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Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

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Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#231

Post by BTCOG »

aww_dang wrote: post #204
stagas wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say this its biggest advantage. It doesn't have to be a controversial or fraudulent transaction. Regular digital money ownership and exchange, especially across countries, is severely policed and most of the time impossible for a huge portion of the population, not because they're criminals, but because they happen to be living in or coming from a place where these freedoms are just not there. Cryptocurrencie…

Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.

Exchanges are not a part of Bitcoin, and should not exist. Not your keys, not your money.

KYC is an invention by financial systems that have nothing to do with Bitcoin and it's intended use. Nobody holds custody over Bitcoin but the privatekey owner. KYC/AML are scams. They do not exist within Bitcoin. This is simply speculators adhering to a financial system that does not control them. There is absolutely no need at all to ever adhere to KYC/AML as they exist in traditional banking, and not in Bitcoin. Folks that don't understand how to use Bitcoin outside of that traditional system for some reason are constantly pining for regulation. This is anti-Bitcoin.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#232

Post by kls »

ac29 wrote: post #80
capnorange wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

open source, permissionless, programmable, trustless, unstoppable.

open source: not exclusive to blockchain permissionless: seems to be code for "lets you do things that are illegal" programmable: not exclusive to blockchain trustless: also attracts those that are untrustworthy (scammers, etc) unstoppable: seems to also be code for "lets you do things that are illegal", and im sure the various people who are in prison and/or under investigation for their various blockchain related c…

So just to be clear illegal does not mean immoral. Lets assume that tomorrow a percentage of nations decided to revoke wealth and confiscate wealth. They could pass laws and make what they are doing legal and evasion of it illegal. While it would be legal for them to do so, it would be immoral as it is basically theft, and one would not be immoral to try to protect the wealth that they have worked for and amassed by illegal activities such as trying to get that wealth out of the country via digital currency before fleeing.

Let's take the Nazi's for example, because they are always the generic personification of an evil government. Had digital currencies existed in that time, it would not have been immoral for the Jews to transitional all of their wealth into digital currencies ahead of trying to flee Germany, though it would have certainly been illegal by German laws against the jews.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#233

Post by DuskStar »

xg15 wrote: post #226
Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #133

Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means. Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks,…

> Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance Kiwi Farms: " Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows". The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.…

As far as I'm aware, only Backpage could be described as "illegal" instead of just "distasteful" or "unacceptable", and there's some controversy over whether Backpage was actually in the wrong there. (Supposedly they were very cooperative with the feds to track down sex traffickers and underage prostitutes)

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#234

Post by ric2b »

romanoderoma wrote: post #229
nojster wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried international money transfers? Bank to bank this can take 3-5 business days (agreed, western union can be faster, but less convenient) and, depending on your payment processor, can easily cost 15% on the transferred value. So I argue that, similarly like with the mail to email example, money to emoney is faster, cheaper and safer.

> Have you tried international money transfers? They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them. International money transfer follow international regulations, you can make them speedier by breaking rules, which is usually not what you want if you receive or send money abroad legally (imagine a mom receiving money from her son having to explain why she received it from unofficial crypto channels)…

> They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them.

Just like a Bitcoin transaction (unless you're excluding it from "real money" because of it's low adoption, but that's not a technical limitation).

> International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever.

Is it insured against your own mistake when selecting the receiver or amount? I doubt it, and that's the only way you'll lose crypto during a transfer.

> International money transfer it's a highly regulated market users have the rights to be informed of the cost of the operation before starting it, costs also include exchange rates (the operator does the operation for you, you send X and the receiver receive dollars or pound or euros directly, crypto don't include that), taxes collected upfront (crypto skips that) and of course service fees.

Actually crypto can do all that (minus the taxes) and it's actually the standard, assuming you're exchanging between different crypto-currencies and not Bitcoin -> Euro. As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address.

> E-mail had no such downsides.

E-mail definitely also skips lots of steps of snail-mail:

- It can't send any physical items

- There's no government agency monitoring your mail for tariffs evasion or other unlawful activities.

- You can't just say you don't want to receive ads by e-mail and then sue the companies that don't comply

- There's no registered mail

- Etc, we could probably come up with other limitations

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#235

Post by romanoderoma »

ric2b wrote: post #234
romanoderoma wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you tried international money transfers? They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them. International money transfer follow international regulations, you can make them speedier by breaking rules, which is usually not what you want if you receive or send money abroad legally (imagine a mom receiving money from her son having to explain why she received it from unofficial crypto channels)…

> They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them. Just like a Bitcoin transaction (unless you're excluding it from "real money" because of it's low adoption, but that's not a technical limitation). > International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever. Is it insured against your own mistake when selecting the receiver or amount? I doubt it, and that's the only way you'll lose cr…

> As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address.

We'll see if that's true the day all the "minor" limitations are solved.

