I wasn’t aware they would make this open. It’s a great way to play around with toy digital currency implementation. There goes my plans for rest of weekend.
Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
51–60 of 190 posts
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are different classes of blockchains. For example, the data structure managed by `git` is a blockchain. So, in and of themselves, blockchains are not problematic. When you raise those criticisms you probably meant to address the security function of the consensus mechanism for distributed decentralized ledgers. The security function there is crazy not because the people are evil scammers and con artists, but be…
Isnt git a merkle tree? And a blockchain a special case of a merkle tree? More like a merkle chain ^.^
That's exactly what a blockchain is. Blockchain being the "secret sauce" has always been a misconception; as noted git is exactly a blockchain. What we call refs in git are blocks in Bitcoin.
Nakamoto consensus was the innovation, the major energy consumer, and not necessary for cryptographic data integrity like a CBDC or git repo needs.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that a Merkle tree? "Blockchain" is not commonly used for what git does.
"Block chaining" is absolutely used to refer to that concept in cryptography, and pre-dates cryptocurrency.
Correct. Block cipher, block list, block chain, block vector, array of blocks -- I'm sure you can find them all decades ago.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#54"In our design users interact with a central transaction processor using digital wallets storing cryptographic keys. ... Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton's approach, which assumes that the…
This is right to some extent. They can have distributed ledger in virtual sense.
Isn’t this somewhat like hyperledger where it’s a permissioned federated blockchain?
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#55Many people on HN claim that the rise of crypto-currencies is a social catastrophe. Maybe so (I disagree), but wait until central-bank issued digital currencies become a reality, you'll very quickly learn the real meaning of social catastrophe. Spending 10 seconds thinking about it, I can come up with the following scenarios: - complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is bas…
Your comment ignores the fact that we already have centralized digital transactions and they're all run by private, for-profit entities. I'm just some random dude with no other qualifications than I read the article, but here are my thoughts on your worries.
> complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is basically China's CCP dream come true.
This problem has nothing to do with having a digital currency, if the government wanted to punish people "if you don't behave as a citizen", it has plenty of tools to do that already. Something like this would be huge government overreach and frankly a violation of the first amendment, I doubt if any law suggested this it would even make it to the supreme court.
Also the current centralized currencies such as PayPal and Banks already do this, if anything this gives deplatformed people more freedom as they have a viable digital alternative to purchase.
> total loss of privacy: the absolute entirety of your financial interactions are an open book to the government. You won't be able to buy a pack of gums without big brother knowing about it, much less paying for your sex toys
Banks already know this information and the government could audit the banks if it wants to. What's stopping a banker from publishing your purchase history? Many Decentralized currencies would also publicly show this. That said I think it's a totally valid point.
> security nightmare : preventing the leakage of citizen's private financial information.
This is true, hence why JP thinks "It's more important to do this right than to do it fast". As I said before though, banks and private companies already leak this kind of information.
> economic nightmare: running the printing press full steam is now instantaneous and gives the government even more unchecked power to spend money on brain-dead programs
I don't see how this changes anything. The Fed can already run the money printer to whatever throughput it needs. This doesn't change that. Only thing this changes is that it would be easier to give direct aid to citizens, especially the lowest 5% who don't own bank accounts.
>if there's healthy competition from decentralized chains such as Bitcoin, the craziness will be kept in check because there will be an escape hatch to the govt
Yeah that's why I kind of think this is a good idea. We already have private versions of this and we could always... Just use those if we don't want to use whatever Powell coin turns out to be. It only gives us more options. Also it would be great to have digital transactions without the $.35 fees
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fwiw in hindsight it appears that structural regulation like Glass-Steagal is what stabilizes the banking system. Separating banking, investment banking, and insurance into separate legal entities and preventing the banks from consolidating into mega-banks prevented another a Great Depression for ~70years. Then roughly 8yrs after we repealed all that, we unsurprisingly had another Great Depression level financial cri…
> Fwiw in hindsight it appears that structural regulation like Glass-Steagal is what stabilizes the banking system. This is not at all clear. > Separating banking, investment banking, and insurance into separate legal entities and preventing the banks from consolidating into mega-banks prevented another a Great Depression for ~70years. Then roughly 8yrs after we repealed all that, we unsurprisingly had another Great…
> How we have a massive trade defect leading to an extremely large negative net-foreign-investment balance? Does it makes sense to you that countries that are much "poorer" than us are lending us money?
If you're against this, what you want is more inflation, not less. This is the entirely intentional result of the strong dollar policy.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#57Many people on HN claim that the rise of crypto-currencies is a social catastrophe. Maybe so (I disagree), but wait until central-bank issued digital currencies become a reality, you'll very quickly learn the real meaning of social catastrophe. Spending 10 seconds thinking about it, I can come up with the following scenarios: - complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is bas…
We already have all of this. The government can tell your bank to do something, and your bank will do it. What a government digital currency would do is end the subsidy of banks as the only "safe" place to park money. If I have a government account with my money, banks don't get to gamble with it for their own benefit. If I want to do that, I could withdraw the cash from where it is safe and consciously put it at risk, rather than the government backstopping the finance industry.
If government bits are just the beginning of a banning of cash, that's the real problem; but there's no reason they can't ban cash now.
The benefit to some sort of government semi-distributed ledger would be that independent people could set up ATMs. Otherwise, I'd just be happy with postal checking/savings. We already have a bunch of post offices.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that argument had more power before a bunch of Canadians set the White House on fire.
the US started that war.
This despite being mostly unprepared:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812#Unpreparedness
Apparently having a very small army didn't help when Jefferson's party wanted a war. I guess they over-rated state militias?
A lot of the founders' ideas didn't work out they way they hoped. (For example, they tried to prevent political parties and failed utterly.)
When people quote American founders out of context, it's as if it settles things, but they were just making it up at the time, often based just on what sounds good. Jefferson in particular was often a rather impractical man, but a popular politician who promoted a lot of bad ideas (and a few good ones) that made for good politics at the time. He's hardly the only one.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The high level of individual gun ownership in the US makes a coup a very risky proposition.
What does civilians owning firearms have to do with a well-trained military force taking over the seats of power?
> What does civilians owning firearms have to do with a well-trained military force taking over the seats of power?
Such a military force would be facing a very well armed citizen-led guerilla response.
Given the amount of private gun ownership in the US, holding on to power after a coup would prove a rather difficult proposition.
Re: Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
#60"In our design users interact with a central transaction processor using digital wallets storing cryptographic keys. ... Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton's approach, which assumes that the…
This doesn't sound all that different from the banking system we have now.