I don't wanna be a full-on hater of crypto. And I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable or at baseline, usable, to laymen.
What utility do you see – through all the noise and chaos and human flaws that taint all things – from crypto, that to you just makes sense and will prevail in light of all the deserved and undeserved criticism?
The ledger. I think people are so caught up with it being a currency or investment asset that they miss the real revolutionary ideas. Triple entry bookkeeping. When double entry accounting emerged in the renaissance it revolutionized commercial activity. I think there are use cases where being able to publicly verify transactions and history would be immensely beneficial.
I worked as a lawyer in NYC unwinding many of the 2008 financial crises bankruptcies and can tell you that billions of dollars of mortgages, home deeds, commercial loans, etc are traded with bankers sending each other excel files. Which means that the property ownership is literally a spreadsheet (often with a date in the file name). It was shocking but how it was done.
There are massive third party organizations that are tasked with tracking those transactions MERS. The commodities exchanges etc but they weren’t much better organized. Lots of excel files.
So if there could be a common accounting ledger that could be verified it would be a big improvement. The question is though would that be 10x better? Or rather enough to get the various stakeholders to adopt the ledger. So far. No.
What about triple entry accounting requires the blockchain? Or how does triple entry accounting benefit from being on the blockchain? Or a distributed ledger in general? The shitty book keeping you encountered will always be cheaper, faster, and easier than the “better” alternative. The people like SBF with a black hole of excel nonsense as their “accounting system” aren’t going to be persuaded to take up triple entry accounting— on the Blockchain or otherwise.
I am not aware of any other triple entry accounting system or proposal other than the block chain ecosystem. But I have been a crypto curmudgeon and skeptic so I don’t follow it closely. Honestly it was the only idea that didn’t make me throw up a little when I would talk to crypto fans. It was my little tactic to find common ground.
Excel may be cheaper and faster for companies but governments care about legitimacy and could probably end up forcing implementation. So imagine that instead of county deed offices that have physical books dating back hundreds of years with title info, they had a blockchain ledger then the third party systems the evolved on top to make title transfer lowers friction will technically not being a true legal transfer could have a middle ground where the transaction has the certainty and legitimacy of a public record and the low friction of a digital transaction rather than physically having to go to each county to record the transaction.
Similarly all large banks now have to submit stress tests to the federal reserve and one of the hardest things to do is trace asset transfers and liabilities to get at contagion risk. If regulators were smart they would mandate a blockchain or time series database so that unwinding transactions didn’t have to happen through junior attorney and bankers manual review of transfers in bankruptcy court.
I still don't understand why this is better on a blockchain than a database.
Transactions are harder to do, they take longer, they're massively more inefficient, etc. And what do we gain from this? Blockchains are not immutable (as we've seen), they're usually controlled by a single entity or group of entities (as we've seen), they're public but in a bad way - as soon as the connection between a person and a key is revealed, that person's entire transaction history is revealed. And so on.
I know that "all these problems are being solved" but you could solve them all in an instant by just using a database and having sufficient oversight over who gets to manage it. I don't understand the enthusiasm to use a blockchain here (or anywhere)
> A decentralized oracle uses a decentralized network of nodes to obtain real-life data from off-chain sources of information and transfer it to smart contracts on-chain. These decentralized oracles are like public libraries with multiple sources of information. Using many sources of information helps to minimize counterparty risk. More importantly, decentralized oracles aim to reduce concerns about reliability and trust because oracles that provide false data will be penalized for data manipulation.
If two rival businesses are transacting with each other, and they don’t really trust each other fully, which one hosts the database?
Whoever hosts the database is in a position to manipulate data to the disadvantage of the other. Which entity gives in and gives up that power to the other? Why should either party agree to take on that sort of counterparty risk when they don’t have to?
Also, what instances of non-immutable blockchains are you referring to? Blockchains by definition are immutable post-finality.
The two rivals write a contract? The contract involves a 3rd party that's mutually agreed upon by the rivals?
If the two rivals can't abide by a contract, a blockchain wouldn't resolve the scenario either. Imagine "bug vs boot" or "shooting war" kinds of contract violations where overwhelming force is in play; why would a blockchain make a difference?
Human history has lots of "people don't trust each other" scenarios, and they've been resolved in the past, with reasonable efficiency, without blockchain.
My point is not that the problem cannot be solved by traditional approaches, but rather to identify that it is a problem that somehow needs to be solved. It's something that people need to expend resources and take on risk to solve.
The reason so much time is spent negotiating legal agreements is to reduce the surface area of dispute. On one hand, we want to reduce the possibility of misunderstandings that could lead to a "shooting war" as you put it, and also to reduce as much as possible the scope of the matter that may need to be evaluated by a court in the event of a litigation.
Using a blockchain in a situation like this can make achieving both of those objectives much easier and less costly from both legal and operating points of view. There would still need to be some contractual relationship among the participants, but the scope of the contract can be simplified and reduced.
And if the number of participants involved exceeds two entities, a blockchain can vastly simplify the relationships of all the participants with each other, without needing to empower a centralized entity to coordinate among all the participants.
> Human history has lots of "people don't trust each other" scenarios, and they've been resolved in the past, with reasonable efficiency, without blockchain.
Sure, but what's wrong with reducing costs and complexity even further?
How does the blockchain solve any of these issues in a way that couldn't be done with a database and a third party/escrow as normal?
And it's interesting to note that no-one (as far as I'm aware) is doing this. Blockchains have been around for a decade and escrows are still going strong - I don't see any movement to adopt blockchain for this.
Sounds like you've already got it right there: implemented well a decentralized blockchain is basically a 3rd party as a transactional service (which through programmability can act as a ledger or escrow).
The commenter up above is directly referencing where existing 3rd party / escrow services are pretty terrible today and they're certainly not easily accessible to the general public or your average piece of computer code.
A lot of the pre-boom blockchain contract excitement really was as simple as "turn the awful banking middlemen into code so we can get the advantages of them programmatically."
A blockchain in this context is much worse than a 3rd party because there's nobody to sign a contract, arrest, subpoena, or bring a lawsuit against.
"It's math, bro" isn't actually comforting if the contents of the distributed database are actually in question, perhaps because of mistakes, shenanigans or misbehavior.
No sane risk assessment of "our company depends on this being correct and consistent" is going to sign up for this.
You're comparing the end user to the one doing maintenance. Maintaining an email server is way more work than sending snail mail too.
For the end user sending a transaction is quicker and cheaper than getting your lawyers to draft contracts, maintaining your own books, paying an accountant or someone else to manage/balance the books, coordinating a deal/terms with them, etc.
Also there's Proof of Stake which is much more efficient than Proof of Work.
While running transactions on a distributed blockchain would provide some additional resilience here, I'm unsure if I can picture any situation where the added protection provided over current contract and civil law would outweigh the issue of having your financial transactions publicly available for review by all other actors to most businesses.
