>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology.
>And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems
This is such an important sentence that is bear repeating ad infinitum. For completeness: if you do have a technological solution to an economic and politcal problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution.
Maybe this ugly, complicated, expensive workaround to a political/economic problem is the best shot we have at addressing this problem at all, since the political process isn't working, only doubling down on stupidity.
> if you do have a technological solution to an economic and politcal problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution
Many of th problems crypto aims to solve are not only political and economic, but also technological. The technology in this case may end up being a driver for new political and economic systems.
Similar thing happening with digital payments - like Apple Pay - that are overtaking cash and card swiping in many parts of the world primarily because of a tech innovation that allows for convenience, security, and privacy. Crypto stands to overtake some aspects of our economic activity in a similar way, regardless of what politicians ask for.
In the last century mathematics gained a new level of rigorousness and maturity. Technology is just a tool to suplement this trend. Same is happening in other disciplines today. Economics and politics won't be spared. Whether it will be crypto or some other idea doesn't matter. In the end there will be a formal framework for economy and politics verifiable by a computer.
> For completeness: if you do have a technological solution to an economic and political problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution.
I'm not so sure about that. I mean, for example, fusion energy would solve a fair few of economic problems and would be a major part of the solution to the political problem of the climate crisis. I imagine there are a few other technological advances that would fit in like that too.
Technology can definitely solve some political problems, at least in a very narrow sense. If you don't believe this, ask yourself what happened after the printing press was invented, or the steam engine.
That's not the same as saying technology will resolve social problems. And I personally think crypto is ridiculous. But knowing technology can completely reshape politics is still an important lesson.
Yanis Varoufakis elucidated it pretty well recently: Crypto won't form a revolution because we haven't changed our own institutions, our relationships and so on. That is what changes in a revolution. In other words we still have the boss-employee wage relationship, the role within a corporation and so on, completely unchanged.
It certainly can. Maybe not blockchain but the old problems of lacking food etc in the west have largely been fixed by technology like tractors and fertilizers and we have obesity now.
What if you think the only political problem worthy of resolution is politics itself? That is, the two wolves and a lamb voting on who is for dinner model expanded up to encompass 7 billion dumb apes. I would argue the only thing worth caring about is that they can't vote that you're for dinner. It doesn't matter how many other people are along for the ride or back happily engaging in the prior game. Getting people to change sides can't be a part of the problem by definition because if a political solution were actually possible then we would not be where we are.
The only problem to solve is insulating yourself from the demonstrably awful global political process. And ledgers which that political process can't change are arguably an essential part of that solution.
If states and the political process didn't exist and you had to actually pitch it as a business model to modern venture capitalists, it would be a near impossible task.
So your customers are just some group of people inside the borders of some contiguous territory over which you exert direct military control?
And you claim no duty to that group and despite a demonstrable failure in basically everything you do relative to the traditional form of execution, you demand a pricing model that amounts to some permutation of "tell us how much you made and spent this year, great now we want a cut of x out of it".
And all your customers have to do to evade your business model is leave?
And you only transact in tokens you continuously create out of thin air with the thinnest imaginable pretexts?
And last century when this was tried it was the largest non natural cause of death?
And your failure mode may provoke an extinction level event?
Why would anybody actually participate in any of this for any reason other than they have no viable alternative whatsoever and thus you end up with a self selecting group of participants who consume more economic resources than they produce? Apple pie and baseball is not an acceptable answer. Isn't economic collapse basically inevitable?
Oh that's where we are now back in the real world? Well that's inconvenient. Better get to building alternatives asap.
There are many flaws in this perspective, but I'll pick one: the argument that there is no problem being solved with blockchain. This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions.
Of course, from there, people often wince. But that wincing comes from an assumption: that a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal. This is a fairly bad assumption (particularly with a brief skim of the history of the 20th century), but even if it were true, it is provably the case that blockchain technology is solving this problem in a way previous solutions have not been able to, given it is the chosen mechanism.
