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In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#271

Post by landemva »

lottin wrote: post #225
landemva wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it should be state-owned and state-managed (see the network of roads ...) Where I live, the 'roads' are owned by each individual property owner with an easement to every other property owner in the town. Why would we want a group of government bureaucrats to literally own our roads?

Because we don't want the road owner be able to demand extortionate fees to use their road?

Every land owner has granted reciprocal easement to every other land owner in the town to use what looks like roads through the subdivisions but are actually part of each lot. We don't need government to do this because we use what works like contracts on property - reciprocal easements. In fact, if the town disbanded there would be no questions about who owns what.

Oh, maybe you don't know how easements work?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#272

Post by yellowapple »

undoware wrote: post #191

Most of Green's article goes through, except for the answer to the 'climate change' objection (Objection 1). Which is, of course, the most important, and without it, the article as a whole also fails to convince. The problem is in this passage (mine the emphasis): > But the question we should be asking is not whether to be angry about the power consumption of proof-of-work mining. We should be trying to figure out th…

> What is a "good outcome?" A good outcome for whom? A great outcome for most species, and most h.sapiens, would be an outright ban, because of the risk spread.

This only logically follows if literally all cryptocurrencies are proof-of-work (let alone proof-of-work using a hashing algorithm as energy-intensive as SHA256). This is patently false, and therefore the assertion that an outright ban on the very concept of a cryptocurrency is somehow a net benefit to global society requires more of a supporting argument than "Bitcoin exists and is currently dominant". By your metric, banning only proof-of-work cryptocurrencies would be more than sufficient, assuming that such a ban could be enforced...

> Powerful nations might, say, weave a crypto-ban requirement into multilateral trade agreements, like we already do for intellectual property.

Right, and that totally eliminated (or hell, at least even significantly curtailed) copyright infringement in those jurisdictions, right? If you sincerely believe that, then I've got an NFT of Ecuador to sell you.

The cat's out of Pandora's box. You can't "uninvent" peer-to-peer networking, and you can't "uninvent" decentralized ledgers. Nation-states can impose whatever bans they want; unless they're willing to pull a PRC or DPRK and start committing rampant privacy violations for censorship reasons, those bans are toothless.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#273

Post by yellowapple »

jolux wrote: post #53

The biggest problem I see with cryptocurrency is the transaction rate problem. It’s not like attempts haven’t already been made to solve it (Bitcoin Lightning), and Dr. Green fully admits that it’s not certain that any currently proposed changes can solve it either. How long is the world supposed to wait for reasonable transaction rates on this technology? If this is truly like the early internet, they should have va…

> If this is truly like the early internet, they should have vastly improved over the past ten years

They have. There are other cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin. Even the worst proof-of-stake chains have multiple orders of magnitude better throughput and latency than Bitcoin does. Hell, there are plenty of other proof-of-work chains with better throughput and latency than Bitcoin. And that's all entirely ignoring sidechains and other such shenanigans pushing transaction rates and speeds even further.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#274

Post by lottin »

forum_ghost wrote: post #270
lottin wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A virtual token is literally useless. It's only worth something, so far as it can be traded for actual goods, so the availability of "secured" goods is quite essential as far as the value of cryptographic tokens go.

> availability of "secured" goods What do you mean by that? Backing?

By that I mean not easy to steal by anyone at gunpoint.

The point is that money is not wealth. Wealth is the ability to consume goods and services. If you got stranded on a deserted island with a suitcase full of millions you'd still live in extreme poverty despite all your millions.

Therefore securing crypto-currencies doesn't replace the need for securing actual wealth. On the contrary, it's an extra cost that its users have to bear, in addition to the costs of securing GDP and the entire economy.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#275

Post by yata69420 »

Nursie wrote: post #248
yata69420 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now instead of directly transacting at the very low-tech county property registrar I think you've overlooked this in the grandparent, because you've probably never had the experience of going to a low-tech county property registrar's office to pull a record. > it's the absolute ton of bureaucracy and paper-shuffling that takes several weeks Of course, but so much of that bureaucracy is about being risk-adverse. I r…

Your response is so full of gaping holes it's kinda crazy. I'm not sure I can even begin to address them. > I think you've overlooked this in the grandparent, because you've probably never had the experience of going to a low-tech county property registrar's office to pull a record. No, I haven't overlooked this at all, in fact it's bang on with what I'm trying to get you to understand - that pulling a record can be…

You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates and I'm not saying this is 100% about signing. Searching, pulling GIS files, whatever, it's all essentially the same problem.

Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well. Maybe San Francisco could, but most of America cannot.

Twitter's core function is that it lets you send and receive short messages. That's absolutely great for a local government office, but it didn't make enough sense for any local government to invent Twitter. That's not the job of local government.

The value here is in the network effect of agreed upon protocols between interested parties.

If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value.

> we can transact using an on-chain NFT that grants the equivalent of ownership rights to the house

He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials. I think that's a fine idea to try out. It will probably reduce friction most of the time.

> you can just gloss over because blockchain

The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications. This seems obvious to me.

I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today.

All networks are hard to get off the ground. If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea. I feel like this time it's going to work because there's a money-layer built into it.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#276

Post by igorkraw »

strofcon wrote: post #163

Anyone notice how the author goes to great lengths to 'bold' the claims in the original letter that talk about how worthless the technology is - and then fails entirely to address those points? Letter: "Crypo rests on tech that is useless." Blogger: "I disagree, I think there are some fascinating things to be done with blockchain tech! Just... don't expect me to share them. You should DYOR." sigh

Yeah, this is the classic playbook of hype vendors. The bigger the claim, the less specific, the better, because specifics can be settled one way or another.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#277

Post by puranjay »

yellowapple wrote: post #268
olalonde wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of existing laws for dealing with scammers and fraudsters, why not use them? Also, are victims really victims when they knowingly buy into scams "because of greed"? At the very least, they don't seem to be the ones calling for a cryptocurrency ban. I disagree that there is a monolithic "crypto community" that encourages scams. For example, a great deal of the Bitcoin community is fervently anti altco…

> There was a time in my life when I was "unbanked" and Bitcoin was the only way I could transact online. This really needs said louder. Writing off the entirety of cryptocurrency as "useless" betrays either stunning ignorance or immense privilege (or possibly even both). Even in the "developed" world (let alone "developing") there are countless people whom the legacy financial system does not serve yet is happy to e…

Don't disagree with that, but does banking the unbanked require hundreds of billions of dollars in funding? Do the unbanked need algostables, five-figure APY yield farming, sophisticated options protocols like Ribbon, and memecoins valued at $20B?

The core ideas behind crypto remain solid. Unfortunately that has been hijacked completely by speculators.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#278

Post by tsimionescu »

bradwood wrote: post #238
Quekid5 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Microsoft stock is basically fungible whereas houses and most other real-world property very much are not.

But for houses, you could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset.

The problem is the very definition of "the underlying physical asset".

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#279

Post by meowkit »

xthrowawayxx wrote: post #263
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you’ve never bought a house without telling me you’ve never bought a house. Buying houses are expensive because: - Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions and suck up a % of the costs. They also provide the necessary service of aggregating information about the market and negotiating on your behalf - Due diligence on the state of the property. This means inspecting that there’s n…

What happens if you get hacked and someone steals your house NFT? Have a trusted third party transfer it back to you? Or give up your house to the hacker?

A snarky and simplistic question. Here's a simplistic answer: You could program the NFT to not be transferable based on a blockchain datetime or only transferable in an "escrow transaction" with a minimum exchange value (i.e. the market value of the house + some percentage).

Or time delayed exchanges for important things like your house NFT.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#280

Post by kmonsen »

bradwood wrote: post #238
Quekid5 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Microsoft stock is basically fungible whereas houses and most other real-world property very much are not.

But for houses, you could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset.

I'm honestly not sure if you are joking or not. In case you are not, the problem with house buying is not to find out who owns it, but trying to address the value and condition etc. And that you have to spend that 1 million in one go instead of Microsoft stock that you can buy $10 at the time.
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