It also doesn't really do much for most real world transactions because of the oracle problem. Unless both businesses only care about entities that exist on that blockchain as well having the transactions there doesn't provide any additional benefit since the blockchain cannot verify nor enforce anything outside of it. Regardless of whether the transaction of you sending me money is immutable I can still just not send you what you paid me for.
Good points! Yes, public blockchains are often not suitable for private or confidential transactions. That being said, anonymization tools do exist, which can solve this problem for many use cases.
Also, I agree that blockchains only work in the context of a functioning legal system, in that the link between on-chain assets and physical assets must be enforced via some legal or governmental mechanism. This should be possible using contracts under current law, however, and such contracts could be limited to establishing this linkage, avoiding more complex issues that might otherwise come into play if it were not for the use of a blockchain for record-keeping, transfers and settlement.
It’s actually an interesting question if or how anonymization tooling/coins would work in a business context.
You want to shield your transactions some of the time to prevent competitive analysis of your business expenses etc but other times require provable transaction reporting and tracking for stuff like tax purposes and financial disputes.
You want to be able to prove you sent a payment or need to document yearly expenditures for instance, being anonymous in those situations could cause issues. You could use signatures to prove ownership of the keys involved in a transaction I suppose but I’m not familiar enough with the laws in this context to know if it’s sufficient legally nor am I an accountant.
I guess stuff like that is kind of a gray area and is an example of the unclear guidance that pro-regulation crypto folks in the US have been asking for the government to provide clarity on.
Enforcement is only as good as the records available to ascertain the facts.
Imagine installment sales where the original seller transfers their right to collect the remaining balance to two separate companies. How does the original buyer have any confidence that their payments will be applied correctly if they are reliant on and beholden to shoddy records of the seller or some third party?
I mean if this were such a big problem with our current system I feel like there would be a lot more financial issues occurring. Counterpoint to that being maybe there actually are already, see the 2008 collapse for instance which happened in part from mismanagement like your example.
More importantly though I don’t feel like blockchain prevents shoddiness and human error from causing problems, it just changes the methods available and how they manifest.
Badly written contracts, mistyped addresses, and misplaced keys have lost people tons of coins. And the lack of reversibility and centralization makes cleaning up mistakes significantly more difficult.
What happens to the buyer when the original seller writes a broken contract to transfer the recipient for the remaining balance that results in the payments being completely irretrievable?
As much as I hate bitcoin and blockchain and think that the technology is simply not very useful outside of speculation (+ bad from ecology point of view + slow + unsalable + often a simple database can be better + ...), the one argument that they they say I agree on. Transparency.
Clearing houses do not provide any real information what they do. Supposedly they are regulated, but nobody really seems to look under the rug - which seems to have a lot of dead bodies (anyone remembers the Clearstream scandals?).
DTCC was accused multiple times during the Gamestop saga for allowing naked short selling + for allowing "fail to deliver" all the time. And the worst is that we really dont know. There were no real investigations, no real audits, no information provided to the general public. We are supposed to "trust" the clearing house, but without the ability to verify what it is doing. So how can we know what they are doing? The things we have dont really show what they are doing; also different thing is that they can claim to do one thing, but do something different in reality.
I bet that clearing houses are allowing naked shorts all the time, because nobody can really control it. Are there any programmers doing complicated code reviews with sys admins? The "big four" audits are a joke, they check some papers, of things that supposedly happened or did not happen.
Audits are done by accounting by graduates, who barely understand basics of accounting and here we talk about inspecting complicated software of some clearing house that does a million things per second. Everything is done inside some complicated operatically tool - and I doubt big 4 has any chance to understand it, if even they investigate it, because probably it is outside of scope - they just investigate the print outs, or Excel files "provided by customer". Everyone who works in finance knows that audits are a joke; the auditors barely understand what normal things are doing - and they can barely keep up with the financial part; here we talk about actual checking if the business side isnt cheating somehow inside its software.
A clearing house can just run two sets of books; also how can anyone know it isnt front-running, or naked shorting? There is a lot of money on the table in that and I bet someone tried to skim some of it from time to time. And as I said, we will never know, since this information is hidden from public. We dont really have any way to check it and very doubt if those who check really do.
Bitcoin and blockchain are not synonymous. Bitcoin is one of the few major blockchain projects still using proof of work, and one of the others, Monero, actually has a good reason to still be doing that (though I still don't like it), and also has a much smaller energy footprint.
You build one because it's way easier and cheaper to build a clearinghouse than it is to build a massively decentralized network of trust-less computers?
Yeah, but what if that decentralized network of trustless computers already exists, and transaction costs relative to costs you would otherwise incur are very low?
The premise of your argument is that building a clearinghouse is cheaper and easier than using a blockchain. That seems laughable, honestly.
> Yeah, but what if that decentralized network of trustless computers already exists, and transactions costs relative to costs you would otherwise incur are very low?
Sure and what if unicorns were real? Horses would seem pretty boring then I bet.
> The premise of your argument is that building a clearinghouse is cheaper and easier than using a blockchain. That seems laughable, honestly.
I guess it’s good that we are both laughing at each other then.
"hey let's facilitate this transaction on Ethereum"
"no, that's ridiculous, let's build a clearinghouse, get a bunch of lawyers and have paper contracts drafter, ad deal with differences in international law."
Lmfao. What is this straw man transaction that can be settled on ETH (keep in mind, you’re already completely leaning on sunk cost fallacy) but needs a lawyer off chain?!
Like, either the terms are known and you put them in a smart contract or they’re unknown and you need lawyers anyway.
I dig the energy, but at least be sort of realistic in your “owns”
I'm just going along with everyone else's rebuttal of "just use a lawyer", "just use a clearing house", "just pay someone to balance/record your own books", and whatever else they mention to avoid a solution that exists.
It's a bit like hearing people dismiss email and saying "just use snail mail", "just have a scribe write the letter for you", "just use a personal carrier so it's faster".
> An escrow is a contractual arrangement in which a third party (the stakeholder or escrow agent) receives and disburses money or property for the primary transacting parties, with the disbursement dependent on conditions agreed to by the transacting parties.
To implement a traditional escrow you need an escrow agent and an escrow agreement, as you rightly note. In the event of a dispute, the escrow just holds onto the money until the question is resolved in arbitration or litigation.
Expenses involved is such a process include legal fees to draft and negotiate the agreement; paying the escrow agent for their bother; paying for litigation in the event of a dispute. Plus, you have the risk of the escrow agent misappropriating the funds.
Escrows can be implemented on a blockchain as well. If the use case is suitable, you can save a lot of money and hassle! And if settlement is on-chain and is indisputable, you might not even need any escrow at all.
