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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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…
Maybe it "seems" valuable, but why exactly is it valuable? For what use case and which situation (besides crime)?
I think the issue is that many don't see value in its "primary value proposition" because the features they want from banks are already there (stability, FDIC insurance). The only thing I personally see missing is no/low-fee instant transfers, but crypto hasn't solved that either (too slow and/or high fees).
> 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.
In the end, it's just a question of whether you trust a centralised authority that's ultimate accountable, however imperfectly, or decentralised authorities that are accountable only to themselves and have no enforcement power.
If you give me bitcoin and I don't give you goods in exchange, or vice-versa, aren't you going to run to that central authority?
"Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime." So you're saying there IS a use case :)
Actually I think he is wrong about that, crime can be done better on a centralized infrastructure. See all crime before cryptocurrencies were a thing.
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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.
If all transaction can be tracked, what prevents the [FBI\et al] from simply following the bitcoin trail until someone cashes out?
For example, you take your ill-gotten gains and just randomly send $1 to a million different addresses, some owned by you, some owned by random people or exchanges or whatever. Nobody's going to say no to free money, so the trail goes cold.
Or you use an offshore exchange that doesn't really practice strong KYC, and exchange the ill-gotten gains for a different cryptocurrency and now without the private ledger of the exchange, the trail is cold.
At one point "mixing services" were the talk of the town, but at this point it's clear that you can get 99% of the benefits of mixing without having to go through an explicit service.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is rubber-hose cryptanalysis the concept of extracting info by torture? I guess... I mean, if you're willing to beat someone to get their SSN, you could probably do a lot more harm already just using that info to apply for CCs and loans in their name. 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…
So any system that allows you to verify a vote needs to come not only with a way for you to validate it, but also with deniability built in. Because if it's not then you can a) sell your vote or b) be intimidated into showing how you voted (which may result in a firing/beating if you did it wrong).
There are, I think, one or two ways to achieve this, but it's a non-trivial problem.
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?
Most Bitcoin transactions have a quite high transaction cost, and I would argue that chargebacks are an important consumer protection.
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…
As in impossible to influence via regulation. Once you realize that proper regulation is a good thing and a must in a functioning society, you realize something that can not be regulated can't be allowed to exist as it will undermine said society.
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?