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Introducing A16Z Crypto

a16zcrypto.com

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Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#221

Post by codebje »

Jonovono wrote: post #109
HenryTheHorse wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Instead of going through a lawyer, paying money, I make this a smart contract. What is a "smart contract" and how would this contract be aware of legal requirements?

Sure, I suppose it couldn't replace every payment like this from needing to go through a lawyer. I suppose if you wanted to send 10 billion over seas to someone in 20 years, you might want to seek some legal input. But say for the simplest case I just wanna set something up that sends some money to my child on his 18th birthday I could use a smart contract like: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ww0sr/need_…

You're placing a heck of a lot of trust in a digital system if you're putting a significant (as in "I would hate to lose this") sum of money into it in the expectation it'll still be there in the future.

Even if we put aside the problem of unstable valuation, forks, and potential total collapse of cryptocurrencies, you're going to face the challenge of keeping a private key secure for however many years you plan to escrow the money.

Compared to creating a trust account, this is insanely risky - you'd have to be convinced that the legal and banking systems were facing imminent catastrophic collapse to think that's better than what we've got.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#222

Post by optimuspaul »

seibelj wrote: post #202
Max_aaa wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this being solved by a block-chain? You still need to trust all the people in the production line (Farmer, Juicer, Seller and not to mention that transportation guys) that brought the bottle of juice to market to actually record things correctly into the used block-chain. The trust required in the data entry "Link/Step" basically results in the use of a block-chain to be pointless, as trust is already a requir…

The blockchain makes it extraordinarily difficult to tamper with post facto. As the ledger is distributed with multiple parties and each block is hashed, it’s exponentially difficult to change later. This means that no centralized entity can cook the books if a situation arises.

But that's the point blockchain is missing. You don't need to tamper with the data in the ledger because there is no way to put a carrot in it, how would you prove that the carrot in the juice is the same carrot picked? Technology isn't going to solve for that without some magical way to identity specific carrots (or beef, or whatever) that have been transformed into something else... or even just from another carrot in the next box. Blockchain is interesting but trust is still required in the system, and in many cases it is in fact blind trust.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#223

Post by dd36 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #206
dd36 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still have to trust the people doing the inspecting and certifying - or whatever. I'd be less worried about them altering information than them altering or substituting actual product.

That will always be the case, but given the ease of tracking all the transactions in the chain, you can find the point at which the product deviates. Of course, if every step on that chain has colluded, and produced false attestations, then there's no defense against that. But then, if all parties are coordinating then they've created their own supply chain independent of the one being tracked.

But, again, solutions to that already exist. Cheats to that system will be cheats to a blockchain system.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#224

Post by wpietri »

spunker540 wrote: post #204
wpietri wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, those aren't real problems either. Problems are experienced by humans. Humans willing to pay money for solutions. Actual problems are things like "I want to buy this candy bar," or "I want to fly to New York in August and I need to pay for the ticket." Those are problems Bitcoin, as "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" [1], was intended to solve. It didn't. As far as I can tell, the main problems bl…

How about “I want to buy a house without needing a bank as the middle man” or “I want to transact online without needing a credit card company intermediary taking fees” or “I want to cheaply send money to my family across the globe” or “I want to diversify with an asset that is truly global and not easily printable by some central government” or “my country’s currency is inflating like crazy and there arent enough us…

So all of these are basically Bitcoin. Bitcoin's been going for a decade with minimal use for any of those things. That suggests none of them are significant user needs for most people. (Or, at least, Bitcoin is a terrible match for any need that does exist.)

Some of those aren't real needs. E.g., "without needing a bank" is not a real problem. The "diversify with an asset that is truly global" is similarly an ideological statement, not a financial one.

The "without taking fees" thing is slightly more plausible, but in practice most people are happy to pay 2-3%, or have merchants pay that, and payment networks aren't free to run, so I'm not sure how plausible it is. Sending money to family can be solved much better with non-blockchain methods, which is why Bitcoin has approximately zero foothold there.

