My friend, I worked in the tech side of a big bank that you might have an account with, so I have seen how the sausage is made. I would trust Google, Apple, and many other tech companies with my money.
A better analogy - tech improves the hammer, it does not have to re-invent it. Example: open your phone and marvel at how easily you can send and receive funds from you banking app; 10+ years ago, you would have to go to a bank to do that.
My rule of thumb for tech companies is they're all a mess under the covers so every company looks bad from the inside compared to the outside.
> I would trust Google, Apple, and many other tech companies with my money.
When I have a problem and need to call my bank I can usually get an actual person or even go to a branch where I can annoy someone in person, where as Google acts like categorically opposed to support even to people paying or making them money.
Not to mention, if you protest an extensively corrupt government, they could just call up <big-tech-company> and say "Hey, shut 'em down." And they'd happily oblige.
That doesn't happen as easily on the blockchain.
You are fully in control of your funds with cryptocurrency. There is no middleman that can say "no, sorry, you can't use your money today."
Miners could in theory decide to blacklist transactions from particular addresses which are pseudoanonymous. It's a harder coordination problem because miners are less geographically concentrated since the mining ban in China [0] but it's not inconceivable for a country to restrict mining in that way though which would pretty quickly restrict your ability to get transactions included successfully because you'd have a double gamble first on a non-restricted miner including you then on being included on their block (which you could increase by overpaying transaction fees).
Yeah, you can get a person on the phone, who will calmly and patiently explain that they are going to proceed with fucking you because it's their policy to fuck you. Google doesn't pay a human to answer the phone, they just go ahead and fuck you. Either way, you're getting fucked, and the only difference is that if you do it the boomer way you get free phone therapy.
Personally I don't much care for free phone therapy. I think you get what you pay for.
As someone who works in finance and sees the messiness, my takeaway is the exact opposite: the bad tech is evidence that the maintenance of the monetary system is largely not a tech concern, it’s an institutional and societal trust concern. And that’s why banks are actually pretty decent at it.
I’m not saying there aren’t major improvements to be made in fintech, but I think by and large crypto is trying to improve parts of finance that are not actually improved by technology.
analogies are for when you are trying to explain something to someone who lacks the capacity to understand the high-dimensional representation of the problem.
its like talking to a kid vs talking to a grown-up, to put it in terms you might better be able to grok
