401–410 of 497 posts
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"problem most don't care about" Just as Chinese citizens seem to be mostly happy about the politics in their country. Maybe that is the actual problem, people not caring about issues like free speech until it is too late. (Julian Assange is still imprisoned in the UK and almost nobody cares)
Many people care about Julian Assange.
The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…
Cash: Not backed by anything but literal 'trust' in the government. It's fiat, and has been since 1971.
Government Bonds: similar to cash, also relies on the trust and "too big to fail" ethos.
Houses: Greater fool theory. People realized they can simply ban building them to make theirs worth more, as the remaining home supplies are in far-off, economically irrelevant (undesirable) areas.
Stocks: Over 90% are owned by the top 10%. Someone had to make it to sell it to someone else, just like crypto.
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And the problem is centralization, which facilitates censorship and totalitarian control. That nobody cares does not imply that it doesn't matter. I don't want to bash China specifically, it just happens to be the first example that comes to my mind. So for example nobody cares that millions of Uyghurs are being enslaved in China, but that does not imply that it is not important. (Or take the example of Assange I men…
> And the problem is centralization, which facilitates censorship and totalitarian control. This is a gross misunderstanding of both the current banking system (which is decentralized) and the degree to which using a slow database doesn’t prevent legal actions. Blockchains are very easy to monitor and censor: ideal for an authoritarian government to get a signed confession for every disapproved transaction you make,…
I know that transactions on the Bitcon blockchain are public. There are approaches to fixing it and several altcoins claim to fix it. It certainly isn't the last iteration of the tech forever. And I think you can also do things to anonymize Bitcoin transactions. I haven't really dug into it yet.
The real fire test of governments attacking crypto coins has yet to happen, agreed. It won't be easy, but nothing will be easy under authoritarian control.
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> Second, it's not inherent to the money system to use Visa / Mastercard. You can use other ways to transfer money -- but again, this is irrelevant. To highlight this, Americans are grappling with Zelle (which is just rolled out) and ACH while their neighbors to the north have Interac running relatively seamlessly and Europeans have SEPA and even some countries have local feeless/reasonably priced quick transfer syst…
If you don't charge customers for their debit/credit card payments (which again you sometimes legally cannot do) the point stands even if you have a 0-fee payment option since even if you choose to use that you are still paying for other people's transactions.
Ultimately, someone needs to eat the cost of that. For barter, you need to eat the cost of wrongly-advertised products. For paper money, you need to eat the cost of either actively rejecting fake paper money or accept that from time to time you will have fake and unredeemable paper money. For coins, same thing, you need to verify that the weight is indeed what's expected or accept that some fake coins will end up in your coffers. For electronic systems (regardless of the form), someone needs to run the computers that verifies that transaction A did indeed happen.
Some pretend that only centralised electronic systems are the only ones having costs, while in fact it's far from the truth. Ironically, the credit card game in the US where they jack up the merchant fees way, way up is a counterexample that capitalism is fostering a pro-consumer market (I'm not saying that capitalism per se is broken, it's just the fact that capitalist policies in this area doesn't work out great). In Europe where they implemented caps, "rewards" type credit cards have gone down, but regular credit card and debit card usage have gone up. This is because the "rewards" system isn't pro-consumer, it looks like pro-consumer but instead it actually benefits only those who massively use them to the detriment of others. Unlike "rewards" type credit cards, regular credit cards acts more like a tool that can make or break finances who uses them not correlated to the frequency of use, and debit cards are essentially plastic wallets.
This whole article starts by missunderstanding logical and operational decentralization. Blockchain tech succeeds in allowing developers that don't know each other come to a consensus about how a financial system should work (logical centralization) and then operate an instance of that in a completely trust less, participatory environment (complete operational decentralization).
This is "works as intended" and explicitly good. It shows that consensus on what is right can be achieved over an anonymous internet.
Based on that, I'd say improbable that anything insightfull remains inside this article.
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Ownership of "content" requires intellectual property laws, which are enforced by courts of justice, and we already have these. A blockchain cannot enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks coercive power. If your goal is to "retain ownership" of the content that you produce, a blockchain is not going to help you AT ALL with that.
I wasn't talking about it as in copyright / legal sense, and more in the I can allow others to access a snapshot of it at a given time and/or remove access to it for future content if I wish to do so. Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free. e.g. from Twitter's…
Unless whatever service accessed the tweet/image/text/whatever made a local copy and is displaying that once the "blockchain service" no longer allows access.
An NFT doesn't confer access control. Its a certificate of ownership, the asset itself is infinitely reproducible.
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A lot of these smaller networks are on top of or connected to top 10 chains. A number of the top 10 networks will eventually (~5-10 year time frame) get privacy preserving transactions however the space is still very much in development and it's a bit easier to reason about the network and what changes to make next when you can see what the users are doing. I know at the very least, IOG (the company currently leading…
I hear the word “eventually” associated with crypto, quite a bit. I’ve yet to see an “eventually” actually pan out before they run out of money or the value tanks so low nobody will mine it anymore. As an observer following all of this fairly closely, it feels remarkably like a scam.
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I don't about other block chains but that's a problem that Monero has (partially?) solved by tying transactions to two other wallets each transaction so that it is hard to follow your steps. Of course it doesn't solve all other blockchains problems but I would be curious to see it discussed more. The main criticism I have seen about it is that it allows criminality to move funds under the govts radar, which is not a…
> I don't about other block chains but that's a problem that Monero has (partially?) solved by tying transactions to two other wallets each transaction so that it is hard to follow your steps. I would be very hesitant to recommend that to anyone who lives under an authoritarian regime rather than casually giving you plausible deniability for buying weird porn. Large scale analysis of the entire network will see throu…
Could elaborate on that ? I am curious.
True enough although cash does not move by itself, you have to meet up and you can be caught with an unsual amount of cash with you.
The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…
...Or you can use a cryptocurrency like NANO (I'm sure there are others very similar), which is feeless and has nearly no delay to transfer. If there is a scam hiding in there, I've yet to find it. Honestly I've stepped back from the entire crypto space for a while now, the whole space pisses me off, it's all hype and no progress. Or rather, the work that was needed to be done has now been done (feeless, near instant…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of these smaller networks are on top of or connected to top 10 chains. A number of the top 10 networks will eventually (~5-10 year time frame) get privacy preserving transactions however the space is still very much in development and it's a bit easier to reason about the network and what changes to make next when you can see what the users are doing. I know at the very least, IOG (the company currently leading…
I hear the word “eventually” associated with crypto, quite a bit. I’ve yet to see an “eventually” actually pan out before they run out of money or the value tanks so low nobody will mine it anymore. As an observer following all of this fairly closely, it feels remarkably like a scam.