Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 226 posts

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

#171

Post by tCfD »

clarkmoody wrote: post #169
tCfD wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creating money outside state control Which if successful enough to constitute a counterweight with enough force to push back against "the state" will yield merely... another state, but conveniently one with "Our Guys" in control of all the economic leverage. You call yourself non utopian, yet Bitcoin - a tool to deleverage the state by sapping its power of taxation - is a nakedly self serving utopian project. And y…

Yet nothing those in power do will ever change the monetary base or inflation rate of Bitcoin.

These are fig leaf constraints which do nothing to curb the ability for highly leveraged, anonymous individuals in the ecosystem to severely and without warning or accountability alter the purchasing power of the Bitcoins in circulation.

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

#172

Post by nickpsecurity »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #137
nickpsecurity wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't commit them to Venmo's repos. You make a Venmo-like system controlled by one or more cooperating non-profits acting in countries with strong legal systems for dealing with financial fraud. The protocol and code are open. The charter of the non-profits addresses common concerns about fees, disputes, and so on.

In other words, you use established forms of law and incentives to make organizations that protect their members' interests. You can further decentralize the scheme by having diverse sets of such organizations that have to agree on changes for participation to continue. Each problem is solved in the simplest, most-legally/technically-proven way possible. One can also make the individual customers voting members on things like charter changes that can add more protections later.

"why deal with the middle-persons?"

The author of the original article addressed that. Even the crypocurrencies have middle persons don't most of the stuff that middle-persons do in traditional systems. They're just getting worse results so far in the new model.

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

#173

Post by wsy »

slededit wrote: post #168
jeremyjh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I moved from the US to Canada. Banks wanted to hold my transferred money for a month even though they got the cash within 3 days. with cryptocoins I wouldn't have had to move the money at all.

So why didn't you convert your USD to Bitcoins, move, then convert your Bitcoins back to CAD as you needed CAD?

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

#174

Post by emodendroket »

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…

I don't really get the appeal of Venmo either. Anyone I'd consider using Venmo with I can simply hand cash.

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

#175

Post by emodendroket »

fhood wrote: post #87
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…

You know, paypal may well suck. I have never used it as a developer or a seller, but I really, really, like to have it as an option when I am purchasing something from some rinky dink website that doesn't look like it has been updated int 10 years.

One of my credit cards has a thing where you can create a throwaway card number with a limit of your choosing. Which is a great idea I wish more cards gave you.

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

#176

Post by nokcha »

spookthesunset wrote: post #160
nokcha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Immutable" as in "immutable up until the folks at the top decide to alter history to benefit themselves financially". See also - Ethereum & The DAO. You seem to be implying that the Ethereum Foundation had the ability to unilaterally alter the blockchain for everybody. But that's not really true. While anyone can hard-fork the blockchain, that doesn't mean that anybody else is going to accept the new fork. In fact,…

> Ultimately, it was the market that decided to recognize the Ethereum Foundation's fork as the winner. So instead of a carefully designed system of law that has thousands of years of evolution to get where it is today, we'll just regress back to what is basically mob rule?

Any currency is only worth what the market values it at. (Yes, this is true for fiat currencies too, as evidenced by countries that have suffered hyperinflation.)

You can still use Ethereum Classic if you really want to, but it has a significantly smaller userbase and market cap than the Ethereum Foundation's fork.

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

#177

Post by dorgo »

spookthesunset wrote: post #160
nokcha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Immutable" as in "immutable up until the folks at the top decide to alter history to benefit themselves financially". See also - Ethereum & The DAO. You seem to be implying that the Ethereum Foundation had the ability to unilaterally alter the blockchain for everybody. But that's not really true. While anyone can hard-fork the blockchain, that doesn't mean that anybody else is going to accept the new fork. In fact,…

> Ultimately, it was the market that decided to recognize the Ethereum Foundation's fork as the winner. So instead of a carefully designed system of law that has thousands of years of evolution to get where it is today, we'll just regress back to what is basically mob rule?

Some call it mob rule. Others call it democracy..

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

#178

Post by TeMPOraL »

spookthesunset wrote: post #93
cowpig wrote: post #68

> Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free Venmo is not free. There's a cost, it's just hiding. > Blockchain-based trustworthiness falls apart in practice... The particular brand of trustworthiness the author is arguing against is indeed a myth, but that doesn't mean blockchain is "crappy technology" or "a bad vision for the future" Blockchain adds a new thing to the world: digi…

> digital property that cannot be reproduced for free. Sure, all through the magic of using a medium sized country's worth of electricity.... > Smart contracts add another new thing to the world: the ability to build immutable software that interacts directly with the financial system. "Immutable" as in "immutable up until the folks at the top decide to alter history to benefit themselves financially". See also - Eth…

>> digital property that cannot be reproduced for free.

> Sure, all through the magic of using a medium sized country's worth of electricity....

Exactly. Also, I'd question if having more kinds of "property that cannot be reproduced for free" is a good thing. We have plenty of that already. The world becomes better as more things can be reproduced cheaper.

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

#179

Post by nickpsecurity »

specialist wrote: post #121
spookthesunset wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FFS. It's turtles all the way down, right? None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin. Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me. -- Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an int…

What you're describing are hashchains and logs that predate Bitcoin. They're useful. They might even be part of the solution to the problems you were talking about. Here's some old ones just to illustrate that people have been on the topic for a while.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/peerreview-tr2.pdf

https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/002.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.625...

And here's you a blockchain-based solution to medical sharing since you said you were looking into such things.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7990130

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

specialist wrote: post #121
spookthesunset wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FFS. It's turtles all the way down, right? None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin. Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me. -- Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an int…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN