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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

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Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#131

Post by gshulegaard »

tptacek wrote: post #111
gshulegaard wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 3% fee for processing credit cards * Platform play where the first stage is to amass users and then use that audience to sell to businesses ( https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/venmo-m... ) And I always assumed that the short delay for transferring money out of Venmo allowed them to eek a small margin against the time value of money somewhat similar to Robinhood ( https://www.investopedia.com/arti…

It is a lot easier to avoid paying a fee on Venmo than it is to use a cryptocurrency to send money to someone: just don't use a credit card.

I think you are taking my response as in the context of Bitcoin. It's not. It was outlining the ways Venmo makes or seeks to make money. Some of which could be considered hidden costs to the user (e.g. transfer delays and the associated opportunity cost/time value of money).

I did not mean to make an implication about crytpocurrencies one way or the other.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#132

Post by mkirklions »

aalleavitch wrote: post #110

In many ways, blockchain tech is the stupidest thing that has ever existed. It is a colossal monument to the inefficiency of human behavior. You are literally throwing energy and immensely valuable computation time out of a window simply because people can't trust each other. It is a massive sink for the destructively self-interested behavior of mankind. The problems that blockchains are trying to solve are not inher…

This is nearly entirely my opinion of blockchain.

If you were a logistics company would you rather-

>Total control of fees and servers

>Directly working with companies to solve their problems

or

>Writing something open ended so other companies can develop their own uses

>Get paid with supporting software

>Big cost increase because of miners

I completely understand Bitcoin and currencies. But I think most blockchain is going to be bad for the environment and not needed. Centralized servers are superior for most uses.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#133

Post by mkirklions »

mido22 wrote: post #123
aalleavitch wrote: post #110

In many ways, blockchain tech is the stupidest thing that has ever existed. It is a colossal monument to the inefficiency of human behavior. You are literally throwing energy and immensely valuable computation time out of a window simply because people can't trust each other. It is a massive sink for the destructively self-interested behavior of mankind. The problems that blockchains are trying to solve are not inher…

FYI: when you talk about GPU/mining/energy, you are talking about Proof of Work (pow) and not blockchain. You can look up about Proof of Stake among other ways for consensus

Lets see proof of work be used for 9+ years and millions of people.

I worry about russian hackers(spamming) stakes or pulling off attacks.

It took me long enough to believe that BTC wasnt going to break.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#134

Post by zodiac »

localhost3000 wrote: post #95
zodiac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And once you outsource the security you're no longer in a "trustless" state. The "trustless" pipe-dream (in the consumer use case) all sort of unravels from there for me. I think the conclusion doesn't follow. An analogous solution is that traditional public-key cryptography (e.g. as implemented in TLS) is supposed to be trustless, but I haven't personally audited or even read any of the relevant code (e.g. TLS), s…

My comment wasn't suggesting that blockchain is "useless" (that obviously isn't true), just that the "trustless" argument doesn't hold up for me, and that is a primary argument for why blockchain is awesome at pretty much every event/talk I go to on the topic.

So what would you characterize the "trustless argument" as being? Would you say that an analogous argument could be made for TLS?

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#135

Post by specialist »

spookthesunset wrote: post #99
specialist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, banking & finance are its least interesting potential use cases. --- Medical Records Mid aughts, I was trying to figure out how to use tamper evident logs (rolling hashes) for our electronic medical records infrastructure. To answer questions like "what did you know and when did you know it?" and "where did this bad data come from?" Coupled with the notions for Translucent Databases (all data at rest is encrypt…

All of this is hype. Blockchain is only useful when you bolt a speculative asset on top because otherwise, who the heck will pay for the miners to make it work? If your answer is "the people using it will", that means there is already enough trust in the system to just use a Real Database.... And even if you manage to solve that problem, the blockchain still doesn't help with medical records, authenticity or anything…

PS- My default position is that smart contracts are a malware vector.

