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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

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

#841

Post by missedthecue »

djdjfhsje33edh wrote: post #810
missedthecue wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

There are plenty of HNW individuals who want to buy or sell crytpo for cash no questions asked. Just last week a Swiss guy wanted to buy 1.5 million EUR of bitcoin from me for cash at a 10% premium. He'd supposedly have the cash delivered anywhere in Europe. Too risky for me, but if you're a drug cartel, that's business as usual.

yes, it can be done of course, but I'm still not seeing the connection for Dubai real estate.

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

#842

Post by samhw »

jakupovic wrote: post #463
usrbinbash wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique. How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information. So how exactly is that different from using my google account to l…

This is not true. Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it. There is no central poin involved. You can connect to any chain node, yours including, and assert control over it. There is no central authority, that's the whole point. If you're referring to an NFT being a url hosted somewhere other tha. IPFS, nobody is arguing that.

> Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it.

Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?

For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:

> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.

I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.

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

#843

Post by tinco »

clairity wrote: post #825
tinco wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

there is no market, other than the DoD (a literal monopsony). having a product for sale is for show, not a profitability move.

My company seriously considered buying a couple. There will be a market, especially if they perform well.

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

#844

Post by hiq »

freemanon wrote: post #439
magicjosh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable. This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual... (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration…

> Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.

That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain.

There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction.

Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it.

> There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.

Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.

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

#845

Post by lolinder »

mw888 wrote: post #710
lolinder wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when a space becomes dominated by the insane people, it's the insane people who drive its future. Any hope for a sane web3 depended on the hype starting after there was an actual use case. As it stands, web3's Eternal September began before the foundations were even laid, and it's going to be very difficult to retrofit them.

That’s absolute nonsense. Scammers and grifters making vaporware projects have no significant influence on the projects who spend their budget on development rather than marketing. What you just said is “all these novice basketball players training the wrong techniques is a dire problem for those training effectively.” No it’s not, if anything investments in actual projects during relative, senseless mania is cheaper…

The analogy to basketball falls short because the narrative surrounding basketball is driven by the pro teams. It doesn't matter that there are millions more amateurs than there are pros because all the money and power lies with the pros. The pros dominate the space even while being a minority.

In web3, the amateurs are the majority and control the narrative. The space is dominated by people who make promises they can't deliver on and found companies that disappear in a year. When those are the people who control the narrative, it's impossible for the sane folks to prevent them from sullying the field's reputation until no one else will touch it.

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

#846

Post by tim333 »

doomrobo wrote: post #718
tim333 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is somewhat disruptive to banks. You can invest stable coins and get interest for example which is higher than bank interest. And the operator doesn't need to spend a fortune applying for banking licenses for each country they operate in.

Absolutely not. The reason bank interest is lower is because the FDIC ensures that you get your money if the bank stops existing. If the company backing your stablecoin stops existing, what are you left with? Nothing, of course This not disruptive. This is just normal investing with all the risks attached

According to Nexo "Disrupting the financial system, one bit at a time." they have 3 million users on their saving platform. (https://nexo.io/about-us). I haven't used them and am not recommending them but there seems to be something going on there.

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

#847

Post by koonsolo »

wackro wrote: post #815
koonsolo wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are awesome use-cases, but the real problem of the skeptics is that they can't let go of their fiat. Take Nano for example: sub-second, 0-fee transactions, of any amount, to any (unbanked) person in the world. Of course, there is no way that any other (fiat) system can achieve this (due to operation costs, regulation, etc) But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat mone…

> ... but the real problem of the skeptics is that they can't let go of their fiat. >But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money". Here's a thought experiment for you. Your mother/father/neighbour's entire wealth is converted, at no cost to them, into BTC/ETH/whatever. What is their reaction? Is it, 'thank god we didn't have to pay those conversion fees!' I think not.

Here's a thought experiment for you. How do you transfer money from US to: Venezuela, Mali, Lybia, Angolia, Tajikistan, Uruguay?

I can give you a really simple answer when using crypto: you just transfer it.

Can't wait to hear your answer for each of those countries, and the fees and delays associated with it.

edit: some people go work in a western country and send money home to their family.

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

#848

Post by sabhiram »

dmitriid wrote: post #350
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…

> There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did Ah yes. How can we forget the community-audited and vetted smart contracts that ended up draining its users' wallets of all their money. Transparency!

Well, as opposed to hearing "oops our black box implementation of your information got hacked", I honestly don't mind the trend of "read the contract, it is code". Sure it can be misleading, sure it can be intended to trick someone. However, code is law, and even backdoors are "code". Instead we should fix the backdoors so that code can be reasonable "law".

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

#849

Post by samhw »

nly wrote: post #443
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…

Everyone doing P2P transfer and bypassing traditional banking institutions is a powerful idea... but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard. And it's debatable whether fiat will ever whither and die. The Government will ultimately have to endorse a currency for tax purposes, and they'll always seek to control the inflationary environment so th…

Yes, I’m a strong believer in cryptocurrency, but I don’t believe any current cryptocurrency will be the one that changes the world. They deserve praise - some of them - for laying groundwork, but I tend to believe that the world-changing crypto will have to behave more like Moxie Marlinspike described in his recent essay: i.e. truly building on cryptography as the source of trust, not distributed consensus among servers.

The transaction processing mechanism will also have to radically change, and be detached from the mechanism for generating money (even if you believe the two should be proportional, to strictly couple them is an impracticable engineering failure).

As for Bitcoin, aside from the flaws in Satoshi’s scheme itself, the current Bitcoin system has suffered from focussing on its unexpected popularity as a store of value, which popularity has meant it’s incredibly volatile and thus useless as a medium of exchange or unit of account. Of course the slow processing as a result of the mining mechanism is also a major hurdle.

I hope something better will come about soon. I know that it won’t come from the world of people who suddenly idolise Bitcoin because of the cult around it. It’ll come from the people who were capable of reading the original paper and seeing its potential even before it was in the news - that’s a tiny subset of crypto enthusiasts, but I hope they stay motivated.

(Final thing: it’s ‘wither’, not ‘whither’. ‘Whither’ means ‘from where’.)

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

#850

Post by wackro »

koonsolo wrote: post #847
wackro wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... but the real problem of the skeptics is that they can't let go of their fiat. >But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money". Here's a thought experiment for you. Your mother/father/neighbour's entire wealth is converted, at no cost to them, into BTC/ETH/whatever. What is their reaction? Is it, 'thank god we didn't have to pay those conversion fees!' I think not.

Here's a thought experiment for you. How do you transfer money from US to: Venezuela, Mali, Lybia, Angolia, Tajikistan, Uruguay? I can give you a really simple answer when using crypto: you just transfer it. Can't wait to hear your answer for each of those countries, and the fees and delays associated with it. edit: some people go work in a western country and send money home to their family.

The fact that crypto exists without borders is great.

But your idea that the only thing stopping sceptics from embracing it is fees is wrong. Also, your tone makes me think you've got a dog in this fight.

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