Then the legal system deals with them and your business insurance covers you (or doesn't). This stuff is a solved problem. Business transact in a low trust environment all the time all over the world.
Let me just operate a database for everyone I interact with, and also pay a lawyer to write a contract for every interation.
> How is this even possible? Don't they sign their transactions?
In a blockchain, yes. What you quoted was talking about a database. It seems like you accidentally just realized the issue with your own argument by trying to find an issue with his. Great way to get around bias.
> Let me just operate a database for everyone I interact with.
If I'm a company, I already have a database of transactions, even if it is a spreadsheet or physical file folders.
> It seems like you accidentally just realized the issue with your own argument by trying to find an issue with his.
Where is the issue? The two companies can sign and keep separate copies of the contract/transaction. That's literally what they do now. Just digitize it, no blockchain necessary.
Companies could sign a text file of a contract with PGP keys. We could standardize a transaction format and both companies could sign each exchange. Company A would keep the contract and Company B's signature, and vice versa. Trusted third parties (our attornies, banks) could sign as witnesses for bigger transactions.
What do cryptocurrency and blockchain achieve over that, especially given the high costs of transactions?
As I noted, "by definition" a block that has reached finality will not be removed. Any attempt to add, modify or delete transactions or blocks prior to this point would be self-defeating because it would be automatically rejected.
Yes, newer blocks can be forked out of existence before they reach finality, which is why only blocks that have reached finality are deemed immutable.
If the two rival businesses are trading real world things, they each need a database and the actual situation of the trading has to be established by real-world paper trails or whatever.
So basically, the only use-case of the blockchain is "virtual currency" like bitcoin and we've seen that these "virtual currencies" doesn't actually operate as a practical currencies but rather a speculative investments and means of laundering money/control-of-sources (if you have free electricity, you can turn it into cash at a cost to the planet etc).
One reasonable way to keep detailed records of transactions is a blockchain!
The best thing about a blockchain in a situation like this is that the different participants don't need to reconcile their transaction records to make sure they agree. Reconciliation between the participants—which is costly and can lead to disputes—is unnecessary.
Of course there are other technologies you can use as well, but using a blockchain would be easier and cheaper—especially if additional parties begin to participate in the arrangement as well.
It's not reasonable, because the moment you have to interact with things off the blockchain, like dollars or physical stuff, you get the same reconciliation problems you had before. It's needlessly complicated for no gain.
Reconciling digital records against physical assets is something that all electronic systems of this sort must contend with. But traditional multi-party systems also need to worry about reconciling each entity's records against all the other entities' records.
The blockchain simplifies the arrangement. Where is the additional complexity you are referring to?
The use of a blockchain itself is the complexity, and it is a tremendous amount of complexity. All the smart contracts, infrastructure, and cryptography that it entails adds up. And there's the maintenance burden of setting up and running a byzantine fault tolerant system - If this is a private chain, who owns the servers and how many votes for each participant? How do you keep the voting fair if one side has to scale up more than the other? If this is a public chain, how do you keep your transactions private? What if there's a bug in the chain or the smart contract?
All of these questions need serious consideration if you are doing real business. Particularly when a database looks like it gets you 98% of the way there and your legal department covers the other 2%. What value is a blockchain actually adding compared to MySQL and a lawyer?
After all, the threat of a lawsuit is enough to keep the databases in sync almost 100% of the time, and to resolve most other problems quickly. For anything more serious, you will need to do a full reconciliation of the stuff and the money, which a blockchain won't help you with anyway.
A database is great for one entity. A blockchain is useful for situations with multiple actors with an inherent lack of trust, but with a need for a shared truth
Wait until you hear that cryptography and chain of block architectures can be done on centralized equipment and we don't need to rely on mining farms that we have no control over!
3rd party trust and central point of failure. I don't agree that we've seen Bitcoin be controlled by a single entity or that anyone has power to modify it against the will of market. I would argue the things you don't see a need for are necessary, if not sufficient, to have a sufficiently decentralized ledger. Network effect might be the other ingredient.
> I don't agree that we've seen Bitcoin be controlled by a single entity or that anyone has power to modify it against the will of market.
I can say the same things of Visa? If the point is that economic incentives are what keep miners honest, what do you think keeps Visa honest? (I'll tell you as soon as they start doing things that don't follow the rules, their market cap will plummet)
Email isn't perfect but is widely used and widely useful. If the world naturally converged to a standard protocol based on blockchain that alone would be worth it.
Would it make sense to put those transactions into something like git or does a conventional database sound more appropriate?
Why do internet companies not use blockchains like git for all their transactions and instead use some form of database?
And git doesn't prevent software developers from pushing bad/hostile code/data into their repos. A blockchain wouldn't prevent financial institutions from publishing incorrect/fraudulent transactions into the blockchain.
What you theoretically gain out of a public blockchain is just that it is permanent and public. You could try to pass laws to require permanent and public access to a companies books instead and be technology agnostic. This law would be highly unlikely to ever pass. But you don't need a blockchain to do it.
And if it isn't public and immutable then the company can change the ledger whenever they like and throw away the old chain and commit fraud, there's nothing magical about the word "blockchain" which prevents that. It is the public nature of it which makes it immutable. If you want to make it private and immutable a normal database with a public, published cryptographic hash of the entire contents published at intervals would make that possible. What you need then is an append-only database where incorrect prior data is fixed not by throwing away the bad data, but by publishing new records which update the old data, and then a way of publicly validating that the old data hasn't been tampered with. That can actually be solved without blockchain. It definitely can be solved without public blockchain, you just the company to periodically "publish" its bookkeeping hashes to an agency (or the public) that tracks them.
That doesn't fix fraud, though, those records could all be bullshit the first time they're entered. Just makes it harder to go back and commit fraud. And if the company never opens it books and is never audited then none of it really matters, blockchain or not it just becomes a private diary of lies.
Everyone loves cryptography and the chain of blocks structure because they are good things
Neither of those things are the defining feature of cryptocurrencies, decentralization is.
Decentralization is one of the most pointless endeavors in technology, because it's so hard to scale anything decentralized (case in point, how expensive on-chain BTC/ETH transactions are).
No one cares about decentralization until there's a centralization failure, then those people are glad there's an alternative that others have been toiling away for for years, like with Twitter and the Fediverse.
The entire Internet is built on various levels/degrees of decentralization, and while there are performance costs, it's still usually cheaper than the alternative in the long term.
> No one cares about decentralization until there's a centralization failure
It’s so wild to hear this, when, actually let’s just count some decentralized failures.
1) Remember when Solana just turned off? I bet you do since it happens so often. (I know, it’s the miners fault; crypto can never fail, only be failed)
2)Remember when Bitcoin hard forked 8+ times and many of those forks suffered 51% attacks due to lack of interest? If decentralization were good, then why does everyone centralize on the original chain?
