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In defense of cryptocurrency

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#231

Post by benreesman »

olalonde wrote: post #206

Great article but let's get real, a great deal of the cryptocurrency criticism is rationalization. HN recently revealed the true motivation behind much of it[0]: > It's less that I'm glad the market is crashing, and more that I'm glad that the insufferable crypto bros are finally getting a punch to the mouth. Seriously, these people are the worst. Your average "crypto investor" has no skills, no mathematical foundati…

Yeah. It used to be Google RSUs, then it was all high-paying software jobs doing LeetCode interviews, now it’s cyber money.

People on here just fucking hate other people making money.

That’s not to say that Google is necessarily ethical, or LeetCode interviews are necessarily good, or that cyber money is necessarily going to work out. Maybe, maybe not on all above.

But that’s not why people scream on here about these things.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#232

Post by Geee »

npad wrote: post #186

I was a crypto skeptic for many years. If you look at crypto purely from an engineering lens, you'll always find it wanting. What I didn't understand was that crypto is as much of an economic and political project, as it is an engineering project. If you think decentralisation and trustlessness are valuable, you should think crypto is important. If you don't care for decentralisation then being negative on crypto is…

I think this is very close to the truth. Most tech people, like the author of the article, look Bitcoin only from technological perspective. This completely misses the point, because Bitcoin is worse on many purely technical metrics compared to centralized currencies. The benefits are economical and societal, and they are not very easily understood. This misunderstanding leads to both "anti-crypto" and altcoins that are supposedly better than Bitcoin.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#233

Post by codebje »

yata69420 wrote: post #208
Nursie wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect we have different governments. I don't see mine doing anything remotely like that. Then why are they going to bring in a blockchain solution? It's got the exact same problem there as any other software solution would. That's my point here, making it a blockchain (or a database!) doesn't magically solve the root cause, it's just an implementation detail. If it even is a problem (a lot of other posters don'…

> Now instead of directly transacting at the very low-tech county property registrar 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. > it's the absolute ton of bureaucracy and paper-shuffling that takes several weeks Of course, but so much of that bureaucracy is about being risk-adverse. I r…

What happens when someone loses the key to their house NFT?

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#234

Post by yellowapple »

evouga wrote: post #152

This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…

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 disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; that the same applies to an electronic equivalent ain't the fatal flaw that critics seem to regularly insist without real basis. Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it (and/or giving it to others who will do so, be it voluntarily through some shady dealmaking or involuntarily through card skimmers and database breaches and what have you).

> interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction

You wouldn't need a central authority for this. Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. 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).

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#235

Post by invasivemullet »

egeozcan wrote: post #230

I really don't want to be a downer but all I read in pro cryptocurrency posts are: It's still new! It needs time! You need to follow the latest developments! It has a lot of potential! It's time already that someone shows some of that potential and it better not be something like NFTs!

[dead]

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#236

Post by lottin »

forum_ghost wrote: post #128
pavlov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, L2 systems aren't on a blockchain at all, so do they even count? If we get to cherry-pick from whatever money transfer systems exist, it's worth remembering that bank transfers within the Eurozone area are free and practically immediate. What crypto can beat that? Clearly you don't need cryptocurrency to deliver a service that's ideal for consumers, as regulation has achieved it in Europe.

Bitcoin solves the problem of frozen fx reserves and seized assets. It's a neutral store of value. the TAM is 400+ trillion. Payments are low margin, low value business. Often even subsidized by the systemic banks. Do you really think it costs zero to secure the entire GDP, and the entire wealth, of an entire economy? zero cost SEPA transactions don't secure the EU economy. The US military and their nuclear weapons d…

A virtual token is literally useless. It's only worth something, so far as it can be traded for actual goods, so the availability of "secured" goods is quite essential as far as the value of cryptographic tokens go.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#237

Post by hajhatten »

WJW wrote: post #24
latchkey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think Mastercard and Visa fees are too high, fees are higher on Bitcoin. Source for this misinformation? https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... Remember that for bitcoin value transaction size is not a factor in the transaction fee. So if you want to transmit a billion dollars worth of bitcoin around the world, it is the same exact fee. Unlike credit card transactions, which are a pe…

It's all good and well that bitcoin is cheaper than credit cards for billion dollar transactions, but that is not really important for all of us non-billionaires. For smaller amounts, the fixed cost of a bitcoin transaction can make it a significant amount of the total. L2 networks would be nice, but "work is being done" for years now so let's wait to see if they ever get that working properly before touting possible…

> but that is not really important for all of us non-billionaires. For smaller amounts, the fixed cost of a bitcoin transaction can make it a significant amount of the total. L2 networks would be nice, but "work is being done" for years now so let's wait to see if they ever get that working

You gotta get up to speed with these things then. A lot has been happening the past year.

Lightning in it self is used all over the world by small vendors in developing and western countries. And it's a mix of using a service provider for using this (usually in the west) to self custodian where they cannot motivate the cost.

It was one of the big things needed before El Salvador's legal tender roll out.

I can give you more examples if you want.

https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769...

https://twitter.com/CoinCornerMolly/status/15323143997629480...

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#238

Post by bradwood »

Quekid5 wrote: post #204
lbwtaylor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock It's interesting, both have registries, so why is one harder? Is it because the registry is better? No, it's because real property transactions are more complex: - What condition will the property be delivered in and when? - What happens if the condition is not as specified? - what personal property is included in…

Exactly. Microsoft stock is basically fungible whereas houses and most other real-world property very much are not.

But for houses, you could use an NFT to represent digital ownership of the underlying physical asset.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#239

Post by Termitiono »

beambot wrote: post #189
evouga wrote: post #152

This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…

How do you prove that no one manually added or edited database rows? How do you store the transaction logs & verify their accuracy & authenticity? By the time you build a system with historical "proofs" with enough replication, you'll basically have invented a Blockchain with more complexity.

Just that we already do that successful while Blockchain now needs miners.

Re: In defense of cryptocurrency

#240

Post by yellowapple »

Quekid5 wrote: post #209
beambot wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you prove that no one manually added or edited database rows? How do you store the transaction logs & verify their accuracy & authenticity? By the time you build a system with historical "proofs" with enough replication, you'll basically have invented a Blockchain with more complexity.

Write-once physical storage?

I'm sure it's theoretically possible to write a database that only allows reads/inserts and that runs off a CD-R burner, but it's weird that I haven't seen that in the wild. Seems like something that should be doable with SQLite's VFS support (and in fact I'm pretty sure the existing demo VFS for read-only support gets you most of the way there).

In any case, "write-once" media can still be rewritten; the same lasers that etch data into a CD-R can do so to destroy the same data. You're going to want redundancy/backups and you're going to want each new row in the table to cryptographically reference the previous (such that any data destruction invalidates all subsequent rows) - by which point you've reinvented most of what constitutes a blockchain anyway.

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