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Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#81

Post by PragmaticPulp »

hamburga wrote: post #49

I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.[1] A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol. Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blo…

> I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.

This is even worse than it sounds. Crypto projects like DAOs actually make hidden centralization a breeze for well-funded adversaries.

If someone has enough money, they can simply take over a DAO by buying enough tokens to swing the votes in the direction they want. Thanks to the way most blockchain solutions are implemented, they can even accumulate all of these tokens in ways that appear decentralized across many unique wallets that are nevertheless controlled by a central party.

Big players can acquire centralized control of decentralized projects in ways that consumers and regulators wouldn't even be able to detect.

Decentralized, tokenized ownership structures are definitely not "power to the people" structures. They are "power to the money" structures, where whoever can spend the most money is guaranteed to win and all of the participants have given up their ability to ever even know when it's happening.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#82

Post by dqpb »

Kalium wrote: post #59
21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?…

Look up Turing award winner Silvio Micali.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#83

Post by avivo »

I've used "magical decentralization fallacy" to get at something similar[1], but I appreciate how much more concise this is!

[1] https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy... "the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#84

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

Mark my words, Tech people believing they can solve political problems with technology will doom us all.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#85

Post by whitepaint »

TrackerFF wrote: post #63
whitepaint wrote: post #3

OP seems to have no idea about DeFI. You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like Polymarket. You can gamble. More on: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ . All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies, you just need an internet connection. How can y…

There's no free lunch. Just because regulators haven't caught up with things, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Here's how it's going to go down, like it always does: 1. Gov. tries to regulate and restrict usage 2. If that fails, they will go after bank accounts tied to brokerage accounts etc. Hell, in some countries it's extremely hard to use money made from crypto as a down payment for mortgage, auto loans,…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#86

Post by lifty »

Kalium wrote: post #59
21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?…

One example is https://www.proofofhumanity.id . Their token is also an UBI implementation.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#87

Post by brighton36 »

woodruffw wrote: post #31
capableweb wrote: post #10

Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology. I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies. Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article…

Normally when we use the phrase "conflict of interest," we use it to imply a conflict between parties. One of the parties in your account is the blog author and/or their company; who is the other? The cryptocurrency community ? They aren't a party in the traditional sense, and the concept weakens further when we consider the press campaign among cryptocurrency fans to rebrand their schemes as transaction substrates.…

I think it's safe to assume that we're seeing a post-hoc rationalization here in our commenter.

The commenter has tasked themselves with discrediting the author. So, the commenter is thus tasked with either taking umbrage against a conflict-of-interest, or not-having-experience-in-the-field. Whichever state of the binary switch the author is configured in. That's where the foul will be.

Also note that the commenter takes umbrage with the person, not the ideas. Which, is mostly just amusing to me, at this point.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#88

Post by delaaxe »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44
21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” ar…

The projects reshaping the economy are named. The good ones are Ethereum and L2s. Their goal is to become planetary infrastructure for the global economy.

There's such an abundance of VC money that funding isn't scarce. Developer talent is however.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#89

Post by voidmain0001 »

The sentence in the second last paragraph reads "They all have their idea about how to “make the world a better place” and to do it they need you to tithe and purchase their ponzicoin today to buy a stake in a better tomorrow." and is the anthem of this video I saw posted on reddit.com/r/bitcoin called "Bitcoin is Generational Wealth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA A lot of fluff and no details regarding the implementation of the ideal future except that one must get on the Bitcoin train now to be part of it.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#90

Post by dqpb »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #84
21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

Mark my words, Tech people believing they can solve political problems with technology will doom us all.

Operations Research already solves a huge number of problems which, in its absence, would be political problems.
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