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FWIW, I'm pretty sure banks loose in the hundreds of billions per year to fraud... and it's all heavily regulated.



And customers who experience a loss are made whole through EFTA [2] and Reg. E [1] (if transfer related), with banks eating any costs unrecoverable after pursuing those who perpetrated the theft. Does Coinbase reimburse you if lose your crypto due to fraud [3] [4]? If not, clearly regulation is warranted if they put themselves forth as a custodian and exchange. This doesn't happen in centralized finance, and everyone has some semblance of recourse (depending on fraudulent loss experienced; either your securities or commodities are returned, or investment insurance pays out).

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/regecg.htm

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/supmanual/cch/efta....

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/huobi-global-warrant-seeks-1... (A Coinbase user lost $11.6 million in under 10 minutes after falling for a fake-notification scam, the US attorney's office said)

[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=coinbase+theft


Those are only certain types of fraud. There are others that are not covered. For instance, someone stole my wife's credit card information and bought nearly $3k worth of stuff from various stores. The company refused to cover it. Apparently once your loss exceeds a certain amount, they suddenly become much less willing.

If someone somehow lost 11.6M due to credit card fraud, I seriously doubt they'd get their money back.


You are not liable for credit card fraud in your name in the us. You should have been able to refuse to pay. That sounds shady that the company tricked you into making them whole for something you aren't liable for.


You do realize that using credit cards is completely irrelevant to trading in a regulated marketplace? The closest connection is that both are parts of the financial system, but that’s about it.


So you respond with the user experience and say its a limitation of the whole concept

Fascinating…

Confidence in the banking system via state insurance was added retroactively

Don’t pretend that came organically, the banks thought it would be fun too


The vast majority of the value proposition of crypto is that it operates outside of legal and regulatory frameworks. It doesn't settle faster than instant payments (which, in many countries, are usually much cheaper or free and have settlement targets of <60 seconds), and it's a store of value because of technological controls (vs monetary policy).

I want to be open minded and am really trying hard to "stay curious" in this technology domain. Please share any points I would've missed about the benefits of crypto, besides the ability to evade government controls around value transfer or storage and that there is no ability to reverse fraudulent transfers (to the benefit of billions of dollars in theft). I will readily admit it has benefits for folks in places like Venezuela, Turkey, or anywhere else with bad faith fiscal and monetary policy, but not the world as a whole. I know of people in Venezuela who are attempting to operate outside of the dysfunctional financial system, and they use Zelle [1]!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Venezuela+zelle


Lets focus on one topic instead of a hodgepodge of unrelated reasons why you dont have confidence in this system

Banks state backed insurance came retroactively and it took decades for people to feel confidence in that system and is one of several factors in why the customer experience has things you like. You can still find a sliver of society that doesn't trust banks. That confidence and transaction reversibility isnt inherent to banks, and the lack of these redundancies isnt inherent to crypto.

Can you respond to that specifically?


> You can still find a sliver of society that doesn't trust banks.

I don’t believe it’s necessary to pander to fringe groups, just as I wouldn’t entertain the concerns of sovereign citizens and similar folks “off the reservation.” Financial and banking regulations in developed countries (including the US) are robust, and arguably are sufficient to provide a firm safety net for participants in the system.

No need to address my other points.


Your other points also assume crypto asset users even care about it as a replacement financial system as opposed to a merely parallel one

I just use it and it works for what I want, and yeah for me it is faster and cheaper and better due to the lack of transaction size limits


To some extent, yes the major exchanges are insured:

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/legal-pol...

However, most losses in crypto are not happening from custodial exchanges, but dAPPs that get hacked... or phishing targeting folks that have custody of their own private keys.




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