Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 578 posts

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#411

Post by cy_overlord »

dmitriid wrote: post #388
cy_overlord wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect that legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system." It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority? Blockchain might not the solution but it shows us an alternative to trusting some…

> instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent. Yes. Because that code just appeared out of nowhere, and it's perfect, and devoid of issues.

No, that's why many people is working on it now. If you compare old smart contract with new ones, you will see that things are slowly getting fixed.

For e.g., you could literally send NFTs to any address (including a smart contract address) which make things stuck forever. Now there's a safe way to transfer things which check whether or not it is a valid address. And this became the de facto standard for almost any NFT smart contract.

All these didn't came out of nowhere.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#412

Post by dmichulke »

petmon wrote: post #129
j_walter wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really...the fees for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other L2 options are flat fees and are well under Visa/MC fees most of the time. Might want to look at Western Union and the like too...way way under those fees. Current transaction fee (for 1 cent or a billion dollars) Bitcoin - $1.62 per transaction Ethereum - $3.50 per transaction Ethereum L2 - as low as 12 cents https://l2fees.info/ Here are credit card fees by comp…

The cost of a bitcoin transaction is not adequately captured by transaction fees. There's two alternative ways to look at it: 1. Divide miner revenue (fees + seignorage) by the number of transactions, yielding the total amount that miners extract. It was $34m today, with ~261k transactions, yielding a cost per transaction of $130. [1] 2. Estimate energy cost at 1,173 kWh per transaction [2]. If you assume cheap elect…

Re 1: Shouldn't we then also add the increase in the monetary base to the cost of a dollar transaction?

3.4 trillions in Jan 2020 -> 5.8 trillions now

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#413

Post by samhw »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #145
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disputing the claims the article makes, I'm just saying: it's not an especially persuasive reason to support cryptocurrency; if the problem is simply "bring transaction costs down for the working poor", there are much simpler ways to do that. Meanwhile: the cryptocurrencies we have today are causing ongoing harm.

What harm?

Harms like: the aforementioned energy usage equivalent to Eastern Europe, scams wiping out billions on the regular (e.g. the absurd Luna pyramid scheme which collapsed the other week), facilitating vast drug dealing and consumption at huge detriment to poor countries and many users, etc.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#414

Post by saalweachter »

Joker_vD wrote: post #406
saalweachter wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also not forget the whole deal with financing . When you buy a house, for $1 million or $50,000, the normal case being described in yours and the parent post is that you are buying a house on margin while using the house itself as collateral for the loan. If you show up at a house that is for sale and ready to be sold with a million dollars in cash -- well, a million dollars in easily-authenticated cash equival…

> the sellers might balk at such a weird transaction Over there, buying a house without taking out a mortgage does not count as "weird": it's not terribly common, but happens often enough to not be considered weird. After all, if you have 100% of the house price on hands, there is not much reason to take a mortgage with 20% down payment and then immediately closing the rest of 80%, is there?

Buying a house without financing isn't weird (even if it is uncommon). Trying to buy a house as quickly as possible with as little due diligence or negotiation as possible, is.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#415

Post by maccard »

m00dy wrote: post #399
maccard wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a snarky question, it's a genuine concern. Telling people to not worry about the details like "what happens in case of fraud" is handwaving away the problem. > (i.e. the market value of the house + some percentage). Where does the market value come from? "Market value" for properties varies wildly, and the number a property does not necessarily track to a fair market value - I might be willing to accept 10%…

Market value comes from a decentralised oracle. I don't want to write here the most famous decentralised oracle, but right now, it provides price information to various defi protocols why not also the market value...

Market values aren't generally quantifiable though. Two houses on the exact same street might be valued slightly differently because one has some original features, or one has historic significance. Unless your decentralised oracle factors in all or the unique aspects of an area and a property, it's not an accurate representation of the value, and as I said before market valuation isn't something that dictates a purchase price. If the paper valuation of a house is 500k, I am well within my rights to give it to my children for nothing, or to sell it to a local person for below cost because they have a unique interest in the property that I agree with.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#416

Post by binkHN »

evouga wrote: post #152

This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…

> ...trusted central authority...

The major point is to not have this. No central authority, or government, will be able to alter the value of the currency.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#417

Post by mckmk »

cableshaft wrote: post #284
mckmk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all…

>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.

If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#418

Post by toolz »

shkkmo wrote: post #158
toolz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand why crypto discussions seems to draw out so many rude comments. If satoshi wanted fame and fortune he could have both easily, but there are a ton of early bitcoins that haven't moved - so obviously he wasn't in it for the money or he would've used those coins.

Or they lost the key to the wallet before the tokens were worth cashing out.

this is evidence that he wasn't in it for the money. If you came up with an elaborate scam with intentions of hustling people - how likely are you to be wildly successful, but accidentally lose access to the funds you worked so hard for?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#419

Post by Kon-Peki »

dcolkitt wrote: post #127
JackC wrote: 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…

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…

> Whereas a buy order to execute Microsoft shares happens in microseconds.

To be perfectly pedantic, you still aren't the owner of the Microsoft stock. Your broker makes a record of you being the beneficiary of X shares of Microsoft stock, with about a dozen asterisks. Each of those asterisks fall off over the course of the next few days and then it is all finalized - your broker owns a bunch of shares for your benefit.

It only feels like it is instantaneous because they assume everything will work out (it usually does). They can do this, because everything is reversible if it doesn't.

Now, if you would like to be the actual owner of Microsoft stock, you can do that. If you've never done that before, expect the process to take a few weeks. But go right ahead - head over to ComputerShare [1] and start the process. If you really want, you can even get them to issue you some paper stock certificates in your own name, but that takes even more time and comes with a lot of extra fees.

[1] https://www-us.computershare.com/Investor/#DirectStock/Summa...

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#420

Post by toolz »

tromp wrote: post #344
toolz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand why crypto discussions seems to draw out so many rude comments. If satoshi wanted fame and fortune he could have both easily, but there are a ton of early bitcoins that haven't moved - so obviously he wasn't in it for the money or he would've used those coins.

If he wanted to make clear his intention to never ever cash out, he could have burned those bitcoins.

are you aware of what it means to "burn" bitcoin? It's simply putting the coins in a wallet and destroying the keys.

For all we know, these coins have already been "burned"

Post reply on HN