New Initiative for Donations

Neia Neutuladh neia at ikeran.org
Fri Oct 26 17:20:08 UTC 2018


On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 06:19:29 +0000, Joakim wrote:

> On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 05:47:05 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
>> On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 02:38:08 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>>> As with D, sometimes the new _is_ better, so perhaps you shouldn't
>>> assume old is better either.
>>
>> There's no assuming going on. Cryptocurrencies are worse than credit
>> cards for everything that normal people care about,
> 
> Such as? I already noted that they're easier and cheaper, you simply
> flatly state that "normal people" find them worse.

In most countries where people are going to donate to D, the vast majority 
of people have access to a credit card.

>> If for some reason cryptocurrencies become popular and sufficiently
>> stable to be used as currency, I have no doubt that existing credit
>> card companies will start offering automatic currency exchange, so you
>> can have an account in USD and pay a vendor who accepts only Ethereum,
>> or vice versa. As such, accepting credit card payments is good enough.
> 
> I don't know what we'd be waiting for, the tokens I mentioned are all
> worth billions and widely used, particularly by techies:

Very few merchants accept any sort of cryptocurrency. I think I've found 
three. One was through a cryptocurrency forum, and one was Valve 
announcing that they would stop accepting it.

> Why would I wait for antiquated credit-card companies to accept these
> tokens? The whole point of these new tokens is to obsolete the credit
> card companies.

You wouldn't wait. You haven't waited. For you, the benefits are large 
enough and the downsides small enough that it doesn't make sense to wait. 
But I'm not you.

I would wait because I've lost access to important credentials before and 
had to send a copy of my government-issued ID to a company to get them to 
deactivate two-factor authentication. I've had to use password reset 
mechanisms frequently. I don't trust myself not to lose access to a 
cryptocurrency private key. And that would destroy currency and lose me my 
life savings.

I would wait because I want a mechanism to dispute transactions. Maybe I 
authorized that transaction, but the merchant didn't deliver.

I would wait because I want an environmentally-friendly system instead of 
one that uses as much electricity as Afghanistan to process fifteen 
transactions per second.

I would wait because cryptocurrencies have extremely volatile exchange 
rates, which makes it difficult to set prices or store value in them.

I would wait because I can't use cryptocurrency to do anything useful, so 
I would incur a fee to transfer money into it and another to transfer 
money out of it.

I would wait because I don't trust any cryptocurrency exchanges to stick 
around like I expect Visa or even a community bank to remain in business, 
or even not to commit fraud against me. While I might not trust my local 
bank much, I do trust my government to regulate them and to bail me out 
should the worst happen.

I think my concerns are rather normal. Judging by adoption, there's some 
set of concerns that's normal.


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