The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy • Hacker News Board

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#341

Post by cortesoft » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #304

cortesoft wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dismissal of the problem with forks is missing a big danger to users. You say that market forces will control it, and people should just use what works best for them. The problem is that you might guess wrong; you might look at the two forks, make your best guess as to which side is going to win out via the network effect, and put your money there. If you are wrong, and your fork dies out, there goes all your mo…

Forks tend not to die out. See ethereum classic. As long as people are using the currency that you use, your currency will have value. Also, if your currency is losing traction, the value will decrease gradually, not evaporate to zero all at once. Well, highly speculative currencies can tumble dramatically, but as we've seen with Bitcoin, as the legitimate use cases grow, so to does the price stability.

The idea that a currency will never decrease at such a rapid rate is a bit naive. There is nothing so fundamentally different from bitcoin that it is immune to panics and a 'bank run'. If a panic starts, and people are trying to pull their money out, you could have the same effect as a bank run, as the transaction rate becomes higher and higher (the digital equivalent of a line at the bank).

Bitcoin may or may not stay stable, but you can't know that any more than you can know it about any other currency, with the additional caveat that there is no central authority with a track record to base your decision on.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#342

Post by rosser » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

anothercomment wrote: post #336

rosser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the predatory complexities found in some shady securities are a very prudent way of "excusing" the technical complexities and consequences of BTC, or any other cryptocurrency. "Not as bad as" is broadly fallacious, anyway.

OK then, explain to me: what is money?

I'm probably not the person to ask, because my "succinct to the point of sounding flippant, but offered completely honestly" answer is: a profoundly destructive social fiction whose time is well past. The notion and role of a medium of exchange are things on which I have ... divergent views.

It's a human invention we have collectively chosen to value more than the thing it was presumably created to serve — you know, "humanity". Any tool that becomes more important than the lives and well-being of the folks that tool was invented to benefit (that is: all of us [0]), I'd submit, needs some serious critical re-examination.

I'm not holding my breath on that happening any time soon, though.

Your question is a complete non-sequitur, anyway. It's entirely possible to create systems and stores of value that aren't as abusable, abusive, exploitable, exploited, and just generally bad (or at least less good) for the overwhelming majority of the monkeys involved in its circulation and use, as compared to "money".

[0] If your counter is that it doesn't have to serve all of us, then I'd say it was the wrong tool out the gate.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#343

Post by cnnsucks » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #306

cnnsucks wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but it doesn't salvage your argument. Your accounting fiction isn't a 'service' for the purposes of GDP.

Yes it is. It's a pretty common criticism of GDP. The other comment had it right though - taxes would kill this scheme.

"It's a pretty common criticism of GDP."

...with no more veracity than your hypothetical. You don't understand what GDP measures. You've allowed yourself to believe that the economists involved are naive. You are correct, however, that this sort of bad thinking is common. Very common.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#344

Post by hectorr510 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #136

moduspol wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch this video [1] of Bill Gates explaining the value of the Internet to David Letterman, where he's just not getting it at all. Bill's telling him the things it can do relative to David's interests, but he just sees those as problems that don't really exist because they've already been solved. It took decades before the Internet was useful to "the masses." I don't think there's some conspiracy among VCs, but I do…

I tire of the internet comparison. You're drawing a surface-level comparison between the greatest communication and economic innovation in human history and blockchain software, because people were skeptical of both. And? That doesn't prove anything except that people were skeptical of both; nothing in that comparison speaks to the underlying nature of either things being compared. They are not the same.

I see blockchain as an evolutionary step for computing and the internet.

The internet is great because it grants the ability to communicate worldwide at minimal cost, to distribute software at minimal cost, and to replicate information at zero cost.

While copying is great for knowledge, it's problematic for value. Blockchain solves this, now you can share applications and communicate globally with objects of value. That's it.

I don't know if any of the current implementations will survive. I could see blockchain only running a small subset of online activity relating to finance, insurance, and law. I could also see it rendering our current conception of the internet sector as the media/advertising niche, the way cable changed broadcast TV forever.

Mostly I think the tech is really cool. So I'm going to keep messing with it. But I appreciate the skepticism, it means there's work to do.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#345

Post by criddell » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 6:37 PM UTC

cnnsucks wrote: post #343

criddell wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. It's a pretty common criticism of GDP. The other comment had it right though - taxes would kill this scheme.

"It's a pretty common criticism of GDP." ...with no more veracity than your hypothetical. You don't understand what GDP measures. You've allowed yourself to believe that the economists involved are naive. You are correct, however, that this sort of bad thinking is common. Very common.

