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Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

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Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#121

Post by CyberDildonics »

MBCook wrote: post #69
solatic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of course that's ancient history now, but Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. You are correct that history hasn't been very favorable to the noti…

> Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. Isn't that a flawed premise though? There are clear incentives. As soon as Bitcoin had any value, it seems obvious it would start an arms race for people to mine the coins as fast as possible. At that point any normal computer would quickly become almost useless.…

There is such a thing, it is called Argon and it relies on memory latency.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#122

Post by GrinningFool »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #31
GrinningFool wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in places like India you see wealthy people living in enclaves treating the working class around them like a different species. I'm frightened that a decline of nationalism and populism in the US could see a move in the same direction. We're already there, we just don't yet see it for what it is. Yesterday I watched a man on the phone while paying for his goods at a convenience store. The cashier spoke to him s…

Or maybe he was reading a text message about the death of a family member? Extrapolating from almost zero data usually isn't helpful, and probably often ends up being an opportunity to reinforce our own biases.

In this case he was speaking on the phone , and that wasn't the subject matter in question. I k ow this because he was also speaking as if he were in his private office.

Certainly it's possible that some of the situations I've seen are of that type of origin - but IMO if you're interacting with a live human it's not an excuse. "I'm sorry , I just got terrible news" takes about two seconds to say.

I don't know, I see very little that could excuse the behavior. If someone is able to get into the store and conduct a transaction, then that person is generally able to acknowledge the person assisting him or her on a minimal level as a human.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#123

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

Willamin wrote: post #13
aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore human nature which history has revealed time and time again. The wild west no existing power structure idea is great until some entity inevitably comes along and controls it and its not so decentralized anymore. Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad a…

> That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system I think part of the goal of these new decentralization movements is to create a system that has no weaknesses, despite how impossible that may seem. For example, using paper money has the weakness that people can counterfeit it. A naïve solution to that problem is putting sec…

Your comment completely disregards the parents entire thrust.

And boils down to: because blochchain

Pass the kool-aid.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#124

Post by harryh »

sctb wrote: post #119
harryh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pretty big percentage of atheists have replaced religion with environmentalism. The narrative is basically the same: We used to live in paradise but then man was corrupted and if we don't repent fast enough we'll be doomed to eternal damnation.

Arguments are easy when you can place whatever concepts you like in another's head, but we ask that comments stay civil and substantive on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, didn't mean to cross a line!

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#125

Post by zilchers »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #89
zilchers wrote: post #33

Ya, this is kind of silly. I'll actually say - before this election I was all about a Blockchain / electronic voting system. After Russia and Wikileaks and everything, no way. The paper based, locally run elections are incredibly secure, and protect against systematic attacks (which in an electronic world could even mean phishing, or something more mundane than actual hacks). I'm a huge fan of bitcoin, but I'm still…

Interesting how our messy, heterogenous system of state and local-run elections is more decentralized, and thus harder to hack, than blockchains.

Ya, good call, that's kind of the irony here, huh?

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#126

Post by olalonde »

harryh wrote: post #124
sctb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguments are easy when you can place whatever concepts you like in another's head, but we ask that comments stay civil and substantive on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, didn't mean to cross a line!

FWIW, I don't think your comment deserved to get killed and I don't entirely disagree with it but I'm skeptical that the percentage is as high as you imagine and it's not obvious to me that environmentalism is strictly worse than religion (the environmental extremists seem less dangerous than the religious ones for example).

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#127

Post by harryh »

olalonde wrote: post #126
harryh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, didn't mean to cross a line!

FWIW, I don't think your comment deserved to get killed and I don't entirely disagree with it but I'm skeptical that the percentage is as high as you imagine and it's not obvious to me that environmentalism is strictly worse than religion (the environmental extremists seem less dangerous than the religious ones for example).

Not my house, not my rules.

Given that, I'll leave the topic to rest.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#128

Post by brilliantcode »

drcode wrote: post #115
brilliantcode wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know what aspect of ethereum are you excited about that current solutions aren't addressing?

1. People being able to manage their own universal identity instead of using "Sign in with Facebook" 2. Transparent financial markets on arbitrary derivates (like etherdelta.com) 3. Eventually, people authoring and managing their own content, instead of acting as free labor to generate advertising revenue for Twitter/Facebook/etc

1. https://milagro.apache.org/

2. SEC & IRS will be a roadblock there, eventually.

3. I don't see why blockchain is necessary for that.

I fail to see why ethereum would be the only & best solution here for those cases. I just don't see anything special about it, at best its an unscalable and insecure medium given what we've seen in the past with DAO (now starting another one!) and subsequent editing of blockchain ledger (effectively signaling distributed consensus is not possible with profiteering mixed in).

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#129

Post by erikpukinskis »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #116
erikpukinskis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The network of contingencies would be much richer than just a "murder list". For example, if anyone had a "murder list" with arbitrary people on it, and was killing people for no reason, then a whole body of people would step in and murder that person back in self defense. You would be able to see at a glance the extent to which someone's values align or don't align with yours, so that you could decide how to act on…

> you could very easily summon a mob of people to protect you That's a good idea. But what if the mob is busy? We should probably have some people on stand-by all the time, like a rotating watch system. Or, better yet, we could just pay some people to be on watch all the time. Empower them to protect us. We could train them, too, and equip them. Maybe there could be a telephone number to summon them, too. Something s…

You can have awareness of how busy the mob is and make decisions about risky behaviors on that basis.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#130

Post by bandrami »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #92
bandrami wrote: post #27

Yeah, yeah, the neoliberal global order is falling apart and we all applaud. The fact that over the past 20 years it saw the largest reduction in global poverty and inequality in world history? Doesn't matter: it made middle class tech-savy people in industrialized countries feel slightly constrained, so we're cheering as it burns.

>The fact that over the past 20 years it saw the largest reduction in global poverty and rise in inequality in world history? FTFY https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-01-19/...

Nope. Your link did not contradict my statement.
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