arkensaw 3 hours ago

Stories like this just reinforce my belief that all crypto is just a big con.

  • FloorEgg an hour ago

    Have you ever heard of the great depression?

    Do you know what consumer banking was like in it's first ~50 years?

  • kobalsky 2 hours ago

    well, then you are the target demographic of that headline, keep rolling on the confirmation bias.

    the only reason this is public is because the blockchain ledger is public and unmodifiable.

    if this mistake had been made on banking system, you wouldn't have heard about it

    • ekjhgkejhgk 2 hours ago

      This is really funny.

      You first wrote

      > if this mistake had been made on banking system, you wouldn't have heard about it, because it gets fixed and its gone without a trace.

      And then you edited it to

      > if this mistake had been made on banking system, you wouldn't have heard about it

      I was going to reply that if gets fixed and doesn't cause anyone problems, you're making a case for it. I guess you must have understood that too and backtracked :-) I actually loled at the dishonesty.

      • kobalsky an hour ago

        I didn't want to discuss whether the banking system provides or not a trustable audit trail when someone screws up, because I don't know about it and I don't want to speculate whether stuff gets sweeped under rug or not.

        with the blockchain you can't hide the mistakes, that was my point.

        • FloorEgg an hour ago

          When I see these interactions play out, I can't help but suspect the people who see crypto only as a scam haven't studied history.

          I see a lot of crypto as a scam, but immutable distributed ledger technology sure seems like a societal defense mechanism against authoritarianism.

        • ekjhgkejhgk an hour ago

          > I didn't want to discuss whether the banking system provides or not a trustable audit trail

          You did want to discuss it because you said

          > you wouldn't have heard about it

          What you wanted to avoid is the fact that because the system works well, it doesn't cause anyone problems.

          • kobalsky an hour ago

            Banks wouldn't have made an error like this public. Maybe if there was an investigation an audit trail exists that could bring that to the public. With crypto this isn't an option, you screw up in public by default, there's no possibility to hide it.

            > What you wanted to avoid is the fact that because the system works well, it doesn't cause anyone problems.

            I don't know what you mean by the system. But banks, and their ability to create money on the spot, have been the epicenter of uncountable economic crises.

            • ekjhgkejhgk 41 minutes ago

              > you screw up in public by default, there's no possibility to hide it.

              It doesn't matter, because as you admitted yourself, it gets fixed so fast it doesn't cause anyone problems. Better than the alternative, which is if you screw up it's a problem for all eternity.

    • lisbbb 2 hours ago

      Vanguard won't allow clients to even buy anything crypto related in their accounts. That should tell you something right there. If it's so great, why isn't one of the leading wealth management brokers on board?

      I once worked with a guy who was an Ethereum "millionaire" which I knew because he couldn't stop telling people. He was a nice guy, just really, super annoying. Anyways, he was so well off he sold his house and bought an RV and was going around the country, family in tow, doing whatever. I don't really know what to believe there. Wealthy people don't usually sell everything they own and go live in an RV. Who knows?

      • kobalsky an hour ago

        you are mixing up concepts.

        crypto assets like BTC and ETH are insanely volatile, I agree with this, don't put your retirement money there.

        crypto coins issued by an entity, like in the article, you can trust them as much as you trust the entity, the difference with electronic or paper money is that it cannot be created in private, the ledger is public and it cannot be modified.

      • r_lee an hour ago

        that's because of AML. Crypto is associated with money laundering so it's easier to just ban it as not that many are into it yet

Cpoll 4 hours ago

I think this is a LMGTFY question, but: If Paypal started doing this maliciously, or otherwise failed in custodianship, would the community have any recourse? Specifically, can they fork the coin? The ledger is public, so I imagine yes?

  • walletdrainer 3 hours ago

    Of course the community can fork the coin, it just won’t be worth anything without PayPal buying it to maintain the peg.

maxrev17 31 minutes ago

Depressing comments section conflating crypto with DLT. Money bros will always be money bros the platform doesn’t matter.