821–830 of 1001 posts
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Law is not like code. It requires interpretation. You're nuts if you don't think most of these "smart contacts" wouldn't just end up in court anyways.
thats the legal framework in place bit.
I'm not long on anything blockchain related. But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure. Maybe it is, and it'll all die. That's fine. Why do people spend so much time insisting that it's the inevitable outcome. Let it do its thing, find something better to do.
I'd like to go back to ignoring it. But it looks like it's here to stay, and it's taken away one of the few things enjoyed about the internet. I guess I'm still moving through the anger and grief stages and am yet to reach acceptance.
Why couldn't they have just left art alone?
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This https://youtu.be/8CAafjodkyE?t=104 is a recent thing I found mind blowing; 2020 iPhone can do on-device image processing and object recognition and speak a description of what the camera sees. Just quietly a builtin feature. 2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-real…
That’s not a great argument. It’s like comparing the invention of tcp with the iphone. They’re just two different technologies. If you’re interested in learning there are many resources, but it’s too easy to criticize something by looking at its cover.
Money obsessed people moving money around in ways that seem manipulative and gambling feels like a negative influence on the world.
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The thing is it's not really particularly good at that. No moreso at least because of any attributes of the blockchain. It's really because of external reasons: 1. Lack of tooling and cooperation for investigating fraud 2. Lack of regulation 3. Programmatic interfaces 4. There are markets like the NFT space that are amazing for laundering But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
Reason 2) does seem to be due to an attribute of the Blockchain, as there is no central organization that the government can force to establish the real-world identity of all participants. (Although this is now happening at the point of conversion to/from fiat currency.)
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boston dynamics has never even been close to being on a trajectory to build useful products. they’re a grant-harvesting company first and foremost. they simply do not know how to build efficient and useful locomotors despite at least 3 decades of practice and millions of years of evolutionary precedents literally living right outside its doors. in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts…
They literally have a product for sale now. You make it sound like they're somehow worse at making locomotors than other companies are. Do you have any competitors in mind that achieved more with less practice?
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> It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. In no way does bitcoin being blockchain based enable you to do this better or more effectively. It's just because it's a less regulated currency.
Bitcoin being blockchain and a consensus algorithm to append it is what enables people to use it without asking for permission. Permissionlessness is the main killer feature, and I dare you to find another way to implement it using some other method.
Blockchain provides integrity guarantees given a number of malicious participants. That's all it provides over any other ACID database.
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Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade. Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation abou…
You call it speculation and that’s convenient for your argument. Bitcoin as a store of value is not speculative. It has objective qualities that make it valuable and you dismissing those as speculation lets you be ignorant to the comparable short term success of Bitcoin.
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Except NFT storage is actually highly centralized? What happens if OpenSea shuts down?
another market pops up. opensea is just reading on-chain data, just like everyone else.
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>>Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car? Uhm, here in UK DVLA holds it? Anyone can access it too, you can just check the entire car history including its tax payments as well as technical inspections online. No Blockchain needed. >>because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it I'd like you to explain why you think that's true. If you assume an external au…
How much taxpayers money goes into maintaining this database? Not sayin blockchain is a better solution but it can replace 99% of UK DVLA staff with an algorithm.
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Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/
Here by "remove trust" I didn't mean "trust-less assurance that voting is correct", I meant "you have no reason to trust that the system recorded your vote correctly". A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and…
First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography.
Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to look further than the previous presidential election in the U.S., in which a significant portion of votes were cast on paper ballots, and a large portion of the population STILL does not trust that those votes were counted correctly. And if you look at developing countries handling their own paper ballot elections, you will find out that many of those elections are manipulated, and people do not trust the results.
That said, I agree with your general sentiment that adding electronic and cryptographic elements to a voting scheme will make that scheme generally "less understandable" to a layperson, such that they need to defer to "expert opinion" on whether that voting scheme can be trusted. However, it's not a binary thing like you make it out to be; people do not 100% trust your chosen paper voting scheme and 0% trust your chosen electronic voting scheme.
Anyway, I feel like "how do we get people to trust the results of the election more than they currently do" is a secondary problem. The main problem is how we can actually secure the results of the election while maintaining ballot secrecy. It's more important.