Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-06/george-so...
Yeah, that proves bitcoin's bright future /s
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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
191–200 of 226 posts
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> cannot be reproduced for free Only if you opt into the particular set of constraints that define what that property is (as set forth in the base of protocol code most commonly used to define it). If you don't, as innumerable forks of Bitcoin have demonstrated, you certainly can reproduce it for free. I suspect there is a hypothesis of "property" at work here that is being subject to some very privileged and Protean…
Sure. You can print your own money for free and call it FakeDollar. Nobody will confuse it with the real thing
You mean TetherCoin? Which some people are actually treating like US Dollars for some insane reason?
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#193The 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 uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique. Did we really? BTC vs BCH, Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic. Sigwitx2. These hardforks technically break established consensus and rely upon social means (hey everyone: switch algorithms right now!!) to stay in order. At the end of the day, it seems to me that the "blockchain" is only as strong as the community's resolve to w…
Laws change (get broken) when establishd consensus shifts (hey everyone: women should also have the right to vote!!). Crypto/Blockchain doesn't going to change how consensus works (nor is it supposed to). It's just the digitalisation of laws/currency etc.
Edit: But Crypto/Blockchain allows you to opt out of laws/currency without physically leaving the country.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is absolutely untrue. Venmo requires a bank account, and presumably some proof of citizenship, to have been setup far ahead of the point at which "money" goes into or comes out of Venmo.
Gajillions of people send money to each other on Venmo, to the point where my parents know what it is. You can't say that about Bitcoin. QED.
Even more people give each other cash for stuff, to the point where my GRANDparents know what it is. you can't say that about venmo. QED.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a few different personas, such as investment banker, retail store owner, and soccer mom. Then complete the following sentence: I need a decentralized time ordered log so that I can ...
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul... > A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 o…
This is a complete non-sequitor. The usefulness of blockchain is not assured because people have been skeptical of useful technology in the past. You must actually propose and defend an application of this technology. Otherwise you are offering my skepticism as evidence itself that blockchain will be useful. If that had merit we can go into business together: you propose a technology and patent it, and then I express skepticism and then - profits!
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#196Earlier 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
Even just the concept of the blockchain itself is based on a massively inefficient use of resources to have a public ledger that can't be tampered with. This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it!
>This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it!
:O, the only possibility for that which comes to my mind is a world in which everybody is infinetly rich?
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the problem it solves is "I need a way to buy illegal drugs, weapons, and fake IDs while evading the police," I think you can see obvious problems to mass-market adoption. I also wonder whether a system with a permanent, publicly accessible ledger is truly ideal for this application.
It's already massively adopted in this field, like it or not. Buying drugs with bitcoin is mainstream; no drug dealer takes cash now.
"no drug dealer takes cash now." seem hyperbole on its face.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are anti-counterfeiting efforts done today? Accounting. For this use case, think of blockchains as a shared ledger.
If you already trust the accountant, he can set up a conventional database, and you can look stuff up there. Much simpler and cheaper. A blockchain-based shared ledger is only useful in case the participants don't trust each other. In which case you cannot do anything with it to help detecting counterfeits.
Or when you have a supply chain composed of various participants.
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you already trust the accountant, he can set up a conventional database, and you can look stuff up there. Much simpler and cheaper. A blockchain-based shared ledger is only useful in case the participants don't trust each other. In which case you cannot do anything with it to help detecting counterfeits.
Or when you have a supply chain composed of various participants.
And now you're trusting each participant to enter their portion of the ledger accurately.
The original articles goes into this very problem. What's to stop your mango provider from spraying pesticides all over their mangoes and then entering "organic" into the ledger?
Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even just the concept of the blockchain itself is based on a massively inefficient use of resources to have a public ledger that can't be tampered with. This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it!
>This wouldn't be an issue at all if people just didn't have incentives to tamper with it! :O, the only possibility for that which comes to my mind is a world in which everybody is infinetly rich?
Compared to any point in the human past, this is already largely the case in many countries. The problem is that it has been uneven.