> The entire Internet is built on various levels/degrees of decentralization, and while there are performance costs, it's still usually cheaper than the alternative in the long term.
Explain to me how many machines running at under 100% capacity is cheaper. Why does the cloud exist if that’s the case?
I don't think is does - but exposing too much data is a problem. The block chain can be public and still maintain a certain anonymity. If people see a lot of money going into a particular wallet they can ask the city to clarify where/why the money if being spent. It might be nice to see exactly how money is being spent for schools (payroll, facilities etc) for example. Block chain seem made for such a thing is all.
I see 2 core parts to cryptocoins: The Merkle tree for honesty and the Proof of work for value.
I'd agree the Merkle tree is good as the ledger. AFAIK it is also used in certificate transparancy logs: Every block of log entries contains a cryptographic hash to a previous block, so you can't rewrite log entries, only append them. This is what guarantees honesty in the certificate world, and is I assume the only aspect you need for your proposal.
But the Proof of work is basically a race to do as much computation as possible. This is the part that wastes so much energy and resources, the part that slows things down, but also the part that provides value to cryptocoins by proving that someone wanted to waste/spend the resources.
Do you see value in a system that has both aspects?
I'll chime in here that Merkle trees are best used to tell you if something changed in the historical records. Certificate Transparency (CT) provides you with an easy to verify way to generate a single identifier that tells you the current state of a set of information. You can then incrementally add onto it while checking that none of the past information was changed during that addition. This is a pretty similar concept (and motivation) to Git.
Where this becomes interesting is that someone can just change the past data, then go through and update all the subsequent additions to come up with a the new final value. CT handles this by having multiple other entities check that the CT root values are not changing over time. Git handles this by allowing for similar mechanisms - if you believe Linus he memorizes the root hash of his local repo before bed each night. A post-it note would work just about as well for the Linus/Git case, but I am getting off topic.
I don't see value in proof of work because it assumes that any system would have more entities (where each entity has some amount of computing power..) watching than there is computing power attempting to rewrite it. That doesn't really scale up across most industries use cases. A set of say, mortgage companies, could just exchange data in a merkle tree format and raise an alarm if it looks like the values changed from the prior root. This is very fast and cheap to compute and doesn't require proof of work calculations.
Home deeds, loans, mortgages are not accounting concepts, but more in the ... contract(?) land.
When a loan is made, a loan document exists; and accounting entries exist somewhat separately. A contract can be entered without writing, a contract can result in complex accounting treatment which may be investigated, rules clarified, decided, corrected when methodology errors were made.
Do you mean that the blockchain is supposed to help with the accounting side, or with the contract side, or both?
These are separate things. The legal contract is separate from the legal document establishing ownership, separate from the government ledger which tracks the chain of ownership conveyed, separate from documents related to the performance of the contract such as installment payments, principal and interest balances, and lifting of the encumbrances such as liens. There are different systems and procedures for each. Some are fine. Some could benefit from a central ledger. Whether that’s a database or crypto I don’t really care. Just throwing the idea out there.
I think the dream is something like making a single commit that updates your code and the documentation that is kept alongside it in the same repo. A blockchain transaction would represent the entire transaction including the mortgage agreement, the deed, the asset on the lender's books, and the liability on the borrower's books. I say dream because there's no real path to this ever happening, and it's definitely not happened yet.
Couldn't that be more efficiently solved using a public database maintained by a trusted third party? We don't need a blockchain to know who owns shares for example.
I'm just an engineer with no background in finance, but didn't a fair part of the 2008 collapse come about by trusted third party risk auditing that went bad? Rather than maintaining a centrality of trust at some level, it seems intuitive that if there is a public database with trust decentralized among all the participants, there is less of a chance for that trust to be abused.
Not in a way that would have been impacted by a blockchain ledger. Third party risk auditors were giving financial products risk ratings that were far out of touch with their actual risk levels. But this was due to flawed logic, financial incentives, and corruption, and not because of a lack of transparency. The data of the mortgages comprising these financial products was available to those interested in those looking to fact check, but no one was.
Financial transparency and integrity is a wonderful goal. However, I am yet to understand why any kind of blockchain is necessary or sufficient, or even a good solution. If you want to cook the books you can do it with or without blockchain. Same if you want to be honest. Blockchain seems like a very complex and expensive way of persisting transactions in a database.
It’s just a fundamental naïveté about how the world works. If I’m dodging taxes or hiding profits then I’ll just enter false numbers on the blockchain. Now what good is the blockchain? Unless the whole world runs on the super inefficient blockchain system then there is always a potential for gigantic drift between the actual state of the world and the blockchain.
The "risk auditing" was the bad part, and that's a human problem; writing those decisions to a different kind of database wouldn't have helped in the slightest.
Efficiently? Maybe. Providing the same type trust and guarantees? Probably not. A public, append-only Merkle tree just has a lot of interesting properties and I think there are spaces where they are useful.
>Which means that the property ownership is literally a spreadsheet (often with a date in the file name)
Are you implying that the spreadsheet is/was itself a legal document signifying ownership? Because that is radically different for my understanding of home ownership. I have never owned property, but to my knowledge ownership is conferred by way of a deed that is registered with the government.
Which leads to the main issue with the crypto hype that I see. The majority of the space is taken up by two overlapping camps: get rich quick shills and techno libertarians who believe we’d have utopia if not for the pesky government.
There is legal and practical ownership and they differ in practice.
So imagine Bank of America issues a mortgage. They don’t want to keep the risk on their balance sheet so they create a mortgage backed security with 1000 other mortgages. Then they sell that to Goldman Sachs who in turn sells it to Lehman, but not the full portfolio only a portio, say tiers 8-10 of 10. In order to “facilitate liquidity” and “market efficiency” they wouldn’t document every transaction on the local county register of deeds. They would “trade” the securities by sending each other spreadsheets and hopefully “record” the transaction with a 3rd party like MERS. But when 2008 hit it often required going to court to fight out who owned what. Worse lots of homeowners ended up being foreclosed on because their payments didn’t go to the right owner on file.
So yes, the legal title is recognized by a written record held by the government, the market implementation adds layers on top to facilitate trading the paper.
Sounds like the issue is that they aren’t properly recording their transactions, which is something that could be fairly effectively managed by a centralized database rather than the blockchain.
Or at least, I don’t see what benefit the blockchain provides over such a centralized structure.
If there's a mortgage the deed is held by the mortgagee. Or at the very least there will be a formal legal claim on the deed (in the UK it's called a lien or a charge - not quite identical but similar) which isn't satisfied until the mortgage is paid off.
Worse, there were instances in 2008 of banks stealing homes out from under people - who sometimes didn't even have a mortgage - by getting fake paperwork waved through, because it was impractical for all the competing claims on a loan to be properly validated.
