6 ms·

Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

34 points by nvk 3y ago

CrampusDestrus 3y ago
We could print pieces of folded paper containing wallets with a standard amount of satoshi and.... wooops, we just invented cash again
- brianf0 3y ago
  This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't. That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1] [1] https://kong.cash/ https://kong.cash/
    - ephbit 3y ago
      > I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't. You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking. I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society. One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time. The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before. Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes. No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect. But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.
  - V__ 3y ago
    I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      > I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking. The problem is a social one, for congress to solve. It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. They might have some money but they may not have a home address.
      - csomar 3y ago
        This is a comment that says "I have no idea about the struggle of 4Bn+ people around the world when it comes to payments and banking, so I am just going to dismiss all these people as non-existent and argue that everything is fine here in the West".
        arcticbull 3y ago
        Ah yes my favorite counter-argument: check your privilege. The GDP per capita of Burundi is $221. A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60. The thermodynamics of these kinds of systems make them dramatically more expensive than classical finance because you have to replicate the data so many times. The only reason a Bitcoin payment doesn't cost significantly more than that is nobody's using it, lol. It's slow, it's inefficient, and worse yet, there's no authority to help try and stabilize the currency. The worst off are hurt the most by wild volatility swings, and crypto is volatility incarnate. The promise that volatility would decrease as a function of market cap simply did not materialize. Enough with the silly privilege arguments, let's stick to facts. I specifically called out M-PESA because it's a regional solution to an actual problem they have. [1] And not a blockchain in sight. [1] https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-products-and-services/m-pesa https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-...
  - PretzelPirate 3y ago
    Exactly. The idea of cash is great: we can pay each other without intermediaries and we know that the payment we're receiving has the value it appears to. Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom. Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.
    - ephbit 3y ago
      > Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom. As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system. https://taler.net/en/ https://taler.net/en/
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Wish Hacker News wasn’t so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. Is it curmudgeonly to be uninterested in searching for problems for an overhyped solution than is sadly lacking in them? Well, fine, then I’m happy to be a curmudgeon.
    - pookha 3y ago
      in my mind centralized banking that can turn off your finances for societal reasons (Jinping style) and fiat-currency-backed-by-drone strike are problems that need some kind of solution. Bitcoin has persisted through multiple dips and seems to be a competitor (solution).
      - jfengel 3y ago
        These problems don't seem to bother the vast majority of people. There are a few use cases where they can make a genuine difference, but they're swamped by the number of people using it to circumvent a valid and (reasonably) ethical law. As for violence, that's literally one definition of government: a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not just currency that derives its value from that. It includes your own physical safety and all of the coordination that allows a densely-packed society to function. If you wish to reconsider that, you'll have to go further back than trivia like currency. You'll have to reinvent everything about the social contract that makes government work. Otherwise you're just layering a band-aid on top of a much more significant basis of your daily life.
      - Yizahi 3y ago
        It's not a competitor because it can't scale at all and is a gigantic space heater too (which would be a point of discussion if the advertised functionality worked at least). So the guys governing bittoken network invented a lightning system. Which at close inspection is a highly centralised system, separate from the original bittoken network, and working exactly as current banks. People deposit btc in it, then bank (node) issues you some derivative IOUs which which you trade with others, then transactions are settled between banks (nodes) only. Basically tokenbros are reinventing banks, only with zero oversight and governed from offshores. Amazing alternative I must say. /s
  - zinekeller 3y ago
    Maybe it's because most of those people have actually sincerely thought about it but saw cryptocurrencies to be a worse solution than the current ones? Most cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies (just not derived from government trust) after all, and most currency problems stems from those questions of trust (so let's assume that everyone adopts one: it won't solve any societal problem).
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    I'll bite: What are some of the multitude of ways that cryptocurrency can improve society if adopted?
    - tphyahoo 3y ago
      If bitcoin is adopted as reserve currency, it would innoculate against the existential risk of regional or even global hyperinflations. Forever.
      - ElevenLathe 3y ago
        Inflation is an existential risk? When have we ever seen global hyperinflation?
  - taeric 3y ago
    Stated this way, though, we reinvented credit/gift cards?
  - onionisafruit 3y ago
    A lot of us earned our right to be curmudgeons by getting excited about it ten years ago only to see it play out very differently from our expectations.
    - deweller 3y ago
      There was a lot of change-the-world ideology around bitcoin ten years ago. No it has not lived up to those perfect visions. I don't think it is irrevocably broken. I for one think there is still a lot of potential in cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. I believe a credibly neutral store of value not in the control of any nation state is something that benefits the world. Why can't we celebrate what is good and try to fix what is bad?
      - bb88 3y ago
        Basically your argument is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good." I think the issue I have is the crypto folk haven't wanted to fix any of it -- with the rare exception being ethereum moving to PoS. A lot of the "fixes" would break the "features".
        danShumway 3y ago
