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

371–380 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#371

Post by brandonmenc »

whatshisface wrote: post #223
dmitriid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed : -…

It improves that process in a disintegrating third world country, which many of us may find ourselves in within our lifetimes.

If you wake up one day and find that your society is disintegrating with that speed, you're going to need food, water, ammo - all of which are tradeable - and a good support network - not a bunch of fake computer monopoly money tokens.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#372

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

solveit wrote: post #322
whatshisface wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.

> I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between…

Cash transactions, by definition, are pretty much always in-person. Thus, the risk of fraud or "significantly not as described" goods are significantly reduced. On the contrary, the modern world depends on being able to transact remotely.

Even then, there is still recourse if you pay for something with cash and the thing you buy ends up being non-functional (e.g. small claims court). And since the transaction was in person it's less likely you have no idea who the seller is.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#373

Post by meheleventyone »

davidw wrote: post #254
beambot wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#374

Post by Animats »

There's one line in there which is very important.

Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).

Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.

There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.

We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.

This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#375

Post by vkou »

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…

> It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.

They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe.

It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#376

Post by Avernar »

"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."

As human beings, we have an underlying need for belonging and connection. All of us are by default programmed to be connected to our own interests. For many that circle broadens to their friends and family and for a few that broadens to their immediate community. Fewer still feel connected to their country and only some of us will feel connected to the world.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#377

Post by moffkalast »

sva_ wrote: post #346
pjkundert wrote: post #39

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 theor…

> https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#379

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pdonis wrote: post #110

The article lost me here: "The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff." Here's the problem: a "market" that is regulated this way is no longer a market . In order to have a market that works at all as a market, it has to be free in the sense that all transactions are voluntary. If you restrict people's freedom to engage in the transactions of their ch…

Here's someone trying to rig the stock market. Regulation means that they aren't free to do that. Regulation means that I am free to get a fair market for my stock. I'm more free, and they're less free. (I mean, I also am not free to rig the market, but I wasn't going to do that anyway.

You're free from the threat of murder, which means that I am not free to murder you. Giving freedom always means taking away some other freedom.

The point of regulation is to say that some freedoms are more important than others. The freedom from murder is more important than the freedom to murder. The freedom to get a fair price is more important than the freedom to rig the market. And so on.

Markets work well when the regulations are right. They work badly when the regulations are wrong, or when the regulations are missing.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#380

Post by frockington1 »

whatshisface wrote: post #197
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.

Wire transfers are next to impossible to reverse, that's why fraud is so rampant
Post reply on HN