441–450 of 704 posts
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The problem with bank accounts is the banks. The promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust any institution, such as a bank, to keep track of your money.
Which could be compelling if you lived in a society where the banks were extremely unstable, but looks terrible if you live in one with regulation, deposit insurance and and other account protections.
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>go read the UniswapV2 contract. If you don’t think that’s a cool innovation, please come back and let me know, I’m interested. I feel like the coolness of Uniswap requires putting the cart before the horse. If I'm not convinced of the real utility of these tokens, why would I be impressed with the ability to move them around in various clever ways? I need to see a valuable external use case before I can see the valu…
The automated market maker design of Uniswap is useful even for non-blockchain based scripts to e.g. trade stocks digitally. It's just a simple way of creating an orderbook and liquidity. So you don't need to be convinced of the real utilities of tokens to appreciate the brilliance of the design.
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KYC laws aimed at anti-money laundering; any large movement of money has to be between trusted parties. Which means a verification process that is more thorough the more money you move around.
Right, but that just means some paperwork gets filed when you attempt to do large transactions with cash, not that it's literally illegal to do those transactions. I don't understand why the toplevel comment says it's illegal to buy stocks. It seems like it would be merely very difficult, not illegal. I think your biggest problem would be finding a broker that would accept a pile of cash to buy you stocks with, rathe…
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See, I think you're disconnecting two issues which are inherently related. Fraud is not going anywhere anytime soon. If you have no proposed mechanism to reconcile fraud, I'd argue there's not any true value stored. If the proposed mechanism is "just use the existing government" then the whole house of cards in built on the back of that central authority enforcing ownership for you anyways in which case why not just…
The reason I am disconnecting those issues is that Bitcoin was never designed to solve the type of fraud you're talking about. There is no proposed mechanism to solve it, because it's outside of it's scope. It was designed to solve a specific set of frauds related with having a central authority though: censoring people from financial system, seizing your savings from your bank account and debasing the currency for t…
We started with:
"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."
Except the ledger doesn't actually provide any remedy to counter-party risk at all - I still have to trust a 3rd party at the time of exchange.
So the value of bitcoin is entirely dependent on the risk of the counter-party (because I have to pay to offset that risk, whether that's insurance, a private militia, legal contract enforced by a gov that I pay taxes to, simply eating the lost coins, etc)
Which means the intrinsic value of bitcoin is dependent on my ability to offset that risk - which I realistically (as a law abiding citizen) have to rely on the government to do, because the government has a monopoly on violence and imprisonment.
Which means the intrinsic value of a bitcoin is entirely at the whim of government control anyways. (which we already have an intuitive understanding of - this is why the price will fluctuate so much when news about government regulation or enforcement breaks).
Even though I agree that current crypto coins have no clear value, there is some aspect of it which people want but was probably not done right or sometimes illegal
Imagine being in 90s and everyone doing some silly websites and saying it is future. Then came the giants which actually solved the problem for the masses
I think the biggest lesson here is that people really, really love unregulated gambling. The same way they love doing drugs, making narcotics an extremely profitable business. If we don’t legalize the things our population deeply desire, the criminal elements are more than happy to step up and provide said services.
The authors example use cases about a database doing everything except crime summarizes it well. One persons crime is another persons freedom. If you rephrased it as saying, the only thing blockchains provide that a database doesn't is freedom, I think the resounding response would be: Yes. What I think anti-crypto people object to is the freedom of others, because it represents a limit and undermines the necessary a…
See also: people getting absolutely furious when the bank stops them from wiring money to Nigerian scammers for their million-dollar lottery win - and then demanding the same bank reverses the transactions after the jig is up.
They want to freely gamble with cryptos now that everything is going to the moon, but are going to be demanding answers once the bubble pops and the casino takes their life savings
If anything, I think stablecoins are way more dangerous than the author indicates. People talk about things like Bitcoin as a threat to sovereign currencies, and they are, as competitors, of sorts. But stablecoins are another matter entirely. One huge aspect of the value of sovereign currencies is that they are instruments of law -- courts will settle in them as a lowest common denominator, and it is safe to use them…
Why is that scenario worse than now? Why is bank the preferred medium to support when they default?
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Have you seen the price of bitcoin evolve? We recently had 2 all time highs again. You must be really stupid to lose money on that.
hindsight is 20/20
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See, I think you're disconnecting two issues which are inherently related. Fraud is not going anywhere anytime soon. If you have no proposed mechanism to reconcile fraud, I'd argue there's not any true value stored. If the proposed mechanism is "just use the existing government" then the whole house of cards in built on the back of that central authority enforcing ownership for you anyways in which case why not just…
The reason I am disconnecting those issues is that Bitcoin was never designed to solve the type of fraud you're talking about. There is no proposed mechanism to solve it, because it's outside of it's scope. It was designed to solve a specific set of frauds related with having a central authority though: censoring people from financial system, seizing your savings from your bank account and debasing the currency for t…
If I'm understanding this thread, you're saying that bit coin is simultaneously designed to allow for this kind of seizure and not.
Swap the mtGox hacker with the government.
It's useful keeping the two problems connected though, since both are features of competing payment methods
This is a classic misrepresentation of the properties of a smart contract. It's nothing like a procedure and the environment that its executed is different.
A database procedure can be deployed, run and deleted by anyone being a database admin. Anyone else cannot even see the procedures. A procedure can be edited mid-lifecycle too. E.g. we cannot see DB procedures of FB, neither can we interact with them.
A database has mutable state. And every data base makes trust assumptions about the nodes and their operators. You wouldn't invite a malicious actor to run a node in your regular DB cluster.
Anyone can host a blockchain node but not all state can be arbitrarily edited. That may require "work" as in "Proof of Work".
A smart contract can be published by anyone, be run by anyone and it cannot be updated. And it's internal state can be read after any transaction. DB procedures have no internal state that's persisted. They are functional and pure. They update the DB records.
Smart contracts and DB procedures are very different.