        Exactly. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but sometimes terrible is also the enemy of the good. It's not that perfectionists are holding back the ecosystem, it's that the community is satisfied with terrible. Cryptocurrency communities are aggressively hostile to improvement. Every chance to make the ecosystem better is met with pushback. It's funny you bring up PoS, because how much energy was spent (pun absolutely intended) by the Ethereum community fighting that change? It doesn't make sense to celebrate the good and fix the bad in cryptocurrency because a nontrivial portion of its userbase actively wants it to keep its terrible qualities and will fight anyone tooth-and-nail that tries to fix its problems. It's exhausting to even have conversations about what parts of the ecosystem need improvement. I mean, this project is still using Bitcoin, right? So clearly we're not going to fix the bad parts of cryptocurrency, because if y'all in the cryto-community were willing to fix any of the bad parts, Bitcoin of all the implementations wouldn't still somehow inexplicably be your most popular coin. Cryptocurrency is a system with a lot flaws, but its biggest problem that gets in the way of it turning into something useful is that its community that has internalized those flaws as strengths. And honestly, that's the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that there are a lot of bad actors in cryptocurrency communities that aren't even interested in building something useful in the first place, they're purely interested in furthering whatever scam they're working on at the moment. How much of the PoS fight was about genuine academic disagreement about centralization, and how much of that "disagreement" was just a cloak over "I think I have pretty good thing going on with this GPU farm and how dare you mess with that"?
  - ufo 3y ago
    We can also imagine the ways that Bitcoin can make society worse. Satscard already gives some suggestions in their proposed designs, several of which reference El Salvador.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    >it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. a dollar is a voucher for the US economy and the actual value was transferred on an immutable ledger, i.e. append-only physical reality of the universe
  - mbesto 3y ago
    > but it's more like a voucher Vouchers already exist - they're called cashier checks. > transferred on an immutable ledger. Which isn't universally a good thing. If someone steals your voucher, there is no recourse. If someone steals a cashier's check, I can call the bank (and sovereign authorities). Said differently, one is not equivocally better than the other. There's a tradeoff. > Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. I wish crypto advocates would stop being such apologists on HN. It's not productive. Make your statement, explain your rationale and defend your position.
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    Which society it would improve? No extradition offshores, with Giancarlo, Czao, Paolo, Machinski, Sun, Bankrun-Fraud and many others? Maybe so. The problem is that I belong to a different society.
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  Not the same. A paper wallet has actual value like a metal coin. Now if the paper wallet could not be redeemed for sats you have a pretty piece of paper like cash.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    What's the value of a bitcoin? The price it took to mine it in dollars?
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Coins of modern currencies have fiat values far beyond their base metals.
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      Kinda. Its a moving target as metal value and dollar value change. Metal content of coins is changed occasionally to more closely match the face value. For example, solid copper pennies that are still in circulation have a melt value worth more than one cent. My comment didn't state that melt value equals face value. Just that a metal coin has intrinsic value.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        Paper also has intrinsic value. Fiat coins materials aren't changed in value to match their face value. They're changed to lower production cost and achieve a particular quality of production.
        tastyfreeze 3y ago
        That isn't entirely correct. The mint changes coin composition to reduce the intrinsic value of a coin to be less than face value. It is classic debasement. Gold was removed from coins in 1933, silver in 1965, and most of the copper in 1983. In all cases the coin composition was changed because the intrinsic value was greater than the face value. Paper and ink do have a marginal intrinsic value. It just isn't that much. In areas with rampant counterfitting, the value of a printed bill settles to the market value of the paper and ink.
- lobstrosity420 3y ago
  Yeah, it’s the same thing as government issued currency the moment you put it in paper. A corollary is that digital dollars on your banking app is just like crypto.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - brianf0 3y ago
    Not the same, BTC can't be created / devalued at will.
    - zinekeller 3y ago
      We already see some currencies that are valued differently based on the current situation and who holds it, what's the difference with BTC? What safeguards it has that prevents such discrimination?
    - loeg 3y ago
      BTC is highly volatile and its price is sensitive to voluntary (“at will”) trading.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Awesome. That means that the fewer than 0.03% of wallet holders who hold more than 40% of the coins can own everything forever! Also, it can. See the Ethereum fork and Bitcoin Segwit.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
      It can be created at the will of the developers of the software and their ability to influence the community. Plenty of times the market value of Bitcoin has dropped drastically because one person said or did something.
      - ursuscamp 3y ago
        Someone saying something that affects the price has nothing to do with creating new Bitcoin. That's just a function of it being a small market still, relative to larger and more deeper capital markets. If any developers tried to convince anyone to run Bitcoin software that debased their savings, they are going to have a very bad time.
- amanj41 3y ago
  I would say this is more analogous to a debit card
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
agravier 3y ago
Could we fix the typo in the title? It almost phisically hurts to read.
- nvk 3y ago
  Ha! fixed.
psychphysic 3y ago
How's it work? Website explains nothing.
- amanj41 3y ago
  There's a video. It would appear there is an app on your phone which contains public wallet information, but then this NFC card contains your wallet private key. The card is encrypted with a short pin code. If you want to make a tx you have to use phone app and tap card to phone to sign the tx (after typing in the PIN to decrypt key)
- peterscbrown 3y ago
  [dead]
ada1981 3y ago
But can’t I simply clone the signal that the chip emits using flipper or something similar?
- amanj41 3y ago
  I'm assuming based on the demo video that the private key is encrypted via the "CVC" code. Not great security but enough that someone would need at least a little while to brute force. Perhaps a solution where you only load a little cash onto it
- nvk 3y ago
  No. It's a signed message.
  - ada1981 3y ago
    But if I replay the signaled message and have the code? I must be confused how this works.
amanj41 3y ago
This is interesting, though ultimately the private key is ostensibly only protected by a pin code of a few digits. At the end of the day that might be ok since no one would reasonably carry a large amount of cash in their wallet. Perhaps one would only load small amounts to their corresponding BTC wallet for the card.
- peterscbrown 3y ago
  [dead]
cryptohuney 3y ago
Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they don't know that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident and therefore completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.
cryptohuney 3y ago
Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they won't have any confidence that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident with the printed or forged denomination and therefore these assets are completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card behind proprietary tech, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.

