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In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#501

Post by shkkmo »

toolz wrote: post #418
shkkmo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This seems like a post hoc rationalization to support a narrative. Key management is hard and just because people mess it up, it doesn't meam that they weren't serious about using that key. Designing and building novel software is a different skill set than keeping your stuff organized enough to not lose things.

I could just as easily come up with a post hoc story that says that the reason that he has never come forward to claim credit is out of extreme embarrassment about the size of the fortune he lost, and that this is evidence that he does care about the money.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#502

Post by dmitriid »

yata69420 wrote: post #275
Nursie wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> You are vastly over-estimating the scale at which local government operates

You, and every other crypto bro vastly underestimates the scale at which local government operates. And the scale here means not "number of transactions per second", but "number of edge cases that need to be handled on a daily basis."

Some time ago I was in a conversation about how blockchain is going to solve everything around property registrations. Blockchain is just a slow distributed database that solves jack shit on its own, of course.

Here are some simple examples that land registries have to deal with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

Good luck to you and your summer intern minting NFTs for that. And that's before we go into the whole definition of ownership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217681

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#503

Post by everfree »

strofcon wrote: post #479
everfree wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not going to argue with you about how a Macbook is valuable to melt down, or has intrinsic value as a paperweight. Frankly I think that line of thinking is a dead-end for insight.

I also don't believe it's helpful to ponder the value of objects in the context of societal collapse. If that's your definition of intrinsic value, I don't think it's useful or practical.

All money falls into the greater fool category. The difference is that fiat money is not opt-in. It too is held mostly people who adopted earlier than you and lucky folks. Millennials are over 20% more likely to cry when trying to buy a home than the general population.[1]

> Negative sum games are not a good thing to prop up.

Your logic is circular - crypto has no value, therefore it's not useful, therefore it's a negative sum game, therefore it has no value.

You could just as easily say the opposite. People perceive crypto to have value, therefore due to its unique storage/transfer properties it has usefulness or extrinsic value, therefore it provides utility and is positive sum, therefore it has value.

It's all subjective.

[1]: https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2022-06-02-Half-of-Americans-cr...

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#504

Post by mckmk »

cableshaft wrote: post #484
mckmk wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All NFTs are is a token on a blockchain. People might decide that having it let's you do other things, but that's all it is really. That's not being taken away from anyone. It's up to the organization or society or code written in smart contracts whether they want to honor, and how much they honor, the promises made for having possession of that NFT. It's really no different than any other organization out there for…

It seems like, whenever there is an issue with the representations of blockchain the answer is to ignore the blockchain. (Shoot, our smart contract was a little too limited for the service we want to offer “Hey everyone don’t use that NFT!”) Where as a traditional database the answer is to fix the database or code. I look at any process involving NFTs and have to wonder how they aren’t more easily and cheaply accomplished as digital records in a centralized database and have yet to see any examples where that is not the case. Concert tickets? Set aside the fact that minting an ETH NFT is probably the entire profit margin of a ticket seller, why not a REST API? Or a web interface? (FYI they already do this) If the people who are letting you into the show are the final say whether you get in – you’re already trusting them and they already have full authority. What are you gaining bringing blockchain into this?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#505

Post by cy_overlord »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #456
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…

>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? Who is hosting the blockchain? Who is the trusted authority over the maintenance of the protocol that implements the blockchain, that all miners must use if they want to participate in the system? Who is it you're trusting not to organize a malicious 51% attack against the…

"Who is hosting the blockchain?"

Miners/Stakers who is incentivize to validate the network and maintain the collective consensus.

All your points are valid and universally known but the more important here is whether or not those vulnerabilities are inherently caused by the nature of blockchain or tehcnical problems that we can/need to solve.

A good blockchain is not owned by anyone, any changes made need to go through multiple layers of peer review.

We are still very rooted in our current ways of doing things hence we are seeing phenomenon where companies are trying to take control by either building their own blockchain or centralised service on top of a blockchain. But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?

We are no where near endgame but if you dig deep enough, you will see many exciting technical breakthroughs. One of the fascinating one is zero-knowledge validation. Blockchain could be the solution or maybe not, I don't care, I'm excited about the innovative opportunities that it brought upon.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#506

Post by everfree »

kingaillas wrote: post #478
almostkorean wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Hackers aren't usually in the business of locking people out of their money. There's no profit in that for the hacker.

