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

471–480 of 578 posts

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#471

Post by kingaillas »

abirch wrote: post #331
what-the-grump wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen commercial banks reverse wire transfers within the first 30 days. When you are moving large sums of money between well known institutions the money is very illiquid, mostly to prevent mistakes, fraud, etc. It’s why most fraud that you hear about involves movement of money overseas or into another type of asset or more liquid form, e.g bills, physical goods etc. No one sits their stolen funds at chase bank……

Why didn't Citi reverse this wire? https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...

There's a bit more nuance here than merely Citi wants to reverse a wire transaction. The article explains they were servicing debt and accidentally paid the loan off early (rough summary). The debtors could argue they had no reason to suspect error and viewed the payment as settling the loan.

New payments contracts now include "revlon clawback" clause. The blockchain analogy is a buggy smart contract that gets fixed.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#472

Post by randomhodler84 »

samhw wrote: post #413
randomhodler84 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

none of those are harm, you just want to control others. Esp drugs, I will not stand by and let you attack the good name of drugs.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#473

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

randomran01234 wrote: post #444
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analysis has a major flaw. One of the main advantages of a centralized exchange is that they don't have to process all transactions on chain. As such, this is measuring very different statistics for centralized and decentralized exchanges.

That is true. Probably by pure volume of trades the CEX order books will always be able to facilitate an order of magnitude more than DEX as they can fulfill orders instantly with almost no fees at all, and many beginners and casual traders with crypto will not bother with or even understand what it means to transact on-chain. But there is a very significant amount of crypto trading occurring on-chain, to the tune of…

It's hard to know for sure, but it wouldn't be surprising if the majority of on chain trading is between different accounts of the same person in a (bad) attempt to launder the money.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#474

Post by mckmk »

cableshaft wrote: post #460
mckmk wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 woul…

You could check if the NFT was still valid by calling the smart contract directly if they provide public functions for it. No need for a published list by a centralized authority (beyond whatever you're using to call functions on a smart contract, like I'd probably use Etherscan if it's an ETH contract). And calling read-only functions (doesn't write anything to the blockchain) doesn't cost anything. I didn't think o…

This does not sound like good system design.

“NFTs create a frictionless easily exchangeable market for goods… BUT make sure you check with the people, project, company or government that has authority over this good as to whether this particular NFT is actually a useful representation of anything. Because, at any arbitrary point they can just decide to not honor any of these.”

Why not buy the good directly from this party? Then at least the government has authority and can enforce your right to the product or service or at least a refund?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#475

Post by cesarb »

AlexandrB wrote: post #46

I find the last section of this article particularly ironic considering cryptocurrency is one of the biggest steps back for technological efficiency I've seen in my lifetime. No, credit card fees have not improved in 30 years, but at least the energy required to process those transactions hasn't increased by orders of magnitude in the same time period.

> No, credit card fees have not improved in 30 years,

A quick web search tells me that the law which capped credit card fees at 0.3% is from 2015. That's less than 10 years ago.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#476

Post by dolmen »

landemva wrote: post #181
photochemsyn wrote: post #68

> "The top credit-card merchant fee actually rose in the United States between 1991 and 2009, and this is a goddamn tragedy, since these fees are baked into the cost of most retail goods and thus born by the working poor (who pay them even if they use cash.) . . . Why are these IT-focused industries so consistently immune to the same technological improvements and cost reductions we see everywhere else?" The simplest…

>> 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 want road to be a maintained regularly and at once (a patchwork is not convenient to drive) and not depending on the will or the means of the owner of each piece.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#477

Post by hnthrow1010 »

yellowapple wrote: post #467
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is itself possible by penalizing stake pools that go offline, thus motivating them to maximize uptime. This is still unfair to stakers that legitimately have infra disruptions. I have not seen any design for PoS that is actually fair and reasonable and I doubt it will ever happen because this is simply not something you want to just put in an algorithm. The problem space fundamentally requires human interventi…

> This is still unfair to stakers that legitimately have infra disruptions. I'd hardly characterize that as "unfair"; it's no more unfair than any other perceived correlation between uptime and trustworthiness. > The problem space fundamentally requires human intervention at a high level. It fundamentally requires the opposite. The more human intervention possible, the more room for exploitation and corruption and un…

>it's no more unfair than any other perceived correlation between uptime and trustworthiness.