>This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions.
yes, and so does the other crypto - cryptography. facilitating illegal transactions, illegal speech, illegal opinions, illegal thoughts. list of users includes terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, Russians, antivaxers and so on.
it boggles me how do people fail still fail to understand, after watching our collective liberty being eroded for the past 20 years in the name of combating terrorists and protecting children, that the slippery slope is not a fallacy but a law of nature.
the people and entities who want cryptocurrency gone don't give a flying fuck about things they feed the useful idiots as the rationale to do it.
> But that wincing comes from an assumption: that a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal.
I don't think this is true. The wincing comes from a different assumption; that the state has the right to restrict some transactions.
I think almost everyone agrees that there are laws that are either unfair or should be repealed; however, most people don't think that means that the state should be blocked from enforcing laws.
While I agree that there needs to be some ability to act outside of the law to allow public opinions on unjust or inappropriate laws to shift, but I don't think being concerned that laws are easy to bypass means that we believe all the laws are just.
"And “ransomware couldn’t exist because criminals are blocked from using the conventional financial networks, and cash payments aren’t feasible” does not count."
I assume you picked your strongest objection, you need to say something about why blockchain is better than alternatives to make illegal transactions.
Isn't Bitcoin worse than cash for facilitating illegal transactions? Sure, it works over distances without physical contact, which is a huge logistical advantage. But on the other hand, the blockchain is literally a public ledger, so anonymity is tricky. I know there are solutions, but they require significant savvy. Overall I'm not sure that Bitcoin really solves this very well because your average criminal will probably have better intuition about how to hide and cover up cash transactions than Bitcoin, especially as volumes increase and law enforcement develops their expertise, it will only increase the risk for unsophisticated individuals.
> This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions.
There are other mechanisms for facilitating illegal transactions, e.g. the Hawala network. So the blockchain is at least not the single mechanism for this.
And if we're really precise, the blockchain itself doesn't solve this particular problem. It solves the trust problem, just like Hawala.
Only if you consider making it easier to break the law to be solving a problem rather than creating one. Personally, I hew towards the latter point of view. And if you think about it, the continuation of civilization literally depends on having a significant majority of people do the same.
> a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal
But that is not the same thing at all. What you originally said was that (legal) crypto transactions solve a problem by making it easier to do other illegal things. The legality of the crypto transaction itself is a red herring. The point is that you are advancing the view that crypto's ability to facilitate breaking the law in general is a feature, not a bug, notwithstanding the legality of crypto per se.
Civilization cannot survive that attitude spreading too widely. A system can only sustain so many parasites before it dies.
I don't really have any interest in crypto currencies, but they seem to have fond some use in remittances to countries with dysfunctional governments and hyper-inflation that don't allow conversion to USD. It is in some of those circumstances illegal to move in and out of the local currency, but is that a just or reasonable law? If ETH or BTC allow Venezuelans(as one example) in the US to help their relatives buy food, is that not a good thing?
There are numerous accounts of people fleeing war and persecution using crypto currencies to escape with their life savings. That seems like a good use case. Not everyone gets to live in a place with strong rule of law, and bad governments love to seize people's bank accounts and hard currency.
Uncensorable digital currencies are being used to facilitate illegal transactions, and amongs all the blockchains, only ONE of them started with the intention of being a currency of some sort. Yes, there is a distinction between "blockchain" and "blockchain-based currency". Most of the other bullshit blockchain could not be used for that purpose.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people dismissive of blockchain, even on HN, would agree that the world is probably a whole lot better if Bitcoin is the only blockchain exist. It is a bit unfortunate that technical issue might prevent bitcoin of ever be a functional currency, but that is a different topic.
Blockchain is a relatively poor facilitator of illegal transactions, in that the chain of past transactions needs to be kept and known to many parties in the distributed algorithm. That makes it not-difficult to track down who it was that made a transaction.
This reads to me like an argument against the internet because everything can still be done on intranets or other permissioned networks. After all, the internet can be used by criminals so we should absolutely stay away from it!
