Not in the context I’m alluding to. With conventional banking, the only place to move money to is another bank. You can withdraw cash at an ATM, but large transfers have to go to another bank. If someone hacks my bank account and initiates a large transfer, that transaction can be reversed. And moreover, it will be going to an account at another bank that is owned by a known customer.
But crypto exchanges must have the ability to transfer to unvetted crypto wallets. No crypto customer would accept an exchange that simply didn’t let you transfer coins to your own private wallet. So even though the accounts themselves have KYC, you can still hack a crypto account and send the entire balance to an unknown person.
The equivalent for regular banks would be if your regular bank offered you the option to send a large cash withdrawal to a physical address of your choice. Enter any address, and any amount of your funds can be sent to any address you specify. The closest banks have to that is bill pay, and even that is just a bank to bank transfer in the form of a check in the mail.
The closest real banks actually get to this is wire transfers, and those are pretty locked down nowadays. They often require going to a physical branch, showing ID, etc in order to initiate a wire transfer. They’re locked down precisely because they’re the one irreversible transaction built into the regular banking system.
Crypto bros often fail to realize what actually secures the banking system. The banking system is not secured by foolproof cryptography. The cryptographic security of crypto solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Every bank is not the gold standard of IT security. Rather, what really secures the banking system is that there’s not much you can actually do with stolen bank login credentials. Pretty much every way you could move money out of said bank account would require you to show your face somewhere or transfer funds to an account traced to your real ID. And pretty much any method of moving money out of a bank account can be reversed.
The people actually buying and selling crypto don’t care about the decentralized part nor the currency part, it’s just an extremely speculative investment vehicle.
Not using the decentralized part of your decentralized currency is kinda crazy.
All the hacking risk of keeping your money in a regular bank, but none of the protections that come from reversible transactions and KYC laws.
KYC laws still apply to all these major brokerages
Not in the context I’m alluding to. With conventional banking, the only place to move money to is another bank. You can withdraw cash at an ATM, but large transfers have to go to another bank. If someone hacks my bank account and initiates a large transfer, that transaction can be reversed. And moreover, it will be going to an account at another bank that is owned by a known customer.
But crypto exchanges must have the ability to transfer to unvetted crypto wallets. No crypto customer would accept an exchange that simply didn’t let you transfer coins to your own private wallet. So even though the accounts themselves have KYC, you can still hack a crypto account and send the entire balance to an unknown person.
The equivalent for regular banks would be if your regular bank offered you the option to send a large cash withdrawal to a physical address of your choice. Enter any address, and any amount of your funds can be sent to any address you specify. The closest banks have to that is bill pay, and even that is just a bank to bank transfer in the form of a check in the mail.
The closest real banks actually get to this is wire transfers, and those are pretty locked down nowadays. They often require going to a physical branch, showing ID, etc in order to initiate a wire transfer. They’re locked down precisely because they’re the one irreversible transaction built into the regular banking system.
Crypto bros often fail to realize what actually secures the banking system. The banking system is not secured by foolproof cryptography. The cryptographic security of crypto solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Every bank is not the gold standard of IT security. Rather, what really secures the banking system is that there’s not much you can actually do with stolen bank login credentials. Pretty much every way you could move money out of said bank account would require you to show your face somewhere or transfer funds to an account traced to your real ID. And pretty much any method of moving money out of a bank account can be reversed.
The people actually buying and selling crypto don’t care about the decentralized part nor the currency part, it’s just an extremely speculative investment vehicle.
Yup. Crypto was supposed to solve this but cryptobros are idiots.
I know right, total insanity.
You can lead a horse to water.
but you can’t burn them when they get there.