But if there's some meat on those bones, I wanna know about it. I think of it as a constraints satisfaction problem. If the "vocabulary" can be kept simple enough, where our current theorem provers are sufficient, that could be cool.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#136

Post by zodiac »

manbart wrote: post #116
zodiac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And once you outsource the security you're no longer in a "trustless" state. The "trustless" pipe-dream (in the consumer use case) all sort of unravels from there for me. I think the conclusion doesn't follow. An analogous solution is that traditional public-key cryptography (e.g. as implemented in TLS) is supposed to be trustless, but I haven't personally audited or even read any of the relevant code (e.g. TLS), s…

TLS relies on trusted certificate authorities though. I don't think it was ever intended to be trustless, in fact you specifically get warnings when a trusted certificate authority cannot be found for a given cert.

I was actually referring to the transport encryption which is designed to be "trustless" (but which, as you point out, is distinct from the digital certificates part)

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#137

Post by mr_spothawk »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #98
phasnox wrote: post #59

Gotta love how he begins saying he was bashing the tech in December(when the market was on the rise) just so that no one can tell him "everyone bashes bitcoin when it's going down". Venmo is centralized. I cannot use it as I live in a third world county with no access to it. Paypal sucks. It takes 5% from the seller and it has power over your money, they can(AND HAVE IN THE PAST) seize it whenever they want. I had my…

His point was these technologies solve people's problems very well. People doing blockchains could just work on improved versions of proven tech that have fewer problems. For Venmo, you might make changes to facilitate more access. He mentioned credit unions to point out different types of institutions can be more fair. A non-profit version of Paypal with chartered protections against high rates or unfair seizures mi…

> For Venmo, you might make changes to facilitate more access.

yeah, and you might commit those changes to Venmo's own repos. and if Venmo's leadership sells out, society would be still be without an open alternative to Venmo's "open access" gardens.

why deal with the middle-persons?

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#138

Post by mkirklions »

mido22 wrote: post #124
mido22 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: when you talk about GPU/mining/energy, you are talking about Proof of Work (pow) and not blockchain. You can look up about Proof of Stake among other ways for consensus

While you are at it, you can also read up about "triple ledger accounting"

I looked this up, what is your point(if you dont mind)?

It seems like a feature with ~0 benefits. Can you explain?

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#139

Post by AlexCoventry »

floatboth wrote: post #122
AlexCoventry wrote: post #88

> I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. He hasn't been paying attention to the space long enough: Many traders in contraband meet that description, and used to talk about it at length in r/darknetmarkets, before it was banned. (BTW, d…

Contraband markets, ransomware authors, and scammers. The world is wasting power on hashing to support that .

The consensus doesn't have to be based on PoW. Almost all interesting cryptocurrencies (well, interesting to me) use or plan to use proof-of-share mechanisms.

Check out Algorand, for instance: https://www.algorand.com/how-it-works/

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#140

Post by aalleavitch »

otakucode wrote: post #126
aalleavitch wrote: post #110

In many ways, blockchain tech is the stupidest thing that has ever existed. It is a colossal monument to the inefficiency of human behavior. You are literally throwing energy and immensely valuable computation time out of a window simply because people can't trust each other. It is a massive sink for the destructively self-interested behavior of mankind. The problems that blockchains are trying to solve are not inher…

I am perplexed. If I wanted to, say, record licenses for a piece of software and enable people to transfer the licenses to others, why wouldn't a blockchain ledger be the perfect solution? Sure I could require them to physically buy a disc and then have them physically give the disc to a person they want to transfer it to, and it's just overcoming our human limitation of being meat-based creatures that exist in physi…

Or, what if you didn't have to worry about making money off of your software and you could just do the massively more efficient and socially beneficial thing and give away your software for free to everyone as soon as it's created?

What is human? Is dying from diseases and starving to death human? Is waging war and inflicting massive suffering on each other for little real gain human? Maybe there's some aspects of being human we're willing to give up.

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