The author fails to see that people want to build products and companies on open networks, and so the closed ones will struggle to compete.
I have a contrarian view on cryptocurrencies: I don't think the blockchain is the biggest innovation. I think that Bitcoin is. And Bitcoin is more than just a blockchain.
However, I think blockchains are only useful for a single purpose: digital money. Every other use seems misplaced for me.
I really don't understand these arguments. "Blockchain" is a collection of technology but at its heart it's about byzantine-fault tolerant consensus and distributed protocols.
1) a distributed database: it is here to emulate a centralized system, like a central bank! and
2) a distributed database that works even in the presence of malicious actors, so like an international central bank that wants to operate across borders
There's nothing more than that, if you want to understand the technology in a financial scenario.
If you want to understand how this kind of technology can be useful outside of a financial scenario, think about the web PKI (which I wrote about here https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/) or protocols like certificate transparency and binary transparency, and how they could provide resistance against attacks (instead of detection of attacks) if they used a BFT consensus protocol.
There's a lot talk about what blockchains could be but most of the time this is just people lying to themselves or others about getting rich. It's the FOMO from Bitcoin. It's somehow picking the next Bitcoin from the 30,000 shitcoins.
Algorithmic stablecoins have shown their obvious weaknesses in recent times and is another application that doesn't deliver.
But here's the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to blockchains: the government could shut down any blockchain, including Bitcoin, tomorrow if it chose to.
The US could make mining Bitcoin illegal and make it illegal for any financial institution who wants access to the US financial system to transact with cryptocurrencies. Will that shut down the network? Not technically, no. But it will make any such network basically useless.
The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system.
China shut down crypto mining and it basically disappeared the next day (mostly moving to Kazakhstan it seems). With rising energy costs in the developed world (including the disruption to natural gas supply in Europe thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine), at some point hte fact tha Bitcoin uses more power than Sweden is going to be an political issue.
The US dollar is maintained by the long dick of the US government. A currency is a projection of government power. And no crypto network is a match for the projection of power of nation states.
>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology
I generally agree but there definitely are exceptions. For example they can provide viable financial models for tech organizations like Brave and Protocol Labs (I'm not endorsing them) to actually care about privacy, which is an enormous social issue right now.
Are you referring to things like the Basic Attention Token? As I see it, there are two separate things going on here.
1. A micropayment system. Nothing here requires a blockchain. Maybe doing it in a privacy-preserving way is easier with a decentralized solution, but I’m not convinced this is necessarily true.
2. Bypassing problematic regulation. The US and US-led financial system make legally moving small amounts of money around on behalf of clients prohibitively expensive and require an unfortunate degree of discrimination. By magic, blockchains bypass this.
The latter is, in my mind, a huge problem in both directions. A non-blockchain company should be able to offer micropayments without getting tangled in a KYC-AML morass. To the contrary, I would argue that financial services on a common carrier basis would be superior to the current system.
On the flip side, I don’t understand why regulators tolerate cryptocurrency exchanges or why they should tolerate them. From outside, Bitcoin (and, even more so, Monero) are systems by which unknown people can instruct exchanges to move fiat currency without knowing on whose behalf they are moving it. This flies entirely in the face of AML-KYC. The exchanges do not know the customer. Money is laundered.
The way it has supported the development of practical zero-knowledge proof-based applications alone is worth the weight of the blockchain industry in full, and then some.
Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.
The core thinking behind the argument in this article is perhaps this:
This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems.
It's the same issue with things like personal data protection and mass surveillance - everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, and it's eminently clear that only reform of government policies, i.e. legal policy changes like enforceable data privacy laws, offers any real solution.
>everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong,
Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?
The same tech bros have already ignored the 'free software' arguments made by the FSF and just moved on to implement their surveillance capitalist tools in their products; a telling that the move to stop and get rid of all non-free software has been a complete failure.
They continue to scream open-source as if it helps everyone that they can be trusted, but it is only by talk or if the tool, company is shutdown; and everything else is closed-source and not free software. This is why the FSF has failed to stopping all of it as it's co-existing with closed-source software.