Would blockchain fix this? No. The problem wasn't tracking the transactions, it was the fact that banks and the financial industry fraudulently hid the true risk of various loan bundles.
Blockchain would only have solved this problem if the loan context - creditworthiness, payment history, and so on - was included with every loan transaction, and could easily be accessed and summarised for all the transactions in all of the loan bundles.
Which blockchain doesn't do.
Coincidentally, this is exactly the same problem that blockchain hasn't solved for FTX, Binance, Mt Gox, etc. Blockchain does not provide an objective assessment of risk, value, or corporate credibility. It's just a ledger.
Even if you can't manipulate the ledger, you can still manipulate the perceived meaning of the numbers in the ledger. Especially if you're a trusted party in the cryptoverse.
In fact it doesn't just fail to fix these problems, it creates new opportunities for spectacular frauds.
Actually yes the problem was tracking the transactions. There were literally competing spreadsheets that teams of lawyers had to argue about and reconcile by looking at emails between traders and comparing row by row. Have you ever tried to compare two spreadsheets? Lawyers know how to blackline two word docs. They don’t know how to compare two datasets programmatically. It’s part of the reason I started coding. I felt after charging $850hr to manually compare row level data across spreadsheets.
In fact counts eventually started getting harder on banks, rejecting the argument that tracking transactions was impractical and ruling in favor of homeowners and making the banks eat the loss for their own shoddy paperwork. But for many it was too late.
Because separation of the record from the record keeper means the system will be endowed with new attributes such as accuracy, verification. distribution, longevity etc that result in a more robust and valuable system.
Imagine you run a fast food franchise with 10 restaurants, each keeping their inventories in a local database, how do you coordinate global restocking? Manual reconciliation across each database. Ok move to the cloud. Now you have a global picture where state is adjusting in closer to real time and reconciliation is an inherent property of they system rather than a process implementation operationally. Well as I have described elsewhere in this thread. A lot of financial transactions are managed in an equivalent process of local databases with manual reconciliation.
I am oversimplifying because there are a number of road blocks that prevent a solution like “implementing a cloud database” and also conflating what happens within a company (using the franchise analogy) rather than a market (where every single franchise had a common inventory and ordering system not tied to a third party supplier). By my point is that a block chain ledger would solve many of these problems without users even being fully aware of the problem in the first place.
There is no reason you can't mix the cryptological security of the Bitcoin Blockchain without the proof of work part.
If I (a trusted third party) maintained a giant public database that anybody could append to, it would be trivial to release checksums or hash values at specific intervals to prove that nothing in the past was altered.
> If I (a trusted third party) maintained a giant public database that anybody could append to
You're opening yourself up to equivalent of DDoS for databases.
Add extra maintainers for redundancy and economically incentivise people to act in good faith. Congratulations, you now have a proof of stake blockchain.
If someone wants to cheat, they will cheat via blockchain.
If you want to know that the data is correct, you have to test it - for example by making stocktaking, or random spot checks. Otherwise, someone can write on blockchain that they sold 10000 hamburgers, while in reality they sold none.
As for your example of "10 restaurants" - it seems that you have very poor knowledge of ERP systems and concepts like MRP
Companies have been using databases to collect information about their resources since their inception. You have a very naive view when you think that "databases have to be moved to the cloud", when in reality companies have been using own servers that collected data from shops since the 1980s if not earlier.
If you really think that storing data in one database is some new concept, or you think that basic MRP for 10 restaurants is impossible.. then maybe read a bit about supply chain management. Those concepts are not new at all; tons of tools help with that, since last ~30 years, if not more.
Bitcoin is not even useful in this scenario; because if 1 restaurant fat fingers something into blockchain, then this error sits there forever, while in a classic database, someone can usually correct it in an easier way. And people make mistakes all the time.
Could these ledger be a log data structure in a single database that is run by a trusted entity like a government? Why does it need to be decentralized?
What you want is full transparency and incentive alignment. A government, or rather the people running the government, fundamentally don't benefit from these things because they use monetary policy to benefit themselves and the elite that is currently in control. Of course they need to get re-elected, so they must make it so that the general population believes in their "goodness" - The fed is just a group a people making decisions behind close doors with who-knows-what political incentives.
So yes, in theory it could be a centralized database but I don't think there exists this mystical "global trusted entity" that has the population's best interests as their main incentive because everything within a single nation state is clouded by politics. Banks and big tech are prime examples. That's why it needs to be decentralized, decoupled from specific governments and people in power.
I would agree. The whole currency thing is a sham. It has enabled some horrendous criminal financial activity. But when I think of state and local gov't making there ledgers public and preserving some anonymity of the payees. I see some really exciting prospects for transparency.
I won't summarize, beyond agreeing with the second that a lot of the view that "all of crypto is a scam" is driven by the fact that essentially all public facing crypto advertisements are for scams. However behind the scenes there are open decentralized system that do move billions of dollars smoothly and safely for millions of people.
In most of the cases Scott cites the underlying thing being facilitated can be done via a normal financial system, some countries just don't have one that functions very well. So I don't see the benefits of crypto as much as I see the benefits of having a well functioning financial system. Crypto just outsources that from local regulators, banks, etc., to crypto developers. Might be a good tradeoff for those countries.
The personal example Scott gives of sending money to Russians is probably illegal and circumvents currency controls that the Russian government has deliberately put in place, so not really a demonstration for crypto as much as it is an example that people find these types of transactions useful for various reasons.
Having a normal, working financial system isn't really a global or historical norm. Very arguably we're on an isolated island of relative economic calm in both time and space, and that we should not assume these conditions will just continue forever.
It would be interesting if the US set up some kind of Freedom Bank specifically for people in China, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, etc. to access US dollars and dollar-based investments. Those countries wouldn't appreciate it though so I'd expect a lot of diplomatic blowback. Until then, there's crypto for better or worse.
[Insert conspiracy theory here about Tether being a CIA op to dollarize the developing world.]
(not op) I stayed with a friend in Zimbabwe at the height of their hyperinflation.
His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been paid and he had to buy something the same day that would keep for a month and hold it's value or his money would evaporate. So we sat in his house praying there wasn't a fire.
That's the use case for Bitcoin: currency of final resort. It's the same as gold only better (can't be faked, hard to steal etc).
I think in countries with stable currencies and after 2 decades of low interest and inflation, that's underrated as a use case...
I also believe (forgive the digression into my weird conspiracy theories) that one reason the US has made so much progress on legalised weed is because crypto and the dark web basically mean you can get whatever you want delivered right to your door. But that's just my own weird world view.
> His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been paid and he had to buy something the same day that would keep for a month and hold its value or his money would evaporate. So we sat in his house praying there wasn't a fire.
I'm guessing the friend sold the petrol for USD, right?