If I find a shiny rock and sell it to you for $100 and you find a fossil and sell it to me for $100, that's $200 added to the GDP. If we trade rather than pay each other, then it's $0 added to GDP. The same goes for services. If I mow your lawn, paint your house, hypnotize you to quit smoking, or sing you a song - all of those things (are included in GDP.

When you pay for entertainment it's 100% included in GDP the same way as when you pay for somebody to inspect your car.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

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Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #265

erikpukinskis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the revolution? To me, the revolution is the realization that certain softwares don't need to be built, merely described and they will bring certain things into being. If Satoshi hadn't built Bitcoin, he had simply released the paper, I think Bitcoin would still exist today. That's interesting. I don't think the same is true, if, for example Mark Zuckerberg had just described Facebook rather than writing i…

I can almost guarantee you it wouldn't be built. I think you overestimate the value of ideas without concrete implementations. Without Satoshi actually building it, the barrier for his idea being seen as success would be to build the entire system. Much easier to just mock it and ignore it. With it being built, all someone has to do to test the system is do a little mining or send a transaction.

Widespread mockery and ignoring is fine. It would only take one person who can code and thinks the contract makes sense for it to get implemented.

Its your assertion that no such person would have emerged between 2008 and now, if Satoshi hadn't written the reference implementation in 2009? What is your reason for believing that?

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#347

Post by anothercomment » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

zilchers wrote: post #252

anothercomment wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and it is a reason why I am holding back on Etherium so far. I don't know if they have a proposed solution to that, tbh, but it seems pretty impossible to solve. Although, to be fair, "classic" contracts also need that someone to enforce them. Maybe Etherium & the likes only replace one aspect of it, not the whole process. If company X publicly announces that they'll adhere to a certain contract in the blockc…

Haha, my issue with Ethereum has always been that, as a software engineer, I know it's impossible to write bug free code. It's a great idea to have a code driven contract utopia, but our first experiment with that model proved we still need human intervention. If it were that simple, we would just have hyper formalized real world contracts (in an almost mathematical notation) - but that obviously never happened. Fran…

True, I worry about that, too. And in case of the DAO, that issue hit home big time.

There are efforts under way to create contracts with formal verification, but I remain a bit skeptic. It is difficult to write complex software that way afaik.

On the other hand, a lot of contracts are maybe not very complex. I thought about a bank account recently (receive and send money). That could perhaps be done in 100 lines of code? (I don't know the programming language yet, but their basic token creation example seems to be short, and it is kind of like a bank account). That seems impressive compared to the effort banks probably spend on IT.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#348

Post by anothercomment » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:36 PM UTC

rosser wrote: post #342

anothercomment wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK then, explain to me: what is money?

I'm probably not the person to ask, because my "succinct to the point of sounding flippant, but offered completely honestly" answer is: a profoundly destructive social fiction whose time is well past. The notion and role of a medium of exchange are things on which I have ... divergent views. It's a human invention we have collectively chosen to value more than the thing it was presumably created to serve — you know,…

I just meant to illustrate that money is actually quite complicated, even though we use it daily without giving it much thought.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#349

Post by rosser » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:01 PM UTC

anothercomment wrote: post #348

rosser wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably not the person to ask, because my "succinct to the point of sounding flippant, but offered completely honestly" answer is: a profoundly destructive social fiction whose time is well past. The notion and role of a medium of exchange are things on which I have ... divergent views. It's a human invention we have collectively chosen to value more than the thing it was presumably created to serve — you know,…

I just meant to illustrate that money is actually quite complicated, even though we use it daily without giving it much thought.

And my original response merely suggested that using the ethically compromised complexity deliberately introduced into one of the more obscure forms of "money" we have to justify the technical complexities and their attendant consequences in yet another is at best fallacious.

That is: "But CDOs" isn't materially responsive to "BTC is complicated."

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#350

Post by munchbunny » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #98

If I had a Bitcoin for every skeptic that posts a blog on why it can't work... This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things and saw potential where no one else did, I just don't see the love for the potential of smart contracts, DApps, etc. And how this is just the begin…

My skepticism is not for Bitcoin itself, but blockchain in general. And not blockchain by itself, but actually the marketing hype that blockchain based startups are putting out.

Blockchain is a cool algorithm that can be useful if the situation calls for it. Ethereum is a cool idea that I'm skeptical of, but hey, that's why they're doing it and I'm not. I have my own ongoing bets. But I'm seeing much more of the marketing department using "blockchain" as a catchphrase to turn heads. Specifically the heads that don't actually understand what blockchains are.