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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

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Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#61

Post by lawn »

beefield wrote: post #49

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

What's actually funny is how people still believe that no use cases exist. Here are just some examples:

* Uncensorable donations

* No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal)

* Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble)

* Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions.

* You can use cryptocurrencies anonymously (to for example buy VPNs)

* It's possible to flee your country with some of your wealth intact (for example by converting to Bitcoin and crossing the Venezuela border)

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#62

Post by unityByFreedom »

newguy1234 wrote: post #53
beefield wrote: post #49

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

One legitimate use case for cryptocurrency is so you can transact with individuals who do not have bank accounts. Cryptocurrency allows anyone in the world to get a cryptocurrency "bank account" and that "bank account" allows the individual to transact freely in society. It is important for a free society.

Cash? Otherwise, for digital, who are we talking about, exactly? What country doesn't have banks?

If you can't get a bank account it's unlikely your basic needs are going to be met by a stranger you've never met.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#63

Post by camdenlock »

snitko wrote: post #31
EGreg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about being able to raise money for a project, and whitelist investors, without people having to trust you to send them the securities after they send you the money, and them seeing exactly what is being done with dilution or whatever instead of having to trust? Or having a fair pricing model as investors buy in using a bonding curve, eliminating priced rounds and other crap, pg said that’s the “future” - Ethereu…

Explain the mechanism by which people who invest can exercise their rights as stakeholders, receive dividends etc? Who's to enforce they actually own anything? What's stopping this project from taking all the money and producing nothing (which is exactly what happened with pretty much every ICO out there)?

As far as I understand it, all that matters is the logic of the smart contract code, and possession of private keys. Humans are removed completely from the process. If you own the private key involved in a transaction, then that is the guarantee you’re looking for. All that’s left is to examine the smart contract code in order to figure out what sort of contract to which you’re now a cryptographically-guaranteed party.

No person enforces anything. Only the math does. And I think that’s entirely the point.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#64

Post by joosters »

magma17 wrote: post #59
fxtentacle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus there's the problem that smart contracts cannot be easily modified if they are found to be buggy and that one can always reverse engineer them, because they're distributed to everyone. These two together have already caused lots of damage https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-deleted-150-... and they make most real-world uses impossible. It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart…

That's what oracles do.

If you have to trust an oracle, you have essentially thrown away all of the plusses of decentralisation/trustlessness. At that point, the blockchain becomes pointless busywork, useful only for duping mug investors.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#65

Post by Findeton »

beefield wrote: post #49

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

So you're envious that the crooks are not using the dollar anymore?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#66

Post by lawn »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #62
newguy1234 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One legitimate use case for cryptocurrency is so you can transact with individuals who do not have bank accounts. Cryptocurrency allows anyone in the world to get a cryptocurrency "bank account" and that "bank account" allows the individual to transact freely in society. It is important for a free society.

Cash? Otherwise, for digital, who are we talking about, exactly? What country doesn't have banks? If you can't get a bank account it's unlikely your basic needs are going to be met by a stranger you've never met.

There are 1.7 billion adults in the world who are unbanked. 420 million of them have internet access. You can find them in countries all over the world. For example USA have 18 million and France have 3 million who don't have a bank account.

It's not just poor people in countries without banks who have these problems. Even rich porn stars have had their bank accounts closed (for being porn stars) and people in the marijuana business too.

Some more info here: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/for_the_unbanked.html

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#67

Post by toastal »

wyldfire wrote: post #22
broodbucket wrote: post #3

It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.

Besides proof-of-stake, there's also a coin that tries (tried?) a proof-of-work with greater public utility: Primecoin [1]. It creates Cunningham chains of prime numbers [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain

Wasn't there also like CureCoin that unfolds proteins for medical application?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#68

Post by bitcoinbutter »

lawn wrote: post #66
unityByFreedom wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash? Otherwise, for digital, who are we talking about, exactly? What country doesn't have banks? If you can't get a bank account it's unlikely your basic needs are going to be met by a stranger you've never met.

There are 1.7 billion adults in the world who are unbanked. 420 million of them have internet access. You can find them in countries all over the world. For example USA have 18 million and France have 3 million who don't have a bank account. It's not just poor people in countries without banks who have these problems. Even rich porn stars have had their bank accounts closed (for being porn stars) and people in the ma…

Yes, one big issue is that payment processors are incredibly centralized and massive. These two combined means that they are incentivized to de-risk their platforms and stop serving customers they determine to be "high risk".

"High risk" is often mistaken for illegal, but that's incorrect. Many industries that are completely legal are still viewed as high risk and become deplatformed. Small companies are at the highest risk of being deplatformed.

Crypto currency allows anyone to send and receive money, without depending on the blessing of a third party which can decide whether or not to serve your business. Access to the financial system is not seen as a basic human right.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#69

Post by Gatsky »

beefield wrote: post #49

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

Sure, those are all good points, but cryptocurrency has one special, virtually unique characteristic in the current era - newness. We should cut it a bit of slack.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#70

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

snitko wrote: post #25
seibelj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum is a blockchain for general purpose computing. It’s not a scam, it delivered what it promised. MakerDAO, mentioned in the post, is a cool and useful project running on Ethereum. I agree with you about the core use case for Bitcoin currently being an escape from the government-forced financial system. It pierced the monopoly successfully. But the Ethereum screed is just lies at this point, Ethereum is one of…

What has it delivered exactly? Where is it being used that's not itself a scam? MakerDAO - which seems to be some sort of token issuance thing - has no real world mechanism for enforcement. That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH fanboys are completely delusional about.…

>That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents?

...the smart contract? Maker pays interest (via buy and burn). It's really not that different than a corporate board agreeing to pay dividends. We don't need a state regulator to pay ourselves, do we?

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