361–370 of 578 posts
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Why didn't Citi reverse this wire? https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...
The article explains why.
If this was done by check, Citi could have simply cancelled the check.
I did not see any real pro crypto argument in this text. Nothing is really proven in practice and everything is in ideas. Meanwhile scammers are taking money from enthusiasts and existing blockchains are burning up a huge amount of energy.
I defense of those existing blockchains: the annual worldwide energy usage of blockchain technology is roughly equal to the annual US energy waste from machines plugged in while in standby mode. It is also significantly lower than the annual worldwide usage of Christmas lights, and wash dryers.
“Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina'”
Yes, Blockchains inherently get their robustness from an incredibly wasteful algorithm. No it's not a problem they're inefficient because we're actually just going to do everything off-chain. No, it's not a contradiction for my defence of cryptocurrencies to advocate for not using them.
Ok, so I've been a bit snarky here, but the core of what I want to say is this: It is very difficult to read about the compromises made to achieve practical uses of crypto and still have the view that there's any of the original value proposition left.
I think the best cryptocurrency defence is just "We've got a lot of smart people trying new things and maybe something of value will end up being created". That's about as compelling as you can get.
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> DNS requires proof of identity and a mechanism for settling disputes Hah. Like giving Meta the ability to create legal disputes against long-standing companies that happen to share its new name. This is a system that rewards those with the funds to pay the legal fees, or settle disputes outside of court with large lump sums. Not all users want a system where Meta can take a domain you own simply because they now ha…
> Not all users want a system where Meta can take a domain you own simply because they now have a trademark that loosely correlates with it. Agreed, yet the government won't care and will make sure enforcement happens anyway. If your NFT based domain system is used by a dozen hardcore nerds, then nobody will care, sure. But if it somehow managed to overtake DNS and become the de-facto standard, the government would j…
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> And there are theoretical solutions to this as well; projects like Bright-ID are working on proof-of-identity / proof-of-humanity.. maybe we'll see a proof-of-stake blockchain with governance tied to identity in the future? This is what I'm hoping for. As soon as this proves viable, this opens up the door for things like automated international UBI.
It probably is not solved without a central authority that distributes and revoked identity tokens, like we have with passports. Decentralized proof of personhood is a pipe dream.
I did not see any real pro crypto argument in this text. Nothing is really proven in practice and everything is in ideas. Meanwhile scammers are taking money from enthusiasts and existing blockchains are burning up a huge amount of energy.
I defense of those existing blockchains: the annual worldwide energy usage of blockchain technology is roughly equal to the annual US energy waste from machines plugged in while in standby mode. It is also significantly lower than the annual worldwide usage of Christmas lights, and wash dryers.
"transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess" I think this is arguing th…
Transaction irreversability is the whole point of the "peer to peer electronic cash system": "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments... cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions ... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two…
Very small transactions happen on the internet all the time. Services like venmo allow for very small casual transactions all the time. And there is no cost for the transaction.
Sure venmo is trusted third party and the transaction is reversible, but it's still significantly easier and cheaper than bitcoin. Or any other other coin for that matter.
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…
Replace “crypto” with “GPL” and the comment still makes sense. And, at the same time, still makes no sense.
Therefore, an un-debaseable, trustless and liquid asset is crucial in making the powers-that-be accountable for their actions.
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> running a full node for a proof-of-stake blockchain Are there any extant proof-of-stake blockchains that achieve the security guarantees necessary to make a currency viable? Last I heard proof-of-stake was still a hypothetical idea, not something that someone had actually managed to make a working currency with, and that all of the cryptocurrencies in common use were still using proof-of-work (which is of course mu…
Proof-of-stake is possible, but requires an honest majority of stakers continuously online. If you want to eliminate Sybil attacks in PoS, there is no way of externally validating which branch of a split chain is legitimate. Each of them has a majority of stake backing it. As for PoW however, you can just look at the total work proven.
Which is itself possible by penalizing stake pools that go offline, thus motivating them to maximize uptime. That's how Ouroboros-based chains (Cardano, Polkadot) do it (among other mitigations against various attacks).
> If you want to eliminate Sybil attacks in PoS, there is no way of externally validating which branch of a split chain is legitimate. Each of them has a majority of stake backing it.
Which is why Ouroboros-based chains consider the "pledged stake" (put simply: an upfront collateral) of each pool when selecting one to control the next block and receive the corresponding rewards. This has its own implications (in particular, the pledge needs to be high enough to deter would-be Sybil attackers but not so high that it's unattainable to honest pool operators), but it seems to be effective in practice.
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And it is fine to build systems with trusted parties on top of a permissionless network. The article cites USDC which does this, it is one of many applications users can choose to transact with. Attempting to bake reversibility into the protocol would lead to a tightly permissioned system with only a few trusted authorities. A loose analogy might be the internet, which aims to be a decentralized global protocol that…
I'm not an expert but I think this is what the original letter authors objected to. If you build these mechanisms on top of a blockchain which is inherently baked in stone, then there is no point in having the blockchain be so strict. In other words, if you allow an organisation to change things like refund you, then they might as well just manage their own leger like they do at the minute.
I can look at the USDC contracts and see that privileged users have the ability to freeze the USDC in my account.
I can look at the DAI contracts and see that they do not.
Good luck getting visibility into the back-end processes of web2 applications. Even if they publish the source on github, there's no way to verify what they're running