Now what we are seeing here is the same tech bros are now trying to stop all cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their projects which i'm afraid that they will end up being very disappointed just like the FSF was with stopping all non-free software. And no, the crypto maxis thinking that it will takeover the current system or all crypto projects will succeed will also be very disappointed with that expectation.
> To me, the problem isn’t that internet can be made slightly less awful than it is today. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything its proponents claim it does. In some very important ways, the internet is not secure. It doesn’t replace the post office with ethernet cables; in fact, in many ways it is far less trustworthy than the postal service. It's not decentralized, and its inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. It still has trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than the post office. Internet still requires governance. It still requires regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with internet is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse.
> In our letter, we write: “By its very design, the internet is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as e-commerce and information-at-your-fingertips to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated services and are not an improvement on the existing mailing system.”
> I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space.
This guy wants the US government to regulate what data structures, algorithms, and protocols you’re allowed to use in your software.
Sorry, but I don’t think anyone really wants the US congress and a baby boomer with a blog to be the ceiling of technology progress.
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." - CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, leading computer maker, in 1977. Microsoft was founded in 1975.
This article talks about everything except what I think is the value proposition of Bitcoin/blockchain: A gambling system one can speculate about entirely anonymously.
It’s anonymous Las Vegas and people love it.
It’s a programmable Wall Street stock market where new kind of invisible wolves can Ponzi scheme the hell out of others in a new kind of scary unstoppable way.
You can argue this is bad for the world (in fact I think it is), but in my opinion this is why blockchain still exist.
Not because it’s a value storage system, or programmable money.
The scary part is that it’s built to be unstoppable so people will continue to gamble and get rich/poor over it.
A new more interesting discussion could be: is it inherent within humans to be able to gamble in this unhealthy way and what can we do to raise awareness about its real nature? (Similar to having facilities where people can get help on gambling or drug addiction)
One often overlooked application of crypto is that it may be attracting a large proportion of scammers and those easily scammed, thereby pulling a whole bunch of scam activity out of the regular financial system and into the crypto space. If we can get all the fraud onto the blockchain, I'd call that a win.
Blockchain solves the problem of trust; you don't have to trust centralized entity with your transactions because with
the Bitcoin's blockchain implementation there is consensus among nodes on the chronology and the nature of transactions plus all transactions are open to public aka transparent.
> Someone, please show me an application where blockchain is essential.
There seriously should be a requirement for anyone writing an article or a comment about how crypto is useless to install MetaMask and go play with Defi protocols for a few days: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ (You can use all of this if you have an internet connection, no arbitrary restrictions by governments or companies imposed can stop you - how on earth does it not blow your mind?!?! Not only that, countries that will have digital stablecoins (like USDC) will gain tremendous benefits; to the similar extent as Petrodollar has). I honestly can't get the short-sightedness of tech people in this area. This is a revolution. Obviously.
[+] [-] automatic6131|3 years ago|reply
>And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems
This is such an important sentence that is bear repeating ad infinitum. For completeness: if you do have a technological solution to an economic and politcal problem, you have created a new political problem (for yourself): getting everyone to use and understand your solution.
[+] [-] oppositelock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatisweb3|3 years ago|reply
Many of th problems crypto aims to solve are not only political and economic, but also technological. The technology in this case may end up being a driver for new political and economic systems.
Similar thing happening with digital payments - like Apple Pay - that are overtaking cash and card swiping in many parts of the world primarily because of a tech innovation that allows for convenience, security, and privacy. Crypto stands to overtake some aspects of our economic activity in a similar way, regardless of what politicians ask for.
[+] [-] dorgo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|3 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure about that. I mean, for example, fusion energy would solve a fair few of economic problems and would be a major part of the solution to the political problem of the climate crisis. I imagine there are a few other technological advances that would fit in like that too.