34 points by nvk 3y ago

We could print pieces of folded paper containing wallets with a standard amount of satoshi and.... wooops, we just invented cash again

brianf0 3y ago
This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't. That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1] [1] https://kong.cash/ https://kong.cash/
  - ephbit 3y ago
    > I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't. You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking. I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society. One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time. The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before. Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes. No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect. But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.
- V__ 3y ago
  I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking. The problem is a social one, for congress to solve. It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. They might have some money but they may not have a home address.
    - csomar 3y ago
      This is a comment that says "I have no idea about the struggle of 4Bn+ people around the world when it comes to payments and banking, so I am just going to dismiss all these people as non-existent and argue that everything is fine here in the West".
      - arcticbull 3y ago
        Ah yes my favorite counter-argument: check your privilege. The GDP per capita of Burundi is $221. A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60. The thermodynamics of these kinds of systems make them dramatically more expensive than classical finance because you have to replicate the data so many times. The only reason a Bitcoin payment doesn't cost significantly more than that is nobody's using it, lol. It's slow, it's inefficient, and worse yet, there's no authority to help try and stabilize the currency. The worst off are hurt the most by wild volatility swings, and crypto is volatility incarnate. The promise that volatility would decrease as a function of market cap simply did not materialize. Enough with the silly privilege arguments, let's stick to facts. I specifically called out M-PESA because it's a regional solution to an actual problem they have. [1] And not a blockchain in sight. [1] https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-products-and-services/m-pesa https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-...
- PretzelPirate 3y ago
  Exactly. The idea of cash is great: we can pay each other without intermediaries and we know that the payment we're receiving has the value it appears to. Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom. Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.
  - ephbit 3y ago
    > Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom. As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system. https://taler.net/en/ https://taler.net/en/
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Wish Hacker News wasn’t so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. Is it curmudgeonly to be uninterested in searching for problems for an overhyped solution than is sadly lacking in them? Well, fine, then I’m happy to be a curmudgeon.
  - pookha 3y ago
    in my mind centralized banking that can turn off your finances for societal reasons (Jinping style) and fiat-currency-backed-by-drone strike are problems that need some kind of solution. Bitcoin has persisted through multiple dips and seems to be a competitor (solution).
    - jfengel 3y ago
      These problems don't seem to bother the vast majority of people. There are a few use cases where they can make a genuine difference, but they're swamped by the number of people using it to circumvent a valid and (reasonably) ethical law. As for violence, that's literally one definition of government: a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not just currency that derives its value from that. It includes your own physical safety and all of the coordination that allows a densely-packed society to function. If you wish to reconsider that, you'll have to go further back than trivia like currency. You'll have to reinvent everything about the social contract that makes government work. Otherwise you're just layering a band-aid on top of a much more significant basis of your daily life.
    - Yizahi 3y ago
      It's not a competitor because it can't scale at all and is a gigantic space heater too (which would be a point of discussion if the advertised functionality worked at least). So the guys governing bittoken network invented a lightning system. Which at close inspection is a highly centralised system, separate from the original bittoken network, and working exactly as current banks. People deposit btc in it, then bank (node) issues you some derivative IOUs which which you trade with others, then transactions are settled between banks (nodes) only. Basically tokenbros are reinventing banks, only with zero oversight and governed from offshores. Amazing alternative I must say. /s
- zinekeller 3y ago
  Maybe it's because most of those people have actually sincerely thought about it but saw cryptocurrencies to be a worse solution than the current ones? Most cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies (just not derived from government trust) after all, and most currency problems stems from those questions of trust (so let's assume that everyone adopts one: it won't solve any societal problem).
- ElevenLathe 3y ago
  I'll bite: What are some of the multitude of ways that cryptocurrency can improve society if adopted?
  - tphyahoo 3y ago
    If bitcoin is adopted as reserve currency, it would innoculate against the existential risk of regional or even global hyperinflations. Forever.
    - ElevenLathe 3y ago
      Inflation is an existential risk? When have we ever seen global hyperinflation?
- taeric 3y ago
  Stated this way, though, we reinvented credit/gift cards?
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  A lot of us earned our right to be curmudgeons by getting excited about it ten years ago only to see it play out very differently from our expectations.
  - deweller 3y ago
    There was a lot of change-the-world ideology around bitcoin ten years ago. No it has not lived up to those perfect visions. I don't think it is irrevocably broken. I for one think there is still a lot of potential in cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. I believe a credibly neutral store of value not in the control of any nation state is something that benefits the world. Why can't we celebrate what is good and try to fix what is bad?
    - bb88 3y ago
