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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#151

Post by agumonkey »

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

This DeFi thing is big, large, involves money, teh future; is probably bubbly. There's not a lot to understand IMO. It's a wave of emotions wrapped into "tech". It's wise to treat it like a ~thing and see how it evolves.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#152

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate.

I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.")

I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#153

Post by nouveaux »

potatolicious wrote: post #113
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus. At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees. This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees. I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points o…

In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient.

Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#155

Post by wilkommen »

jq-r wrote: post #111
wilkommen wrote: post #65

I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2…

You've answered your own question. It is going to be a war. War is a great mallet which destroys most of the power structures and shuffles the cards a bit. But the price to pay is atrociously high. After the war everyone will swear "Never again!", but their children's children have no idea what that means, and have no problem going to war all over again.

Yeah I guess. I hope not. I wonder throughout history, has there ever been a "ruling class" which starts to see that unless they cede a significant amount of power, there will be a war, and they will lose it, and thus they proactively decide to cede a sufficient amount of said power? I guess that's more or less the dream scenario. Cause then things get a lot better without a war. But they wouldn't even let Bernie Sanders get elected president. So it seems like we're pretty far off from such a scenario.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#156

Post by Juliate »

moistrobot wrote: post #98
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom

The "kingdom" as you say it, involves instutions AND people that depend on it, if only, by habit, but also by trust. Be these habit and trust be misplaced or not is not much relevant: a new system just does not have a hint of these either just because it's new.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#157

Post by Joeri »

_9omd wrote: post #92
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).

Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite.

I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#158

Post by curiousllama »

_9omd wrote: post #92
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).

You're right, but it's because we made the conscious decision to not have a totally-open playing field after seeing how it went.

It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.

Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#159

Post by twofornone »

_9omd wrote: post #106
shadowgovt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days. Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Becaus…

But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the…

>Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds

It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want the protections of our modern financial system...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#160

Post by M2Ys4U »

lisper wrote: post #103

This essay seems deep and profoundly insightful but I don't think it actually is. Its ultimate call for "better designed regulation" is the no-true-scotsman fallacy in sheep's clothing. How do you know if your regulations are "properly designed?" If they produce good outcomes. But the problem is that there is no consensus about what a good outcome is. Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite lit…

You could say that the distributed system of politics has bad regulation.

The regulations constrain the system in such a way to produce two huge opposing parties, and encourage corruption of their members.

Regulations like the voting system(s) in use, the regulations on who can donate how much to whom, or how corruption and other rule breaking by politicians is investigated and punished (or not punished, as the case may be).

And I'm not just talking about the US here - although US politics is a giant dumpster fire in this regard.

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