Decentralized Woo Hoo • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#131

Post by newacc9 » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

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 idea is that whatever you build on top of a platform like Ethereum will persist; if you build on top of Facebook or IOS your app can be removed without recourse.

Bankless | 90 - 5 Mental Models for Web3 | Chris Dixon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jezH_7qEk50

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#132

Post by billjings » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

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…

> 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 to the status quo, or they choose not to educate themselves (try it) - neither is really valid response if you want to write coherently about something.

The claim you are referring to here doesn't say that the technology is valueless. It says that the individual assets - the NFTs, the Bitcoins - are valueless.

This is a meaningful distinction, because the premise that a global decentralized unit of exchange is valuable doesn't connect at all with what value the individual coins in that exchange system should have.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#133

Post by uncomputation » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #100

uncomputation wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually a rare breed excited about the potential about cryptocurrency here on HN. That said, when I go through your example, I don’t see much difference from the current system despite the illusion that it’s different. > appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. > every…

"So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for." Laws are not mechanisms, proof of transaction, records etc.. 'Smart Contracts' as something unassailable in courts are ridiculous obviously. But 'smart contracts' that facilitate micro-transactions, every day purchases, and flow through the system without human interaction seem like a good idea. Imag…

> Laws are not mechanisms

This part is interesting, the idea that enforcement and legislation are one in the same. However, for taxes, this would only just prevent tax fraud, right? There’s not really “mechanisms” for taxes. Congress passes the laws. You follow them when you file your taxes, or you may be audited later and fined/jailed.

> to skip VISA and classical banks while we’re at it

Loan pools and such are interesting, basically community lending. I’m not sure how much we could skip VISA. It’s a payment processor. You need someone to submit your transactions to nodes. In reality, they are of course going to charge a fee because they can make money. Just like VISA. One advantage is I guess they won’t have VISA’s prudish objections to certain kinds of transactions.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#134

Post by crypto_is_king » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #81

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 t…

This is true, but at some point the community will figure out what's going on, and either leave to a more promising and uncompromised project, or find a way to limit the voting power of the attacker. You can see this happening now with the Curve Wars.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#135

Post by klntsky » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

> The essence of decentralized woo, and why it’s such a pernicious form of sophistry, is that it’s simply a proxy meme of the more dangerous idea that technology can fix social problems.

That's a strong wording. Technology can actually "fix" some social problems. The problem is that we don't know, which of them. Also, we know very little about the tradeoffs.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#136

Post by simias » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

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,…

Persecuted? Are cryptocultists hiding in basements for fear of the nocoin police? Tortured in backrooms to have them recant the holy blockchain?

Blockchain is shilled everywhere, you can find ads for it in the subway.

>I really wish people would stop bashing the industry and instead join in the experiment.

I'm absolutely ok with experimenting. I'm not ok running trillion dollar ponzi schemes that use a mindbending amount of resources in order to make a proof of concept. That's ridiculous.

>For example Bitcoin with its fixed supply of 21M coins which prevents dillution and debasement.

Except, you know, for all the bitcoin forks out there.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#137

Post by cslarson » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

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…

in the last 24hrs i,

- funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account.

- joined a dao to bid on the last privately held copy of the US Constitution.

- claimed an airdrop representing some control of a protocol i had used

- borrowed stables against volatile collateral

- repaid loans, shored up collateral (market went down)

- many token swaps (stable stable, volatile stable)

the hn crowd should be leading discussion on the ethical implications of the technology but it is stuck where it was like 10 years ago. it is very strange. but i guess this happened to slashdot too.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#138

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #65

Critically fails to distinguish between decentralization technologies (a wider category) and cryptocurrency. Does not understand the term he is criticizing. There is another deeper primary failure here shared by much of the HN community. That is the inability, despite so much evidence, to comprehend that technology IS an ally to society. In fact, it has always been a core part of progress in human society. But the ab…

Most of HN is aware and mature enough to comprehend that Ayn Rand is NOT an ally of society.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#139

Post by tenuousemphasis » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

Here I thought politicians pretending like they can solve political problems is dooming us all.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#140

Post by Kalium » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

shoto_io wrote: post #118

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 val…

We tech people see a lot of ideas. Most of them are superficially exciting. For example, a way of detecting when counterfeit parts with substandard specs are used in farming equipment. Maybe a music-centered social network for users of a particular music player.

Many of them go on to be either wastes of time or much, much worse. Suddenly detecting substandard parts is DRM for John Deere tractors and the social network is iTunes Ping.

Most ideas fail. This doesn't make them bad ideas or the people creating them bad people. It just means we've collectively learned that most ideas will fail and there are some fairly common reasons for this.