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Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

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Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#71

Post by throwaway8184 »

a_d wrote: post #2

"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…

[using a throwaway so I can say this]

It always bugs me when I hear someone who I know knows better use a line like: "Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC" -- as though this was a matter of dropping a postcard in the mail. I'm confident that these writers know better.

The real situation -- as you can see in any of the stories about Blue Bottle's non-IPO, Hedosophia, etc -- is that "just do it legally" is rapidly approaching the regulatory singularity of "just get the NRC to license your new nuclear reactor design." Even for multibillion-dollar companies, "just do it legally" is becoming prohibitively costly. Compare to the 1990s, when sub-100M IPOs were not that weird.

This has enabled VCs to earn enormous monopoly fees, originally as gatekeepers to the IPO process, now as gatekeepers to a gigantic secondary market in "unicorns." Lambos all around.

As in taxi medallions, this bottleneck creates immense profits. Naturally, the spectacle of Uber versus the taxi mafia, or ICOs versus the VC mafia, creates a lot of passions. Especially among those with axes to grind.

There is one big difference: Uber provides a consistently excellent transportation experience. Whereas most ICOs are straight-out terrible. Let's hope that the sheep get separated from the goats, as fast as possible.

[/end imprudently-frank throwaway]

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#72

Post by StanislavPetrov »

abakker wrote: post #22
grandalf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compliance with what, the whim of officials in any nation?

Yeah, pretty much. You could also think of it as the decisions of the governments of people, who were chose to act in those people's best interests.

> who were chose to act in those people's best interests.

Are you seriously suggesting this is how politicians are chosen?

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#73

Post by [deleted] »

ColanR wrote: post #52
wyc wrote: post #12

What really upsets me is that most of the whitepapers pumped out by ICOs today are emphatically not the way we best understand how sustainable new companies come into existence. Many contain big grandiose plans that stretch years and don’t admit the necessary network effects, new technologies, etc., for even modest success. An idea, a LaTeX installation, and WordPress landing page are a very low bar for raising milli…

That's probably an optimistic view of the motivations of a lot of the ICOs. Your comment reminds me of an HN thread from about a month ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072257 ). > How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk ... 3. Even more profitable is kicking off your own ICO. Go through the checklist - fancy HTML5 theme that you can buy off of Themeforest and edit the HTML a bit for the landi…

[deleted]

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#74

Post by zodiac »

wmf wrote: post #66
zodiac wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really interested in the stablecoin space but I don't think it's realistic to expect bitcoin to have started out as such. Firstly bitcoin was already testing some unknown assumptions (mainly "is our PoW scheme secure and scalable?") and it would be too confounding to also test "is our chosen stability mechanism effective?". Secondly none of the solutions Vitalik mentioned are easy at all; you need decentralized m…

It seems like some variant of a bounded estimator would have dramatically reduced volatility without the complexity of two currencies.

And yet, I'm not aware on any current cryptocurrencies that implement bounded estimator-based stabilization - not trying to be snarky, but stablecoins will indeed be pretty useful, if you think bounded estimator-based inflation would be "good enough" for stabilization, fork bitcoin (or build it on top of ethereum, idk if it's possible) and you'd have produced something valuable

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#75

Post by sp527 »

klank wrote: post #42
sp527 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens surprisingly often when reasoning about blockchains: you start with some concern and follow the trail of logic to some form of necessary centralization. For example, when someone on Twitter raised the problem of collaterizing smart contracts (no one is going to lock capital away in extended escrow, which creates an obvious enforceability problem), Naval Ravikant argued in response that a third party guar…

A third party guarantor is different from THE third party guarantor though, no? I only follow blockchain/ICO events from the peripheries so I'm sorry if I'm grossly misunderstanding.

The problem is trust: why would anyone trust anything other than THE third party guarantor, who has enough available capital and an established reputation for providing recourse?

