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In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

281–290 of 578 posts

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#281

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.

you could but things like easements would make that much more complicated There are a lot of things that come / don't come with a piece of property (mineral rights, water rights, homeowner associations) that make it a complicated thing to own.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#282
Good that he talks about the climate.

Independent of this: "We should be trying to figure out the right path out of this mess. "

For me I'm fine on thinking about how to solve the climate crisis before I will spend energy on solving crypto issues but that's something every one has to decide for themselves.

Fixing climate change will be more beneficial for everyone who has kids and/or likes his/her family members kids or kids from friends.

Which I do.

I think overall people would prefer less energy costs, more food and more water and less extreme weather before crypto but that's just my guess.

But at least on hn I'm reading more about crypto than that.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#283
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I don't know how easements work. So, you need to sign a reciprocity agreement with the road owner before they let you use their road for free? What prevents road owners from charging extortionate fees to people who don't own roads themselves?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#284
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many real world systems are "nearly trustless". Of course you still need some sort of court system if someone decides to break bad. But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock? The former process takes weeks, and dozens of man hours fro…

In this ‘house NFT within the court system’ paradigm, what happens if the court disagrees with the blockchain on who is the rightful ‘owner’ of the house NFT?

Considering it's a physical house they sould be able to do more than they can when someone steals bitcoin.

So I imagine they can either legal pressure on the illegitimate owner to transfer the NFT to the other owner (which has worked with some bitcoin transactions in the past), or if that doesn't work, then the system of smart contracts created for something like houses would most likely have something in it that allows the smart contract owners to mark that NFT as void in the blockchain (while it remains in the perpetrators wallet, it would no longer be associated with the physical benefits) and have a fresh NFT minted based on the data in the previous one and sent to the legitimate wallet.

Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#285
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bitcoin "solves" the problem by being non-compliant with local laws and regulations.

Crypto attempts to solve the problem in the same way that web protocols and web standards do. Define a single shared spec that spans all geographic borders, rather than a spec that is reinvented at each jurisdiction.

And this violates the spec that is already in force in each jurisdiction.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#286
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which argument do you find to be an "edge case"? My main argument in favor of crypto is the democratization of finance and leveling the playing field, which as we can already see crypto generally only has real benefits to the poor - for rich it's just a speculative play, but for the poor it can mean the difference between getting paid across borders without corruption stealing your money or being able to save wealth…

The general form is that crypto can't do X. The response is that an obscure implementation Y does do X. The problem is that Y, while existing, largely doesn't address X in practice because Y's trading volume and/or market cap is insignificant. I guess to your point. How much corruption is avoided, and how much wealth is being saved that would otherwise be locked out? Without the means to quantify it, it feels like an…

> The general form is that crypto can't do X. The response is that an obscure implementation Y does do X. The problem is that Y, while existing, largely doesn't address X in practice because Y's trading volume and/or market cap is insignificant.

Sure, but this presupposes that Y's trading volume and/or market cap are indeed actually insignificant. A lot of people make that presupposition, but it's often about as accurate as a drunk chimpanzee playing darts. Proof-of-stake is the case-in-point: "but but Ethereum hasn't switched yet so therefore PoS is obscure", quoth the "skeptic", entirely ignoring that multiple of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap and/or transaction volume are already proof-of-stake and have been for some time now.

Even taking that presupposition at face value, what's experimental today is less so tomorrow. That experimental solutions do exist bodes well for the state of things even months (let alone years, let alone decades) from now. If you want to wait until then, then you do you; meanwhile, those of us willing to experiment will do so.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#287
post #98

"transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess" I think this is arguing th…

Transaction irreversability is the whole point of the "peer to peer electronic cash system": "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments... cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions ... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud" from the opening lines of the Bitcoin white paper.

So Bitcoin was designed for micropayments, and irreversability is a feature to reduce the friction. That is fine because it was intended for "small casual transactions" which very few people are going to invest the time and effort into disputing. It even looked like it might be successful as a micropayment system at first, given small Bitcoin transactions were initially processed without any transaction fees.

The problem is that it has clearly failed as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". It is now used primarily for large transactions, which you absolutely do need consumer protections for if you are a legitimate user (indeed the fact that there aren't consumer protections has made the space so popular with fraudsters, scammers etc.). And as others have commented, the newer cryptocurrencies which attempt to offer such protections end up being worse in every conceivable way from the traditional solutions. Leading back to the original article - is there any legitimate point to cryptocurrencies nowadays?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair script to use against arguments of the form "cryptocurrencies will never amount to anything". I would hazard to say that it's not the criticism of the current state of cryptocurrency that irks most of its proponents - most of them agree that it's not very useful currently . However, it becomes problematic when you take that valid criticism of the technology's current state and use it to support th…

> If you want your mind changed that cryptocurrency is currently useful, I can't help you there. But if you want your mind changed that many of the drawbacks of blockchain technology are not as insurmountable as detractors would have you believe. Let me summarize the sentiment to see if I'm understanding: "I'm excited about crypto now because of what crypto could be in the future." To me it feels like being really ex…

I'm excited about space exploration now because of what it could be in the future. I'm excited about various up-and-coming programming languages and operating systems and such because of what they could be in the future. Why shouldn't I be excited about crypto because of what it could be in the future?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#289

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.

Yeah, but you'd accomplish nothing. Because the only way a registry could be meaningful in determining ownership, is if the government that protects your property rights considers the registration valid. And in that case, you have to trust the government which means a trust-based registry is far more simple and efficient. Could still be blockchain based though, with proof-of-authority. Could be nice to see a ledger seeing exactly who signed (with cryptographic signatures) the transfer of the property etc. Okay, that' be a kind of NFT-system, but not in the sense that most people think of NFTs (trustless)

For houses this is easy to prove. But this goes for nearly every other suggested NFT application, including tickets.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Owner lose the digital asset that proves his ownership.

Now who owns the house? Do we have to let it decay forever?

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