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Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

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Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#171

Post by giaour »

aww_dang wrote: post #141
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Centralized payment services are vulnerable to regulators, see eGold and Liberty Reserve. Note that BTC emerged shortly after these services were destroyed. Anti-terror legislation was used. According to Wikipedia, Liberty Reserve was used to launder over $6B stolen from offshore banks. That sounds like a pretty legitimate reason to shut a service like that down to me. You argue that central banks are incompetent a…

>a pretty legitimate reason to shut a service like that down to me Meanwhile physical cash is preferred for criminal acts. Would you similarly blame the issuer of cash for these crimes? What about footwear? Most criminals wear shoes or boots. Running shoes can be used to evade capture. Should we hold Nike accountable? >does anything but benefit those with the most resources in the system. As long as that remains true…

>Meanwhile physical cash is preferred for criminal acts. Would you similarly blame the issuer of cash for these crimes?

Authorities (at least in the US) try to strike a balance between crime prevention and seamless use of cash. Depositing or withdrawing large sums in cash will attract regulatory attention. Currency entering the banking system is checked against a list of serial numbers known to have been used in or obtained through criminal activity. Crossing borders with large sums of cash requires a customs declaration. When cash denominations or cash-like instruments are shown to primarily enable criminal activity, their issue is discontinued (hence why we no longer have $1K bills or bearer bonds).

> What about footwear? Most criminals wear shoes or boots. Running shoes can be used to evade capture. Should we hold Nike accountable?

I mean, if there were some kind of shoe that primarily or uniquely enabled criminal activity, I'm pretty sure it would get banned? Or Nike would get pressured into no longer making them.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#172

Post by cannabis_sam »

bodge5000 wrote: post #160
cannabis_sam wrote: post #143

Yeah, as if perpetually rising housing prices, subsidized petrol, shoving the cost of climate change over onto poor countries and responding to migration crises by interning and torturing people is a great vision for the future.. I have never made a single penny of off crypto, but I wholeheartedly appreciate it as a transactional currency in a country with extremely draconian drug laws, the highest overdose numbers a…

I dont think anyone is saying that crypto is a bigger problem than those things. Just that its also not the solution to those things that we keep being promised it is (or will be). Maybe in time, crypto will die out as a fad and come back again, and then it might stand a chance. I highly doubt it'll fix all those problems, but it could be a legitimate decentralised currency (for good or for bad, thats up to you to de…

Of course it won’t solve those problems, it simply does one useful thing, allows untrusted transfer of a representation of “money”..

I’m just fed up with people demonizing crypto while our society is far more dependent on the destruction of the environment.

Ban using cheap electricity to fuel crypto, sure, and pay “miners” with transaction fees. And ofc fuck the speculators and the get-rich-quick morons. I guess the problem is that it would easily tank the whole ecosystem if it got reduced to something more reasonable.

Ofc the same is true for the world economy, hence my comment.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#173

Post by oblio »

aww_dang wrote: post #166
oblio wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet this era was also known as the "Gilded Age". Literally covered in gold. Let's be real here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age > which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Age:_A_Tale_of_Toda... "The book is remarkable for two reasons—it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synony…

It was an era of unprecedented wealth creation and upward mobility. There were also robber barons, who preyed upon government largess. The irony here is that the Fed was created at the behest of one of the greatest robber barons of them all, John Pierpont Morgan. To this day the institution still protects the interests of Wall Street at the expense of holders of USD. Corruption is still with us. If we are to be real…

1. There are a lot of central banks in the world, not everything in the world revolves around the US.

> If the Federal Reserve Notes issued by the central bank were sufficient to meet our monetary needs, there would be no interest in cryptocurrencies.

2. The cynical interpretation would that a large part of that ton of monetary needs that need meeting are criminal activities.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#174

Post by egeozcan »

bko wrote: post #114
egeozcan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the government decides paid sex work is illegal, it'd also be hard to make transactions for it via Bitcoin. If you think taking your wallet (the key) and running away with it is an option, then how is it better than using cash?

It's not that its illegal. It's that its "discouraged" via arbitrary regulation usually under the guise of money laundering or high charge backs. For instance, cam girls are legal in the US, but they have a difficulty getting a payment provider Same is true for states with recreational marijuana. Cryptocurrency also solves the problem of charge-backs. Venmo and PayPal gives a sense of finality, but it actually takes…

> the problem of charge-backs

Charge-backs aren't there to purely annoy/scam sellers, you know.

> difficulty getting a payment provider

Because there are too many money laundering attempts via transactions in that industry. If you want to deal with the stuff Paypal/Venmo/etc doesn't want to deal with, go ahead.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#175

Post by bodge5000 »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #172
bodge5000 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think anyone is saying that crypto is a bigger problem than those things. Just that its also not the solution to those things that we keep being promised it is (or will be). Maybe in time, crypto will die out as a fad and come back again, and then it might stand a chance. I highly doubt it'll fix all those problems, but it could be a legitimate decentralised currency (for good or for bad, thats up to you to de…

Of course it won’t solve those problems, it simply does one useful thing, allows untrusted transfer of a representation of “money”.. I’m just fed up with people demonizing crypto while our society is far more dependent on the destruction of the environment. Ban using cheap electricity to fuel crypto, sure, and pay “miners” with transaction fees. And ofc fuck the speculators and the get-rich-quick morons. I guess the…

> I guess the problem is that it would easily tank the whole ecosystem if it got reduced to something more reasonable.

