rest of the discussion?

FTX !== crypto.

What they did is fraud regardless of the cryptocurrency aspect, and plenty of people in crypto warned against centralized exchanges for decades now because of this exact reason, with MtGox and FTX being the most prominent examples because CENTRALIZED EXCHANGES WILL RUN AWAY WITH YOUR MONEY.

Because ->CENTRALIZED EXCHANGES<- ARE SCAMS.

BTC had NOTHING to do with it, it was just what gullible people fake traded in the exchange. If BTC was used properly and implemented actual Proof of Solvency as per the discussion we're currently having, this whole discussion would not be taking place because the ledger is public. The whole fiasco has taken place because the entire circus operated on "trust me bro we have your money, look we have been audited by a certified auditor ;)", which, in case you haven't noticed, is exactly how the rest of the financial system works.

How many more FTX disasters do we need until we've decided not using crypto as a public ledger is clearly the worse option?

Oh and BTW good luck next time the US doubles the circulating money supply again, but I guess that's ok because they have lots of big ships lol.

How does cryptography solve for this? You always need people to enforce things. Ideas don't execute themselves.

It seems like magical thinking to me. Like layers and layers of magical thinking, to prop the whole thing up.

It seems obvious to me you can't use technology to plug a social issue (trust).