      Basically your argument is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good." I think the issue I have is the crypto folk haven't wanted to fix any of it -- with the rare exception being ethereum moving to PoS. A lot of the "fixes" would break the "features".
      - danShumway 3y ago
        Exactly. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but sometimes terrible is also the enemy of the good. It's not that perfectionists are holding back the ecosystem, it's that the community is satisfied with terrible. Cryptocurrency communities are aggressively hostile to improvement. Every chance to make the ecosystem better is met with pushback. It's funny you bring up PoS, because how much energy was spent (pun absolutely intended) by the Ethereum community fighting that change? It doesn't make sense to celebrate the good and fix the bad in cryptocurrency because a nontrivial portion of its userbase actively wants it to keep its terrible qualities and will fight anyone tooth-and-nail that tries to fix its problems. It's exhausting to even have conversations about what parts of the ecosystem need improvement. I mean, this project is still using Bitcoin, right? So clearly we're not going to fix the bad parts of cryptocurrency, because if y'all in the cryto-community were willing to fix any of the bad parts, Bitcoin of all the implementations wouldn't still somehow inexplicably be your most popular coin. Cryptocurrency is a system with a lot flaws, but its biggest problem that gets in the way of it turning into something useful is that its community that has internalized those flaws as strengths. And honestly, that's the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that there are a lot of bad actors in cryptocurrency communities that aren't even interested in building something useful in the first place, they're purely interested in furthering whatever scam they're working on at the moment. How much of the PoS fight was about genuine academic disagreement about centralization, and how much of that "disagreement" was just a cloak over "I think I have pretty good thing going on with this GPU farm and how dare you mess with that"?
- ufo 3y ago
  We can also imagine the ways that Bitcoin can make society worse. Satscard already gives some suggestions in their proposed designs, several of which reference El Salvador.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  >it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. a dollar is a voucher for the US economy and the actual value was transferred on an immutable ledger, i.e. append-only physical reality of the universe
- mbesto 3y ago
  > but it's more like a voucher Vouchers already exist - they're called cashier checks. > transferred on an immutable ledger. Which isn't universally a good thing. If someone steals your voucher, there is no recourse. If someone steals a cashier's check, I can call the bank (and sovereign authorities). Said differently, one is not equivocally better than the other. There's a tradeoff. > Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. I wish crypto advocates would stop being such apologists on HN. It's not productive. Make your statement, explain your rationale and defend your position.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  Which society it would improve? No extradition offshores, with Giancarlo, Czao, Paolo, Machinski, Sun, Bankrun-Fraud and many others? Maybe so. The problem is that I belong to a different society.
tastyfreeze 3y ago
Not the same. A paper wallet has actual value like a metal coin. Now if the paper wallet could not be redeemed for sats you have a pretty piece of paper like cash.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  What's the value of a bitcoin? The price it took to mine it in dollars?
- kube-system 3y ago
  Coins of modern currencies have fiat values far beyond their base metals.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Kinda. Its a moving target as metal value and dollar value change. Metal content of coins is changed occasionally to more closely match the face value. For example, solid copper pennies that are still in circulation have a melt value worth more than one cent. My comment didn't state that melt value equals face value. Just that a metal coin has intrinsic value.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      Paper also has intrinsic value. Fiat coins materials aren't changed in value to match their face value. They're changed to lower production cost and achieve a particular quality of production.
      - tastyfreeze 3y ago
        That isn't entirely correct. The mint changes coin composition to reduce the intrinsic value of a coin to be less than face value. It is classic debasement. Gold was removed from coins in 1933, silver in 1965, and most of the copper in 1983. In all cases the coin composition was changed because the intrinsic value was greater than the face value. Paper and ink do have a marginal intrinsic value. It just isn't that much. In areas with rampant counterfitting, the value of a printed bill settles to the market value of the paper and ink.
lobstrosity420 3y ago
Yeah, it’s the same thing as government issued currency the moment you put it in paper. A corollary is that digital dollars on your banking app is just like crypto.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- brianf0 3y ago
  Not the same, BTC can't be created / devalued at will.
  - zinekeller 3y ago
    We already see some currencies that are valued differently based on the current situation and who holds it, what's the difference with BTC? What safeguards it has that prevents such discrimination?
  - loeg 3y ago
    BTC is highly volatile and its price is sensitive to voluntary (“at will”) trading.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Awesome. That means that the fewer than 0.03% of wallet holders who hold more than 40% of the coins can own everything forever! Also, it can. See the Ethereum fork and Bitcoin Segwit.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
    It can be created at the will of the developers of the software and their ability to influence the community. Plenty of times the market value of Bitcoin has dropped drastically because one person said or did something.
    - ursuscamp 3y ago
      Someone saying something that affects the price has nothing to do with creating new Bitcoin. That's just a function of it being a small market still, relative to larger and more deeper capital markets. If any developers tried to convince anyone to run Bitcoin software that debased their savings, they are going to have a very bad time.
amanj41 3y ago
I would say this is more analogous to a debit card
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

