321–330 of 392 posts
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Ok, let me send dollars from the US to Japan via SEPA real quick.
You asked “where”, and the answer is “in the SEPA countries”, which at least includes most of Europe.
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It seems a bit off to assert that "people feel it is a price worth paying" when almost all purchases online are made with credit cards which have some protections against fraud, and almost none are made with blockchains in comparison. It seems like so far, most people don't think it's a price worth paying?
Blockchain is just a decentralized ledger of transactions. A cryptocurrency is an implementation of digital currency using a blockchain. Blaming blockchain for not having fraud prevention tech is like blaming TCP/IP stack for delivering a scam email to your inbox. This is a problem to be solved in a higher layer, which we're seemingly nowhere near as we're still just trying to get blockchain to scale efficiently.
Well, so is Git!
The big difference is that the blockchain requires all transactions to appear on all nodes, and has a wildly expensive and slow consensus phase.
Thing is, these two features provide great negative utility for the average person and no positive utility at all unless you are an anonymous entity wanting to transact with other anonymous entities with no legal framework at all.
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I'd go one step further: the few legal purchases done with crypto currencies are mostly done by people unaware they're paying that price
I am one of those people that uses cash and bitcoin for privacy and reliability and for 100% legal use cases. I have experienced bank accounts of mine and those I know be frozen, emptied without warning due to identity theft, a false criminal accusation, forgotten debts, etc. I also know very well that banks have data sharing relationships with Visa, etc, that form a full map of where and when you spend money to aid…
Your bank account has been frozen and emptied at least four times?!
Surely the common factor in these incidents is you!
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The games needs to be built to allow this, however here's how it works for games that do implement it. This is using the C-Chain. Most games now would use a subnet (which is like a parallel blockchain integrated with the mainnet, but cheaper transactions) 1. Dev Create an ERC721 contract for WoW items 2. Dev Create an ERC20 contract for Final Fantasy 14 money 3. ANYONE can Create a liquidity pair for the Final Fantas…
Sure, if I'm allowed to change the games, I can link them even without a block chain. Transacting digital assets on a particular market (be it a single blockchain or Steam or the WoW Auction House) is a solved problem, and is not helped in any clear way by adding a blockchain in the middle.
The game should be integrated with the blockchain directly, if I was unclear I apologize. That means, when you open the game, you need to use your wallet to connect to the game. You don't have a "Steam" account or whatever, you have your Web3 identity.
"Transacting digital assets on a particular market (be it a single blockchain or Steam or the WoW Auction House) is a solved problem"
1 of those things is not like the other. The blockchain isn't "a market", it's an economy. An economy with multiple markets... and it's your choice. Steam is a single market, and I have no choices.
If your assets are on the Avalanche blockchain (that's the avax I keep talking about) you can choose to use Trader Joes (https://traderjoexyz.com/trade#/) Pangolin (https://app.pangolin.exchange/#/swap) Sushiswap (https://app.sushi.com/swap) or one of the hundred other choices. If you want to buy items you can use NFT Trade (https://nftrade.com/) Kalao (https://marketplace.kalao.io/) or one of the other hundred choices popping up. It's an economy with choices and competition. Steam is a centralized market that sets the rules, and you either have to take it or leave it. They get to charge a premium for that privledge, and there's no possibility of competition to check that privledge.
Saying you prefer steam, is like saying you'd prefer to buy popcorn from a movie theatre over a grocery store.
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And you've set yourself up for an answer;) I think any adversarial system has something to gain from blockchain. When participants of a system are naturally pitted against one another due to being competitors (a la engaging in a zero-sum game), the solution is usually to agree to auditing by a third-party. However, this method is easily corruptible by replacing the auditors with biased parties[1]. This is not an unco…
1. How do you solve the oracle problem? Blockchain can only deal with things that are on the blockchain already. Any interface to the real world suffers the trust and bias issues you described. You're just shifting the problem ever so slightly. (That's why the only real application is crypto currencies so far, because those can be realised wholly within the blockchain.) 2. How do you incentivise expending the PoW wor…
That said, the movement of "tangible assets" to "blockchain assets" is without a doubt a huge challenge for blockchains, but usually only when dealing with "real things" vs "systemic things", eg exchanging fiat for cryptocurrency. Integration into a private blockchain can be wholly systemic (so system-to-system vs reality-to-system). Integrating a new company into the system could be done by a joint effort between the members of private blockchain (who are all incentivized to help, because it's in their interest to ensure that no member of their industry goes unchecked.)