I am saying that correlation inherently makes no sense. Uptime isn't the same as trustworthiness, that assumption is only made because designers of blockchain algorithms have bizarrely decided that "trustworthiness" is not a real thing so they need to continuously look for other things to use as a substitute for it, instead of just using what most people (including many promoters of cryptocurrencies in their real, physical lives) use: trustworthiness.

>It fundamentally requires the opposite.

No, this is extremely, extremely, extremely wrong on every possible level. Even from the perspective of a cryptocurrency, this is extremely wrong. I can't stress this enough. You are creating a system for humans to use for human purposes. The entire point of it is human intervention. When designing these blockchain algorithms (which I should remind you are designed and maintained by humans as code that needs to be continuously maintained by humans) all that happens is you encode that particular form of exploitation and corruption and unfairness into the system itself. Even within your example it's wrong; discriminating against those with bad uptime enables exploitation and corruption towards areas that have bad infra. And remember since this is code that can be updated and changed by humans it will be vulnerable to the same level of corruption that you see anywhere else. You might trust the maintainers not to do this but now you're back to the same old trustworthiness again.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#478

Post by kingaillas »

almostkorean wrote: post #438
senttoschool wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're still putting your trust into a centralized organization (Coinbase). So we're back to square one.

I was talking about Coinbase MPC wallet, where they have part of your private key. I think that's pretty far from back to square one, is it not? You still own your private keys but are trusting a centralized organization to keep the other, so it would require both parties to be hacked for the wallet to be at risk.

>You still own your private keys but are trusting a centralized organization to keep the other, so it would require both parties to be hacked for the wallet to be at risk

Wouldn't it just require one to be hacked - where the risk is losing access to your wallet? Say an evil hacker destroys one of the halves of your private key, now the wallet is unavailable.

If the risk is - drain the account - then yes, both would need to be hacked in order to get access.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#479

Post by strofcon »

everfree wrote: post #184
strofcon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the Mac is worth something in and of itself . It is a tool of productivity, entertainment, education, creation, etc. And, failing all of that, it's valuable for its parts. A bitcoin is an ID number pointing to pretend money. It has zero intrinsic value.

Productivity, entertainment, education, and creation are all subjective, just like the value of an entry in a ledger. I could say "I don't use Macs because I find I can't be productive with them." That's a subjective statement. Or I could say "I don't find it entertaining to sit in front of a Mac," or "I don't learn anything when I use a Mac," "I can't create anything valuable using a Mac." None of the properties you…

Value is subjective in many cases, yes, but there is still intrinsic value in the device itself, if we have to boil it down. You missed that bit - the intrinsic part is literally the metals of which the device is made. Even failing that, it's useful as a weighted object. You can get down to the nuts and bolts of a thing with intrinsic value, such that even in the vent that society collapses and there's no coordinated economy to speak of, there is still SOMETHING for which the thing/service can be used. Cryptocurrencies literally stop existing in such an event, and become entirely worthless in even less catastrophic situations.

Money is an agreed upon tool for exchanging items/services of value - but it also a store of value, because it retains at least a semblance of stability. Cryptocurrencies are... well, not currencies, for starters, but they're also simply a proxy for "real" money (ie: fiat).

Where cryptocurrencies entirely fall apart is when the realization hits that they all fall into the greater fool category - once you run out of new marks, the scheme collapses, and all the money - note actual currency - ends up in the hands of a few early adopters and a couple extra lucky folks who timed it right. Negative sum games are not a good thing to prop up.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#480

Post by kingaillas »

samhw wrote: post #413
randomhodler84 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget the preferred payment system for ransomware, among cryptocurrencies many technological achievements.
Post reply on HN