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Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

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Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#121

Post by TimPC »

tatertots1234 wrote: post #110
TimPC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we reinvent a VISA-like entity that charges VISA-like fees to replace VISA. This seems like a very impressive and extremely novel innovation.

Pretty much. Now VISA has to compete with every other protocol deployed on the permissionless network, some of which may charge lower to no fees and provide different user experiences. Users can also, as they desire, connect with the base layer if they wish to circumvent the VISA-like protocols entirely. An example of that might be a company moving or exchanging several million dollars without wanting to deal with VI…

As evidenced by the hard fork of Ethereum when a smart contract didn't work the way it was supposed to. There clearly is demand for something like transaction disputes.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#122

Post by solveit »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116
darawk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly true that there's a line, but i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity. Certainly dragnet surveillance of speech could prevent a fair amount of terrorism, mass shootings, child pornography, etc. Dragnet surveillance of money flows accomplishes that too. We just as a soci…

> i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity Speech is more primitive, and far less dependent on community efforts, than money. We can theorise working societies without money. I don't think we can do similarly without speech, at least not without changing what it means to be human.

> We can theorise working societies without money.

Really? At scales larger than a few hundred people?

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#123

Post by rurp »

solveit wrote: post #122
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity Speech is more primitive, and far less dependent on community efforts, than money. We can theorise working societies without money. I don't think we can do similarly without speech, at least not without changing what it means to be human.

> We can theorise working societies without money. Really? At scales larger than a few hundred people?

Sure, there have probably been thousands of such societies throughout history. Bartering was common for many hunter gatherer communities. Having a standard currency isn't very practical if you have many groups across a large geographical area that meet sporadically. Directly trading goods would work just fine in those cases.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#124

Post by darawk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116
darawk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly true that there's a line, but i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity. Certainly dragnet surveillance of speech could prevent a fair amount of terrorism, mass shootings, child pornography, etc. Dragnet surveillance of money flows accomplishes that too. We just as a soci…

> i've never heard a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money and speech are really not much different in terms of their power to organize problematic activity Speech is more primitive, and far less dependent on community efforts, than money. We can theorise working societies without money. I don't think we can do similarly without speech, at least not without changing what it means to be human.

Firstly I don't think that's actually true in any meaningful sense. I mean, yes, literally we could have a completely trivial society without something resembling money, but at even the most rudimentary levels of social organization that actually exist among humans, something resembling money exists. Certainly at the very least, the excahnge of value is occurring between people in anything that could reasonably be called "society".

Secondly, even if we accept that speech is "more primitive", i'm not sure why that implies anything about how they ought to be regulated.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#125

Post by hnthrow1010 »

tatertots1234 wrote: post #97
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring an Ethereum transaction please? Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. I don't know why you're asking this question, you should be able to answer the same question about Tor or Freenet and extrapolate from there. >re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a BFT consensus mechanism? I als…

> Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application, which remains widely distributed across all nodes in the network. Tor is great but has different design goals, such as consensus of the entire network secured by about 10 nodes. > There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens. What BFT mechanism do you propose…

>This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application

Sure, but you can't make those when you're locked in jail with no access to the internet. I believe this was made obvious all the way back in 2013 with the Silk Road bust.

>What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes?

Out of what you said, PoA is the only one that has any chance at being fair over a long period of time because it's a lot easier to eject bad actors from the network. If you use PoA there's not much point to using a blockchain, but this is good actually; it gives you the freedom to choose between any number of more efficient datastructures. PoS is mostly just a loose approximation of another form of PoA (whomever stakes the most is the authority) and it's wholly unnecessary if you get rid of the speculative tokens; PoW (and some PoS algorithms too) are quite literally based around consensus-by-lottery, in my view that's another reason why it will never be useful for anything beyond gambling on speculative tokens. I've seen a lot of variations on the algorithms but none of them can get away from that basic problem without morphing back into another form of PoA.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#126

Post by tatertots1234 »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #125
tatertots1234 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application, which remains widely distributed across all nodes in the network. Tor is great but has different design goals, such as consensus of the entire network secured by about 10 nodes. > There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens. What BFT mechanism do you propose…

>This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application Sure, but you can't make those when you're locked in jail with no access to the internet. I believe this was made obvious all the way back in 2013 with the Silk Road bust. >What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes? Out of what you said, P…

You can jail a person but the contract or message they deployed, which may include private encrypted information or even be a fully fledged blockchain application, is still accessible and functioning as it was before. That is the point of the ledger being censorship-resistant, and it’s a different model than trusting a small handful of node operators.

PoW and PoS may rely on speculative valuation of the token but they aren’t really like PoA at all. The whole concept is that they are permissionless, as opposed to permissioned.

But anyways we have three options: PoW, PoS, PoA. And there are crypto currencies and blockchains for each of those. PoA tends to secure the least amount of value as it’s generally seen as less secure, less censorship-resistant, and less distributed.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#127

Post by malermeister »

alaricus wrote: post #73

This is one of the most ridiculous things I read in a very long time. Why does it concern those 1500 people how I decide to store my money? What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't? There is nothing responsible about the government interfering in things it should not be interfering with.

> What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where I can't?

This is already a thing. See drugs, slaves etc.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#128

Post by tatertots1234 »

TimPC wrote: post #121
tatertots1234 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Now VISA has to compete with every other protocol deployed on the permissionless network, some of which may charge lower to no fees and provide different user experiences. Users can also, as they desire, connect with the base layer if they wish to circumvent the VISA-like protocols entirely. An example of that might be a company moving or exchanging several million dollars without wanting to deal with VI…

As evidenced by the hard fork of Ethereum when a smart contract didn't work the way it was supposed to. There clearly is demand for something like transaction disputes.

Yes, if the vast majority of the users in the network come to clear consensus on forking the protocol to enact a single change, they can do so. This is not a bad thing, it’s similar to how we fork our laws in the real world as we realize they contain pitfalls and loopholes.

This is very different from individual transaction disputes on a VISA-like protocol, and the DAO fork doesn’t suggest that transaction level disputes are in particularly high demand (in 7 years this happened one time on the network, and you call that demand? lol).

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#129

Post by vaidhy »

rurp wrote: post #123
solveit wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can theorise working societies without money. Really? At scales larger than a few hundred people?

Sure, there have probably been thousands of such societies throughout history. Bartering was common for many hunter gatherer communities. Having a standard currency isn't very practical if you have many groups across a large geographical area that meet sporadically. Directly trading goods would work just fine in those cases.

How did they agree on what the exchange rate should be? From my understanding, the answer was almost always plunder among the primitive societies or a tyrant/king enforcing a monetary system. There was really no bartering amongst equals across communities.

Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

#130

Post by tatertots1234 »

maccard wrote: post #85
tatertots1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.

That's not a use of crypto, that's what it does. What is a use for that? I'm with OP on this, I've yet to see a use for it that isn't speculative gambling.

OP asks for a use, I provided. You say it is not a use, it’s “what it does.” Yes, it’s exactly what it does? That’s what it’s being used for.
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