The economic benefit of mostly automating governance is huge. Large financial institutions push so much through COBOL/DB2 on mainframes. The cost of updates to the contracts is horrid and mostly manual taking months if not years. The biggest loser is IBM and it's largest z/OS clients.
The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
11–20 of 355 posts
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#12Black and grey uses, the financial sector is pretty happy with this tool and cyber-criminals too, I suppose.
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#13I was having a similar conversation with a colleague given about 3-rd party enforcement. The news that a Jaxx wallet user had $400,000 in Bitcoin stolen just came out. [1] Who do you turn to reverse that? There's no one really. I'm not sure DLT's are mature enough for serious global investment yet.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/users-report-losing-400000-d...
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#14So the worry is that you need govt courts and police to enforce rules? That's not a great argument. The number of private police today is far greater than govt employed ones. Most international trade disputes are settled by private arbitration and not the govt courts.
What's the real worry?
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#15Blockchain already transformed economy; it brought fast international payments with small fees.
dollar for dollar, traditional money transfer companies are faster and cheaper.
unless the user is trying to conceal the source of funds or is evading capital controls.
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article didn't discuss that issue.
It does if you take USA's "governance of Fed Reserve Notes" and EU "governance of Euro" as examples of the author's "governance of technology" or "governance paradox".
Yeah, I was specifically referring to the crypto ideologues who have a fundamental distrust of fiat currency and think that bitcoin somehow solves governance problems. The eth hard fork to protect the investments of developers and early adopters should have disabused people of that notion.
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#17A while back I wondered if networks like facebook, electrical grids should have more direct user decision making. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14293114 I think eventually networks need to figure out distributed decision making.
Here's[0] an interesting take on a possible way forward to achieve that, very much inline with the recent ICO trend.
In general I think the token design space is an extremely interesting one, and seeing how different models lead to different social structures and outcomes will be extremely interesting.
Of course this is not new (currently reading Debt: the first 5000 years), its just radically easier than before, to design, deploy, and use. As a result we'll see an explosion of variety, diversity, and competition, which'll be fascinating to see.
Already the differences in ICO mechanisms are extremely interesting, though they have a long way to go.
[0] https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-enterprise-23d51baf...
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#18He misses the point that the developers do not control bitcoin; the miners control bitcoin. The developers suggest improvements which will only be adopted if the miners support those improvements.
The miner's interests are purely profit based, so they will not adopt changes which reduce their chance of profit.
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#19Blockchain already transformed economy; it brought fast international payments with small fees.
You could claim the blockchain will transform the economy some day, but to claim it has is plainly false. It's still a niche system, and Bitcoin's seeing rapidly rising transaction fees (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...) because of the block size issue right now.
Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy
#20Because bottom line, the only thing it improves is that there is no longer need to move the money around in armored cars, and that is not high impact in the bottomline of the economy
You lose the following: 1 - Ability control monetary policy 2 - Reduction in theft via cost in effort (same thing as with e-voting and rigging elections)
Because of that you have seen that blockchain stuff works on countries where 1 is badly handled. everywhere else nobody really cares except for the hype.