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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#751

Post by slg »

olalonde wrote: post #353
poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

> A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they…

>But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation.

I will give you the technical innovation, but I really have not found anything financially innovative about cryptocurrency. What does crypto do that traditional currencies or payments systems don't? The only thing I see is that it largely replaces the old financial elite with a new financial elite and maybe under the right circumstances reduces fees for transferring money. That seems to be it unless you count circumventing financial regulation as a financial innovation.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#752

Post by Sholmesy »

mw888 wrote: post #712
saalweachter wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

That’s a nice little Kafka trap you’ve constructed to disregard the people who change their minds away from what you think. So every time someone changes their mind and uses their previous opinion as informative you are going to non-committally imply it’s “evangelism?”

S/he's not disregarding the people who change their mind, he's pointing out the emptiness the trope of "I use to be X, so I know what it's like".

Changing one's mind should be encouraged.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#753

Post by olalonde »

dmitriid wrote: post #682
olalonde wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they…

> But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc. But sure, there are a lot of "innovations" with recursive circular "innovations" (like currency speculation, HFT and flash loans, all of "innovatively…

> Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc.

I just named a rather massive one in my comment.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#754

Post by lumost »

poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

You know, it's funny. I've worked in and around analytics for a long time now, and I've had the thought that blockchain enables the following.

1) A common "universal" transaction data source

2) A shared, readable format

So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visibility into transactional data from a third party without needing to build bespoke integrations into high security/compliance systems.

If a blockchain backed currency was widely used, a third party could easily estimate the real-time sales flow of every brick and mortar store location. You could have real-time auditing and quarterly tracking of both public and private corporations available from a third party. Asset transfers, smart contracts, and their real world equivalents could be instantly monitored - allowing the early detection of emergent supply chain bottlenecks.

The problem with all of this is that in the 5 years since I had this idea, the only use cases for BTC and other cryptos has been price speculation. The market for such analytics products is effectively zero.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#755

Post by meowkit »

slg wrote: post #751
olalonde wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they…

>But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. I will give you the technical innovation, but I really have not found anything financially innovative about cryptocurrency. What does crypto do that traditional currencies or payments systems don't? The only thing I see is that it largely replaces the old financial elite with a new financial elite and maybe under the ri…

Seems unnecessary to nitpick innovation between the disciplines.

The technology enables many new tools to be developed and many old tools to be augmented. Saule Omarova (Biden’s comptroller pick who resigned) had some interesting ideas in her papers/essays. DLT-based deposit debtor accounts being offered by the government was one that I thought would be pretty great.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#756

Post by missedthecue »

georgeecollins wrote: post #336
missedthecue wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's difficult to see how this facilitates money laundering. Say you're a drug kingpin who has a billion in literal paper cash that you need to make appear legitimate. Somehow, you've got to do a billion dollars in cash to bitcoin transactions, but what's the point of buying middle eastern real estate with the bitcoin after that? Why not just rinse the bitcoin through a tumbler and sell it on an exchange and tel…

You may be right but let me explain why I think Bitcoin actually works well in this example for money laundering. You have cash and you buy bitcoin. US bitcoin exchanges probably do kyc (know your customer = laws / forms you file saying you know where the money comes from) but many offshore exchanges supposedly do not. You could take your bitcoin and sell it on an exchange as you suggest but there are two problems wi…

But to buy bitcoin on an exchange, even if it doesn't have KYC laws, you'd need to have the money in a bank account first to do the wire transfer to fund your crypto exchange account. The problem of money laundering is how do you get it into the bank account in the first place. What I'm saying is that you'd have to do actual cash transactions, meaning giving someone paper money and getting bitcoin into your wallet. That's quite a problem, especially as the numbers get larger.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#757

Post by Daishiman »

barnabee wrote: post #496
Daishiman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal. I have yet to see a single enticing idea for blockchain/web3/whatever for a consumer or business not related to finance. If that requires an ever-increasing number of technical challenges to be solved for that to happen, then we're just looking at vapo…

> Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal. Why? You might care about building businesses, mass-market appeal, blah blah, but many (most?) technologies were created because people thought they were cool or interesting or just because they could. Nobody knew what LASERs were for when they inven…

No post body was provided.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#758

Post by baby »

usrbinbash wrote: post #558
miracle2k wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "pretty green" is not a unit of measurement. PoS is just a bunch of computers largely idling. Whether it's 1k or 10k, it doesn't matter - there is no energy use to speak of, at least none that society has a legitimately interest in regulating. The Tezos Foundation, who's interest is in advertising how green they are, claims in a year they consume as much electricity as 17 individuals ( https://tezos.com/carbon/ ).…

> It is up to critics to provide evidence of PoS energy use being a concern So, is there evidence, as in peer-reviewed studies, that PoS blockchains can handle the volume of transactions of traditional financial systems while requiring LESS energy?

Moving the goal post I see.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#759

Post by tootie »

betwixthewires wrote: post #15

> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009. A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a dis…

Changes in the implementations are not the question. It's application that she's skeptical of. Who has found a reason to use Blockchain for anything other than cryptocurrency?

I actually witnessed one attempt. An actual Fortune 100 built a Blockchain for their public communications. Mostly just an excuse to show off their street cred. It landed with an absolute thud. Nobody cared.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#760

Post by baby »

ir123 wrote: post #549
baby wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah they can send money abroad easily?

I send money abroad using Wise though I'd be happier with a publicish API. Why would I in my right mind use crypto? Im not doing anything illegal and I'm not ideologically opposed to paying my taxes.

I’d say continue to use Wise now. No reason to switch UNLESS you get faster transaction, lower fee, less risk, and it’s more practical to do a crypto transfer. I believe if you join the novi beta today this might be the case if you want to send $$ to Guatemala. For the rest of the world: Early days my friend.
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