Zimbabwean who lived through this checking in - let me add context and help deconstruct this for HN: People (and banks) were converting Zimbabwean dollars to anything that could hold value and could be easily resold (in US Dollars) ASAP - this could be petrol or petrol vouchers, groceries, cookies - anything at all that could be bought with Zimbabwean dollars and flogged for USD. One of the retail banks got in trouble with the central bank after adding masonry bricks to their commodity portfolio[1]. Petrol was definitely a risky. Bitcoin would not have solved this because the using Zimbabwean dollars to purchase of commodities was only the first step to procuring US dollars while arbitrating the delta between the official exchange rate that formal businesses had to use, and the much higher real exchange rate as determined by the market. The hypothetical bitcoin:Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate in 2008 would have always tracked the market rate with no opportunity for arbitration.
1. Not brick futures or other fiscalised instrument: the bank bought and took possession of piles of bricks for resale later to hedge against inflation
So our Zimbabewe friend buys bitcoin at $60K and 6 months later has bitcoin worth a third of that. Or he puts it in FTX and has it all disappear. Not seeing how it solves his problem.
The friend could have purchased a stablecoin. For instance, as of writing right now, he could have bought USDT and had the same amount of money after 6 months. Obviously, the stability of USDT is rightfully questioned. But the stability of storing many liters of petrol in your house should also be questioned.
Bitcoin does not solve that problem. The reason he has a ton in gas is that it was government subsdised and sold a a fixed rate to worthless currency. So to get paid you needed to trade worthless paper for gas and then for something of value. Obviously gas is hard to store so there is a negative premium for selling a large amount at the same time
Considering how few world currencies are less stable than BTC this doesn't make a lot of sense.
Plus if you have the ability to turn arbitrary currency X into BTC, you can certainly change it into USD, which is far more stable than BTC. So, nope. This is not a good use for BTC.
If you disagree with your govt. either financial policies (taxation, currency controls etc.) or political. You can use Bitcoin to maintain control your assets. For example, if the government suddenly decides to restrict capital leaving the country, BTC would be free from that restriction. If your govt. decides your political activity is now criminal and wants to freeze all your assets domestically as well with international partners, BTC would not be frozen. This is not a problem that most people in the US will face. But if you are a Russian or Chinese citizen then BTC's utility would be much more real.
In practice, maintaining anonymous ownership of your assets on BTC is excruciatingly hard, because it's a public record.
The organizations that monopolize violence ("governments", typically) have ways of compelling people that simply ignore some magic number in a distributed database. Please do a thing or we'll do a thing to someone you care about. I suspect even Satochi would happily give up the private keys to avoid a visit to Lubyanka...
That's not to say that there's no value to these things, but real life violence trumps imaginary freedom.
the idea boils down to: If the government can see what's your bank account in details, and can seize it, and the government can see what's in your Bitcoin wallet but not with full transparency and cannot seize it, which is better?
Does it really matter that they can't seize your crypto if they can disappear you? I guess you can take some cold comfort in the fact that your assets won't belong to the government, but they won't do you any good either.
You believe you've done a thing in contravention of your government's laws. Perhaps you've done it and will not be caught. Perhaps you've done it and they haven't gotten around to asking you politely not to do this. Some crypto currency obviously leaves a paper trail for all to see; some states it doesn't and perhaps doesn't, but perhaps does.
Autonomy to break a law and not get immediately punished for it isn't really freedom from that law.
To clarify -- breaking a law is not imaginary. Maybe you've broken the law and haven't immediately faced any repercussion, but that doesn't mean that bypassing money laundering controls renders those money laundering controls or punishments for breaking the controls imaginary.
I don’t know about Russia, but I think if China decided to restrict capital from leaving their country, they would definitely crack down on crypto since escaping capital controls is crypto’s primary use case and China knows that.
You might ask “what does such a crackdown look like?” And the answer is, they would simply round up and throw in jail prominent crypto people, make it a crime to do anything with crypto (buy, sell, use as currency etc.) and put the fear of god in everyone else so that nobody dares touch crypto.
This line of reasoning always seems to envision a government that is oppressive, but in a very casual way. They're oppressive enough to outlaw certain types of transactions, but lazy enough to allow free access to crypto networks within their country and to not use the public ledger to track down those engaged in illegal activity.
No real world government that I'm aware of, even the liberal democracies, would pass a law that is circumventable by crypto and then ignore it when crypto becomes widely used to bypass that law. They'll restrict access in such a way that they can identify who is who (KYC) or ban the network altogether. This is what we already see happening.
The only way this works to bypass the government is if it remains a relatively uncommon tool. And if it's an uncommon tool, it's not a useful currency.
Look at what's happening in Nigeria [0]. They have tried to ban bitcoin, but are now looking to legalize it. It's just too difficult to enforce when a lot of people are doing it.
It's too difficult for Nigeria to enforce. Nigeria has a very weak government that has trouble enforcing a lot of laws that other states have no trouble with. OP mentioned Russia and China, and I would be very hesitant to extrapolate either country's capabilities from Nigeria's.
I will say that this could be a valid use case: if you have an ineffective oppressive regime, you may benefit.
That sounds like an empty argument to me. Besides that the only use I see so far for crypto is speculation (with fiat currencies) if you disagree with the government never ever trade these assets with fiat currencies that are backed by governments.
Do the deals between your crypto things that are not controlled by governments and taxations and leave the rest of us and our economies alone.
Being used for financial services isn't controversial, many onlookers and disillusioned crypto proponents seem to think trade and speculation doesn't count as utility. Something that more so reflects complete segregation of how our society works and the largest sector in said society.
Non-permissioned financial services is valuable, it represents pent up interest that has been muted for decades, while we pretended that only ivy league quants who also had lots capital could do anything with financial services. it was never true, just the capital barrier was high and the industry was protectionist
Even if you just look at whatever actions that the gatekept financial services are ostensibly trying to prevent, that undeniably has a value, and now that the gates are down many people transfer value this way because its fun and lucrative and quick. It serves everyone that shows up.
And most importantly: it doesn't have to be the best technological solution. nobody using it cares that a managed database could run the whole platform, people care that a managed database is permissioned and under many arbitrary whims of advertisers, shareholders, executives, and governments. Mitigating that undermines the performance. Not that controversial.
I'm not going to attempt to answer this question in the context of "Web3". Personally, I think that anything with that moniker is doomed to be associated with charlatans now. But, for a fleeting moment, it seemed like Hayek was going to be right:
“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.” – F.A. Hayek 1984
A bit late to the reply party, but for me it's simple: Crypto offers an imperfect but refinable digital means by which people can exchange perceived value with each other worldwide without middlemen or arbiters of what should be permitted or not.
Sure, many people use centralized systems for this now even with crypto and thus miss out on that fundamental aim of these blockchain systems, but the idea itself is doable even in its current form and needed for many edge cases, and for basic financial privacy without often idiotic restrictions and snooping.
