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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#701

Post by hailwren »

dvt wrote: post #691
hailwren wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a vacuous non-sequitur In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.

> In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing. While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity vi…

What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption?

This is a vacuous non-sequitur.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#702

Post by dvt »

hailwren wrote: post #701
dvt wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing. While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity vi…

What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption? This is a vacuous non-sequitur.

> What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption?

I was just trying to elucidate the fact that it's hard to differentiate between real and fake liquidity (and therefore, real and fake adoption) in crypto.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#703

Post by hanniabu »

LilBytes wrote: post #131
hanniabu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We want permissionless, which requires decentralization, which requires blockchain

For what purpose or enabler does permissionless benefit this use case you have in mind? Or in another way, what does requiring permissions block your use case?

I don't want people being able to dictate if I can or can't use a service or to be able to cut me off

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#704

Post by ahstilde »

markdestouches wrote: post #472
arcturus17 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any moment now… I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly… Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.)…

> Crypto is very special in this sense. I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation. In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomo…

A pretty direct correlation for your observation:

https://twitter.com/aakashdotio/status/1593347543739441153?c...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#705

Post by david_shi »

remram wrote: post #575
siftrics wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly decentralized exchanges exist and clear tens of billions of dollars in volume every single day.

Within an ecosystem, yes. You can trade Ethereum currency for Ethereum-based tokens. As for "billions of dollars in volume every single day", I find that hard to believe.

https://info.uniswap.org/

Uniswap alone clears this amount. Part of the power of decentralized exchanges is that every trade is logged and publicly available, which is not something you can claim for their centralized counterparts.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#706

Post by ShamelessC »

remram wrote: post #700
ShamelessC wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an incredibly rude way to try to invite someone to a learn about a subject. Having said that, I think that if these things are so obvious in your opinion, you haven’t considered real world scenarios.

Not GP, but you called it "trivially irrelevant", it didn't seem like you wanted to be invited to learn anything...

I said trivially lying, as in - the ease with which one can simply lie about the nature of a transaction.

People tend to respond that smart contracts are a solution. I personally think they will always contain bugs and are too complicated for the average person to vet.

In any case, I really wasn’t saying I think the whole subject is trivial. Pinky promise.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#707

Post by rswail »

atypeoferror wrote: post #312
runeks wrote: post #167

Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipien…

Maybe I am a confused luddite, but it seems telling that this argument immediately launches into the solution space of a problem that is itself created by the presence of a blockchain. Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be found.

Double spend was solved by the use of cash money, not the financial sector.

If I give you a coin (or paper money), then by definition I don't have it any more. I can't spend it twice.

Accounting with transactions netting to zero ("double entry") solved the problem of recording transactions in an immutable way on a ledger, assuming you control the ledger.

Clearing houses solved the problem of interparty risk when settling (by using an intermediary that controls the ledger of transactions between parties).

Title registries solved the problem of "ownership" by creating the concept of a "title" (ie a government backed identification of property that is recognized by law that the bearer "owns"). Title registries (like "Torrens titles" invented in Australia) solve the bearer problem by having a central ledger of title holding.

Blockchain can "solve" the ledger parts of these elements. But the ledger being immutable doesn't solve the problem of recognition of title (see NFTs). By adding the machinations of "mining" and "proof of stake/work", blockchains can be extended to include the "title" as part of the ledger itself. The mining transaction effectively creates something that is initially owned by the miner.

Ethereum adds to the "intelligence" of the transactions stored on the ledger, adding elements of computation to each one.

All the rest of it, all the invented coins etc, the "exchanges", etc etc ad infinitum are attempts to map these ledgers back to fiat currencies so that "actual" money can be made.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#708

Post by rswail »

Karunamon wrote: post #469
dmitriid wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you live in an oppressive regime That opressive regime holds: - your access to the internet (crypto requires continuous access to internet to function) - your access to exchange offices because crypto is useless if it cannot be converted to fiat So, what exactly have you solved?

Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.

There are some merchants in some places that accept crypto currencies in exchange for goods and services. So yes, saying that none do is "strictly" false.

The question though is are there any merchants that provide, on a wide basis, to numerous consumers, goods and services that are paid for by crypto.

Essentially the answer is no, because most merchant supply chains require fiat, governments require all taxes to be paid in fiat (that's why it exists).

So there is no "crypto" world where I can go live that entirely uses any crypto currency as its medium of exchange.

All of them require conversion to/from fiat, because that's what the world/governments/taxation/laws are based on for value exchanges.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#709

Post by rswail »

louwrentius wrote: post #240
runeks wrote: post #167

Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipien…

What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve? Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has? (Which is the conclusion of the article)

Title conveyancing.

When purchasing a property, there is a dance between the seller and the purchaser (and intermediaries) that effectively perform the necessary transactions to: a) ensure the seller gets paid b) ensure the purchaser gets the property c) ensure that the record of ownership of the property is correctly updated.

This all has to be done simultaneously and atomically.

Moving the records of ownership (ie "title") to the blockchain and then having the appropriate contracts/transactions to ensure the points above solve the conveyancing problems.

But, given that for the most part, the title that declares ownership is essentially a legal document, and that legal documents only have power because of the laws that are enforced, there's no advantage to blockchain that can't be also solved by a central trust registry that maintains the records.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#710

Post by rswail »

louwrentius wrote: post #373
oblio wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve? The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness. So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end. It's like a sort of niche religion. After the first believers…

Oh that’s totally what I observe. Crypto really incentivizes terrible, predatory behavior. A lot of scamming or other criminal behavior. But that’s not the kind of use case I’m looking for. Obviously I want something beneficial and legal. I don’t believe there is any.

So does any form of "money".

The only reason crypto is incentivizing it is because the law hasn't caught up with regulating it.

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