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Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

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Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#201

Post by arcticbull »

disruptalot wrote: post #168
arcticbull wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is availability heuristic. Many financial innovations work out well and power everything we do today without a second thought. Credit cards, internet banking, mobile banking, etc etc etc. Should we ban all financial innovations because a subset can cause collapse? All of these tools are strictly regulated specifically to avoid that collapse. Because we learned from when they collapsed before not to let them ru…

> Trustlessness can by definition only extend to what can be wholly represented on chain. Stablecoins cannot. Many algorithmic stablecoins like DAI can be fully audited on chain and have proved to be robust (so far, 4 years). They let you trustlessly borrow USD, top up your collateral and whatever else you would do with a loan but with no middlemen. I've been reading your comments for a while, and have been getting r…

> Many algorithmic stablecoins like DAI can be fully audited on chain and have proved to be robust (so far, 4 years).

You can't make something from nothing. Alogrithmic stablecoins are just the financial equivalent of honey pots. If you can knock them off their peg you can win big and this has happened many times. Perpetual motion doesn't exist and neither do stable long-term fractionally reserved algorithmic stablecoins.

This is true of all pegs - even in classical finance. This is literally how George Soros made all his money. [1]

MIM and UST are two fractionally reserved algorithmics that got knocked off their pegs yesterday. And this isn't even the first time for UST, I'm led to believe they required a capital infusion of a few hundred million greenbacks to maintain the peg a while ago.

> They let you trustlessly borrow USD ...

Not USD, no. A stablecoin with an opaque backing.

> ... top up your collateral and whatever else you would do with a loan but with no middlemen.

Of course there are middlemen, it's the validators or miners and contract authors and liquidity providers. There's a ton of middle men.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/soros.asp

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#202

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

SCLeo wrote: post #163
dns_snek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance are indeed goals of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. In addition, they also serve as speculative assets. What's fraudulent about that? Cryptocurrencies do in fact provide all of that (not all of them provide all of these guarantees, but some do).

You completely missed my point. Simply put: People use cryptocurrencies as speculative asset while they claim they are using them for decentralization and other properties.

Yes but do you understand what speculation means? Speculation means betting on future value.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#203

Post by runarberg »

logicalmonster wrote: post #68

> what a nightmarish step backwards it is for developers concerned with cost, speed, privacy, safety, and ease. 1) There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people. The systems are improving. What technology we'll have 5, 10, or 25 years from now is going to be much different than what exists now. It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not a…

The 5.25" floppy disk was pretty good at transferring data between machines at the time and didn’t introduce many unintended consequences.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the 5.25" floppy disk actually transferred data slower then if you had handwritten it between the machines, you couldn’t use the data from the 5.25" floppy disk unless you first validated it which would take several kW hours of power. You also could claim a stake at the data and could potentially sue other disk users for patent violations if you validated some patent more often then them. Now you have a case of a technology that is: a) worse then the alternative, b) expensive to use, and c) has harmful unintended consequences. Now I would consider the 5.25" floppy disk a good comparison to cryptocurrency. However the 5.25" floppy disk was none of these things, as it was a perfectly good technology at the time for data interchange despite it’s limitation. The same can not be said about cryptocurrency.

Now this is a silly example I know, I couldn’t find a more realistic case of unintended consequence for the 5.25" floppy disk.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#204

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

arcticbull wrote: post #49
unemphysbro wrote: post #19

why? i think it's the coolest thing ever. anyone can write a contract to automate taking out a loan, investing it, and pulling out the money, develop exotic securities, and bespoke arbitration. anyone can do it regardless of credentials or connections; just a month of learning. pretty darn cool to have unbridled access to a distributed computer.

The answer is pretty straight-forward. Every time we tried this before it collapsed into a giant ball of flame. Nothing crypto is producing is new. We've had stablecoins before in the form of wildcat banks. [1] They were backed at some point by barrels of nails with a few flakes of gold on top, and what little gold there was, was spirited around from bank to bank in front of the inspectors. That ended predictably. We…

Why is it that everything a crypto die-hard says is held to the flame but when you are a skeptic you are allowed to be ignorant and obtuse? The space needs hard looks for every claim said, not just the positives.

