You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies?
None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.
The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done.
The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.
The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.
Which is like, neat and all. But also infuriating. We don't have crypto-currencies, we just have crypto-banks.
None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.
The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done.
The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.
The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.
Which is like, neat and all. But also infuriating. We don't have crypto-currencies, we just have crypto-banks.