Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Slowest and least efficient.. you realize some blockchains update in seconds? Imagine if when you pushed the “buy now” button on Amazon it took seconds for the transaction to complete. You’d stop using Amazon.
It already does take seconds. Sometimes even minutes or hours. When you click "buy now", Amazon optimistically pretends the order completed instantly, and queues a backend job to charge your card. If your card is declined, you get an email some time later.
Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
181–190 of 295 posts
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#182The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that ideal world is achievable with straitjackets of technical solutions that eliminate trust. Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. However, blockchain-adjacent initiative…
Why do people always misunderstand "trustless"?
Being ABLE to trust somebody is a good thing. Being REQUIRED to trust somebody is a problem.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#183The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that ideal world is achievable with straitjackets of technical solutions that eliminate trust. Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. However, blockchain-adjacent initiative…
Even without considering the social benefits of trust, from an economic perspective, trust is often enormously, ridiculously efficient compared to distrust. If I need to borrow my neighbor's weed whacker, I don't need to determine its value (plus interest and opportunity cost) and write up a contract and register collateral on the world's slowest and least efficient database, I can just say, hey, mind if I borrow thi…
The key to building trust online is to recreate some of these aspects. You should have an identity in the community that you belong to and you should own assets under that identity so you can’t easily abandon it and start somewhere else with your ill gotten gains. Communication amongst members of the community should be easy and common. There should even be shared ownership of community assets and the community should provide services to its members.
I imagine this looking something like a discord server combined with some of the hosting features of FB like image sharing, posts, groups, etc. You’d also need a built in token that could be used within the community but also exchanged on a broader network of federated communities.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I dream of a argument recogniser that just maps out an argument on an argument map and hashes it out more or less like you just did. With the goal of not endless rehashing of the same iteration like some stuck genetic algo in a local optima, but rather moving forward as some kind of warm start.
I made an argument and asked questions at the end, leaving it for someone objecting to provide a constructive answer.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corruption is probably a bad description. It is more like what happened to Tulips during Tulip Mania, or Beanie Babies during that bubble. Beanie Babies are not "corrupted". They are "associated" with a bubble. Crypto as a whole is becoming increasingly associated with zero sum scams like Ponzi/MLMs. And it is partially due to the fee extraction entities that are making a profit of off the "investor's" cash.
I mean Mt Gox was almost a decade ago. Bad people try to do bad things with other peoples money. That's the value in bitcoin though. You dont need to use these exchanges. If you're smart, you dont trust large institutions of any kind with your money.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#186The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that ideal world is achievable with straitjackets of technical solutions that eliminate trust. Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. However, blockchain-adjacent initiative…
Even without considering the social benefits of trust, from an economic perspective, trust is often enormously, ridiculously efficient compared to distrust. If I need to borrow my neighbor's weed whacker, I don't need to determine its value (plus interest and opportunity cost) and write up a contract and register collateral on the world's slowest and least efficient database, I can just say, hey, mind if I borrow thi…
In many countries, the richest companies operate unethically, with impunity because the legal system is in the pocket of a corrupt few in power. In such countries trust in institutions is nonexistent. In developed economies, regulatory capture still leads to inequities and gross inefficiencies.
Today on the internet, reviews and product search results can no longer be trusted. For a very long while, buying from a large class of products on Amazon was a gamble. A breakdown in reputation and curation.
Computing environments were originally high trust, a property they could not retain at scale. Encryption, https everywhere, anti-ad tracking, secure VMs, gated app stores, "Don't trust the client" designs, onion routers, anti binary blobs are technologies and principles which reduce the need for trust. Technologies like DRM, copy protection rootkits and Trusted Computing are corporations communicating their lack of trust in humans inhumanly.
There's always some minimal amount of trust necessary. The optimal minimum generally decreases with scale. Hawala might seem an exception but closer inspection shows it depends on shared belief systems, local interactions on reputation networks and honor; memes which reduce trust burden at scale.
I'd also argue bitcoin isn't about trust but about issues which arise with open permissions and no centralized enforcement mechanism. Its throughput issues addressed by "layer 2" solutions, as decentralized credit networks (from a dispute and authority perspective), actually have fair overlap with honor based informal money transfer systems but without the centuries to have ironed out issues.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#187Why is the techno-libertarian world so overwhelmingly obsessed with extreme individualism? We are social creatures. We sacrifice individual needs because we gain massive security and social value in return. We need a balance of the various ideologies, and not the extremism of any one ideology. Fifty years of narcissistic, anti-social, "Leave me the hell alone" libertarianism is at the heart of the culture-rot collaps…
That's pretty much by definition. So-called "libertarian" and neoliberal posit that individuals are greedy yet emotionless rational actors.
Unsurprisingly, individuals with narcissistic tendencies flock to that.
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> being able to establish identity at all is still a major problem in many places Are you sure? Where? And why would the tried and tested methods for establishing identity not work in those places?
There is a certain company that may or may not be bought by $43 billion, depending on its ability to determine how many of its users are actual humans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#189The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that ideal world is achievable with straitjackets of technical solutions that eliminate trust. Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. However, blockchain-adjacent initiative…
You will not find trust _in people_ anywhere in modern society.
Banks certify transactions, governments certify identity. We can go on and on here. Whole swathes of law around this topic too lol (see: fraud).
Crypto isn't about not trusting people, it's about not needing to trust strangers.
Some of them are scams, ironically, but when there's money involved... well it's pretty stupid to _just_ trust people.
Unless I've missed something?
Re: Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
You hit the nail on the head with this comment. And not only is trust a feature, it’s a requirement for society. It’s a deep part of human nature to trust, and trust can’t be removed from how people manage to function in groups.
The problem is scale. If society only had 400 people, the 390 people that were not scammers could remove the 10 people who are scammers from their economic system manually. If you create a online store, one million strangers could connect to it. You need a way to understand who is a scammer in that situation.