I know many people here will hate on that because they're firm believers in the twin gospels of KYC and AML, but so many of these laws are utter abominations in their intrusiveness that i'm glad to see at least something exists which can eventually be made to circumvent them more broadly.
Most of us are not terrorist money laundering cyber criminal drug dealers, and don't deserve to be treated as such with presumptions of guilt and zero privacy rights just because we'd like to spend and move money around without being pried into as if we were little children spending their piggy bank change.
Paper/metal cash used to widely, nearly universally allow for this without so much hand wringing, but sadly, it's slowly going the way of the dodo, and something needs to take its place that isn't loaded with moralizing, puritanical scumbaggery such as that found with credit card companies and banks, or the utter mondstrosity that would be CBDC if implemented as some regulators are planning.
I am mostly interested in proof of stake chains with smart contracts.
I think of them as decentralized, open protocol\source clouds for financial services and transactions.
That seems pretty useful to me.
With all the VC money that pored into defi ponzi schemes gone now, we will hopefully see more sustainable products and growth now. There just was no oxygen left to compete with those Ponzi schemes.
It's fine to see no utility in crypto. It's not fine, however, to restrict people from using crypto how they see fit.
Ponzi schemes will always exist (they are not a new phenomena) and scammers will leverage whatever mean (stock market, real products, etc..) to create their schemes. Should we also shutdown the stock market, or restrict the sale of products?
I'll give this a shot. I've written variants of this comment a billion times on HN, but I sort of enjoy trying to create the perfect articulation of what it is that I like about crypto, so I'll try again:
Crypto is an alternative financial system. Financial systems, on their own, are castles in the air. They provide no value to anyone. Financial systems derive their fundamental economic value by being wired to the real world in some way. That is, efficiently allocating capital to productive enterprises, cheaply translating capital between different forms (e.g. currencies, but also product <-> currency), and transferring risk from those who don't want it to those who do. This is why finance exists, and what it is for.
The cryptocurrency financial system as it exists now is only very weakly connected to the real economy, and only in a few places of marginal or possibly negative social value (e.g. drugs, gambling, prostitution, ransomware). However, there are a few places that actually use crypto fairly heavily for legitimate, socially useful transactions, such as Vietnam, Ukraine and Venezuela. Most people here tend not to find those examples particularly convincing, and neither do I - but they are important to mention.
But what crypto represents is an alternative model for how a financial system could operate. It is a financial system that offers many of the same features that our existing system does, but is different in some ways. Asking "What good is crypto?" is a bit like asking "What good is Linux when we already have Windows?". They both do very similar things, but they do them differently, and most critically, they imply different distributions of power.
If you build your business around Microsoft products, that's fine, but in several important senses that makes you beholden to Microsoft. If you want to build a financial business in the traditional financial economy, you will probably have to go to one of the major money center banks, hat in hand, and ask them to let you do whatever it is that you want to do (or an intermediary that has done this). Depending on what it is you want to do, you may have to go to all of them and ask this.
Crypto is different. If you want to build a financial business in crypto, you simply write the code and deploy it. You don't ask anyone for permission, and there is nobody on earth that can tell you "no". Even the US Treasury hasn't shut down Tornado cash, they've merely sanctioned it. The drawbacks of this approach should be obvious, but so too should the benefits. Whether you like the approach crypto offers is simply a question of values. But it is, in my opinion, undeniable that it is meaningfully different while being capable (in principle) of offering most of what traditional finance does.
The fact that crypto has not yet been wired to the real economy is the reason that it has not yet provided much in the way of concrete utility in most developed markets. The reason it hasn't been wired to the real economy is that regulators and lawmakers mostly have not allowed it. And I agree with them! I would like to see a little more experimentation in that direction, but crypto is fairly obviously not ready for prime time in this sense - not yet, and maybe never. Many things would need to happen first. However, don't mistake the absence of this connection for the theoretical inability to create it. It hasn't been created because people are cautious about things this important, as they should be.
There is nothing in principle right now preventing anyone from tokenizing a house, or a corporate debt instrument. And even if you think "nobody has done those things because they're stupid and crypto is just worse than traditional finance", you may be right! But it should be obvious that there are enough crypto believers out there that this would have been done if it were legal to do so, even if it were a bad idea. Hence, given their total non-existence, it should be clear that the reason it hasn't happened is regulatory, not fundamental capability.
You will know crypto has failed if and when there are a few real estate titles, car titles, equity shares, bond instruments, and other assorted things from the traditional financial realm that have been tokenized, but nobody cares about them. Assets placed there by a few true believers, traded for a bit, and then forgotten. That is how you will know crypto has nothing to offer. But for now nobody has done those things, because the traditional legal system (correctly!) won't respect them sufficiently.
EDIT: To extend the Linux metaphor a bit, Linux was created in the early 90s, but I would argue it didn't become clearly economically significant until the late 2000s. Prior to that it was a toy for nerds and anyone serious used "real products" built by "real companies" and purchased for money[1]. Crypto is FOSS for finance, and maybe the traditional world is right this time, and when it comes to money walled gardens and closed ecosystems are best. But it's not the world that I personally want to live in.
[1] The exact timelines here are obviously fuzzy and certainly you can argue with whether it was late or mid or early 2000s, but what is inarguable is that Linux went through a long "just a toy" phase in the minds of most people
- transfer of provably discrete (and sometimes fully private) values between machines, without a central intermediary. It takes what HTTP/S, FTP, all the information protocols that opened up the internet to what it became, and adds the ability to know that packet_a is the only packet_a out there.
- it's on the back 30-40 years of research of the same computer scientists that brought you consumer cryptography, Tor, and many other consequential innovations. As in, it didn't just pop out of SBF's head.
- Think of what non-discrete digital information transmission did to everything. Now we have discrete digital information transmission. This is where the "money of the internet" terminology comes from IMO.
- "but we have Google/ApplePay, Venmo, etc!:" look at the protocols that govern the internet and similar examples like linux. how many of them are "owned" by a central party like digital payments currently are? yes, some have heavy influence, and ICANN, DNS, etc are somewhat centralized when you really get down to it. But there is no vendor-specific HTTPs.
Not technical:
- simply put: people, governments, financial institutions, and on and on are using it. The opinion pieces and select loud voices in government and HN would make you believe that only criminals or techies putting the dotcom bubble to shame are using it. However, hand on the bible, it has penetration across quite a lot of use cases as a digital, international currency, beyond NFTs and moonCoins. Bank of International Settlements just let member banks deposit 2% of their holdings in BTC. This is not a small event, and its one of many out there. While Senators, ECB, and coworkers in HN are shaming it, it's getting adopted by their peers. And normal folk who don't know better see it as an open question still or fraud somehow.
