Viewing profile — bendtheblock

Molly White, David Gerard and a few other academics and researchers did a 'correction' of a recent NY Times fluff piece from March 2022 here. https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations…

That was price fixing - nothing to do with the bank's ledger. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/libor-scandal.asp

That wasn't a change in the ledger - it was the misselling and fraudulent opening of accounts. And it was remediated, there was a change in the leadership and settlements to the vi…

A better title would be Ledgers in historical perspective. The hypothetical he ends with (what if ledgers could be decentralised) is a classic example of blockchains looking for a …

what's wrong with this comment?! that it's anti-crypto? currency needs to be a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Given its volatility, Bitcoin could only eve…

but what's the benefit of these? - decentralised: why is this good? - trustless: I trust the companies I use, it works - censure resistance: OK, fringe case for most - pseudonymous…

Due to blockchain's architectural shortcomings, you need to do the transactions off chain. Fine... But crypto-"currencies" are actually highly speculative assets (as South Africa d…

The centralized nature of these oligopolies is a property of capitalism, i.e. capital consolidates power. You are saying that search, storage etc are centralised because of the tec…

I think you're right about online fraud being much reduced with public private key tech, but if it's such a good idea why has no one been able to do it?

it does imply that the value doesn't stick - in fact that's exactly what I'm saying. there is no value beyond the expectation that another greater fool will buy it from you in futu…

all money is political. good starting point: https://washingtonspectator.org/paranoia-on-parade/

What about JP Morgan and the Railroad Trusts? The big 4 accounting firms? Big pharma? The Magic Circle of Law Firms? I could keep going.

My question to you is: what's the problem? On the few times I've lost money to online fraud, the bank returned it to me. Why does having a huge public web of transactions on the sl…

Flowers are used for decoration, dies, teas, scents. Sometimes they may be overvalued. Crypto doesn't have any underlying value. It's just greater fool investing, there is no under…

not cryptographically no (and would be nice to see, but crypto is not the answer). But as a consumer when I shop online I never worry - if I am defrauded the (centralised) bank wil…

this is a pithy phrase with about as much logic as "Live, Laugh, Love"

nice rebuttal - but the "profitable and stable flower industry" is the trade of an underlying commodity with utility value i.e. the flowers. there is no such underlying asset with …

the history of this type of speculation and others like it, that leaves many bust, was documented in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published in 1841 htt…

I don't follow the automatic assumption that giving the info to centralised entity like a bank is bad? What is that you are fearing? And why is that more likely than Crypto sinking…

agreed, but consolidation in this way is a property of _capitalism_, not of tech

but why? what advantage is there to using the slowest ledger ever created?

your last point isn't true - EMV cards with a chip (modern credit cards) use public key cryptography and don't reveal more than they need to to the merchant. Typing in the card num…

For anything to work efficiently in crypto it always needs to be centralised e.g. OpenSea, Coinbase. Both of which hilariously are backed by a16z. As Scott G says... "meet the new …