overthrow

This message is devoid of evidence lol

Look how hard some governments have tried to stop this movement, and none have succeeded. That's real life evidence that they simply aren't capable.

I think this cloud will outlast the old men yelling at it.

Also: I hope one day someone calls my company a failure because it "only" has hundreds of thousands of users

Petro is an attempt at embrace-extend-extinguish. If that "Reception" section is to be believed, nobody is using it willingly. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Look under "NiceHash-able", if the number is less than 100% it means (to an approximation) not enough idle hardware exists on the planet to perform an attack. This means any attack must start with a manufacturing project that must stay secret for a decade+, then outpace growth and eventually surpass the capacity of the private sector. And then you need the energy to actually run the chips - no country would ever consider diverting that much energy away from their population.

If it were possible to compromise a $xxx billion dollar system, with only $x million, don't you think it would have been done by now? Maybe even by some bored billionaire just for fun?

And trust me, I don't think posting in a dead HN thread will speed up or slow down crypto's success in any way, lmao. I just enjoy the banter.

> I think if people have working mobile phones then they're able to be sent electronic cash without a p2p system. Indeed, more easily than having a VPN and relevant skills to received crypto assets.

Spoken like a true first-world armchair warrior. Maduro shut off the non-p2p systems, as dicussed. He then failed to stop crypto payments. Do you think it was his "preference" all along to fail to control the flow of money?

Don't underestimate people's ability to figure out a VPN. It's not hard, and the prospect of literally starving to death can be quite motivating.

And since you mentioned magic, the real magic would be any country stopping its citizens from accessing the internet. Even in North Korea, there are people with unfiltered satellite internet, because Kim Jong Un has not yet built a Faraday cage around the sky.

> Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems

Sure, but those systems had been sabotaged by a politican/dictator named Nicolás Maduro who rejected the results of an election.

> What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?

A decentralized payments system is one that cannot be shut down by Nicolás Maduro.

Do you think the Venezuelan crisis was just a big conspiracy theory?

Maybe instead of saying what people should and shouldn't be doing, you should ask yourself why they're using it anyway despite the obvious downsides.

Lightning fees are less than $0.01 - much better than the alternative of $20 for cashing a check. And the volatility is a small price to pay for financial control, for someone who (with good reason) doesn't trust banks or the government that's failing them.

Actually the easiest way the government could kill crypto would be to get rid of the corruption and help those "undesirables" with their problems, instead of making them fend for themselves. I'm not holding my breath, but in a way I hope that happens.

You're right, this is a job for the government... but the government isn't solving the problem. "Let's just" have the government do their job. Call me when that happens.

While we sit around waiting, the private sector stepped in with a (interim?) solution. What's wrong with that?

Under-banked does not mean they have no money. They obviously have some money or they would starve. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck and give 3% of their wages to a check cashing service. If it were as easy as you seem to think for them to get a bank account, those check cashing businesses all around the country would not exist.

If there's a difference I'm open to someone citing a source quantifying it, but I won't quite be convinced by unsourced blanket generalizations that go against common wisdom