Very far aside: fusion energy may be closer than we think : https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
[+] [-] pickovven|3 years ago|reply
That's not the same as saying technology will resolve social problems. And I personally think crypto is ridiculous. But knowing technology can completely reshape politics is still an important lesson.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|3 years ago|reply
It certainly can. Maybe not blockchain but the old problems of lacking food etc in the west have largely been fixed by technology like tractors and fertilizers and we have obesity now.
[+] [-] etherael|3 years ago|reply
The only problem to solve is insulating yourself from the demonstrably awful global political process. And ledgers which that political process can't change are arguably an essential part of that solution.
If states and the political process didn't exist and you had to actually pitch it as a business model to modern venture capitalists, it would be a near impossible task.
So your customers are just some group of people inside the borders of some contiguous territory over which you exert direct military control?
And you claim no duty to that group and despite a demonstrable failure in basically everything you do relative to the traditional form of execution, you demand a pricing model that amounts to some permutation of "tell us how much you made and spent this year, great now we want a cut of x out of it".
And all your customers have to do to evade your business model is leave?
And you only transact in tokens you continuously create out of thin air with the thinnest imaginable pretexts?
And last century when this was tried it was the largest non natural cause of death?
And your failure mode may provoke an extinction level event?
Why would anybody actually participate in any of this for any reason other than they have no viable alternative whatsoever and thus you end up with a self selecting group of participants who consume more economic resources than they produce? Apple pie and baseball is not an acceptable answer. Isn't economic collapse basically inevitable?
Oh that's where we are now back in the real world? Well that's inconvenient. Better get to building alternatives asap.
[+] [-] gfodor|3 years ago|reply
Of course, from there, people often wince. But that wincing comes from an assumption: that a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal. This is a fairly bad assumption (particularly with a brief skim of the history of the 20th century), but even if it were true, it is provably the case that blockchain technology is solving this problem in a way previous solutions have not been able to, given it is the chosen mechanism.
[+] [-] throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago|reply
yes, and so does the other crypto - cryptography. facilitating illegal transactions, illegal speech, illegal opinions, illegal thoughts. list of users includes terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, Russians, antivaxers and so on.
it boggles me how do people fail still fail to understand, after watching our collective liberty being eroded for the past 20 years in the name of combating terrorists and protecting children, that the slippery slope is not a fallacy but a law of nature.
the people and entities who want cryptocurrency gone don't give a flying fuck about things they feed the useful idiots as the rationale to do it.
[+] [-] cortesoft|3 years ago|reply
I don't think this is true. The wincing comes from a different assumption; that the state has the right to restrict some transactions.
I think almost everyone agrees that there are laws that are either unfair or should be repealed; however, most people don't think that means that the state should be blocked from enforcing laws.
While I agree that there needs to be some ability to act outside of the law to allow public opinions on unjust or inappropriate laws to shift, but I don't think being concerned that laws are easy to bypass means that we believe all the laws are just.
[+] [-] randomsearch|3 years ago|reply
He literally makes this point in the article.
[+] [-] sorokod|3 years ago|reply
"And “ransomware couldn’t exist because criminals are blocked from using the conventional financial networks, and cash payments aren’t feasible” does not count."
I assume you picked your strongest objection, you need to say something about why blockchain is better than alternatives to make illegal transactions.
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
There are other mechanisms for facilitating illegal transactions, e.g. the Hawala network. So the blockchain is at least not the single mechanism for this.
And if we're really precise, the blockchain itself doesn't solve this particular problem. It solves the trust problem, just like Hawala.
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
Only if you consider making it easier to break the law to be solving a problem rather than creating one. Personally, I hew towards the latter point of view. And if you think about it, the continuation of civilization literally depends on having a significant majority of people do the same.
> a transaction is morally just if and only if it is legal
But that is not the same thing at all. What you originally said was that (legal) crypto transactions solve a problem by making it easier to do other illegal things. The legality of the crypto transaction itself is a red herring. The point is that you are advancing the view that crypto's ability to facilitate breaking the law in general is a feature, not a bug, notwithstanding the legality of crypto per se.
Civilization cannot survive that attitude spreading too widely. A system can only sustain so many parasites before it dies.