However, I'm sure the MPC wallet prompts you to write down your half of the key on a piece of paper during wallet set-up. That way if your device fails (or you cross fate with a particularly chaotic hacker), you can import your key into a new wallet.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#507

Post by dragonwriter »

cy_overlord wrote: post #505
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? Who is hosting the blockchain? Who is the trusted authority over the maintenance of the protocol that implements the blockchain, that all miners must use if they want to participate in the system? Who is it you're trusting not to organize a malicious 51% attack against the…

"Who is hosting the blockchain?" Miners/Stakers who is incentivize to validate the network and maintain the collective consensus. All your points are valid and universally known but the more important here is whether or not those vulnerabilities are inherently caused by the nature of blockchain or tehcnical problems that we can/need to solve. A good blockchain is not owned by anyone, any changes made need to go throu…

> But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?

If I understood what you were talking about, I would probably idly wonder how I could fit it in between being President of the United States, a firefighter, an astronaut, and a professional soccer player, but I wouldn't actually disbelieve it.

(Hey, in the part of the 1970s where I was alive at all, I was pretty young.)

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#508

Post by fsflover »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #495
fsflover wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how almost any technology can be dismissed.

Great. But let's agree that the opposite is also false. Rather, a technology should be judged against its present merits. As an extreme example: A: I have cancer - just a few months yet to live with the currently developed treatments. B: That's actually not a problem because cancer treatments might get better in the future. Should A feel great instead? No. The converse is that any technology can be accepted. Future m…

As a non-extreme example: My government can seize all my funds in my bank and/or put any local currency exchange rate to dollar that they please. Should I fight them, move, or just buy some crypto which cannot be controlled by any single entity? You will ask how I'm going to spend it and this will miss the point: safe storage of assets is also important. (And I can trade crypto with friends for cash, too)

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#509

Post by kelseyfrog »

fsflover wrote: post #508
kelseyfrog wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. But let's agree that the opposite is also false. Rather, a technology should be judged against its present merits. As an extreme example: A: I have cancer - just a few months yet to live with the currently developed treatments. B: That's actually not a problem because cancer treatments might get better in the future. Should A feel great instead? No. The converse is that any technology can be accepted. Future m…

As a non-extreme example: My government can seize all my funds in my bank and/or put any local currency exchange rate to dollar that they please. Should I fight them, move, or just buy some crypto which cannot be controlled by any single entity? You will ask how I'm going to spend it and this will miss the point: safe storage of assets is also important. (And I can trade crypto with friends for cash, too)

I won't ask that because I'm already checked out debating the details. I'm more interested in the metadebate.

The amount of kettle logic that occurs in these types of discussions inevitably leads to that. I wish there was a way to talk about crypto holistically, but discussions about externalities get detoured into discussions about counter-examples, which get detoured into discussions about value, which get detoured into discussions about monetary policy. Every complaint is met with a just-so rebuttal that brings in a new dimension of justification. Cryptoskeptics end up being defeated by attrition. It's a fine way to cinch a debate rhetorically, but lousy at changing people's minds. I guess that's the rub, people just drop out which looks like a win. I wish cryptoenthusiasts saw how that happens. They could make better arguments.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#510

Post by dmitriid »

cy_overlord wrote: post #499
dmitriid wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. So when you write something like this: "instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent." what you're really saying is: "we trust a bunch of programmers to write perfect code" when even those programmers cannot understand the code they write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704

In an ideal world, things will be build to facilitate the trust, we don't have to trust any programmer at all. The trust in put on the code itself which not one but all of us agreed upon. Today, we don't have the tools to allow people to actually understand it but it doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abstraction layers will be built. Of course this is an optimistic speculation. I'm personally not attached to…

> In an ideal world

There are ponies and magical unicorns that grant you wishes.

> Abstraction layers will be built.

And those abstractions will definitely be built and will be different from any existing ones because? And once again we will have to trust people building them that they are built correctly.

> I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.

And those innovative opportunities are what exactly?

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