321–330 of 377 posts
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Do you feel the same about Tor? That the anonymity is an implementation detail and you don't care?
Yes. Though Tor has demonstrated a far more killer (heh) capability set it enables than the blockchain has.
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I've written and deployed smart contracts, have run an ethereum node, and know most of the EVM opcodes. I'm not an expert by any means but my criticism of crypto isn't that of an "incredibly confused" beginner listening to marketing hype at a convention center.
Well perhaps you should expand your horizons a bit. If you have a good grasp of the core issues with Ethereum then you should have a good idea of what to look for in newer projects.
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
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This is fair, I wish more teams were working on the boring useful use-cases. One I particularly like is gig tickets. Represent them as NFTs, prove ownership of the ticket as it is in your wallet, trade them for USD with anyone around the world in a single atomic transaction, use third party tools to verify a ticket is authentic (either manually copying an NFT address onto a bands website or programatically). Suddenly…
The NFT and blockchain are totally pointless in this scenario, you could achieve the exact same thing using public key cryptography alone.
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This is fair, I wish more teams were working on the boring useful use-cases. One I particularly like is gig tickets. Represent them as NFTs, prove ownership of the ticket as it is in your wallet, trade them for USD with anyone around the world in a single atomic transaction, use third party tools to verify a ticket is authentic (either manually copying an NFT address onto a bands website or programatically). Suddenly…
The tickets are already in closed ecosystems like Ticketmaster. It would be orders if magnitudes more efficient for them to just add resale functionality to their platform. Problem is they don’t want third party resellers. And herein lies the problem. At some point cyrpto tokens have to come back into the real world. If you can’t get $centralized_authority onboard you’re screwed. And if it’s not “decentralized” just…
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Given the comment I was responding to, I was assuming that only a ban would be attempted on the environmentally unfriendly cryptos. How would you propose to ban all cryptos? We haven't even been able to ban torrents.
I believe it is possible to ban them, with a combination of multinational regulation and technical coordination with ISPs. Not easy nor even likely. ISPs could simply run honeypots that in real time sniff out who is running a blockchain node and block traffic to those IPs. These nodes must broadcast publicly to other nodes to even function, so they can't hide the fact that they are a blockchain node: they are forced…
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Given that you can deploy smart contracts as binaries (without source) and you can design the contracts to be upgradeable if needed, I don’t see any advantages of this system. Sure, the contract can be immutable but the only advantage is for the archivist who now has a permanent record of the software history. Other than a public change log, this doesn’t have much utility.
> Given that you can deploy smart contracts as binaries (without source) and you can design the contracts to be upgradeable if needed You can do all that, but then who but the most gullible will use your smart contracts?
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And this is something very useful. There's been a lot to show for the last decade of crypto development. It's just not useful for you . Which I understand. Not everything is for everyone. But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you.
> But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you. Then why can't you provide examples which are useful for things other than moving cryptocurrency tokens around? When the web started, sure some of the pages were talking about the web and how to build new things with it, but most of the things people were putting online were using the web to make were related to their hobbies, profes…
I provided, among other things, examples of trading tokens that track real world assets. Or what, you think the stock market isn't actually useful because it doesn't do anything useful other than moving money around?
Do you know why Ethereum gas fees are so high? Because lots of people are using Ethereum. Obviously because they find it useful for -- yes -- moving tokens around and whatnot.
Again, you're obviously not someone who would find it useful or even interesting. But seriously, how is it so hard for you to understand that the world isn't just you?
> More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens?
Maybe because you're not interested in the tech, so the only people who you ever get to talk to about crypto are the shills? Because that has obviously not been my experience, which has been a lot more technical.
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> Given that you can deploy smart contracts as binaries (without source) and you can design the contracts to be upgradeable if needed You can do all that, but then who but the most gullible will use your smart contracts?
The point I am making is every smart contract is Schrodinger’s contract where the user has no idea what is inside and no way to know. Say you have a game called, I don’t know, Crypto Run. To purchase in game assets, the developers of Crypto Run deployed a smart contract that lets players do this. You have to use the smart contract from the developers and even if alternatives exist, people want to use the official con…
I literally explained a few comments ago how that's not the case. Did you forget what you read already? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588550
I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot. And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity. In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
I think Web3 is a stupid idea unworthy of the name, but this is not a strong objection. > I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot. The lack of trustworthy entities. > And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342... > In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example…
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The eth classic fork was because of the first high profile hack of a smart contract leading to massive loss of funds (way way back in 2016 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) ). The Ethereum community back then was a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what it is compared to the size today, and that early on in the network I don't think it was a detrimental thing to do like it would be today. >…
> Alternatively, "You really really have to give a shit about your own security". Imagine if banks had some skin in the game in terms of their security story. Why was I able to have 2 factor on my world of warcraft account many years before my bank account? It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on secu…
I don’t want to get into some pissing match about my qualifications but I’ve seen the insides of a number of large financial institutions and their security first hand while working in the security industry. Your argument is that they’re regulated and have a large security spend which is sufficient, my counter argument is that they’re bloated and that large spend is largely security theater.
Doing things like spending money and installing Carbon Black on a server in some closet to check the “endpoint protection” box to auditors is not the same as a competent team sitting down and building an infrastructure with effective defense in depth principals.
Crypto is immutable which can be dangerous but that edge of it is also spurring novel research into things like hardware wallets, multi sig smart contracts, and multi party computation which are real tangible ways to alleviate some of these problems (and other, non-crypto space problems as well). You call it a bug, I call it a feature.
Ultimately crypto’s immutability is a form of global free market Darwinism playing out where protocols that are well designed (and again, really really give a shit about their security) are the ones that continue to exist. Shitty protocols built by incompetent people get hacked and die. Darwinism is not a “design flaw”, it’s what allowed us to transcend living in caves and build society. Has it all been smooth and easy? Of course not, but evolution rarely is. E-commerce had its own rocky start too.
> They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things.
Just because banks have reduced the tail end consequences of their ineptitude and crappy behavior doesn’t mean that it’s scalable globally and forever with no cost for those that use it or prop it up (U.S. banks largely rely on U.S. govt for this compensating control, as well as bailouts when they’re too big to fail), and I will point out that major financial institutions/networks have been getting hacked for decades at this point, but especially in the early days. There are tons of cases of theft, fraud, and abuse in the traditional banking sector (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_SWIFT_banking_hack). Fin firms tend to hire “crisis management” firms to spin media coverage and offset the negative PR when it happens though, which makes it ok in the public eye.
I’m not sure what banks you’re referring to here but every major bank has been doing anti consumer and illegal stuff for a long time, whether it’s Wells Fargo (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/02/24/wells-farg...) or JPMC (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...).
Just because they’ve offset the risks from this shitty behavior doesn’t suddenly make this behavior palatable or something we should accept IMO. The Equifax breach comes to mind as well, but don’t worry because they’re still around, and they were so nice as to offer everyone a year of identity protection (…offered through equifax) as compensation for their gross negligence. They definitely learned their lesson though right?