251–260 of 415 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
has worked for literally millennia without it.
Why did we ever move away from sea shells then?
I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal. For any other conceivable use case, a database and a contract between parties are a superior solution. Edit: To clarify wha…
> In other words, anything illegal. Not exactly. It's anything for which the legal system is not effective. For example, you can have a perfectly legal contract, but the other party is in a corrupt foreign jurisdiction that would never find in your favor in the event of a breach. Then you can't contract with them because they have no incentive not to breach, without an alternative method of ensuring compliance that d…
can you give a concrete example? this requires a smart contract does it not? what is an example contract (specifically) where this is useful?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big problem with these kind of arguments is that is misses the interface between the real world and the blockchain. Say I have a blockchain that tracks births and deaths. Now if I see a record on there I can be assured it hasn't been tampered with. But that tells me nothing about how it was created - was the person entering the data acting with malfeasance? All blockchain does is audit the data after its creation…
That's why I said "intermediary attestations". I did not miss the interface between real world and blockchain. I did not claim that the records would be 100% accurate. What I'm saying is, when audited and we discover that someone provided bad data, we know who that was. That's how fraud claims work in general. Having a nicely packaged up list of who attested to what is nice. That's my point.
I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal. For any other conceivable use case, a database and a contract between parties are a superior solution. Edit: To clarify wha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO, Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1989), and was supported by 239 banks in fifteen countries. It started to establish common standards for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network designed by Logica and developed by the Burroughs Corporation. Fundamental operating procedures, rules for liabil…
SWIFT is a messaging system, not a settlement system. Its also far slower than blockchain, more complex, and more prone to error. I think around 6% of transactions just disappear.
I worked on a payment system using the UK's Faster Payment Scheme a while ago. The SLA for latency is two seconds end-to-end, and is usually much faster than that, was simple enough for a gang of underpaid COBOL programmers to implement it successfully, and didn't have a mechanical error rate worth bothering about. In January it moved 186.1 million payments and 161 billion pounds:
http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/statistics
FPS is UK-only, but there's nothing about the technology or the commercial and legal machinery that wouldn't work internationally. If SWIFT is really as bad as you say, it could be replaced with a better instance of the same technology; it doesn't require a haunted git repository to fix it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works. There's no question that it works. The question that blockchain-like solutions seek to explore, is whether it works better than a technological solution which can eliminate most of the layers you describe. The world is deeply complex, more complex than any single human can understand. If operating in the world can be simplified to the point of being understandab…
But you're not making anything simpler. There is a reason we have lawyers and courts and insurers and whatever middle men are supposed to be cut out, and that is because contracts, and insurance and law are hard, and nobody wants to write 200 smart contracts a day where one mistake empties your wallet in unrecoverable ways. These institutions exist because division of labour and trusted institutions are a way to hand…
There's no recourse for deliberate fraud, sure you could read a contract before signing it and know exactly what it does, but you can hide surprising behaviors in innocent looking code. The Underhanded C Challenge (http://www.underhanded-c.org/) proves this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
I can't speak to banks, but I have some personal experience with this sort of thing in the case of trading. I'm guessing it's at least somewhat similar to how it works among banks. All the big players have got real-time feeds they're sharing with each other to keep track of who's made what transactions, and they're constantly reconciling them against each other, to make sure that everyone's looking at the same pictur…
Blockchain does exactly this without everybody having to sort out discrepancies. Everybody getting the same picture is built in. Just the possibility of there being discrepancies in the ledgers you described would have me looking for a better way.
I would much rather have the option of connecting to a decentralized feed that is the same for everybody regardless of resources.
I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal. For any other conceivable use case, a database and a contract between parties are a superior solution. Edit: To clarify wha…
> In other words, anything illegal. Not exactly. It's anything for which the legal system is not effective. For example, you can have a perfectly legal contract, but the other party is in a corrupt foreign jurisdiction that would never find in your favor in the event of a breach. Then you can't contract with them because they have no incentive not to breach, without an alternative method of ensuring compliance that d…
The difficult to resolve problem is enforcing what the contract is trying to measure. It doesn't magically authenticate the state of the real world or objects within it. It can't do things like answer the question: "Did the occupant cause harm or ware beyond normal to a rented unit?" It's very good at enforcing things like regular and timely payment, but can't help resolve things such as "Did the land lord fix plumbing issues when notified?".
It also can't fix things like the biased nature of arbitration (is which relate to the above and in particular relate to the inherent disadvantage of both not knowing and finding it difficult to ascertain the state of the real world at any given time), or the cost involved with performing such observations. Nor can it handle bad actors on the side of renters, either by lack of training/documentation on how to properly use things or direct acts of malice.
I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal. For any other conceivable use case, a database and a contract between parties are a superior solution. Edit: To clarify wha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
I can't speak to banks, but I have some personal experience with this sort of thing in the case of trading. I'm guessing it's at least somewhat similar to how it works among banks. All the big players have got real-time feeds they're sharing with each other to keep track of who's made what transactions, and they're constantly reconciling them against each other, to make sure that everyone's looking at the same pictur…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement
For euros, there's TARGET2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2
Daily average of 342008 payments, value 1.7 trillion euros:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/target2/facts/html/ind...