251–260 of 333 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant that the abstract machine's behavior is dictated by the legislation of the "society" of node operators, in the same way that the judge's behavior is dictated by the legislation of the society you live in. They're both appointed arbiters. And they've both got the responsibility of enforcing, among other things, certain 'inalienable rights' — i.e. making certain contracts (or certain legal motions based on the…
> A judge can't tell a distributed network that has equal presence in countries with mutually-antagonistic economies what to do. They can at most ban the network's nodes from being operated in their country — but people in that country can still continue to use the network through a VPN. The distributed network is to some degree a red herring here: in most cases, an unhappy judge would be issuing orders compelling be…
I'm presuming here that the unhappy judge is on the other end, is the thing. There's no judge local to the person “in the wrong” who actually has cause to go after them. Only the judge in the other country does.
If I'm in Iraq and you're in Brazil, and I rip you off, and you have no idea who I am because I'm just some pseudonym on a darknet market, then sure, a Brazilian judge can write an order for "me" to pay the money back... but how are they ever going to enforce that? They don't even know who "I" am.
Let's say they at least know where I am (Iraq.) In a compatible-legal-frameworks situation, your judge could get an arrest warrant out, and nudge my country's police to try to do some ISP PRISM-ing to figure out who I am. Then your judge could try to get me extradited to Brazil to be tried.
But if Iraq and Brazil aren't on "good buddies who treat one-another's warrants in good faith" terms... then what's your judge going to do?
(To put this another way: if Edward Snowden ripped a bunch of private US citizens off before heading to Russia/Switzerland/wherever, would he have been any more likely to have been extradited sooner?)
> if you're in Iraq and I'm in Brazil and we enter into a contract (as would be legally understood in either or both countries), we are now in a contract under the jurisdictions of both countries.
In the case of actual offshore casinos, if you lose money to another person, you don't owe them money, because you never interacted with them directly. You played a game together; but while doing so, what was technically, legally happening was that you were interacting with the casino, and they were interacting with the casino. So, if anyone owes anyone money, then it's the casino that you owe money; and, separately, it's the casino that owes them money. (This is a large part of why casinos get you to trade your cash in for tokens, and then play games using the tokens. Everything that happens with the tokens, is "you interacting with the casino.")
You see this dynamic domestically in the form of e.g. car insurance. If you rear-end someone, you don't owe that person money. You owe your insurance provider money; your insurance provider owes their insurance provider money; and their insurance provider owes them money. Usually all different amounts! Because those are three different contractual agreements, being settled separately.
While it’s not necessarily the case that this is the body of case-law that would pertain if you send Dogecoin to someone in another country through your mutual memberships in some DEx, it’s not not necessarily the case, either.
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I think we’re getting off-track here, though. My original point wasn’t that a judge would be replaced by a network-consensus abstract machine. It’s that a network-consensus abstract machine is a valid replacement good for a judge, when you don’t have any compatible legal framework through which to access a judge. This is the good people are paying for when they pay crypto transaction fees: this fake robot judge, that—while worse than a real judge in almost all respects—is at least better than the nothing (i.e. the “send Western Union and pray your counterparty isn’t a Nigerian prince”) you get by default in international civil/contract-law dispute scenarios.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judges have tremendous amounts of discretionary power when carrying out the law, and a good judge certainly isn't going to just give up because the identity of one party isn't immediately known. The example already given of ordering that the transaction be reversed on the network (even if that involves compelling uninvolved people to cooperate with the process) is entirely plausible.
Are judges going to manage to identify and compel enough miners (or devs, i guess, assuming the miners adopt the compelled transaction revert version) to have enough hash power to win a fork?
US financial laws have been very useful for the gov't to be able to de facto give it worldwide jurisdiction in some areas, I think there would be relatively few qualms about continuing down this path. Especially if (for example) Robinhood and Coinbase were forced to follow along. At one point the "blessed" thing will become the only place you can really operate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The power of the court to 'right' the 'wrong' (e.g. by reversing transactions) is limited on a decentralized public blockchain governed by pure code that crosses national borders. This strengthens the position "the code is the law". On the other hand, this feature is a motivation for centralists to take issues with public decentralized blockchains.
Except it's not, really, because a judge who's unhappy at it isn't going to care about "the code is the law" talk. They're just going to tell people to fix it or else, and all being in another country usually means is that the asset seizures will take longer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The power of the court to 'right' the 'wrong' (e.g. by reversing transactions) is limited on a decentralized public blockchain governed by pure code that crosses national borders. This strengthens the position "the code is the law". On the other hand, this feature is a motivation for centralists to take issues with public decentralized blockchains.
Except it's not, really, because a judge who's unhappy at it isn't going to care about "the code is the law" talk. They're just going to tell people to fix it or else, and all being in another country usually means is that the asset seizures will take longer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Cryptocurrency doesn't provide any new capabilities at all." The new capability that cryptocurrency provides is that money is now "programmable" it's a fusion between money and software. Wether or not this is a benefit, is subjective, but IMO it's a humble beginning with epic potential.
A) Cryptocurrency is not money. It's not even a recognized currency. It's a virtual item. You can't hold it in your hand. When you spend it, it gets converted to the actual currency in your location and then THAT money is spent on the item you're buying. You don't buy anything with cryptocurrency, you only trade it for real money. Cryptocurrency is not money. B) it's not programmable; it's an inert thing; proof of wo…
A - Of course it's not fiat money, but it doesn't need to be. The money in your bank account can be described as virtual too. Folks transact in crypto all the time for goods, services, and "conceptual" transactions like DeFi and NFTs. Maybe it's not widely adopted enough for you to buy a 6-pack of beer at the corner store, but that doesn't mean it's not money. The money in your bank account is just as virtual anyway by your definition. For example: I can't pay with Shekels at a Walmart in Iowa, but I can pay with my debit card and have the bank convert it to the currency in my location, etc...
B - When I say it's programmable money, I'm talking about things like the EVM. Calling it programmable money is reductionist sure, but in effect that's what it is. Cryptocurrency and dapps provide a platform for folks to have complex transactions. Just because you don't want to participate in those transactions doesn't mean others aren't, they clearly are. Also, this stuff doesn't need to fit the traditional definition of currency in order to be viable. To me, it's a distributed computing platform for the exchange of value. Maybe you think it's worse than what we have already, and that's fine, in many way it is, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have benefits of its own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then why even bother with DeFi when what you're doing is just relaying trust back to a centralised human party? It's just regular finance with extra steps.
Except it's not at all. You can take synthetic TSLA shares and deposit those as collateral to mint stablecoins as a loan. Where else can you do that from your web browser at 10am on a Sunday and confirmed in 30 seconds?
The problem with loans generally isn't that you can have one at 10Am on a Sunday morning.
Looks like there are plenty of more DeFi hacks/internal fraud/incompetence https://www.rekt.news/leaderboard/ Setting aside the hacks, what good is DeFi anyhow for those outside crypto space? Seems DeFi currently serve two main functions. 1. Crypto backed loans - main purpose being crypto speculation / possibly some dubious tax benefits 2. Decentralized exchanges - nice for those into crypto but not for Joe Sixpack.
For people outside the US, they could also get price exposure to US stocks with things like sAAPL, sGOOG, etc (synthetic assets that represent an underlying equity)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it's not, really, because a judge who's unhappy at it isn't going to care about "the code is the law" talk. They're just going to tell people to fix it or else, and all being in another country usually means is that the asset seizures will take longer.
How are they practically going to find the defendant? On a public blockchain, you can't always put a name or face to an address. The tokens in question can change hands many times and make it hard to trace identity.