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In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#531

Post by yellowapple »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #477
yellowapple wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Uptime isn't the same as trustworthiness

The former is pretty darn important for the latter. How can I trust something that is prone to outages?

> You are creating a system for humans to use for human purposes. The entire point of it is human intervention.

One does not follow from the other.

> 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.

Well then it's a good thing that code is available to the general public and can be audited by the general public.

> Even within your example it's wrong; discriminating against those with bad uptime enables exploitation and corruption towards areas that have bad infra.

The correct response would be to improve infra in those areas, or for people in those areas to use one of the umpteen gajillion VPS providers in the world to run their stake pools instead of trying to do so from their closets.

> 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.

Then it's a good thing that the code in question is open to audit by the general public and that new versions of the code require consent from the network before they actually go "live" in any meaningful sense.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#532

Post by toolz »

shkkmo wrote: post #528
toolz wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just stick with my "innocent until proven guilty" opinion. Taking the most outlandish route possible to smear someones name seems rather unhealthy for everyone. There's no precedence for someone pulling off a huge digital scam and failing to cash out because they forgot their password. Could it happen? Sure, there aren't many things outside of the realm of possibilities when you're tasked with proving a negative…

I'm not sure what you mean by "the most outlandish route possible to smear someones name". I fail to see why me asserting that not spending the coins isn't strong evidence about Satoshi's motivations is some how a smear or trying to assign guilt? The entire conversation started because someone pointed out that just because Satoshi said something doesn't mean it has to be true (although they made that point in a rude…

I see your interpretation now, my apologies. When I read "scheme" I understood that to be slander and mean satoshi had malicious intentions. If you understand scheme to simply be a benign way of suggesting his plan was wrong then it de-escalates this entire conversation.

I thought you were defending the a comment claiming satoshi was being malicious. I would've done better to search for a more charitable interpretation.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#533

Post by yellowapple »

Olreich wrote: post #455
yellowapple wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. By the time you've done that, you've very likely reinvented a blockchain, at many times the cost of just using an already-existing public blockchain. > monitoring and reversing payment transactions I disa…

> They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so). No they aren't. They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access) for managing property c…

> They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access)

Not a single county I've lived in has offered that, to my knowledge. If they did, then if other online county services are any indication, the uptime would be horrendous and the interface would be 90's era garbage.

> If a blockchain startup wants to try to get a local government office to let them run it on a blockchain, they will need to prove that the taxes always settle, and that fraud can be reversed.

The former is baked into any cryptocurrency worth its salt, and the latter can be done by minting a new record of ownership invalidating the previous one. Better yet, time-limiting parcel NFTs and issuing them in exchange for tax payments would directly tackle both rather cleanly and would work just as well for land leases as it would for traditional real estate.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#534

Post by mirceal »

SilasX wrote: post #511
mirceal wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for buying a house no. The bank is not the escrow. The escrow is a separate entity that is used by both parties. Before the transaction they setup the rules of the transaction (steps and what ifs) and once the transaction starts escrow just follow those rules. The key thing is that escrow receives a fee and after that they have no skin in the game. So in a sense, the escrow is sort of like a smart contract o…

The way I would put it is, escrow is a workaround for the property system's inability to support smartcontract-like functionality. Because you can't have property conditionally transfer on certain triggers, you have to give it to a trusted escrow to actually execute the appropriate transfers, conditional on those triggers.

An escrow is a smart contract

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#535

Post by landemva »

lottin wrote: post #512
landemva wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easements stay with the land. A land purchaser who uses a competent title search firm will find these easements filed many years ago with county clerk and recorder. Literally it gets set up once. The easements are reciprocal to everyone else in the town. An interesting thing with this is that if a giant company wants to drive around, take pictures of everything, and then monetize those pictures (G's street view),…

So the roads are privately-owned and the owners can charge road users anything they want. Such a system is only in the interest of the road owners, since they have monopoly power. Everybody else loses.

Nobody but Google monetizing street view is losing, or even grumbling about any problems. Everyone in town has reciprocal easement to/from all the other landowners to use the strip of private property that looks like a road.

