41–50 of 704 posts
I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable. The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I…
A blockchain doesn’t provide trust, though. A person who doesn’t understand technology doesn’t trust a distributed ledger, but they do trust their centralised bank because it’s regulated.
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
This is also why taking a picture of your ballot will nullify it if you're caught doing so. Not as punishment, but so you can vote again with potentially different choices and a valid excuse for having no verification.
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
But what about a Sybil attack? How do you ensure "one person == one or zero votes"? I could submit a jillion votes for Donald Duck and how would you ever know that those votes were all cast by the same person? Any sort of election scheme has to deal with messy real-world identity, and there's no cryptographic solution to that, only various weak social network approaches that are pretty much the norm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable. The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I…
A blockchain doesn’t provide trust, though. A person who doesn’t understand technology doesn’t trust a distributed ledger, but they do trust their centralised bank because it’s regulated.
Trust will (continue to) come with time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that use case is HUGE. Cryptos are really enabling unprecedented efficiency in a wide variety of crime
Imagine when ransoms had to be paid in suitcases full of dollar bills with non-sequential serial numbers. Bitcoin has made it all so much easier.
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
You mean, other than trusting elected representatives to oversee the election you'd rather trust miners?
Another rant about crypto which ignores Nano, which has been around for 6 years now. *y*a*w*n*. There is immediate and obvious utility in being able to send value instantly with no fees, with no dependence on a centralized authority. Nano just got its own currency ticker - XNO - and avoids every fault this author finds in the rest of the field. Mr. Diehl went far enough to pick out some flaws, and then generalized th…
> There is immediate and obvious utility in being able to send value instantly with no fees, with no dependence on a centralized authority. There is, the problem is you are not sending value, you are sending the modern equivalent of Charles Ponzi's postal reply coupons.
Yes, there are straight Ponzi schemes in crypto. I seem to remember that 'PonziCoin' actually did quite well. Twice. Like, a quarter million dollars in eight hours well.
But there is also utility. Huge utility, recognized by multiple governments by now. And people working relentlessly to free us from depending on the beyond-evil bankers strip-mining every facet of existence on this planet for their own short-term gain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
You also need a way to use your key to show a false result, or someone can use rubber-hose cryptanalysis to see your vote.
Maybe I'm mistaken or confused here, but in that specific case you could just give any random 9-digit sequence and it would suffice? A non-SSN voter ID would work just as well for a key.
Are people threatening others based on their votes these days?
EDIT: /u/ninjanomnom brought up a good point regarding heads-of-households, which I hadn't thought of before. I suppose some sort of method would be necessary to obfuscate your vote in some situations.