401–410 of 578 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to redesign Fork to prevent user-eyeball interaction.
Given that the actual rate of fork to eyeball is very low, I think the current design is fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If 99% of users stuck their fork in their eyeball, it wouldn't mean that a Fork is a bad design or a bad implement Yes it would.
Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to redesign Fork to prevent user-eyeball interaction.
There is a chance (in my estimate, negligible) that my anecdote is an extreme outlier, but I still dare state with confidence that most forks today are designed in a way that less than 99% of users end up sticking them in their eyeballs.
People using forks for the unconventional and usually unintended purpose of impaling their eyes* are a tiny minority of fork users and thus changing fork designs to encourage the intended method of use is not considered a high priority. Most people are naturally disinclined to pierce themselves, particularly in such a delicate part of their face, and as such the design of a typical fork with its pointy tines directs users to avoid this particular usage mistake.
The thesis stated above in the thread was, that cryptocurrencies are very commonly used in a way that defeats their intended purpose of decentralization. It seems reasonable to assume there is a flaw in contemporary cryptocurrency implementations that encourages this kind of use, or at the very least, doesn't discourage it very strongly.
* Excluding specialized forks for non-mainstream audiences such as very young children
Show me.
I think an interesting feature of defences of cryptocurencies is that they are similar in their composition as a block chain. In a block chain you have a cryptographically secure summary of the previous block in your current block - but you don't actually know what's in that previous block. Similarly in the arguments defending cryptocurrencies at the top of the article you have the description of the advantages of cr…
> and still have the view that there's any of the original value proposition left. While not usable as currency, cryptocurrency is still an asset crucial for holding government accountable for its spending. Government can dilute fiat currency, but not Bitcoin for instance.
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>>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…
Let's also not forget the whole deal with financing . When you buy a house, for $1 million or $50,000, the normal case being described in yours and the parent post is that you are buying a house on margin while using the house itself as collateral for the loan. If you show up at a house that is for sale and ready to be sold with a million dollars in cash -- well, a million dollars in easily-authenticated cash equival…
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…
Let's also not forget the whole deal with financing . When you buy a house, for $1 million or $50,000, the normal case being described in yours and the parent post is that you are buying a house on margin while using the house itself as collateral for the loan. If you show up at a house that is for sale and ready to be sold with a million dollars in cash -- well, a million dollars in easily-authenticated cash equival…
Over there, buying a house without taking out a mortgage does not count as "weird": it's not terribly common, but happens often enough to not be considered weird. After all, if you have 100% of the house price on hands, there is not much reason to take a mortgage with 20% down payment and then immediately closing the rest of 80%, is there?
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But we’ve already established that we can do all that without the energy costs if we end up needing a trusted authority anyway. There’s zero need for proof of work if you’re going to trust a central authority to validate the transaction history. What’s the point of such an extremely costly base layer?
I've yet to see a convincing argument why we end up with a trusted authority. Can you point me to which incentive would cause this?
Per an ancestor comment you replied to:
> Reversibility is one example of a design requirement that undoes the claimed advantages of permissionless blockchains that are meant to justify their inherent downsides.
If we need reversibility on a permissionless blockchain, why have a blockchain? A postgres database would do fine. You could even broadcast the write-ahead log to allow any party to verify that history isn’t silently rewritten.
You even said it yourself:
> Do you not want to transact on the base layer because of lack of reversibility or fees? Move to a higher layer solution that sacrifices some characteristic of Bitcoin to enable something new.
If we’ve established that reversibility is a table stakes requirement for a financial system, the thing you’re “sacrificing” is the very thing that makes PoW essential. Since PoW is planet-melting, can’t we just use a database instead?
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>It is now used primarily for large transactions No it's not. It's now used primarily as a vehicle for speculation.
You probably should look at different numbers than just the dollar price. Number of nodes is rising, number of wallets is rising, number of hash-power is rising. Also, please look into the "Lightning Network". It's the second layer on top of Bitcoin and that's where the whole ecosystem scales (in terms of numbers of transactions per second). Cheap, scalable and fast transactions. Adoption is happening in many places.
I check LN every 6 months or so and situation is not looking so great.
As it was with Bitcoin itself in early 2010s the shops advertising crypto acceptance are doing it mostly for publicity/ideological reasons or actually have stopped existing.
So I check: https://acceptlightning.com/map.html
Random selection:
* http://paraeasy.ch/joomla/ - Adobe Flash Player not supported ...
* https://www.kaeserei-lustnau.ch - unclear if the shop actually takes any payments
* https://shop.energy-kitchen.ch/#/shop - application not taking requests at this endpoint
* http://www.room77.de/ - SMTP-packets to port 25 (info[at]room77.de) may very likely get a response just as much as electrons sent to our telephoney landline-device (+49.30.31102260). Single static page.
* https://acceptlightning.com/rummels-acoustics.com - standard Bootstrap page - page not found
Finally I find - https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/graphs This looks like a serious operation - and lighting network is used quite a bit for smaller transactions.
Unfortunately, this is something that would be of interest only to someone who already owns BTC or some other crypto.
If you are Joe Sixpack you have very little reason to pay with crypto because it will be more expensive than paying with Visa/MC/Paypal etc.
So where are the successful use cases that utilize Lighting Network?
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.
These facts don't provide a defense of one or the other as "not that bad"; these give us multiple opportunities to make small but meaningful reductions in waste with relatively little impact on the quality of life of the world at large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument made was that it's not about the technology itself but the transaction rules. If money are stolen from banks in a specific way (withdrawn into prepaid cards), banks will not and cannot reverse these transactions. Banks do have some rules like chargeback however to reverse legitimate transactions or delayed transactions. The same rules can be converted into Smart Contracts which governs the transaction of…
The problem that I see here, is that with the "code is law" approach if there's a bug in the smart contract that is supposed to protect you then you're screwed without recourse. In a traditional system, if there is a bug in your bank's software that makes you loose money, you can ask the bank to give you the money back. If they refuse, you can take them to court. If instead the smart contract has a bug, there's no on…
Which like the article argues, is not something that can be solved by any ledger, distributed or not. Even if banks reverses records, they don't change the data which is already on the database/record, instead they just issue a new transaction from the backend or withdrawing it from a legit reserve that they own. In any case, no reversing was done.
What if instead of taking the bank to the court, we have something in place for it that runs based on certain "if statements" or "switch case". Of course, is not as easy as it sounds, we need conditions that are robust enough and not vulnerable to abusers. It's a very complicated problem to solve.