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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#51

Post by coralreef »

zwiek wrote: post #27
coralreef wrote: post #5

This entire post seems to avoid or lack the understanding of the basic reasons blockchain were created; that is, to offer a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant network. This was Satoshi's vision, and those values are a blockchain's express priority over scale and efficiency. Centralization is great for speed and efficiency, not so great for protection against authoritarian actors (governments or centr…

But what is it actually used for? Okay, you can donate to WikiLeaks ... But probably 99.999% of people who have possessed cryptocurrency are just speculators: buy low, sell high. And ironically, the exchanges are centralized entities :p

Bitcoin in particular is used as a store of value, or a form of "digital gold".

Everything is speculation (you hope it goes up in the future, but no one knows for sure), but large corporations are increasingly keeping a balance in Bitcoin, as are wealthy individuals and fund managers.

To understand its place in the world, you need to be a bit more familiar with government bond yield and risks, money creation/monetary policy, the macroeconomics of perpetually rising debt and negative interest rates.

Gold has a $11 trillion market cap, and its not because of industrial use or because it sells well as jewelry.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#54

Post by hackinthebochs »

swenger wrote: post #30
padobson wrote: post #17

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.

It provides "distributed trust", in the sense that you know no single person or group is in control and you trust the distributed consensus, in terms of ledger state and algorithm accuracy.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#55

Post by throwaway6977 »

swenger wrote: post #30
padobson wrote: post #17

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.

You sound privileged enough to have access to a reliable and trustworthy bank. Many, many people aren't as lucky.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#56

Post by rawtxapp »

Scarblac wrote: post #38

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?

Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top.

As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#57

Post by maneesh »

andrewla wrote: post #45
maneesh wrote: post #28

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…

First of all, what you're talking about more resembles a Merkle Tree rather than a blockchain, because the "chaining" property is really useless in this scenario. Each election can publish the Merkle Tree of its results and you can be sure that your vote was properly registered. Or frankly, just publish the list of one-way hashes and their vote, and you can dispense with all the Merkle-ing. But what about a Sybil att…

As to your first point, I'm not familiar with Merkle Tree's, so I'll learn about that before I respond. Thank you for the insight.

To the second point--I would imagine you would vote in the same way we do today for MVP, in-person / mailing, etc. So the main function would be to verify that your vote was properly recorded and counted.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#58

Post by andrewla »

IronIvan wrote: post #8

> 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.

Exactly -- "except crime".

Practically speaking these can just be anything from conflicting jurisdictions (buying weed in a state where it's legal but the Federal government is skeptical), to "crimes" like circumventing KYC or AML -- things that look like structuring (like sending > $10k) even if they are not in furtherance of criminal activity.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#59

Post by horsawlarway »

padobson wrote: post #17
IronIvan wrote: post #8

> 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.

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…

But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change.

I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded.

The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists.

I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still.

As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine.

---

So question to you: How do you reconcile the theft of my property with the ledger at this point?

It turns out I have no ability to do so at all. The ledger is distributed and impossible to meaningfully change.

So while I trust that the ledger can't be changed easily - I don't trust the ledger to accurately reflect ownership (it can only represent possession, not true ownership).

So now what?

Now it turns out I have to turn around and trust a central authority anyways! That authority being the government that is handling the prosecution of MtGox for fraud and theft.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#60

Post by maneesh »

ninjanomnom wrote: post #44
maneesh wrote: post #28

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…

Voting is intentionally designed for it to be impossible to verify what your final vote is so that it's impossible for someone to use that to hold you to a particular vote. A classic example being a household all being forced to vote one way by the head of that household. With no verification possible you can freely vote without influence from others who would use that verification for their own ends. This is also wh…

This is interesting and something I hadn't thought of. Thank you.
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