The "inflating like crazy" thing is similarly mostly a fantasy. How many countries are falling apart financially but where rule of law, power service, and internet service are stable enough to run blockchain nodes? How much better would a barely-accessible digital currency be than scarce USD? Why not just buy some directly useful inflation hedge, like medicine or canned goods?

Even if it were good for the "financial collapse" use case, that doesn't mean much in the rest of the world. The US dollar and the Euro are useful in unstable financial environments because they have value elsewhere. But the reverse isn't true; nobody in the US holds USD because it's the black market currency of choice in Caracas. So that use case isn't anything to build a real system on.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#225

Post by strainer »

eblanshey wrote: post #86

> In an era in which the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of large tech incumbents, it’s more important than ever to create the right economic conditions for developers, creators, and entrepreneurs. I'm happy to see that people are taking decentralization seriously. Blockchain has its place as a public ledger, but as everyone knows, scaling it has issues. Recently, MaidSafe released a new whitepaper f…

I've not read the paper but am impressed by their presentation and the experience and community which they have already created around their 'SafeNet' browser. I'm inclined to believe their mathematical analysis of their own system is sound. They say its based on a system with proven O(n^2) messages requirement, with an elaboration reducing message requirement to a more scalable O(n log n)

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#226

Post by dd36 »

plorkyeran wrote: post #189
dd36 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. I still don’t follow how blockchain solves current problems. If the problem in your country is a lack of good record keeping, that’s not a technological problem. It’s a political problem. Cheap solutions have existed for centuries. The real question is why haven’t they been adopted? Why would those in power allow blockchain to be adopted but not existing technologies?

In most cases it seems that the existing technologies have been adopted and the people advocating for blockchain-based solutions just aren't aware that it's a solved problem.

I completely agree. It's naiveté. Technically, my local county recorder's office is a blockchain that has existed for centuries. It's cheap, reliable, correctable, enforceable, etc. It has all of the features without the downside.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#227

Post by workinthehead »

slg wrote: post #209
workinthehead wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect. In your original comment you referred to "a positive net result", which the utilitarian will always prefer by definition. Perhaps you are confusing utility with efficiency?

>which the utilitarian will always prefer by definition That is the heart of our confusion here. You are comparing it to a neutral state. Yes, a utilitarian would prefer any positive outcome to that. However, I was implying that there was another path that would have resulted in an even more positive result but through inefficiency we were left with a lesser but still positive result. That waste of resources like tim…

> I was implying that there was another path that would have resulted in an even more positive result

Ah, the old "I intended the exact opposite of what I said" ploy.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#228

Post by ehrtt »

tomerv wrote: post #122
root_axis wrote: post #48

More breathless fawning rhetoric and nebulous jargon, but I guess the target audience is blockchain enthusiasts so that makes sense. At the end of the day it's their money, so what I do I care? I find it frustrating when I hear comparisons of the blockchain to internet and cellphone communication platforms. The potential use cases for the internet and cellphones were immediately obvious (instant remote communication)…

Is there any logic whatsoever in talking about the intersection of AI and crypto (or AI and blockchain)? It seems to me that this intersection is very close to the empty set.

It's for when machines will need to pay other machines.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#229

Post by hitekker »

TrevorAustin wrote: post #70

Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…

>Blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate.

Unless I'm being extra dense today, this is the un-clearest answer I've read yet.

The 'may' qualifier also does not inspire confidence.

Re: Introducing A16Z Crypto

#230

Post by na85 »

oscargrouch wrote: post #216
madeofpalk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is solvable without blockchain though. Supply chain tracking already happens at the moment without Blockchain.

The blockchain solves the problem of trust. Without the blockchain, you need to trust some monopolistic middle-man that became monopolistic because he was the winner in the 'race of acquiring trust' from its consumers. With a blockchain to track phisical goods, any third-party can consult or print a new transaction into the blockchain, it we wont need to deposit our faith in a company or a government. We managed to s…

Blockchain solves nothing.

How do I indelibly serialize my carrots? What stops me from eating the carrots I said I sent to the juice dude, and then just sending him some carrots I picked up from Loblaws?

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