The number one reason for using a credit-card is that your losses are contractually limited. Not only that, they perform automated fraud detection for you.

And now you want me to give that up, and take on the responsibility myself?

That's not a strong argument in your favor.

I take it you live Thoreau-style, in a cabin in the wilderness completely off-grid? You farm and hunt your own food and do not rely on civilization for any of your needs?

And Thoreau was only a few miles from a town and had his food brought in.

Man has relied on a society since we had tails.

I would certainly prefer to live like that once that is within my means and skills.

But until then, is there no middle ground between surveilance state and free society?

Please just do a little Google/Wikipedia on Adam Smith.

Everyone trying to do 'their own stuff' is basically, stupid.

We gain immensely by the division of labour: the cobbler makes the shoes, the farmer grows food, the banker manages money. Were you to try to 'make your own iPhone in your back yard' you would fail.

We are 'rich' because of this.

Otherwise, we'd be literally feral monkeys.

Bitcoin has little to do with 'control or surveillance'.

You do not need to 'hold' USD in order to live. You just need to use USD in a 'current account' for purposes of transaction. In that context, monetary policy should not matter that much to you - or even frankly anything the Fed does.

If you only buy dollars when you need the to do something else, then frankly, everything about the USD should be basically irrelevant.

And you can still do most things in cash, if you really want. You can put your USDs under your bed, in the closet if you want.

There are countries the cash you have under your bed can become worthless paper overnight. Here's one example that I witnessed personally as a kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_...

And we've just watched this happen with many cryptocurrencies too.

For the audience that reads HN? Probably not that difficult. For the average person who is comparing this to the alternative of a bank where they can just talk to a human who manages all this for them and also get benefits like a credit card with rewards, built a credit score, and have a throat to choke when there's an issue... it doesn't seem like that good of a tradeoff

I keep seeing the argument repeated ad nauseam about how a bank protects from X and Y you and can reverse fraudulent charges and so on.

But as a customer of several national US banks and having gone through the dispute process dozens of times in my life, in reality, I find that to be completely nonsense. I’ve had to deal with numerous incidents where someone stole my card, and the bank blames me (the customer) and then asks me to prove the money was stolen, only to have them make an arbitrary denial months later. It’s the same bogus argument people make for all kinds of insurance, until you go to make a claim, get denied for some obscure legal text in the policy and find out you were just being ripped off the whole time.

Have you ever had your crypto wallet stolen? What was the process like to get that back?

I have a lot of friends in the crypto space, and only one of them has lost any to theft. In that case, it was a SIM-swap for funds he had stored on a centralized exchange, rather than an attack on his own wallet.

Meanwhile, my own credit card numbers were stolen twice.

This is surprising to hear, as I have had the opposite experience.

I have had many fraudulent transactions or unauthorized charges on various accounts, such as:

* Random charges appearing for no reason

* Clear case of stolen card with a series of unusual transactions.

* Scam websites where I bought a product and never received it.

* One egregious case where someone from a IP geolocated in China brute forced my VNC server password in the middle of the night and used my saved browser credentials to PayPal themselves over $10,000 from my linked chequing account.

In all cases I have filed a dispute with the relevant institution and was fully and promptly reimbursed. In the latter case I had my money back in under a week.

Transaction reversibility is a feature, not a bug!

What is an "average person"? An average person in a first world country who has access to "trustworthy" financial system?

Centralized systems work great... until they don't.

P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.

Even developing countries have access to useful financial networks. I did a few projects in Kenya and Cameroon and traveled around Uganda last year, the traditional banking sector isn't great but telco's have filled the gap and it's easy to use mobile money instead (and in a way that doesn't chew up data). Not sure about exporting the means of surveillance, I think it's much more useful as a geoeconomic tool to enforce things like sanctions for a country like the U.S. than it is to spy on the average person.

> P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.

While I agree with the sentiment, this won't happen. Did the Banana Wars and using the military might to control South America prevent all the American wars in the middle east? Nope. Just as those are forgotten about, we Americans will conveniently forget anything else that puts a bad spot on our record.

Who are these people who are well educated and live in first world countries, competent enough to do these tasks, but also are in a position to benefit from crypto? To me the only (incidental, not at all fundamental) benefit of crypto is if you live in a country with sanctions and you need to get money in/out.

> Centralized systems work great... until they don't.

There has yet to be a decentralized cryptocurrency. We can't even say things like "decentralized systems work great until they don't" because so far they don't exist, and what does has been less than "great".

> Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world.

I don't even know what you're going for here? Crypto solves surveillance now? The global, distributed ledger that everyone can fundamentally access because that's the whole point?

I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement that there has never been a functioning decentralized cryptocurrency. I would need you to explain what your bar is for decentralization, and why it's so high.

As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.

> I would need you to explain what your bar is for decentralization, and why it's so high.

A single entity being capable of significant or total disruption of the network.

> As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.

I am interested. I'm aware of some progress being made here theoretically, but I have not seen implementations (I do not follow closely at this point).

For the 'audience that reads HN' it's plausible, but still rife with risk.

Which is the problem.

We can all learn to 'press a button'. But it's that time we accidentally 'double click' because we were not paying attention, that is the problem.