This is the problem with crypto as it currently stands, its hype pretty much relies on the opposite of it being a stable, realistic currency, hence my pessimism.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#176

Post by hiq »

kybernetikos wrote: post #163
hiq wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone provides a financial service on ethereum for example, then it will have an api that can be used by other services on ethereum. Not necessarily. You can have a smart contract that's completely controlled by one address, such that you need manual interaction with an external system to interact with the smart contract. You can even avoid transparency by storing information elsewhere, via an oracle. Nothing…

> IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.

> Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.

Why would you say that? For what reasons?

To engage with your comment a bit more, regarding costs, it's very expensive to:

* write secure smart contracts (if possible at all)

* maintain a smart contract infrastructure (transaction fees)

There's no solution in sight for either of these.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#177

Post by hiq »

mjdesa wrote: post #165
hiq wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we get it thanks to blockchains?

Because they’re open ledgers. I think of blockchain like I do JavaScript / JSON. Are the perfect? No. But there’s a lot of time and energy being put into them and sometimes that’s all you really need to get things going.

> Because they’re open ledgers.

As I explained in another comment in the same thread, it's a far cry from ensuring interoperability. The term "open ledger" is also misguiding since it's just an open ledger of whatever you want to put there, it doesn't necessarily reflect even a representative part of a whole system that would provide some kind of financial service.

As another commenter explained regarding video ownership, there's also no incentive to move any old and non-interoperable system there to begin with.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#178

Post by kybernetikos »

hiq wrote: post #176
kybernetikos wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.

> Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here. Why would you say that? For what reasons? To engage with your comment a bit more, regarding costs, it's very expensive to: * write secure smart contracts (if possible at all) * maintain a smart contract infrastructure (transaction fees) There's no…

It's very expensive to write secure smart contracts, true, but it's also surprisingly expensive to write secure systems using more traditional technologies too.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it being expensive to maintain a smart contract infrastructure, because if your application suits it, you can literally deploy your smart contract and forget it, and people can use it into the future without you ever having to pay server costs - i.e. for the person deploying the smart contract it can be much cheaper. To the extent that it would be reasonable to hope people would deploy public infrastructure as smart contracts, even if they wouldn't want to deploy public infrastructure as cloud services. If you're worried about overall costs like transaction fees, it's not at all true that there's no solution in sight for them. There are minority cryptocurrencies now with no transaction fees, and even if you are skeptical about their promises, the largest smart contract ecosystem around (ethereum) has a plausible roadmap for dramatically reducing transaction fees. You can checkout the first few that are deployed here https://l2fees.info/ but significant improvements in this area are still expected over the next few years on ethereum.

The point about the incentives is that if you are asked to create a mobile app for a bank to manage mortgages, it is possible but extremely unlikely that you will put the effort in to make this accessible via API to the users or the rest of the ecosystem who might want to create tools that create visualisations, aggregate data for the user, certify that someone in the real world is prepared to lend them significant amounts of data, etc.

If on the other hand you create a blockchain solution to manage mortgages, it is extremely unlikely that you wouldn't create a reasonable externally accessible API - it's the default way of writing blockchain applications.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#179

Post by CryptoPunk »

defaultprimate wrote: post #155
CryptoPunk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The problems are impossible to decouple from "blockchain on principle" because the problems are intrinsic to the data structure itself, not "contemporary" approaches to the data structure implementation. If that is indeed the belief, then I concede that is an example of someone opposed to blockchains in principle, for a reason that is not an illiberal political agenda. In any case, I like to think I am pretty well…

>a solution that does not involve moving away from autonomous ledgers that use cryptoeconomics to maintain consensus. What are your proposed solutions to identified problems then?

Can you give me an example of a problem with blockchain, that you think is intractable, because it's inherent to the data structure?

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#180

Post by CryptoPunk »

fnord77 wrote: post #9
CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

>>Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Is the author really unaware of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts? Articles like this want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own mone…

we've steadily moved away from serfdom under centralized government and banking for centuries. yet suddenly because of the actions of a couple private companies, we're going to suddenly go back to serfdom? This makes no sense. it's impossible to go back to serfdom - the economy is too large and diverse and people are too literate. sorry, but this is just a doomer fantasy at best

Serfdom was abolished long before central banking emerged in the US.

The institutions created since the creation of the Federal Reserve, like a vast regulatory apparatus that closes off economic opportunities for the masses, and income taxation that abolishes privacy rights while seriously diminishing private property rights, have taken society toward serfdom.

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