Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#31

Post by drclau »

pezzana wrote: post #5

> Everyone seems to have an increasingly horrifically misguided idea of how distributed systems work. > There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model. This article would benefit from being more spe…

> This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.

The author is probably just trying to avoid attacks from the cryptocurrency proponents.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#32

Post by edmcnulty101 »

It seems to me that it's a little bit of hubris to have human's running the Federal Reserve and setting monetary policy.

It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#33

Post by dash2 »

api wrote: post #16
dash2 wrote: post #2

I think most sensible people had figured this out already. The people that don't and honestly believe everything will be fixed by a DAO or whatever... they're beyond reason.

They're trying really hard to solve a problem that hasn't been solved yet, which requires placing oneself beyond the "reason" of skeptics. https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem. The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all…

I'm really sorry, bud, but I count you as one of my "beyond reason" group. Sure, your technical solution will bring in utopia!

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#34

Post by JanisL »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14
JanisL wrote: post #4

I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completel…

Debt is >50% of advanced economies, and it's price fixed. Why bother with setting the price of bananas and everything else, when you can set one price and have a greater effect?

It would seem that the temptation to set the price of everything is increased when there are impediments to setting the interest rate (since this removes an important monetary policy lever). I think this has been seen lately as the zero-lower-bound on nominal interest rates has started to come into play in many places.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#37

Post by exodister »

GavinMcG wrote: post #9
dougmwne wrote: post #6

Maybe there is already a better alternative that is enjoying meteoric success along many dimensions. Maybe that alternative already dominates the supply of physical goods and supply chains. Or maybe not.

What are you actually saying? You seem to be gesturing at something, but it's not clear what that thing is.

I believe they are gesturing at socialism or some kind of centrally controlled market which has helped companies like Amazon and Walmart excel.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#38

Post by bluetomcat »

Markets can be seen as regulatory institutions in themselves, though they exhibit many undesirable side effects. The inherent "decentralisation" in Western societies is enabled by markets. Producers meet consumers in a constant feedback loop, production follows demand. Some producers are weeded out, new classes of products and their corresponding market types appear. Consumers can choose what, when and where to buy. What would be political decisions in a centralised society are market mechanisms in a market society.

It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#39

Post by pjkundert »

This article is profoundly insightful.

I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:

    All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.

Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").

There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:

https://holo.host

This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.

Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...

Post reply on HN