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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

#221

Post by laktek »

As someone born and lived in a 3rd world country for a better part of my life, I believe Blockchain solves a very real problem. That's equal participation in internet economy irrespective of someone's geographic location. It was thanks to the internet I realized I can also contribute to the world (by creating something people want & writing about something others want to learn). However, when it came to making a living out of that there weren't many options. One of the prime motives for me to move out of Sri Lanka was it will be way easier for me to accept payments online.

PayPal is still not available in Sri Lanka, even after repeated attempts to convince Central Banks and governments [1]. Also, recently Stripe blocked a payment from one of my customers due to high-risk profile. Reason? He used a US issued debit card from Nigeria. I reached out to the person, turns out he was a passionate young entrepreneur who was trying to build a really interesting business. But his geographic location becomes a resistance in a medium it shouldn't.

For me, Blockchain( and Cryptocurrencies) is a reframing of the trust model from heuristics such as geographic location to verifiable algorithms. The Internet protocols enabled us to exchange code, art & virtual goods without geographic boundaries. Then why not money?

[1] https://www.change.org/p/enable-receiving-money-to-sri-lanka...

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

#222

Post by jmeyer2k »

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?

The point is: people who want to manipulate history or cheat need to jump through many more hoops than currently exist. Instead of a simple unilateral decision from a company's CEO, the decision rests on a giant (and growing) ecosystem of developers, economists, and traders.

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

#223

Post by hndamien »

dorgo wrote: post #182
spookthesunset wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is a data structure. It isn't like the invention of flush toilets, the standardized shipping container, or sliced bread. It's been on the market for 10 years and so far its only use seems to be a great way to run pump & dump penny stock scams....

And the first plane could fly a distance of 60 meters after 10+ years of developement..

And we went to the moon literally 56 years after that (the years of development).

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

#224

Post by hndamien »

golergka wrote: post #156
emodendroket wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

Cash is still more anonymous than BTC, just not as mobile. Monero is more anonymous and more mobile. This is what real dealers use over distance.

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

#225

Post by vel0city »

zodiac wrote: post #85
localhost3000 wrote: post #34

"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…

> 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…

Traditional public key cryptography is inherently trustful. Either you're trusting a key because they physically gave it to you, or the key is downloaded from a trusted key server, or the key was signed by a trusted certificate authority, or you got the signing key from a server using HTTPS with a signed webserver certificate, etc.
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