What do you mean by "IN"? Are dollars "IN" your bank account?

I'm not trying to make a tired argument about dollars being fake or something, I just don't see the distinction as far as wallets specifically are concerned.

The difference is: (a) if I don't trust "computers" it absolutely can because I can use deposit box, and (b) the government guarantees that it is via FDIC insurance plus a long list of legal alternatives if it suddenly isn't there.

Crypto has neither (a) nor (b); it is specifically designed to not have (a), and I don't see it having a (b) any time soon since regulation is anathema.

I see your point. Both are ledgers. So in that way crypto and bank accounts are similar. But bank accounts can become cash. Crypto cannot. Now the argument shifts to "what is cash" but a different kind of ledger. We can argue why one is trusted more than the other, and perhaps 100 years from now crypto might be as safe as US dollars or Euros. But today there is a big, bit difference between a crypto wallet and a bank account. I find it especially confusing that many crypto advocates typically lament going off the gold standard, which makes my head hurt...

Now that I argue this... i'm confused. Dammit, Beavis.

Bitcoin was indeed founded by libertarians who believed the loss of the gold standard was the beginning of the end of western civilisation.

It’s a weird belief but - what if they’re right ? What if it did cause a lot of the problems ? Maybe not directly, but by freeing the state from a boundary-setting limiter it somehow corrupted it?

I don’t know the answer but Bitcoin is a bet that it did cause problems. And so far it’s a winning bet.

Ultimately you need to trust the blockchain, which runs on computers. Which is the commenter's point.

Even with cash, you trust that the banks won't blacklist your serial numbers. With gold you trust that the world will not invent a new gold making method that will make it worthless (as happened with aluminum). A basic level of faith is required by any system, so that point is not valid.

The blockchain is a virtualized state - yes it executes on computers but the whole point is distributed consensus - you don't have to trust the computers, you trust the open source code being executed by the network.

> you don't have to trust the computers, you trust the open source code being executed by the network

You're contradicting yourself.

It's not a contradiction.

You can trust the law / trust the code, but not trust the judges / trust the machines that run the code.

You trust the law beacuse you can read it / You trust the code because you can read and mathematically prove that it works

You cant trust the judges -- you have to have faith in them

You cant trust the machines either -- but blockchain gives you specific mathematical guarantees that it is very hard for them to break the system.

I don't think you're using the word 'trust' correctly. Trust is a belief that a particular outcome will occur despite having no guarantees that it will occur. What does it mean to trust the law? I have no idea.

I think you are quibbling over the word "trust". How about you believe, based on your understanding of the system and the monetary cost of attacking it, that the virtualized computer will execute the way you expect it to execute?

The same way you'd "trust" that a safe deposit box will not be breached. It's certainly not impossible, but it's unlikely based on your understanding of how it works.

Yes, I have no objection to this usage of 'trust'. My objection is in 'trust the law'.

With cash, if you put a fortune in your shoebox it is "IN" your shoebox. The whole point of bitcoin is the distributed nature. Your wallet can be copied without altering any actual holdings or values, whereas a shoebox cannot.

A bitcoin wallet is more like a safety deposit box key, than an actual box itself.

> I'm talking about a bank account not holding physical bills

Trusting the regulated bank isn't that far from trusting the monetary authority that gives paper bills value. Or, for that matter, for the 99% of people who have not verified Bitcoin's math and have not inspected the code running on the servers they buy Bitcoin through, trusting the techies who pitch the product.

That's..a different discussion. My point is that IN bank and IN wallet are both technically incorrect, but for basically all purposes correct.

But yes, you are right that the vast majority of users of [piece of software] have not verified [piece of software] and are relying on other humans to basically tell them if they should or shouldn't run it.

You have a point in that neither bank accounts nor bitcoin wallets are wallets in any shape or form, the difference is bank accounts are not advertised as wallets, but bitcoin wallets are. Also interesting that the bitcoin imagery is all about gold coins, when in fact there are no coins at all, virtual or otherwise. Bitcoin is merely an abstract unit of count. The very name 'bitcoin' is misleading. Everything about cryptocurrencies seems fraudulent in one way or another.

You really think people equate crypto wallets with physical wallets, more than they do bank accounts? Not sure I agree. I think it would be much better if they did equate it with a wallet. An account can be recovered if lost, a wallet cannot. Wallet encourages better behavior security wise IMO.

I think you're grasping at straws with the coins thing..you really think there's an attempt to confuse people into thinking that it's..physical coins?

From my experience, most people are left in disbelief when you tell them that the bitcoins they own are not in their wallet. It reflects a deep lack of understanding of how bitcoin works. I don't think misunderstanding how a financial product works is a good thing. Whereas, again, from my experience, bank accounts are well understood. People are fully aware that their funds are not being kept in a box in the bank's vault, and no one tries to convince them of the contrary either.

Okay, then that vacuous point is correct as well. A bank account is just a 9-ish digit number. So in that regard it's similar to a bitcoin wallet. What the person who started this convo was saying is that his friend thought the bitcoin wallet contained the bitcoins, in the exact same way that a regular wallet contains regular paper currency. That the bitcoin wallet would grow in file size based on the amount of bitcoin inside it. All pedantic misinterpretations aside, I'm pretty confident that's what he was trying to convey.

In the 90s a few of my friends decided to be day traders. It worked great until March 2000.