Would you ever trust some random, small-time agent to collaterize a smart contract you're involved in? That's obviously foolish. Even trusting a mid-size agent is foolish. You don't know how these people are operating, and whether they might go insolvent the very next day. This is one of the primary reasons we have large, regulated, centralized institutions in the first place.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#76

Post by empath75 »

zodiac wrote: post #34
wmf wrote: post #5

I hate to even imagine how many billions of dollars of scams and failures and thefts have been perpetrated by abusing people's faith in and enthusiasm for that technology by now. And I have no idea how we could possibly have prevented it. If Bitcoin had stable value instead of a built-in boom-bust cycle then we wouldn't have crypto scam mania today. Dillinger praises Satoshi's honesty, but Bitcoin's monetary policy i…

How would you propose making bitcoin "have stable value"?

What if we had a centralized institution, like say, a bank, that controlled the supply of coins.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#77

Post by wakamoleguy »

CJefferson wrote: post #57
wakamoleguy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking the chain or otherwise building consensus may be necessary to recover the coins from those particular transactions, but it's not clear that we would need to do that. As an analogy from traditional currency, consider what happens if somebody dies while in debt. Their estate can be used to settle the debt, but if the money isn't there, creditors will go unpaid. There's no guarantee that all of the transactions…

I agree with blockchains that represent something equivalent to money, which would include bitcoins. The problem is using blockchains to represent shares in a company (for example). Ownership of a company can't be "lost", or "unpaid". Legally, someone owns each share of a company, and a court can declare ownership is moved. At that point, your blockchain doesn't represent reality any more (as declared by a court) and…

That's definitely an interesting distinction. In that case, I would expect there to be consensus among shareholders to follow the court's order. That could be enough to force the transaction if the chain is unique to the company in question. However, it would pose issues if the shares are riding on a broader chain outside of their control, like Ethereum. Even if the chain was unique to the company, you could still have issues if you are using proof of work instead of proof of stake. Interesting problem.

Can a court actually declare that ownership is moved, or can they only declare that one is to transfer ownership, implicitly under penalty of something else if you don't? If you have a car and the court declares that it is my car now, that doesn't physically transport it to my driveway and you could steps to prevent that from happening (eg, driving it into a lake).

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#78

Post by sowbug »

matt4077 wrote: post #59
Theodores wrote: post #7

On a more day to day level, a few years ago a lot of e-commerce pay-by-bitcoin options existed. You would not put this on the checkout next to PayPal because nobody was doing bitcoin then. What I don't understand is why this never took off. People know bitcoin through the news, it is not new. In this time Apple Pay has come along nicely but not bitcoin. Bitcoin has gone off on a tulips tangent. This seems at odds wit…

I use it at a small B2C shop and about 1 in 1000 customers does use it. It's a custom implementation I once spend a few hours on, so there's nobody taking a cut except the miners. At this adoption rate, I won't invest any more time if it ever breaks. The transaction costs are actually higher now than they are anywhere else, and both PayPal as well as credit cards are faster. Next year, the new EU legislation will ope…

Are chargebacks a consideration for the non-Bitcoin forms of payment?

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#79

Post by chongli »

CJefferson wrote: post #56
jerkstate wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The receiver of ill-gotten gains refusing/being unable to pay them back is not a new legal problem and certainly not unique to blockchain.

But when it comes to (I don't have a good term..) unique objects, like houses, or shares in a company, they exist and have an owner. A court can simply declare "you don't own that house any more, this person does". A business doesn't become ownerless forevermore because someone lost a private key.

With houses it's not always that simple. Often in real estate fraud cases an 'agent' will sell one person's house to another and skip town with the money. If the courts revert the deed to the original owner then the innocent buyers are still out all that money.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#80

Post by mrb »

CJefferson wrote: post #9
a_d wrote: post #2

"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…

I can't imagine blockchains ever satisfying all legal requirements. At some point I expect some court to say "X shares were illegally transferred from person A, give them back". If we don't know where they went, it's impossible on block-chain to give them back, unless we assume the existence of someone who has the rights to make arbitrary changes, at which point there is no point having a blockchain.

«If we don't know where they went, it's impossible on block-chain to give them back»

And how do you think theft of stock certificates is handled (they are a piece of paper)? Stock certificates do satisfy legal requirements...

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