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In Trust we trust!
Trust, LLC, a subsidiary of Koch Industries and Union Carbide
If you'll forgive me coining (see what I did there?) a couple of neologisms, we could call this class of regulations "anti-trust" and their enforcement "trust-busting".
This article highlight a really interesting point here: Trust. And even if there are the “proof-of-work” people are going to distrust that “it’s a mathematical proof”. Just look at Trumps alt-facts and “fake news”. You don’t need to go even that far to find people putting money under the mattress because they distrust authorities. And even if math is “universal” people are going to mistrust it because they don’t unde…
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>> 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.
It's like saying free/easy dollar reproduction would make the world better.
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Sucks for the buyer too. Ever tried to use PayPal (or credit cards for that matter) to buy something from the US with a Canadian shipping address while you're living in Vietnam with a Vietnamese IP address? I did; I got fraud blocked.
Haha, no, I am one of those annoyingly generic users. But honestly I kind of expect them to block that. That seems pretty suspicious at first glance.
Fraud detection systems basically have most of their feedback mechanisms geared toward reducing - even eliminating - false negatives, and very little attention comparatively given to false positives as long as no individual merchant notices a measurable drop in sales.
Meanwhile, a hapless individual might have many of their purchase attempts foiled as false positives, and be left with little to no recourse (well, I suppose their complaint on Twitter may go viral, that does seem to work occasionally with ebay).
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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?
I honestly thought the author was trolling us (until I read the comments). There are so many holes in his example of ebook transaction. Here's just the two points he made that were the most egregious to me: >> and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all — will actually arrive Really? Ever heard of checksums - its used all over the place. And if we weren't able to trust it, I guarantee you that…
How are you supposed to checksum the book before you have it? You can't do that without trust, because you need to trust someone to give you the right checksum.
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Bitcoin solves a problem. Ever used a dark web market. Good luck with Paypal
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.
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How are you supposed to checksum the book before you have it? You can't do that without trust, because you need to trust someone to give you the right checksum.
Not quite that dire: The checksum is typically public, where a large set of diverse stakeholders (most of which have incentives aligned with yours) can publically dispute it's veracity, increasing the costs of fraud. Moreover, some of those stakeholders may already be part of your existing circle of trust (either directly or transitively), which increases uncertainty for fradulent sellers.
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> 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.
As do clubs, corporations, and "Roberts Rules". People have been making secret societies and private laws since the mid 1850s. That's a long solved problem. Chuck-E-Cheese tokens, Disney Resort Meal Points, and hell, even credit card money is "made up money" to some extent.
For example of all the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op
The thing is, people need to understand the laws for them to be useful. You can't just "outsource" the rules to the blockchain.
My point is that the currently established social structure behind these cryptocommunities is horribly defined right now. Its pretty much structured around trusting a few developers. The key for success is a true governance body. Blockchain doesn't solve the hard problem at all. (Case in point: should Ethereum hardfork right now, or wait for Proof of Stake? GPU miners want a hardfork ASAP due to the ASIC miners incomming, but the rest of the community doesn't want unnecessary hardforks. Finally, the ASIC-investors definitely don't want a hard fork.)
Someone needs to make a decision, and a group of people will lose out. Probably the ASIC guys / Bitmain based on the current political environment.
But then it all begs the question: if everyone is centralizing trust in the developers, then what the hell is the point of the blockchain? Its no different than trusting the rules of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op and their fake monopoly money (erm... babysitting "scrip")