It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

> The core things that blockchain stuff tries to solve are not actually the hard problems.

What are the hard problems though? Depending on where you stand you might see different things, but to me the hard problems are that banks throughout the world have a hard time trusting and interoperating, things are slow (payments have to go through banks correspondences and central banks and the BIS and that route takes a long time even if some of the stages are RTGSs), errors are way too common (basically audits happen all the time, are manual, and consequences of errors are real issues that people have to deal with).

> The hard part of online commerce is not that customers can reverse credit card transactions. The hard part of contract law is not automatic payments. The hard part about property law is not atomic transactions of money and deed transfers.

What are the hard parts from your point of view? Is your point of view that the system is perfect and doesn't need the technical improvements proposed by blockchain? I'm not sure I follow.

> It's not trivial to track money, but the stated goals of cryptocurrencies is to make it hard or impossible to trace, and to compel.

I feel like that's too much of a strong statement considering that some cryptocurrencies, which I've worked on, were built specifically to follow regulations and make fraud hard.

> The explicit goals of cryptocurrencies is to get around AML & KYC laws. This is what Pintrest was talking about.

Again, there are many cryptocurrencies with very different goals and this statement can't apply to all. The statement is at least very wrong for some well-known cryptocurrencies.

> We as a society, as a people, don't even want people to be able to send money any way they want. E.g. we don't want people to be able to send money to ISIS. There's a "baby and bathwater" argument that can be made here, but since cryptocurrency people don't even WANT to prevent this use case, it's not what they're making, or selling.

So, ignoring what I said previously that different cryptocurrencies have different goal, and so that statement doesn't apply to the field in general, there's still something to be said about that. How much privacy do we deserve? Where is the line where privacy is too strong that it is damaging to society? There's a very similar argument with end-to-end encryption in messaging applications and governments trying to fight it. For example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-sta...

> Like airline security, it's not effective because it's perfect, but because there's too much risk that one of the layers will catch you.

BTW I don't think airline security is a good example. Adam ruins everything has a good episode on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LDzOi1dyAA (tl;dw: it's security theater)

> Reversibility: People don't want this. One of the main reasons to use a credit card AT ALL is that people want reversibility. If that's all you wanted then you can probably just accept debit cards.

Credit cards are mostly a US thing btw, I never knew about them before moving here, and even in the US reversibility is not always a thing. For example, you can't reverse transactions done on venmo or zelle. But even then, cryptocurrencies don't preclude reversing transactions, there's nothing in the technology that would prevent that, especially if it used as a settlement layer for virtual assert service providers (exchanges, banks, etc.)

> And as for smart contracts: All smart contract systems need a way for a court to interpret the contract. The contract may not be legal, it may have been signed under duress, etc.. So all smart contract systems need this escape hatch.

I'm not sure I understand your point. A smart contract has its code published in clear so by using it you already choose to trust and obey the code.

> The most ridiculous one is "land ownership registry". You know who ultimately decides who own a piece of land? The government of the country it's in.

Agree, linking real objects to the blockchain is hard, and projects that tout that usecase are often scams.

> And note that all this is in addition to technical problems like PoW/PoS, electricity use, scalability, transaction speed, 51% attacks, etc... Even assuming all those are solved, the problem is the the very GOAL is a dystopia.

PoW/electricity use are things of the past for the technology. No new cryptocurrency rely on these. Scalability and transaction speed are things that are being solved (I believe Algorand is aiming for 20k transaction/s for the end of the year). There are other consensusless protocols that pretty much scale linearly based on the number of machines you throw on the problem (see fastpay or At2).

BTW if you have any question, happy to continue this conversation or clarify anything.

"Bitcoin value has changed 200,000x in a decade and just halved in a few weeks."

"You're envious because you didn't get rich quick."

"I thought this wasn't a get rich quick scheme?"

"It isn't, how could you suggest such a thing? It's a currency used to buy groceries in Venezuela."

"Then why do you care about it - do you put your savings into the Mongolian Tugrik because it's a currency used to buy groceries? Do you go round singing its praises on the internet?"

"No, because they won't get me rich quick. It's still a currency, deal with it."

"Doesn't that rapid change in value make it a poor thing to use as currency?"

"It's unquestionably better than a hyperinflationary fiat currency in a collapsing state."

"Almost anything would be."

"You're just dissing it out of envy because you didn't get rich quick. Look at that - over $30,000/coin, nothing that valuable could be nonsense or scammy!"

"Tulips?"

"That's all you ever say, Tulips, Madoff, Ponzi, Pyramid."

"They were all things that had high valuations and were nonsense. At least tulips have some inherent value, unlike Bitcoin, you can't grow or eat Bitcoin."

"Ah! Ah! You can't eat gold!"

"Indeed you can't. If you like that kind of thing, do you hold any gold?"

"No, gold won't get me rich quick."

> "It’s been more than a decade. It’s here to stay."

I guess this is why you're religious - it's been here for a long time, many people believe in it, that's enough to convince you, yes?

I'm not saying crypto won't work. I'm saying every single idea that's been proposed won't work.

And the base problem is that the whole point of these coins is disguising "I want to create a world problem" as "I want to solve a problem".

"It's hard to get around [AML, KYC, tax, etc.] laws" is not a "problem" that needs to be solved. Yet again and again, this is what coiners propose as a potential "killer app".

> When you're talking global interoperability and value exchange, conflict resolution is off the table anyway.

Huh?

> What court am I supposed to go to if I wire money to a guy in Nigeria and he doesn't fulfill his end of the bargain?

Your bank makes it hard to do this, to make sure you're not being scammed.

And what problem exactly are you trying to solve? If you send BTC to Nigeria and the guy doesn't fulfill his end of the bargain then BTC by design doesn't allow any recourse.

Our current system may or may not be able to help you, but BTC goes out of its way to say "fuck you, you should just never have made a mistake".

But also, if someone moves $10B to Nigeria, you can bet your ass they'll find a way.

C.f. when one of the Pirate Bay founders, while living in Cambodia which doesn't have an extradition treaty, hacked some banks. VERY quickly that whole "doesn't have an extradition treaty" did not matter at all, and he got arrested and put in prison.

He should have bought bitcoin/monero. Noob. :-)

It's actually telling that he had full access to the bank's mainframe, yet still only managed to steal like a couple of thousand USD. The rest of the transfers were blocked or reversed.

So the system worked as intended. And as we've seen time and time again (cough, Mt Gox), bitcoin just doesn't work even as intended.

> One example might be

For many years now we've heard hypotheticals, but no actual solutions. The time for brainstorming should have been over, considering the HUGE environmental and crime impact.

At this point it all sounds like "it's not worked so far, but can we just continue setting fire to children? I think it'll do something good one of these days".

> decentralized lending that can provide better interest rates because there's not a huge meatspace banking infrastructure to support.

But can we have an actual solution, not just handwaving, here?

How are you going to solve the intersection between lending contract and laws? What about bankrupsy? What about court ordered child support? What about inheritance, death, etc?

These blockchain things are trying to solve what is actually the EASY problems, not the hard problems.

Like, what do you think will happen if you say "can I get a better interest rate, if I agree to be excluded from chapter 11 and chapter 7 laws?". Likely no, no you cannot. Your "math" doesn't magically make the government, judicial system, and police just "go away". And for good reason.