51–60 of 60 posts
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When you hand someone cash you can get the cash back. You know the person you can chase them down.
No, you can't necessarily get it back. It's like sending cash internationally, but you sent it to the wrong address and now you don't know who the fuck has it.
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(2) the transactions are irreversible, and the software is clearly doing that well. The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.
Yes, they do. That is a feature, not a bug. It gives digital transactions the same properties as cash. When you hand over $50K in cash to someone, you better make sure you trust that someone. When you send $50K in crypto to an address, you better make sure you trust that address. People have to learn new habits and precautions with crypto. With great power comes great responsibility. Maybe the UI for wallets should d…
They want transactions where they pay someone, and that person doesn't send the goods they can reverse the charge.
They want to be able to correct erroneous or fraudulent transfers.
These are all things that the normal financial system does well, and crypto systems absolutely cannot.
You cannot force someone to return a crypto currency transfer. No matter what the case: error, fraud, or theft. Even the latter is feasible within the regular financial system.
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Its an active research area, there are proposals like helios https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting which check some of the boxes but aren't perfect . I'm sure cryptographers would love to come up with a fully scalable, trustless, verifiable, anonomous, coercion resistant system. But that's a hard set of properties to satisfy especially if nothing is in the physical world. If you allow physical voting places,…
No, scan the full paper ballots with personal info redacted and make them publicly accessible so anyone can count the result.
Personally i think risk limiting audits of the original physical documents is a much more secure system.
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I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.
I mean, it's been already solved with a decentralized, low-cost, secure technology. It's called paper, and it has this wonderful security property that the amount of work needed to subvert the result is proportional to the number of votes you need to change, whatever you do.
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No, you can't necessarily get it back. It's like sending cash internationally, but you sent it to the wrong address and now you don't know who the fuck has it.
If you mis-address cash sent internationally it does get held for reversal. That's why international wires require so many details.
I like that one of the recommended solutions is to use named addresses instead of wallet hashes. DNS and domains instead of IP addresses
Why don't these tech support the oldest trick every financial companies have been doing? They send a cent and see if the recipient received it or not. If the money went through and is secured, then send the rest. Simply by doing this, you could avoid almost all incidents like these.
On decentralized exchanges, a single ERC-20 coin transaction can sometimes be as expensive as $50+ in gas fees and take 15-30 minutes to confirm. Sending a test transaction of $1 is not always feasible.
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The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested pa…
I understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate... In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.
It's not 50k (more like $50), but I have a similar story with Stellar. I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase/Stellar/mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into /dev/null because I didn't understand the separate sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide. I wasn't exactly upset, bu…
That's a different situation. Those Stellar tokens didn't go into /dev/null. They went into the hands of Coinbase, they're just not crediting you. It's not that they can't do anything about it, they just aren't.
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That's a pain. If you might still be willing to give the _entire_ entire space a try, it's getting easier to participate with services like Coinbase and e.g. XLM-USD trading, which is different from holding XLM. (Is that a cup with handle on the 1D?) Or trading crypto-related stocks, even.
That's just gambling with extra steps.