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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#581

Post by exdsq »

chuckcode wrote: post #359
AlotOfReading wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like regular old cryptography, which I don't think anyone would argue isn't important. It's a very different discussion than "crypto" a.k.a cryptocurrencies.

Author is making an argument against any blockchain or distributed ledger. To quote from article. "Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime." I'd like to see people look past the noise of cryptocurrencies to see how important digital trust and new applications of cryptography will be as we try to scale the ability of humans to work together effect…

Which is dumb because he works on a digital coin on a distributed ledger

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#582

Post by chillacy »

horsawlarway wrote: post #253
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I don't trust the ledger to accurately reflect ownership (it can only represent possession, not true ownership).” Possession is ownership on the Bitcoin network. Not ownership in the sense of it is written down in some legal document somewhere but ownership in the sense that you have the power to perform a transaction with what you say you own. You were trusting a central party all along. If you didn’t you wouldn’t…

But the alternative here is that you have to place all your trust in an unknown and untrusted 3rd party to ever actually make an exchange. Even the silk-road used an escrow service that required that the seller trust the buyer, and both parties trust the silk-road. (a buyer places coins in escrow with the silk-road, the silk-road confirms it has the coins to the seller, the seller ships the product, the buyer unlocks…

Afaik markets use multisig now, so the facilitator never has access to the funds unilaterally.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#583

Post by compiler-guy »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #556
lubonay wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how IS fiat a Ponzi scheme? You don't buy into the US dollar expecting your "share" of dollars to go up. You just use it to pay for stuff.

In most modern economies fiat is backed by the 'full faith and credit' of the issuing government, which requires more young people paying into the pension system than retirees drawing from it. That's as clear an example of a Ponzi scheme as can be imagined, albeit moving on a slower timeframe than we usually think of such things working.

Fiat is backed by the insistence of the issuing government that you pay your taxes in that denomination. It has very little to do with pension systems, except to the extent that the government runs those also denominated in dollars.

But the US could end social security tomorrow and as long as it still required taxes and tariffs in the form of dollars, the dollar would still have value.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#584

Post by compiler-guy »

mlcrypto wrote: post #512
pphysch wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Smart engineered gold" is an oxymoron. Gold is a terrible platform for economic activity, because it is expensive to create and difficult to move/transact with. Just because it was the best financial technology hundreds of years ago does not make gold, artificial or not, the best financial technology for today. "Faster horses"...

It's all the good of gold with none of the bad

Crypto adds it’s own bad parts.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#585

Post by verdverm »

sjtindell wrote: post #452
verdverm wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited 4 years ago when I first discovered these crypto concepts. As time has gone on and I've learned more about them, they are less interesting and come with a ton of baggage. There are interesting things like formal verification, but I expect that these types of things will be taken without the blockchain. You shouldn't dismiss HN attitudes as jealousy or asleep, that is derogatory.

Yeah the language is a bit strong. I’m serious about the jealousy though - perhaps it’s just me. But when I see someone making a boatload on Tesla and I’m sitting there thinking it’s ridiculous, where does that really come from? All I know is I probably wouldn’t care either way if I’d owned some…and since my experiences with day trading and algorithmic trading, I’m convinced 90% of finance is emotional. It clouds the…

The biggest attitude problem in crypto is to respond to technical questions and challenges with personal attacks.

Such a turn off both technically and socially. I find it more toxic and tribal than politics at this point.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#586

Post by Eduard »

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?

> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU

Um, no. I'm not used to that. My latest online German-bank-to-German-bank giro transfer took the usual two-to-three business days.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#587

Post by almostkorean »

jakear wrote: post #573
almostkorean wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some projects working towards addressing the issues of blockchain scalability: - Lightning network on bitcoin. Super cheap and fast transactions, makes micropayments a reality (this is what Twitter is using) - Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. There are two optimistic rollups currently on main net (Arbitrum and Optimism). Reddit has recently committed to building on Arbitrum. There are also ZK rollups (starkwar…

As I understand it these layer 2 solutions typically require a resolution transaction in order to actually extract value, which has similar costs to a normal on-chain transaction. In the ideal world folks would be able to use the existing infrastructure of established Bitcoin atms to make transactions with low fees, but that doesn’t seem like it will happen any time soon. Things like the Twitter solution aren’t great…

Not sure what you mean about layer 2 solutions being similar in cost to layer 1 transactions. See here: https://l2fees.info. Arbitrum and Optimism are both running in "safe mode" so their tx cost will continue to go down.

I agree that the twitter solution isn't great. Just pointing out that Lightning network is a tech that can be used for cheap transactions.

100% agree that none of these solutions are accessible to the masses. Tons of UX issues, most people don't want to self custody, layer 2s can require bridging, etc. But, I don't think it's terribly hard to see how these issues will be addressed and they are actively being worked on

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#588

Post by horsawlarway »

carpo wrote: post #572
horsawlarway wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok - so follow along with me here: I owned no bitcoins at the time I desired to trade bitcoins for a physical product (in this case: ~7g of Cannabis) What recourse do I have that does not require trusting a third party? I do not own the required compute power to mine it myself (not technically true at the time, although certainly true today) I'd like to have you walk me through the exact set of steps to acquire my bi…

You could have reduced the risk substantially by transferring off their wallet to yours right after purchase. You still could have purchased your weed too.

There was no holding. It wasn't an asset I was interested in holding, it was a medium of exchange to purchase a good I couldn't otherwise get.

The coins would sit in the wallet for as long as it took me to figure out how to place an order on silk-road again, where I would buy down to as small an amount of bitcoin as I could.

I got unlucky the last time through and hit it right when the service went down.

Which is funny - because the attitude that I should be hiding my coins away as tightly as possible is exactly why I'm so non-plussed on bitcoin: It's no longer an medium of exchange, it's a speculative asset with price completely unhinged from utility (which in my opinion is basically just buying black market goods).

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#589

Post by bhouston »

koonsolo wrote: post #324
__alexs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said digital cash and tokens and NFTs do have value and I expect them to get even more popular. Literally all my cash is already digital.

That is impossible: the numbers on your bankaccount are multiplied, thanks to fractional reserve. The cash in your hand is not. Maybe not a big deal now, but at some point it might be. And then it's "surprise! The numbers on your account != cash in your hand"

But we have insurance on deposits in the US/Canada. Also DAO are trying to replicate fraction reserve lending.

So basically we have protections against this problem in the traditional system and the crypto system is trying to replicate fractional reserves.

Tether also is engaging in massive fractional reserve lending. Apparently only 3% of Tethers are backed by cash holdings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27151370

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#590

Post by pphysch »

mlcrypto wrote: post #512
pphysch wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Smart engineered gold" is an oxymoron. Gold is a terrible platform for economic activity, because it is expensive to create and difficult to move/transact with. Just because it was the best financial technology hundreds of years ago does not make gold, artificial or not, the best financial technology for today. "Faster horses"...

It's all the good of gold with none of the bad

Bitcoins are both "expensive to create" and "difficult to transact with". It's all of the good with all of the bad, and then some.
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