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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
71–80 of 226 posts
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all. I think you are specifically talking about Bitcoin (Proof of Work)
What live implementations are using POS (Poof of Stake)? It's all academic and likely to be only marginally faster without a lot of risky optimizations.
> Poof of Stake
Is that what happens when you accidentally lock yourself out of your crypto wallet forever?
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#73"Instead of relying on trust or regulation, in the blockchain world, individuals are on-purpose responsible for their own security precautions. And if the software they use is malicious or buggy, they should have read the software more carefully." This is also one of the aspects of "the blockchain" that I struggle with. I don't think normal people want this or should be expected to do this effectively. And once you o…
I don't think that many users would store their tokens locally. I believe the trust aspect is that YOU have a choice where as currently you may not (if you think globally).
You could think of it like hosting your own email server.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a clear example of survivor bias; there have been plenty of things that people thought were the future that turned out to be false, and the people who ‘hung on to the past’ and didn’t adopt those things won out in the end. Betamax, 3D TVs, laserdiscs, segways, new coke, etc.
Cryptocoins appear to have drastically more adoption than any of those.
Their adoption comes as a consequence of their temporarily uncensorable ability to facilitate open speculation and gambling, so the adoption curve is merely following the well worn grooves laid by ancient vices.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#75One thing is sure, if you're hanging on to the past you'll always lose in the end. That's not to say blockchain is the be all and end all, but constantly hunting for arguments why something will never work , is not only terribly boring, but IMO the most counterproductive way to look at anything.
Money will continue on the path of virtualization and unversalization.
It was cows and jugs of honey at first. Then it was seashells. Then it was gold. Then it was printed paper. Then it was records in a database, but living isolated as local records.
It will become even more abstract and even more open, eventually. Whether that's the blockchain or something else, remains to be seen.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#76The problem that proof-of-work blockchain solves is widely misunderstood. It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique. Prior to the publication of Satoshi's paper we did not have a solution to this problem and for that reason it is a significant advance in technology. I wouldn't call it crappy, it's actually quite brilliant. For a detailed description see this: https:…
> I wouldn't call it crappy, it's actually quite brilliant.
I agree with you, I always thought that the Bitcoin algorithm was very clever and "mind opening" in a way. It's one of these things I'd never have thought about but almost seems obvious in hindsight. What's even more interesting is that basically all of it is pre-existing technology: HashCash, ECC, Merkle trees etc... Just combined together in a clever way to create something that's more than the sum of their parts.
Now where I become a naysayer is when we switch from the realm of intellectual curiosity and into the world of cryptocurrencies today. Being clever and innovative doesn't necessarily mean useful or valuable. We have plenty of clever ideas out there that don't have much of a practical use (or used to have one but are now obsolete). Duff's Device, sleep sort, the fast inverse square root, one instruction set computers, code golf and 4KB demos ...
I think I do understand the technological value of Bitcoin's PoW blockchain, I just think that its only practical use is for a tiny niche. It's the Prolog of consensus algorithms, I'm sure it'll be useful to some but I doubt it's going to be the new C++. You say that "It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique" and it's true but how useful or valuable is that? Is it such a huge problem in our modern society to agree on a sequence of events? Do you often program something and think "man, I wish that there was a way to establish a consensus over points in time which are universally unique" and 1/ there's no other simpler solution to achieve that and 2/ a blockchain could actually solve it? There's only a tiny gap between these two propositions.
But I think at this point talk is cheap and all that needs to be said about the blockchain has been said long ago and multiple times. How many billion of dollars has been poured into "blockchain" technology these past few years, in the form of pre-mined coins or ICOs? How many hundreds of engineers are working on those killer blockchain applications? How many high profile companies have boldly announced blockchain-related tech investments lately? So.... where are the results? How long do we wait for them until we decide that maybe it's not that revolutionary?
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#77The TL;DR is:
- blockchain systems still need trust;
- security is not solved;
- blockchains are overhyped and most followers don't want it for the problems serious actors try to use it to solve.
- it has many issues (need for infra, require tech knowhow, etc)
I agree, but I still don't see how it's crapy tech, nor how it's a bad vision of the future.
You have an system that make auditing easier, with one place only for the data to be read and written and yet robust enough because of the duplication.
You have transactions logs tided to identities you can fake organised in a timeline in an open format that is not only very well documented, but being actively tested right now on the field.
You have hundreds of start up engage in a Darwinism race to find out which use case we can make that's worth it on the long run.
And finally, the tech has enough impact to force state actors to create new laws, financial actors to adapt and a huge amount of money to be invested by a lot of people.
So on one hand one very interesting concept. On the other hand, pretty much hate for the sake of hate.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#78The problem that proof-of-work blockchain solves is widely misunderstood. It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique. Prior to the publication of Satoshi's paper we did not have a solution to this problem and for that reason it is a significant advance in technology. I wouldn't call it crappy, it's actually quite brilliant. For a detailed description see this: https:…
It’s very interesting as a matter of pure technology. I’m just not sure it’s that useful as a banking system.
It doesn't have to be either or, the banking system of the future can be a mix of different technologies. Personally I see bitcoin(and friends) as the higher layers of a hierarchy used by humans to securely trade value. The 3rd record of account doesn't have to contain 100% of all transactions taken by it's holders, but when the transaction is big enough, or the values held by 2 parties is questionable because the time since either of them updated the 3rd record has been too long, then write to the blockchain. Most other transactions can be taken care of between the 2 parties without involving the chain at all, as long as in the future someone squashes all their transactions and writes to the public ledger, to prove they haven't cheated or made a mistake.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#79Blockchain is perfect for its original use case, a distributed trustless database. The tradeoffs don't make any sense for a trusted system, i.e. replacing SWIFT or storing titles to property.
All the evidence to date suggests that banks are much more capable of providing useful financial services than blockchains. Can you give a counter example of a real world use?
Depend on what you mean by financial services. For example, no bank can beat crypto in price for remitting ~$1k to Southeast Asia within a couple of hours. I spent years as a digital nomad and there was no traditional fiat solution that came close.
I couldn't even find a traditional solution that beat crypto for converting ~$10k USD in the US to CAD in Canada (although I did have to write a script to do this via crypto and it sometimes took a few days for the markets to align favourably).
On the other hand, I highly doubt blockchain is going to beat banks at their main business of being a middleman between savers and borrowers.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#80"Instead of relying on trust or regulation, in the blockchain world, individuals are on-purpose responsible for their own security precautions. And if the software they use is malicious or buggy, they should have read the software more carefully." This is also one of the aspects of "the blockchain" that I struggle with. I don't think normal people want this or should be expected to do this effectively. And once you o…
The banks should step up and secure the average joe's private keys.