I assume you’re saying the way they prevent misuse is because the ledger is public and it’s trackable by anyone who wants to look at the ledger.
If I’ve mistaken your argument then please correct me. I’m familiar with blockchain and have contributed to multiple projects in the open source community back when I saw potential and promise in blockchain tech.
If you’re depositing into a bank or exchange it’s not like 1 person is controlling that entire entities wallet(s). Deposits have the same risk of being misused in crypto as in fiat.
No but with these exchanges collapsing I keep seeing the argument that it people kept everything in a soft or hard wallet then everything would be OK. I disagree with that premise for the reasons prior. Also in the case of Luna and many others their coins are effectively worthless.
Totally valid criticism about the coins potentially being worthless.
I just want to stop the ignorant, misinformed takes.
It's so paradoxical that HN is paranoid about the government changing settings on your phone without your permission, and yet HN does not think we should prevent the government or an opaque set of third parties from arbitrarily seizing and freezing your money.
So am I to assume you have read the entire source code of any cryptocurrency you put money in to prove to yourself there is no "backdoor"? And you argue every user of cryptocurrency should do the same? i.e. "don't put money in X if you have not read and verified the source code of X and committed to reading every code for every future update of X, and also verified that the nodes you are talking to are running the same code X, and in the future will keep verifying that the network is not pulling a sneaky on ya?" In which case, I strongly agree with you. Moreover, with such a great user interface cryptocurrency will surely replace traditional finance any day :)
Never argued blockchains should fully replace traditional finance.
Banks are extremely valuable to me and probably always will be.
Blockchains have certain properties which make them extremely desirable in a specific set of use-cases. That set was greatly exaggerated by ignorance and insanity in the bull market. Still, the true set is nonzero.
You did not answer my earlier question, only latched on to a throwaway line at the end. Do you verify code of everything on a Blockchain you interact with, and maintain that everyone who interacts with the Blockchain should verify these "mathematical properties" themselves?
Yes, I do not hold assets in contracts which I have not personally verified.
Yes, I strongly recommend everyone do the same.
If it's a "yield vault" or an "LP pool" then you really truly should read every line of code and understand all the risks, because it is extremely likely that there is some catastrophic exploit, given the current near non-existent scaffolding regarding formal verification of smart contracts.
Great! At least we agree on one count. Now, from what you say, I see only two possible logical conclusions:
1. People only deposit their crypto on LP pools they can read and verify, on chains whose code they can read and verify. Since people with such technical know-how is very limited, there is not much liquidity in the "liquidity pools" and thus the DEXes are virtually unusable.
2. People deposit their money to DEXes without reading and verifying every single smart contracts and Blockchain code. DEXes have sufficient liquidity but the depositors sometimes wake up with all their money gone in the air.
If you are arriving at a third possibility, naturally you are making a different assumption than I made in the above two points. What are the assumptions that leads you there? I would really like to understand.
You make a good point. We need to figure out how to make it easier to use blockchains correctly.
It could be that there is no good answer and blockchains are simply hard to use and we should advise the general public to exercise extreme caution when using them, if at all.
An argument against the worth of an arbitrary token created on a permissionless blockchain is not an argument against the good, useful, valuable properties of blockchains, such as the fact that you mathematically cannot be stolen from without physical coercion or profound negligence.
Yes, DEXs exist. Yes, you can self-custody on DEXs.