Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#231

Post by jhwang5 » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 3:59 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #210

roymurdock wrote: post #60

Crypto allows people to do 2 very important and useful things: 1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee) 2) Invest and speculate on potentially valuable assets. Sure you can't live in, eat, or drive a Bitcoin, but finance/trading is all about creating and betting on abstractions, and virtual currencies are the ultimate abstraction. Crypto is especially attractive given the current easy money…

> 1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee) It's also an improvement over PayPal or banking for sellers who don't want chargebacks/bad checks/their account frozen for writing "Nico" in the transaction comments.

Wait, but what if you are a consumer and you got scammed by a seller? Chargebacks are legitimate means of consumer protection.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#232

Post by djsumdog » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #98

throwaway30yo wrote: post #25

DOGE is a pretty good currency to use for moving money between exchanges. That is why its used. If BTC had low/no transaction fees and was fast, people would have less incentive to use DOGE. Overvalued? Its possible but I think the entire crypto market is actually insanely undervalued. I was talking to my financial advisor the other day and he said pretty much 100% of people now are asking him about crypto and are co…

> I was talking to my financial advisor the other day and he said pretty much 100% of people now are asking him about crypto and are considering putting money in. 100% of those are not interested in cryptocurrency at all, they are interested in anything that goes from bottom left to top right if charted against their local denomination. They don't want crypto, they want fiat and see crypto merely as a possible means…

They should have bought shit tons of DDR4 in 2016 and have it on eBay, new in box, now.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#233

Post by djsumdog » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

ojr wrote: post #149

The founder who was given the title as "inventor" in this article is not the inventor. He did not mention the developer who help do the C++ source code and actually invent Dogecoin. I would call my cryptocurrency a joke too probably if I saw the price rise exponentially and didn't put the work to make it a viable blockchain. It is easy to criticize from an armchair.

It was a fork of Litecoin (I think?), so yea, someone had to fork it, rebrand everything and publish all the apps. (All the bitcoin derivatives from like 2012-2014 looked exactly the same .. same Android/QT apps .. minor differences and rebranding here and there. The big differences were usually the crypto algorithms and hashing variations...)

But really, your comment goes to something more fundamental in how we look at inventors and Captains of a ship.

Zuckerburge early code leaks of Facebook show it was some pretty terrible PHP, yet we attribute everything to him instead of the hundreds of engineers that made things like Hiphop, Hack, React, etc. etc. Bill Gates was not a good developer. A lot of his early success projects were license purchases and rebrands and not trying to get fucked by IBM. Don't even get me started on the cult of Steve Jobs.

People like to see a Captain of a ship. People like Karl Marx saw those workers rowing the ores. Even people with the nicer more high paying jobs like navigators, sill made a fraction compared to the captain, but it was enough they felt better than the stack below them.

Orwell agreed, but contested that even if the crew men revolt and take control to give everyone a better and more equal share, eventually over time, some people will convince everyone on the boat they should be at the top, and enough people would follow and you'd be back to where you were.

But yes, we always need to have an "Inventor" .. a Tesla or Musk or Ford; the leader of a ship, ignoring the thousands of people that made it happen.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#234

Post by C_J_H » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

cornyNetHandle wrote: post #112

ummjackson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I agree! I was calling out Bitcoin's initial goals in the article but don't 100% align with them myself. Financial institutions came to exist for a reason and I'm really not on board with everyone "being their own bank" as I feel it'd be a step backwards from what we have today. What I do agree with is the need for more audit-able, accountable systems so the institutions we trust are less susceptible to…

What I never understood with the blockchain is the idea that it would change the politics of finance in favour of the little guy. As far as I can tell, financial institutions are exceedingly well practiced at co-opting new monetary systems, as they have been doing exactly that for a very long time, so I never thought that a new model of ledger was ever going to really faze them.

Wouldn't the new model dramatically lower the cost of entry into that industry?

