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Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#181

Post by hhmc »

cableshaft wrote: post #171
hhmc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. If they have no bank account, how do they convert ETH into something actually useful to them (presumably Turkish Lira)?

Yeah no, the Turkish Lira is no longer useful. "The Turkish lira hit its weakest ever level against the US dollar on August 7, trading at 7.36 at one point, having lost nearly 20% of its value since the beginning of the year....The lira has been on life support for the past two years and the economy has continually struggled." https://theconversation.com/turkeys-collapsing-lira-governme...

> Yeah no, the Turkish Lira is no longer useful.

Yeah, no, it actually is.

The USDTRY rate doesn't matter nearly as much if you actually live in Turkey, for hopefully obviously reasons.

And if your argument is that realized volatility makes a currency useless, then I'm afraid I have some very bad news about cryptocurrency.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#182

Post by Zababa »

crypto_is_king wrote: post #127
Zababa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people said about objects in the context of object-oriented programming and it never really happened. Currently software doesn't really feel like lego bricks, it feels more like the mix of legos, mega blocks, duplos, kaplas and playmobiles that I played with when I was younger. You can build lots of stuff with it, and they can kind of go together, but not as easily as things from the same brand.

Have you checked your npm_modules folder lately?

Yes, and it's full of little packages that are made to make sure one package will work with the other. In my example, this would be duplo to lego connectors, duplo to mega blocks connectors, lego to mega blocks connectors, etc. I also often write myself glue code between two packages.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#183

Post by timdaub »

scyclow wrote: post #169
timdaub wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform ris…

I think we're on the same page. That's kind of what I was saying about how you're essentially open sourcing the "read" on data. Also, I'm not trying to sell the write side short! Owning writes is the major value proposition of a blockchain. I just feel like people conflate the two when talking about on chain ownership

ok fair enough. I'm glad we hashed it out and arrived on the same page :)

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#184

Post by cableshaft »

hhmc wrote: post #181
cableshaft wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no, the Turkish Lira is no longer useful. "The Turkish lira hit its weakest ever level against the US dollar on August 7, trading at 7.36 at one point, having lost nearly 20% of its value since the beginning of the year....The lira has been on life support for the past two years and the economy has continually struggled." https://theconversation.com/turkeys-collapsing-lira-governme...

> Yeah no, the Turkish Lira is no longer useful. Yeah, no, it actually is. The USDTRY rate doesn't matter nearly as much if you actually live in Turkey, for hopefully obviously reasons. And if your argument is that realized volatility makes a currency useless, then I'm afraid I have some very bad news about cryptocurrency.

I was being a bit facetious. Obviously people still use it. But it's not in a great place right now.

Volatility based on speculation, price discovery, and early adoption is different than volatility because of high inflation. The former just means you might lose your investments. The latter means your government could collapse.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#185

Post by ghostwriter »

kcabdelta wrote: post #114
mistermann wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Name the criteria by which Cardano fits into the snakeoil category.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#186

Post by rileyphone »

uncomputation wrote: post #70
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…

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…

> Or direct democracy without senators, which the founding fathers (US-specific) agreed was bad because most people do not understand how taxes and budgeting work.

To be fair, people were MUCH dumber back then, and the capability to access information was a modicum of what it is today. Direct democracy was also impossible back then given the slow speed of communication and population distributed across vast territory. Today, I don't think it's fair to paternalize the general public as such - we have the system we have due to legacy and inertia, not its merits.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#187

Post by Xorlev »

tata71 wrote: post #161
Xorlev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind. Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.

Yes, you can. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/petco-usa/?hl=en They don't have it at the payment terminal directly yet, because of the stigma you and others still have against cryptocurrency. But after this cycle, the news will have normalized it enough that you WILL pay for your dog food and Taco Bell with Dogecoin — I'd bet 10 DOGE on it.

You're correct, I am opposed to crytocurrencies as implemented today. I'm horrified that we spend tons of resources and energy doing effectively useless work. Maybe a Folding at Home coin would be more palatable.

I'd also argue that bitrefill is, yet again, centralization being needed to make it useful. Once defi is accepted everywhere, suddenly people will want the law and central authorities to perform chargebacks, and end up reinventing our exact same system.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#188

Post by cableshaft »

ghostwriter wrote: post #185
kcabdelta wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@mistermann: "I am most optimistic about blockchain based innovation with respect to direct/liquid/etc democracy." Please stop pushing this snakeoil!

Name the criteria by which Cardano fits into the snakeoil category.

That user account has only made two comments on all of HN, and they're both in this thread. Not worth wasting your time.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#189

Post by lottin »

didericis wrote: post #157
api wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency i…

There are huge regulatory and societal roadblocks for crypto to be used as envisioned not as present during those other cases of wide technological adoption. For crypto to be valuable, merchants need to use it. Transactions need to be cheaper. A stable decentralized financial system needs to emerge. The use case is a world without central banks and central currency manipulation. People who don’t see the use case don’…

I think the major roadblock is the fact that bitcoin was conceived as anarcho-capitalist money, and for it to succeed anarcho-capitalism would have to succeed. And that's not going to happen, because anarcho-capitalism is not viable way of organising a society. It should be obvious to anyone who has delved into the literature.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#190

Post by raintrees »

Maybe decentralized needs to be valued against the (possibly negative) value of centralized authority?

Similar to how air quality, other natural resources are frequently not taken into account during the manufacturing of goods or services, so we may end up with a Tragedy of the Commons situation; If proportional effective causes and their constituent values are not taken into account, then the value cannot be correctly ascertained.

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