- payment censorship: The largest capital outflows from CN where when crypto was legal there, and then subsequently banned. Ok though, "it could never happen here" is often thought if you live in the West. People saw Julian Assange's cut off from payment rails and rightfully so perhaps dismissed it. But then what about OnlyFans last year almost having to change its entire product because someone didn't like porn and pressured enough investors/payment providers in the West to cut them off? Mindgeek (Pornhub) lost payment providers access as well last year. Ok though, "well that's porn." When you combine the march of digital payment censorship based on the values of the day, combined with the digitization of cash and limitations around paper currency, that's a trend to note. What about abortion? What about pro-life funding? What about...? What about Equifax selling your compensation history to competitors, and your lack of opt-out from that system because you get paid in USD via digital banks? In short, digital currency is not currently trustless and censorship-less in the same way paper currency more or less is and has been for centuries, crypto is the only (perhaps imperfect!) alternative out there right now.
- inflation: 8% inflation in the US is one thing, but I know for a fact restaurants where I live (normal town, US) have faced 100% raw ingredient prices YoY. money printing == inflation is irresponsibly simplifying it, but where is your right to have a currency backup that at least has some boundaries around the monetary policy of the day, enables to you exist and spend online, and aligns with your incentives to spend or not spend? Dgital currencies built in CN have test trial "expiration dates" on them to spend for instance. The US is in the middle of similar tech. "It could never happen here" but if you dig in and read some Keynes which our monetary policy is based on... it certainly could.
There are better bets out there against inflation. Dollar is “down” 8% because of inflation but BTC is down 65%..
Just buy gold if you want a hedge that is not correlated with the general stock market. Crypto is just a proxy for tech stocks
Not to be an a-hole, but responses like this are why me and others are like “ok well I’ll give it a shot to explain the angle” and then regret doing it.
That’s a lot of details and context beyond “crypto is just a proxy for tech stocks,” but usually that seems to be the flavor of the response one will get after going out in a limb to engage in dialogue.
My country is cracking down on civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom among other things and crypto like XMR gives me a way to make sure I am able to buy stuff like Mullvad VPN (again for privacy) without going through a centralized payment processor. This is just one instance though, I even get domains from njall.la now with XMR/crypto and enjoy a lot of privacy benefits (coming from godaddy)
It's pretty telling that Monero, a project with actual utility, underperforms in terms of value/attention compared to pump and dump scams or useless NFTs / tokens.
You're comparing its market cap, when that's not that important.
People know what Monero is, and it's likely one of the most important cryptos for many people.
It's also in a legally tenuous area in many jurisdictions, and therefore perhaps not considered as 'safe' for people who just want to speculate on price.
It's still massive, and a 2.6 billion $ market cap is nothing to sneeze at. Not sure why we need to compare everything to the price of other projects in the space. The fact that people inevitably place so much emphasis on 'price' (as denominated in USD of course), is really the most negative consequence of the space.
The more frequently breaking the law coincides with good morality, the weaker the law becomes, and the less legitimacy the state holds. That's why setting everything up for selective enforcement is so destructive.
> Yes, it may surprise you that the women in Iran, for instance, are breaking the law. And so did the people who founded the USA, in another example.
Sure, but plenty of bad actors have broken the law as well - the examples of these are far more numerous. While there are hypothetical moral use cases for crypto, some of the most common actual uses are greed (yield farming, speculation), scams (rug pulls, pump and dumps, wash trading, ransomware), tax evasion, and as currency for contraband like drugs. What ratio of moral to immoral use cases is acceptable to the crypto community? 1:10? 1:100? Or is anything ok as long as someone out there is using it to escape repression?
It's beautiful when people you like doing things you approve of are breaking the law. Let's say someone uses crypto to buy weapons or explosives and your loved one dies in the attack. Are you still going to support it?
Crypto makes it easier to buy things that are illegal to buy. That's exactly what's being touted as a benefit here. Being outside the law cuts both ways.
Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there.
Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless.
> Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there.
If it didn't change anything then by the same token it wouldn't help people in oppressive regimes.
> Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless.
Security is always a tradeoff. You can't make it impossible to get hold of weapons, but you can make it harder, and that matters at the margin.
> If it didn't change anything then by the same token it wouldn't help people in oppressive regimes.
I said "doesn't change anything there", not "doesn't change anything".
> Security is always a tradeoff. You can't make it impossible to get hold of weapons, but you can make it harder, and that matters at the margin.
The payment itself is not where these efforts should go to. Transport, manufacturing, advertising. These are all much more fruitful places to look at stopping illegal trade.
> I said "doesn't change anything there", not "doesn't change anything".
But there's a symmetry to the situations. To the extent that it helps people evade government controls, it will help people evade government controls.
> The payment itself is not where these efforts should go to. Transport, manufacturing, advertising. These are all much more fruitful places to look at stopping illegal trade.
That's pure whataboutism. Enforcing laws against bitcoin makes all kinds of illegal activity harder, without significant downsides for law abiding people. So it's a worthwhile measure, regardless of what else you do or don't do.
> But there's a symmetry to the situations. To the extent that it helps people evade government controls, it will help people evade government controls.
I said that crypto didn't create black market trading and so I'm unsure what you mean by this?
> That's pure whataboutism. Enforcing laws against bitcoin makes all kinds of illegal activity harder, without significant downsides for law abiding people. So it's a worthwhile measure, regardless of what else you do or don't do.
That's not what whataboutism means. I said that it's a better idea to target other aspects of the black market.
> civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom
Interesting framing.
I would have thought the ability to control what goes into a person's body, ie bodily autonomy would have far outweigh religious freedom.
If I had to give one up, and I don't think anyone should have to give up either, I would give up religious freedom long before having to give up control over my own body.
I guess that goes hand in hand with the abortion debate, you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp.
it's good to see there are other's who think the opposite.
> you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp
An abortion kills a baby by directly attacking his or her body (dismemberment, lethal injection, etc.). You can firmly be in the bodily autonomy camp and in the religious freedoms camp at the same time.
Either there is some higher principle at play which regulates bodily autonomy or else I can punch anyone who shakes my hand in a way I don't like the moment I don't like it. If there is a principle that requires that I not punch the wet-fish handshaker that principle (or some other one) might require that I care for a child for longer than I would like to.
If you believe in fetal personhood, you absolutely can. At that point it's a question of whose body autonomy gets precedence, not of whether body autonomy is important.
He is probably trying to stop the inevitable derailment once someone mentions(or believes is referring to) vaccines in any way that is not unequivocal and blind support.
I don't wanna be a full-on hater of crypto. And I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable or at baseline, usable, to laymen.
What utility do you see – through all the noise and chaos and human flaws that taint all things – from crypto, that to you just makes sense and will prevail in light of all the deserved and undeserved criticism?