Numberone
I’ve seen this in banking too. I have my health savings account with a provider that charges a percentage of your holdings as the admin fee. That can add up. My old one is a flat rate per month. I have been transferring the money every year to the flat rate provider and the process is completely arcane.
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Find the document on their site. The correct document isn’t named clearly like the document you use to pull other providers into your account.
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You have to print it and write by hand (not an editable PDF)
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Assuming you’ve done this correctly you must mail them the document, like he said, with a stamp like a fucking caveman.
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Behind the scenes the process is even more arcane, because again they claim they PHYSICALLY MAIL A CHECK to the new provider like fucking cavemen.
It’s really clear that this is in bad faith. Banking “innovation” is a joke in the US. I know that everyone hates crypto up in this bitch (I get it), but a little self custody would go a long way in situations like this.
The other commenter is comparing FSA to HSA which is right I think. I think FSAs work for some people (I never understood who though) but there’s literally no downside to an HSA. It basically can end up as another tax sheltered investment account, if you have enough money/luck to be able to pay off your healthcare costs out of pocket.
Like everything in the US, it’s amazing for people with money. Less useful for those that don’t. But at the very least it provides a buffer for the insane deductibles that US persons need to pay to keep living.
NFT’s are a form of ownership (I know, I know, of a JPEG). If we leave out the scammy bullshit that NFT’s have been in the past, then there are interesting things you can do with them. One company now is minting NFT plane tickets. The advantage is that if plans change or something you OWN that plane ticket, and could directly sell it on a seconary market or somthing. Another case would be for games. I personally like collector card games, like hearthstone and things like that. However when you play digital card games you never own shit. They could just close ownership down at any point…technically. with a set of NFT cards you 100% own it.
Beyond that, the ownership model in crypto can be empowering to users as well. One insurance company popped up that let you combine your funds with others directly in the form of their risk pools to provide the necessay function that insurance companies currently do and decreasing the amount of liquidity they have to maintain which can lower prices for consumers and provide for growth on your resources.
Not all of these things have succeeded. The main thing is a different take on ownership. Previously it has been that you give money to institutions and it’s yours because you trust them. In crypto it’s yours because that’s how it’s coded in the smart contract. I’m not a maximalist, but I think if that change can be capitalized on in certain cases it could work well.
I don’t think that I’ll be able to change your mind. I get the bad blood with crypto, really, but I guess I just don’t share the absolute conviction that the whole thing is a scam.
The way you’re breaking down ownership is true, but it’s true about every form or ownership. The deed to your house? You don’t own anything, that’s just a piece of paper that someone says prooves that you have a right to live there. Whether that’s saved in a county records department or a blockchain that doesn’t really change. Point taken, but I think it’s a broader point than how you were using it.
I’m not really sure what makes saving your deed information on a blockchain less valid than in a county records department though. I mean breaking it down, a blockchain is really just a ledger that keeps track of information in a cryptographically secure way. I think that this has gotten out of hand because of all of the get rich quick schemes, and that’s fair. It’s happened…a lot. But does that invalidate the whole endeavor?
The current exchange system has rent seeking vultures sitting on top. Visa, MasterCard, these fuckers sit there and take a percentage of every transaction that theY fascilitate. What are they doing? Keeping a ledger. We trust them to do it accurately and pay them steeply to do it. Now we have a self managing ledger that requires no trust from anyone. Can you really tell me there is ZERO use case potential here?
Your second paragraph is where I think the win is. When you have self custody of things, you have more ineroperability and stuff like that. Largely I buy the statement that all this is a solution in search of a problem. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing though. It broadens the possible space of options in the future, which I find to be exciting.
Edit…added the following.shit
There is at least one airline using this NFT model currently, in Argentina I think. It could be that the CEO is using the service because he’s just a crypto maximalist but I believe the win from their point of view is that they get a cut of subsequent secondary sales. They’ve sold the ticket once, maybe you can get a bit more for it.
As far as the card game goes, what your saying, that the game could be shuttered is not different than what we currently have. It’s only different in that you’re able to own the cards while it’s running. Maybe you want to gift your child a good card that you have, you can just send it to them. Impossible currently because you don’t control anything in hearthstone except how much money to spend on packs.
Yeah that’s true about losing access to your shit for sure. There are options like multisignature accounts that could reduce the possibility of theft, but really the danger in crypto is shooting yourself in the face and losing your keys. Theft comes from bad software around the crypto like browser extensions and shit like that, the blockchain itself though makes theft numerically impossible on timescales like the existance of the universe. But your point stands that it isn’t user friendly, which isn’t new to emerging technology.
On a personal note, I very much like the model of self custody of assets, and this is coming from someone who almost fucked up and lost their keys. Loss of assets is a possibility and should be in the mind of users, but the tradeoff here is that you always have access to your funds and control over them.
Another commenter stated that crypto is solution in search of a problem, and I don’t think that’s not necessarily wrong. I see that as optimistic because it’s still a solution. It potentially broadens the space of possibilities from our sole option of centralized control by existing wealth/power structures.