Most people in crypto are aware of why Tether is bad. In fact a huge portion of stable-coins are handled algorithmically and backed by their network asset. You are building strawmen, likely out of ignorance.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#205

Post by [deleted] »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #193
300bps wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

If 51% of miners could change anything everyone would be spinning up Alpine Virtual Machines with minuscule hash power. You fundamentally misunderstand how blockchain works. Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized. You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use tha…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#206

Post by boopboopbadoop »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #193
300bps wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

If 51% of miners could change anything everyone would be spinning up Alpine Virtual Machines with minuscule hash power. You fundamentally misunderstand how blockchain works. Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized. You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use tha…

> Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

So... you’re saying it’s mutable.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#207

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

Victerius wrote: post #81
tomiplaz wrote: post #63

I don't think you understand what Bitcoin has brought to the table. Consider its fundamentals and its network effect. Other blockchain tech, most prominently permissioned blockchains, should be reprobated, since they don't require blockchain tech and could be better implemented using tech that relies on standard database systems.

What Bitcoin has brought to the table: - More convenient ways for malicious individuals to conduct ransomware attacks - Fraudulent exchanges - Persistent and global GPU shortages - Anonymity to criminals - Staggering consumption of real-life energy supplies, produced mostly with fossil fuels What Bitcoin has not brought to the table: - A store of value - A trusted unit of account - A widespread medium of exchange

Classic. Bitcoin is not a store of value or trusted unit of account despite its massive market cap.

The primary objective measure of value is invalidated because you disagree with it and believe everyone else is wrong. You are a Kafka character.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#208

Post by smoldesu »

valdiorn wrote: post #140
zozbot234 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can be anonymous but still accountable. Require users to post a cryptocurrency bond to post, and let others lay bets against the user's future score in some sort of crowd-sourced karma system. This lets other users gain if they successfully predict that the user's post will be disapproved of (get paid for reporting, e.g. obvious spam!) while conversely rewarding the user for good content that others are malici…

Ok. Who is the arbitrator then? A centralised party? If not, then maybe people who stake the most? Because that way you can literally pay for the right to decide what is "truth".

The best (or at least, most successful) answer to this has come through federation. Platform owners are allowed to create and moderate their own groups with their own distinct rules and regulation. From there, each group decides which of the other groups it would like to interact with, as well as ones that it would like to ignore. The result is a system where everyone can live happily; 4chan trolls can federate with 4chan trolls, mainstream instances can block objectionable content, and people who want to use both can freely make accounts for either group. The result is a pretty good balance of freedom with highly-moderated content, even highly sensitive groups have had a pretty good experience using this tactic, since if all else fails the group can defederate from everyone else and choose only to interact with other group members, or selectively federate with other groups that share their same values.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#209

Post by dvt »

arcticbull wrote: post #199
dvt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that sense, crypto is exactly the same as forex, money markets, equities markets, futures markets, derivatives markets, etc. We haven't been coupling markets with labor for like 300 years now.

Not at all. Forex yes, futures yes, derivatives yes - these are speculative or hedging instruments. Not investments. I've never heard anyone advocate people HODL /NQ futures in their investment account and borrow against them as an investment strategy. Let alone calling them "the future of money." But this is basically what crypto is. Money market funds aren't investments, they're cash equivalents, but they still fac…

> Not investments.

The idea that there's any viable technical reasoning behind TSLA trading as high as it is, or behind what happened with GME and AMC last year is simply fanciful. It's like you've never seen an IPO pump and dump. It's literally the exact same market behavior you saw with ICOs; side-note: it's even worsened now with the advent of SPACs.

Yeah, you can argue until the cows come home that "equities are positive-sum instruments where you purchase a fractional ownership stake in a business," but that doesn't mean that hedge funds won't treat them as speculative instruments, particularly around earnings calls. Or that hedge funds won't try to spin the narrative to justify their risky positions (e.g.: the short squeeze on GME).

Again, just to reiterate: the markets are almost completely decoupled from labor (for better or for worse). It's all speculation (to certain degrees).

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