I am curious how anyone other than maybe Google street view is losing. Who do you think is losing? Who is there to charge, as the people using the roads live there and have the easement for use.

A huge positive is that I don't need a stupid license plate or even a license to travel around in a car or on my dirt bike. It's private property and the government rules only apply on government roads.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#536

Post by landemva »

dolmen wrote: post #476
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 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.

We have the town maintain everything through taxes. The town serves us. If they ever attempt to stop maintenance, we will cut the taxes and make a committee or HOA for that. This really does work well with private ownership.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#537

Post by shakow »

RandomLensman wrote: post #298
dcolkitt wrote: post #127

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…

For me that creates two big questions: (1) Do we really want high frequency markets in real estate? Is that socially and economically desirable? (2) Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia), can we hope that an NFT solution will have the same long-term compatibility?

> Land and property records so far have survived centuries (if not millennia)

Not really, no. Just taking the European example, there have been countless cases of litigious states of affair after e.g. invasions, revolutions, nationalizations, privatizations, etc.

E.g. a house in Romania post Ceaucescu fall, a noble family's domain in Russia in 1917 or France in 1790, a German estate in East Prussia in 1945, a property in Kosovo, etc.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#538

Post by ephbit »

lottin wrote: post #217
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, if you have complete faith and trust in conventional FIAT currencies and the systems they use to transact the use cases for crypto also seem far less compelling. As an example, the appeal of deflationary Bitcoin is much more salient to a citizen of Argentina than to a citizen of the USA (although recent inflation might make the appeal more obvious). Or on the even more extreme end, the citizen of Zimbabwe wo…

No one has complete faith in anything. The institutional system in liberal democracies is such that no single institution has all the power, precisely because we don't completely trust the government. The answer to dysfunctional governments is not get rid of the government. This is just dumb. We need well-functioning governments to enforce human rights, and law and order.

> The answer to dysfunctional governments is not get rid of the government.

As you're probably aware, central banks are usually intended to operate somewhat indepentently from governments. (One could argue to which degree it's actually the case, though.)

Which means that monetary systems are supposed to be somewhat indepentent from governments.

Assuming that Bitcoin were to be adopted as some kind of reserve currency (held by central banks) and also used by states and citizens, where exactly is the "getting rid of the government" happening there?

Exactly, nowhere.

> We need well-functioning governments to enforce human rights, and law and order.

Agree. But this doesn't rule out the possibility of indeed using Bitcoin.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#539

Post by ephbit »

usrn wrote: post #487
olalonde wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin critics: A deflationary money is bad because people will not spend it. Also Bitcoin critics: Bitcoin is not deflationary.

I'm not convinced deflation is worse than inflation anyway. With deflation people hoard currency and with inflation they hoard assets.

I'd go even further: inflation is setting the incentive for full throttle in the economy.

When you're seeing one extreme weather event after the other and a climate catastrophe is imminent, is it a reasonable choice to run the world economy at full throttle, considering that this economy is still based on ~ 80 % fossil energy?

It's like when your car is speeding towards a concrete wall ... and you keep your foot on the gas ... because you "want to make a really fast turn to the side to avoid the wall".

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#540

Post by ephbit »

raverbashing wrote: post #343
cinnamonaed wrote: post #325

It's always interesting to see opinions about crypto currencies by people that actually have no clue where it is about. Just wait until a few years from now when cash money will be phased out and replaced by CBDC's. That's when suddenly all those critics will wake up in horror and realize that money as we know it ceases to exist. What money is CBDC's than? Well, it's credits, social credits to be more precise, contro…

I like this. It's quaint in how they mix and match different dystopias without basis in reality except for what their cryptobros came up with (they can't even tell if 561 is prime or not) "Smart contracts" okay, the cryptobros can't even make smart contracts for bored monkey pictures without shooting themselves in the foot 10 times, why do you think a government will suddenly need one of those to do anything? Why do…

> Why do you think the government needs an immutable ledger powered by inneficient computations to keep track of transactions when current DBs work just fine?

They mentioned CBDCs, not blockchain.

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