Oh well...never mind... another fried air article which deserves only criticism...mixing rug pulls with actual good technology is a tragic error made my a newbie... here's some help free of charge...PoS = centralization or in other words no trust involved. There are a number or PoW Blockchains that literally kick ass yawning. Kadena, for instance has been founded and created by the very ppl that deployed JPM first Blockchain, their target is US stock exchanges to run on their braided chains... Hathor, another excellent example....but most importantly the point is triple entry accounting....go figure what a third accounting dimension does to accounting...
AWS and Blockchain
621–630 of 724 posts
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contracts are agreements between humans. Therefore, the only "correct" outcome is the intended outcome. If your code has bugs or errors or security vulnerabilities, those will all lead to incorrect behavior. That's why smart contracts aren't useful.
May as well say "that's why software isn't useful" which obviously isn't true. Most contracts end in the happy case 99% of the time, it seems very worthwhile to automate that happy case and fall back to the traditional legal system in the failure case where either party isn't happy with the outcome.
Contracts aren't for when things go right, they're for when things go wrong.
It's just as true to say contacts aren't "necessary" 99% of the time, because people follow through on the agreement.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The code does what it does" is not a useful statement; insisting that a smart contract is an executable specification is not helpful unless there's a really very small semantic step from how the user intentions are formed - which again is not the case here.
I think you’re moving the goal post. As I mentioned in my original post, smart contracts allow for the creation of a global computing platform we call a blockchain. Maybe you want formal verification, but not everyone cares about that.
What? You're the one with the "output is guaranteed to be correct" line. A smart contract is just code.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
May as well say "that's why software isn't useful" which obviously isn't true. Most contracts end in the happy case 99% of the time, it seems very worthwhile to automate that happy case and fall back to the traditional legal system in the failure case where either party isn't happy with the outcome.
Contracts aren't for when things go right, they're for when things go wrong. It's just as true to say contacts aren't "necessary" 99% of the time, because people follow through on the agreement.
I think you’re conflating legal contracts and smart contracts. Legal contracts are instruments used by two or more parties that outlines their responsibilities to one another in a way that is protected by civil law. A smart contract is just a program that runs on the blockchain.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Owning gold/silver is legal. It's also regulated - it's not legal tender. Investing in a business is legal. It also means sending money, which is regulated by KYC/AML and you're still responsible for taxes.
Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for. It's these kinds of rules to "save people from themselves" that have the bonus effect of the rich gatekeeping the best investments that make a lot of people mad and see the current system as corrupt. Being able to spend and invest my money how I want should not be a crime.
What? I think you have some fundamental misunderstandings here.
Buying a stake in a small biz is perfectly legal and people do it all the time.
That's entirely separate from the requirement to be an accredited investor to buy unregistered securities.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re moving the goal post. As I mentioned in my original post, smart contracts allow for the creation of a global computing platform we call a blockchain. Maybe you want formal verification, but not everyone cares about that.
What? You're the one with the "output is guaranteed to be correct" line. A smart contract is just code.
Yes, the output is guaranteed to be correct. Let’s say you give me a program and ask me to run it for you. Can you guarantee that I won’t tamper with the executable? No you can’t. You can’t trust the output of an arbitrary program you give me to run. The only way you could trust my result would be to run the program yourself and verify I provided you the correct output. If you run the program yourself, then what’s the point of paying me to run your code? With a smart contract, you can trust the output. That’s the difference.
This brings me back to my main point. You clearly have not implemented a smart contact and have misconceptions about what it does. I suggest you implement one first. You can still think the idea is stupid afterwards. That’s fine. But right now, it seems like you are arguing about how you think the blockchain works, which doesn’t necessarily match how it actually works.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the type of currency you have that prevents bank runs. There were plenty of bank runs with very real dollars in the beginning of the century. What stopped it was proper regulation. EDIT: I mean the beginning the 20th century, of course.
Bank runs still happen. And I will keep it strictly to banks. Abacus being one case, when the DoJ went after it just to punish someone. A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced. People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there. What keeps bank runs from happening is trust. Trust that the central bank wil…
> Bank runs still happen.
I do agree with that. But it has become an extremely rare occurrence that usually indicates some deeper problems.
> A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced.
Well, one of the root causes of the whole crisis was deregulation, poor enforcement of regulations and "new" financial instruments that allowed for circumventing regulations.
> People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.
China is a bad example for many reasons. It is not really a market economy. There are extreme levels of corruption at all levels of the government. The real estate bubble has been growing for a long time at this point and the whole industry was marred with bad practices that eventually lead to the present state. I am no expert in the Chinese banking system, but I have heard about deep problems in there as well, which, I'd assume, would be at least partially tied to the corruption, poor regulation and poor enforcement of regulation. In such a situation when the whole real estate industry is collapsing due to the issues that have been ignored for more than a decade it would be odd not to expect it to negatively affect the banking sector also in the form of bank runs.
> It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.
It is indeed good that we have this belief. But it's also the result of the banking system's stability (even with all these crises). These two things reinforce each other.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut Ok, then call it what it actually is: tax evasion, fraud, and laundering money. You're getting caught up in an anti-government agenda and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
I think most reasonable people would agree that desiring the freedom to invest your personal wealth in non-government approved investments isn't "tax evasion, fraud and laundering money". Isn't such a claim a bit ... bizarre?
It's not investment when there is no industry behind it. It's called speculation. Or gambling - for some people.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because "there are no regulations" is not permission to defraud others.
The fact that fraud is a crime is a form of regulation, although it's clearly not sufficient on its own (just like how smart contract code being auditable isn't sufficient on its own)
Then you are arguing for allowing fraud and crime.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top of a blockchain data structure. The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You…
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... explains why talking about "blockchain" for anything but a public blockchain (including consensus etc.) is uninteresting.
He's right, the phrase "private blockchain" is almost a contradiction in terms, like "horse-drawn automobile" or "centimeter-scale nanotechnology".