agravier 3y ago

Could we fix the typo in the title? It almost phisically hurts to read.

nvk 3y ago
Ha! fixed.

psychphysic 3y ago

How's it work? Website explains nothing.

amanj41 3y ago
There's a video. It would appear there is an app on your phone which contains public wallet information, but then this NFC card contains your wallet private key. The card is encrypted with a short pin code. If you want to make a tx you have to use phone app and tap card to phone to sign the tx (after typing in the PIN to decrypt key)
peterscbrown 3y ago
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ada1981 3y ago

But can’t I simply clone the signal that the chip emits using flipper or something similar?

amanj41 3y ago
I'm assuming based on the demo video that the private key is encrypted via the "CVC" code. Not great security but enough that someone would need at least a little while to brute force. Perhaps a solution where you only load a little cash onto it
nvk 3y ago
No. It's a signed message.
- ada1981 3y ago
  But if I replay the signaled message and have the code? I must be confused how this works.

amanj41 3y ago

This is interesting, though ultimately the private key is ostensibly only protected by a pin code of a few digits. At the end of the day that might be ok since no one would reasonably carry a large amount of cash in their wallet. Perhaps one would only load small amounts to their corresponding BTC wallet for the card.

peterscbrown 3y ago
[dead]

cryptohuney 3y ago

Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they don't know that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident and therefore completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.

cryptohuney 3y ago

Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they won't have any confidence that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident with the printed or forged denomination and therefore these assets are completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card behind proprietary tech, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.