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Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#111

Post by deweller »

notamy wrote: post #91
deweller wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smart contracts you are seeing now are relatively simple programs and are woefully insufficient for nation-state level use. Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.

> but the rules are public and codified. You mean like, say, the current system of laws we have? (: Sure, laws are strange and arcane and require expertise to translate them into understandable terms, but any form of code has the exact same problem.

No. Better than the current system of laws we have.

Currently, the current system requires lengthy court intervention with interpretation done after the fact.

Smart contracts can allow for a fixed number of resolutions with a timeframe defined up front. Smart contracts won't work for everything, but they might be a better fit for some things.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#112

Post by timdaub »

I think there needs to be a new discipline in the cryptosphere similar to what a hacker is to technology. Maybe it's just that hackers need to gain more influence.

Anyways, what's necessary is that the crypto space needs a stronger internal critical voice. It can't just all be about owning tokens and shilling them to others.

We need due diligence too.

I find this type of manifesto quite cool: https://criticalengineering.org/en

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#113

Post by cslarson »

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…

> the crypto world is full of useless memecoins

This criticism should really end - yes, it misleads many people!

Creating a decentralised app, or a token, is permisssionless! Yes, anyone anywhere can do it. Much like publishing a website, or writing a blog article, the costs are negligible. The fact that there are a lot of useless websites and blog articles does not invalidate the usefulness of the web!

The existence of shitcoins means absolutely nothing.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#114

Post by kcabdelta »

mistermann wrote: post #76
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. I know very little about this space, but I get a very strong "real deal" feel from Charles Hoskinson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoskinson https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/ I am most optimistic about blockchain based innovation with respect to direct/liquid/e…

@mistermann: "I am most optimistic about blockchain based innovation with respect to direct/liquid/etc democracy."

Please stop pushing this snakeoil!

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#115

Post by danlugo92 »

Spivak wrote: post #54
pezzana wrote: post #46

> ... But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet…

I don't think critics don't "get it", it's just that money exists in meatspace and if you're goal is to stop people with guns then you're gonna have a rough time unless you also have guns. All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-…

> a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers)

Impossible with bitcoin's latest updates.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#116

Post by kcabdelta »

delaaxe wrote: post #88
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

@delaaxe: "Their goal is to become planetary infrastructure for the global economy."

Seeing as this "planetary infrastructure" will consume more energy than it produces. A better description would be "planetary snakeoil". The economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#117

Post by deweller »

CJefferson wrote: post #62
deweller wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smart contracts you are seeing now are relatively simple programs and are woefully insufficient for nation-state level use. Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.

But, if there is a "court intervention" clause that just lets you say "Transfer X money from Y to Z", then why bother with full blockchain/crypto? You have effectively central control.

I agree that would be a useless smart contract. If that is your intention, then don't use a smart contract.

If, however, there are a limited number of known possible outcomes, then smart contracts offer advantages over court-based settlements.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#118

Post by shoto_io »

cslarson wrote: post #103

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole.

I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases.

I have no answer.

Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the value of having friends I see daily online?". I think it's very difficult to imagine value of technology that is not mainstream yet.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#119

Post by starclerk »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #97

History replays itself every new invention or enlightment humans have. Over the past centuries many have been persecuted for studying chemistry, astronomy, physics and even biology. Think of Galileo who was persecuted for advaing the theory that the Earth was round. Crypto embodies a new paradigm whereby rules can be programmed and enforced by computers. Instead of relying on centralized human authorities to measure,…

> but only if we all agree.

"we all" in this case refers to the top single-digit percent of holders [1]. It's no small feat to get consensus there! But it's also not very decentralized/democratized and sounds a lot like our existing financial (or societal) systems.

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/analysis-shows-bitcoin-whales-are-s... -- which optimistically states that only 71% of BTC is held by the top 2%.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#120

Post by VHRanger »

dqpb wrote: post #96
VHRanger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your laboratory has run for 12 years and is currently consuming 0.5% of the world energy output and 20% of new GPUs. All of that without a popular usecase yet. Except for financial speculation, finance-of-last-resort, and crime. I would say that laboratory is not using the research grants well.

Algorand is carbon negative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykZ-ZSKkxM

Yes, the laboratory would be fine if it weren't for BTC and ETH.

Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects that consume ungodly resource as a byproduct of securing the network (which is a financial problem in any case)

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