The economic incentive to commit to PoW is intrinsic to the adversarial network itself - basically, the desire of a company to survive the zero-sum game (success in such is typically measured by market share.)
To revert to a centralized authority is not an invalid approach, and may very well be the "happy medium" that allows this concept to solidify into something feasible. However, it is a "half-in, half-out" solution and is still vulnerable to corruption.
This is -of course - all speculative, but my overall point is that the discussion to reach solutions to these challenges will not be had if blockchains are written off as "dangerous nonsense".
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Maybe in US. In Europe people pay a lot with money transfer and payments are considered to be mostly irreversible. Banks don't take responsibility for your mistakes (like typos or getting scammed).
Prepayment fraud is somewhat prevelant, so most transactions are post paid or direct debit. Neither form has that problem. Even when fraud occurs, the recipient is a known actual person. Know your costumer rules successfully prevent these kinds of scams to a sufficient degree. Banks will also monitor transactions and will delay execution when there are signs of fraud. That's why so many scams rely on other methods of…
Not really. It's easy enough to set up fake identity that people who go and scam people on the internet usually do that.
I mean crypto and gift cards are way worse than banks of course. I'm just saying that there's no expectation in Europe that most payments are reversible.
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> It should have been a goal, and it's necessary (doesn't have to be perfect, but absolutely has to exist) for anything wanting to be used as a means of exchange in a modern economy, outside of Mad Max situations and speculation. Why are you the one to decide what should have been a goal? And aren't you aware that a lot of people do live in Mad Max like scenarios? Even in a modern country like Argentina the currency…
> Why are you the one to decide what should have been a goal? Notice how this is an absurd strawman. Also how this is not an argument. I'm not claiming "I am the one to decide", if it wasn't obvious. I'm stating my opinion on what should have been decided, followed by some arguments/qualifiers on where/why it should be applicable. Generally, when people say something, it's their opinion. No clarification is required…
Nobody claims that life is impossible without crypto, we were talking about reasons and situations where it makes sense, and one example is when fiat currencies fail or are inflated away. No, it's not the only solution, but it's a solution.
>> Not to mention that Trudeau let the cat out of the bag, you can't even trust that teddybear of a country with your money if you say something the government doesn't like.
> You can trust the blockchain even less then.
That's objectively false. Bitcoin, for example, is not controlled by any single entity, especially not any political entity, so obviously you can trust "the blockchain" not to steal your money for supporting the wrong politics, that can't even happen in theory. But we did just see it happen in the regular banking system in a supposedly free democracy.
I'm very sceptical of blockchain (though I've been in crypto off and on since 2013) but most of the arguments in this article are non-sensical. For example: > But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer. I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds…
One example of those smart contracts was involving a trusted third party into a payment. The smart contract in that payment would only clear if two parties signed off on the payment. That's definitely a way to avoid fraud.
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A centralized escrow is not heresy; it involves a different set of trade-offs. In some cases the decentralized escrow might be more appealing. To go back to my original example of a domain transfer, the exchange can occur in a matter of seconds or minutes within a blockchain, rather than 1 to 20 business days with escrow.com. Never heard of Paxos, if it could achieve the same problems I've outlined earlier, I'd be cu…
The 20 days delay is a problem with escrow.com specifically. Domain sales are a trivially automated process that should be instant e.g. literally any domain registrar. Paxos family of algorithms solves distributed state replication. It is the backbone of the database engines that already power most of the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
Compare this to, say, Tezos domains: exchange and transfer of funds settled in ~30 seconds, without any need for currency conversion, across any ".tez" domain in the network, 2.5% commission (or 0% via custom contract), no private data shared with registrar, and very low transaction fees.
Looking at Paxos: it is permissioned, lacks Sybil protection, uses leader-based rather than peer-to-peer data replication, and seems limited in how many nodes it can support. This isn't to say it's useless, but it clearly aims to solve a different set of problems than Nakamoto's consensus mechanism (and, more generally, cryptocurrency networks).