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#235

Post by roadbeats » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 5:20 AM UTC

meri_dian wrote: post #2

>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…

Bullshit. Have you ever done wire transfer ? Every SWIFT transaction goes through US. Let’s say you want to transfer USD from one Vietnamase bank to another Vietnamase bank; even local USD transfers has to go through US and people get charged a lot for that. Just for transferring 25k USD between two local banks, I got charged $150. It’s ridiculous to claim “USD is decentralized” in a world where developing countries can not even trade with eachother without paying US a cut.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#236

Post by fnordsensei » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 5:34 AM UTC

jhwang5 wrote: post #231

astrange wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee) It's also an improvement over PayPal or banking for sellers who don't want chargebacks/bad checks/their account frozen for writing "Nico" in the transaction comments.

Wait, but what if you are a consumer and you got scammed by a seller? Chargebacks are legitimate means of consumer protection.

It IS possible (but hard) with smart contracts. Integrate with the shipping company API and the payment can be held in escrow until you sign for it plus, say, 7 days.

Caveats:

1. The shipping company doesn't just throw the thing on your porch and SAY you signed for it.

2. You don't sign for it until you've inspected the item.

If you don't sign for it, and seven days passes, the money is deposited back in your account.

Do the same thing in reverse if you choose to send the item back. If the merchant signs for it (upon receiving the return), the money is sent back to your account.

I know it's far from fool proof. There might even be a need for a "cryptocurrency compatible" shipping service in this space.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#237

Post by astrange » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 5:50 AM UTC

jhwang5 wrote: post #231

astrange wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee) It's also an improvement over PayPal or banking for sellers who don't want chargebacks/bad checks/their account frozen for writing "Nico" in the transaction comments.

Wait, but what if you are a consumer and you got scammed by a seller? Chargebacks are legitimate means of consumer protection.

Then I guess the bitcoin people will have to reinvent credit cards.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#238

Post by Demiurge » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #121

cornyNetHandle wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I never understood with the blockchain is the idea that it would change the politics of finance in favour of the little guy. As far as I can tell, financial institutions are exceedingly well practiced at co-opting new monetary systems, as they have been doing exactly that for a very long time, so I never thought that a new model of ledger was ever going to really faze them.

It should be a bonanza for them. Unregulated market. Every trade/contract they want.

I don't think anyone wants unregulated markets for everyone, just like no one really wants anarchy. There are criminal, or rebellious elements in every group, but co-beneficial arbitrage is what we've evolved to.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#239

Post by trevelyan » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 6:41 AM UTC

jhwang5 wrote: post #219

trevelyan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency was absolutely the underlying issue. Read "Too Big To Fail" or "The Great Short" or any of the other histories of the Financial Crisis. The way CDOs were bundled and tranched made it effectively impossible for purchasers or banks to know which properties were actually covered by any CDO. No-one knew what was in them -- the value was asserted by the ratings agencies and they were purchased based on expect…

I don't think you understand how CDOs are priced. The fact that CDOs were trading 35cents on the dollar is largely a part of default EXPECTATIONS resetting up. Smart contracts cannot expedite this process of resetting expectations. Ethereum (which, by the way, is too slow to run CDO pricing models) can only broadcast what the latest market price is. Ethereum helps price dissemination no more than a Bloomberg terminal…

> is largely a part of default EXPECTATIONS resetting up

Yes, exactly! But take the next step and ask what sets EXPECTATIONS about the worth of a security in a smart-contract environment? It stops being generalized market fear and it starts being actual DATA about performance.

> Ethereum (which, by the way, is too slow to run CDO pricing models)

You don't run the monitoring software ON the blockchain (you could but it would be inefficient). You run that off-chain using blockchain analysis software.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#240

Post by trevelyan » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 6:47 AM UTC

jhwang5 wrote: post #220

trevelyan wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your argument seems to be simply that radically more data would enable better predictors. The point is that transparency enables markets to accurately price risk and prevents the sort of market paralysis that caused the liquidity crunch. Yes, it's true that people COULD have spent weeks figuring out the status of at least some of the CDOs on the market. But in reality no-one was reading 200 page long prospects that…

See, every CDO trader already knew where things were trading, and could already derive all implied default rates already. Information dissemination / transparency wasn't the issue. It was people's wrong model assumptions that were the issue...

The problem with this is that overall losses were nowhere near 65 cents on the dollar -- only 20 percent of US mortgages were subprime at the peak of the GFC.

If the market was rational and had full insight into the performance of its securities, losses would have been no more than 20-35 cents on the dollar. That is enough to cause a major crisis, but it wouldn't trigger the paralysis of the global financial system.