>What is even more amazing is watching these same people (no necessarily you OP, but prevailing opinion on HN...) then go on an argue that a permission-less distributed ledger like Bitcoin is a completely unnecessary waste of resources.

Hating the way modern banking works doesn't mean blockchain is a flawless solution. It comes with a ton of its own problems (not the least of which being that it's utterly inscrutable to normies). I personally would prefer we go back to currency backed by gold or some other comparable commodity (silver, etc.)

Sure, I'd agree commodity money is preferable (and certainly trustless in p2p transactions), and in many ways better than blockchain. I just don't see how to map that paradigm onto a world where people who have never met each other regularly transact across continents without introducing some trusted 3rd party. And the moment you add that 3rd party you end up right back where we are now.

How do you transact across continents without a trusted 3rd party, with blockchains? The only transactions you can do trust-less are transactions that happen completely on-chain, i.e. exchanging some cryptocurrency for other cryptocurrency or similar tokens. As soon as you want to exchange currency for good or services, that trusted 3rd party becomes necessary in the exact same way, no matter how "smart" your blockchain money is.

By trust-less I am referring to a trusted 3rd party (e.g bank or escrow service) needed to mediate the transaction between the two parties. Not necessarily a lack of trust between the two parties themselves (obviously it would be foolish to pay someone you didn't trust at all in an irreversible way, but I can order something from Amazon any day with an implicit guarantee I will receive it or a refund, despite not knowing anyone there personally). An if you are referring to the shipping company that is going to move the goods, that would be a separate p2p transaction (and probably insured) between the seller/buyer and the delivery company.

Everyone who transacts in a fiat currency digitally has a defacto third (or more) party in the bank that mediates the transaction, and even non-digital cash transactions inherently include the central issuing bank (who you must trust not to debase the currency...just ask a Turkish citizen how that's going).

So a transaction using cryptocurrency has third parties, who do just the same thing and require trust, but which you don't want to call "defacto" because...?

You describe money as if it’s just numbers being moved around: yes, the technology is just numbers moving around, but money is a social construct not a technology, the use of technology is a very small part of what makes money money.

As someone who finds himself thinking “wtf is money” every decade or so, the most recent book I read on this was pretty good - Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin. It’s firmly in the “social construct” camp and makes some good arguments (to my lay mind!). There’s some really interesting stuff about the Fei stones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

Honestly curious. What is the dissonance that you see there?

Digital fiat currency is indeed bank databases. Similarly, stock markets and stock ownership are also stored in permissioned databases. Both are highly regulated and enforced by law. For people in countries with a high level of rule-of-law, and a stable financial system, I’d argue that this works reasonably well.

I also think that blockchain and other crypto currencies can be very useful. Especially for people in countries where rule-of-law is not as important and corruption is high.

> For people in countries with a high level of rule-of-law, and a stable financial system, I’d argue that this works reasonably well.

I agree, but that's not always obvious at first glance. For example, I would've said Canada qualifies as a stable rule-of-law country with strong property rights up until a couple weeks ago.

> permission-less distributed ledger like Bitcoin is a completely unnecessary waste of resources.

it certainly is when it immediately de facto centralizes! which is in the event what has happened

I'm not sure how you can say it is de facto centralized. You may have had a decent argument as recently as last summer when most of the mining was done in China. However, we just watched them ban mining there completely, and the network carried on relatively unfazed. Seems pretty distributed to me.

> it immediately de facto centralizes

In what respect? Hash power is well-distributed. Consensus (formal and informal) is working as expected.