Earlier quoted context omitted.
That argument could be made for anything if you are the one targeted. I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? It is all about motives. If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.
>It is all about motives. I disagree completely. Motive is completely irrelevant. Mass surveillance and government spying (among other things) on people who have done nothing to suggest they are engaged in criminal activity is absolutely wrong and a violation of human rights and human dignity no matter what the motive. >If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible f…
The Ethereum merge is done
931–940 of 1001 posts
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#932Earlier quoted context omitted.
That argument could be made for anything if you are the one targeted. I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? It is all about motives. If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.
>It is all about motives. I disagree completely. Motive is completely irrelevant. Mass surveillance and government spying (among other things) on people who have done nothing to suggest they are engaged in criminal activity is absolutely wrong and a violation of human rights and human dignity no matter what the motive. >If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible f…
I was speaking of the motives of the institution with the power. In the crypto case, the people with the power are motivated by greed. In the government's case, it could be anything, but at least they are theoretically accountable in a representative democracy.
> The issue is that people with morality and dignity believe that the government is doing something wrong by violating the privacy and human dignity...
What does this have to do with reversibility of financial transactions? If you think there is some government conspiracy with the 'bankers' against you or your group, what is taking away basic consumer protections going to do to help you?
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#933Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.
Agreed. My top concern with cryptocurrency is the huge waste of energy inherent to PoW. It's really, really good to see ETH pull this off. There are a pile of other problems in crypto, but it's fantastic to see this biggest (IMO) issue addressed by the #2 cryptocurrency. I actually thought it might never happen. It's a day to celebrate for sure.
I would love to see this number compared to the amount of energy PoW consumes.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#934Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…
Prior to this merge at least theoretically you could have a consortium of people collaborate to combat centralization. Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms. My young son the other day said “I’ll get money from the store and buy what ever I want”. I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work for the store, then they…
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#935Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.
That defeats the point. People keep forgetting that the single innovative aspect of cryptocurrencies was the invention of a way to do completely anonymous and trustless transactions. That's it. The second you wrap that in a layer that eliminates that, you're better off just skipping the blockchain altogether since it's an otherwise extremely awful performing persistence.
Anyway, back to your point. Why should a layer on top 'eliminate' the layer underneath? Card companies did not eliminate cash.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#936Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. My top concern with cryptocurrency is the huge waste of energy inherent to PoW. It's really, really good to see ETH pull this off. There are a pile of other problems in crypto, but it's fantastic to see this biggest (IMO) issue addressed by the #2 cryptocurrency. I actually thought it might never happen. It's a day to celebrate for sure.
Imagine trying to quantify the amount of energy that goes into the current financial system with all its inefficiencies and manpower, time and energy that it takes. I would love to see this number compared to the amount of energy PoW consumes.
Show me a smart contract that can issue an undercollateralized loan. Turns out that takes manpower, time, and energy to underwrite this stuff.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#937Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. My top concern with cryptocurrency is the huge waste of energy inherent to PoW. It's really, really good to see ETH pull this off. There are a pile of other problems in crypto, but it's fantastic to see this biggest (IMO) issue addressed by the #2 cryptocurrency. I actually thought it might never happen. It's a day to celebrate for sure.
Imagine trying to quantify the amount of energy that goes into the current financial system with all its inefficiencies and manpower, time and energy that it takes. I would love to see this number compared to the amount of energy PoW consumes.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#938Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a shining example of the security of credit cards, but an example of how insecure they are. We regularly carry passwords into our bank accounts in our pockets, and punch them into random ATM machines on the street in a foreign country, say them over the phone, or type them in while using the coffee shop WiFi. It is no wonder our cards are frequently compromised and the total cost of card fraud is many doz…
Perhaps, but it IS a good example of a system that protects the end user from monetary loss in the event of fraud due to leaked credentials (in this case the card number + CVV + exp date). In my opinion, any system that seeks to replace credit cards needs to have a similar ability to recover user funds in the case of inevitable security leaks, which is something many crypto systems struggle with.
That information is practically public already, since you have to provide it to everyone you purchase from online with your card. If you regularly buy things online with your credit or debit card it's less a matter of if the credentials will leak than when. Regular checking and savings accounts are at least as bad given the existence of Direct Debit, a system where practically anyone can take money out of any account just by knowing the routing number (public information) and account number (printed on every check).
Cryptocurrency aside, just compare that to something like PayPal, where the authorization happens directly between you and the payment processor: the merchant never gets your credentials and can't take money out of your account without your express permission. The traditional banking system has the worst security procedures; the design is reminiscent of the early days of the Internet where plaintext passwords were commonplace in protocols like rlogin, FTP, SMTP, and unencrypted HTTP, when authentication was used at all. The only thing keeping it from complete collapse is the absolute fortune they spend on statistical anti-fraud analysis, which completely coincidentally requires them to have deep insight into every transaction passing through their network. Not that they would ever think of using that immensely valuable data for their own gain, of course. Perish the thought.
In any case, Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies weren't built to replace credit cards, but rather to replace cash. If someone steals your cash or you somehow manage to hand it to the wrong person or simply destroy it you can't just call up the U.S. Treasury and expect them to put things right. Holding cash and transacting in cash has its downsides, and yet those same risky properties can be extremely useful if proper care is taken. Escrow and human-mediated reversible payments can be implemented on top of a system of irreversible transactions. The reverse doesn't work; you can't very well run an escrow service where the payer can reverse their payment into the escrow account without following the escrow procedures after getting the goods.
Compared to physical cash, as a digital good crypto has several advantages and a few disadvantages. In the latter category you have the obvious risk of hackers compromising the wallet; IMHO a separate, secure, hardware wallet is mandatory if you keep any significant amount of self-custodial crypto. On the flip side, however, it's not all that difficult or expensive to make your crypto more secure against would-be thieves than the gold in Fort Knox if you're willing to put in a modicum of effort, and the possibility of geographically-distributed encrypted backups makes it much harder to separate you from your money if you plan ahead a bit.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#939Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin. If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really…
Who is going to run a bank without fractional reserve banking, and how can you do that with BTC?
Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, one which simply holds its customers money (for a fee) without lending it out, and perhaps offering separate investment products for those who are interested with full disclosure of the risk involved should the investments fail.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#940Earlier quoted context omitted.
My view is that crypto's goals (e.g. decentralized, deflationary, no transaction reversals) are non-goals, but even if those non-goals were goals, both PoW and PoS fail to effectively solve them, especially the decentralized part. PoS sucks more than PoW on this axis: PoS encourages centralization within the system (those with more ETH control the chain), and PoW encourages centralization outside the system (those wh…
While I am largely against crypto it should be noted that the more ETH you have the less financial incentives you have to attack it.