Today bitcoins cannot be spent, due to technical limitations and psychological ones (high fluctuations make it impossible to know how much you are really spending)

Bitcoins can be stolen by simply hacking (or losing) a device, your money can't, unless it's cash.

But you usually don't keep all your money in cash in the same place, as you do with bitcoins.

etc. etc.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#236

Post by ric2b »

kls wrote: post #227
ric2b wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pointless, it's just yet another way "noSQL" database. It certainly doesn't give you the same benefits of a public blockchain. But if the code is already written, meets the project requirements and is easy to deploy, why not?

Because it is a really inefficient way to store what amounts to an immutable ledger in a traditional database. While I don't agree with a lot of the consensus that blockchain is completely useless. I pretty much agree that it is useless if it is owned by a private entity. That was one of the main points of the blockchain, how can we create a public datastore that is not owned by anyone and it tamperproof. I see publi…

AFAIK private blockchains usually don't rely on proof of work so there's no large energy usage.

I agree that if they're private they're equivalent to a customized database system, private blockchains aren't interesting but it doesn't make them useless, it's simply another way to solve problems that could already be solved before.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#237

Post by ric2b »

romanoderoma wrote: post #235
ric2b wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them. Just like a Bitcoin transaction (unless you're excluding it from "real money" because of it's low adoption, but that's not a technical limitation). > International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever. Is it insured against your own mistake when selecting the receiver or amount? I doubt it, and that's the only way you'll lose cr…

> As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address. We'll see if that's true the day all the "minor" limitations are solved. Today bitcoins cannot be spent, due to technical limitations and psychological ones (high fluctuations make it impossible to know how much you are really spending) Bitcoins can be stolen by simply hacking (or losing) a dev…

> Bitcoins can be stolen by simply hacking (or losing) a device, your money can't, unless it's cash.

Hacking/phishing/social engineering into private bank accounts is quite common, probably more than into cryptocurrency wallets.

It's easy and highly encouraged by every cryptocurrency wallet to backup your wallet seed, so losing a device is not a problem unless you ignore that advice.

> But you usually don't keep all your money in cash in the same place, as you do with bitcoins.

I don't, I have them split into multiple wallets, sort of like my fiat money.

I carry a small amount on my phone but most of the BTC I own in on a cold/hardware wallet. That stays home just like the debit card for my main bank account.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#238

Post by splix »

csande17 wrote: post #174
mongol wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is the size that is the problem. I imagine it is like a routing table, keeping track which number is managed by which operator, and if India has number portability, there needs to be a transactional method to update it that is shared by all operators. I could imagine this being done with a blockchain. Or for that matter, recording of call details for billing between operators?

"Keep track of which number is managed by which operator" reduces to "store a small amount of information for each phone number". In a traditional database setup, the "transactional method to update it" would be sending a request to a central server to update the database. The central server can be run by whatever regulatory body or industry association is responsible for number portability -- ideally, this would be…

What if other operators don't want to introduce an additional governing entity with a super power of taking their customers? Like if they don't want additional corruption, easy to misuse power, etc?

I mean, I can imagine government wants this, so if such ideas comes from government you're going to have such regulatory body. But otherwise, if it comes from operators itself, they don't want to introduce such entity, and they don't want to award one of them as an ultimate boss to rule all of the numbers. Blockchain, at least, gives them a chance to continue to be equal.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#239

Post by splix »

kls wrote: post #227
ric2b wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pointless, it's just yet another way "noSQL" database. It certainly doesn't give you the same benefits of a public blockchain. But if the code is already written, meets the project requirements and is easy to deploy, why not?

Because it is a really inefficient way to store what amounts to an immutable ledger in a traditional database. While I don't agree with a lot of the consensus that blockchain is completely useless. I pretty much agree that it is useless if it is owned by a private entity. That was one of the main points of the blockchain, how can we create a public datastore that is not owned by anyone and it tamperproof. I see publi…

It isn't owned by a single private company, most usually. But multiple companies with equal rights to update. That's what you cannot do with traditional db.

Also I don't think there is any significant energy consumed. There is no mining or anything like that. You have to pay for extra network traffic and more disks, simply because you're going to have more copies of data, most likely, but it's not so large amount of energy.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#240

Post by splix »

Beldin wrote: post #203
andreskytt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number mobility between Indian telecoms runs on private blockchain. AFAIK it is live and actively used. BC solves a problem there because operating a database for that scale would be very complicated. So every telco has their own copy that get synced via a consensus mechanism and signed transactions

Number portability in my country is handled without blockchain. Granted, India's population is about 100 times larger. But I don't see a reason why a scale-up with a factor of roughly 100 would be prohibitively problematic.

Maybe it's not about transaction scale. And I don't really see how blockchain helps with scale, imho it's opposite.

With this particular case, it maybe be solution to fight corruption (just a guess). Centralized trusted control of all phone number of a country is a huge power and a magnet for different types of corruption. So maybe the difference is that in your country the magnitude of corruption is lower than in India, or easier to handle because of size.

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