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
There are numerous accounts of people fleeing war and persecution using crypto currencies to escape with their life savings. That seems like a good use case. Not everyone gets to live in a place with strong rule of law, and bad governments love to seize people's bank accounts and hard currency.
[+] [-] NhanH|3 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure a lot of people dismissive of blockchain, even on HN, would agree that the world is probably a whole lot better if Bitcoin is the only blockchain exist. It is a bit unfortunate that technical issue might prevent bitcoin of ever be a functional currency, but that is a different topic.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] einpoklum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mareko|3 years ago|reply
The author fails to see that people want to build products and companies on open networks, and so the closed ones will struggle to compete.
[+] [-] haolez|3 years ago|reply
However, I think blockchains are only useful for a single purpose: digital money. Every other use seems misplaced for me.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
I explain this here (https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me...) but if you're looking at it from the outside, you should see blockchain as
1) a distributed database: it is here to emulate a centralized system, like a central bank! and
2) a distributed database that works even in the presence of malicious actors, so like an international central bank that wants to operate across borders
There's nothing more than that, if you want to understand the technology in a financial scenario.
If you want to understand how this kind of technology can be useful outside of a financial scenario, think about the web PKI (which I wrote about here https://cryptologie.net/article/561/the-web-pki-20/) or protocols like certificate transparency and binary transparency, and how they could provide resistance against attacks (instead of detection of attacks) if they used a BFT consensus protocol.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
Algorithmic stablecoins have shown their obvious weaknesses in recent times and is another application that doesn't deliver.
But here's the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to blockchains: the government could shut down any blockchain, including Bitcoin, tomorrow if it chose to.
The US could make mining Bitcoin illegal and make it illegal for any financial institution who wants access to the US financial system to transact with cryptocurrencies. Will that shut down the network? Not technically, no. But it will make any such network basically useless.
The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system.
China shut down crypto mining and it basically disappeared the next day (mostly moving to Kazakhstan it seems). With rising energy costs in the developed world (including the disruption to natural gas supply in Europe thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine), at some point hte fact tha Bitcoin uses more power than Sweden is going to be an political issue.
The US dollar is maintained by the long dick of the US government. A currency is a projection of government power. And no crypto network is a match for the projection of power of nation states.
[+] [-] lvass|3 years ago|reply
I generally agree but there definitely are exceptions. For example they can provide viable financial models for tech organizations like Brave and Protocol Labs (I'm not endorsing them) to actually care about privacy, which is an enormous social issue right now.
[+] [-] amluto|3 years ago|reply
1. A micropayment system. Nothing here requires a blockchain. Maybe doing it in a privacy-preserving way is easier with a decentralized solution, but I’m not convinced this is necessarily true.
2. Bypassing problematic regulation. The US and US-led financial system make legally moving small amounts of money around on behalf of clients prohibitively expensive and require an unfortunate degree of discrimination. By magic, blockchains bypass this.
The latter is, in my mind, a huge problem in both directions. A non-blockchain company should be able to offer micropayments without getting tangled in a KYC-AML morass. To the contrary, I would argue that financial services on a common carrier basis would be superior to the current system.
On the flip side, I don’t understand why regulators tolerate cryptocurrency exchanges or why they should tolerate them. From outside, Bitcoin (and, even more so, Monero) are systems by which unknown people can instruct exchanges to move fiat currency without knowing on whose behalf they are moving it. This flies entirely in the face of AML-KYC. The exchanges do not know the customer. Money is laundered.
[+] [-] simonw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] engineer_22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syzygyhack|3 years ago|reply
Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.
[+] [-] JofArnold|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charonn0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomhodler84|3 years ago|reply
You can’t even argue ransomware is a new crime from cryptocurrency, as this existed via payment card networks back in the day, see Reverton malware.
[+] [-] fpalmans|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirmoveon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems.
It's the same issue with things like personal data protection and mass surveillance - everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, and it's eminently clear that only reform of government policies, i.e. legal policy changes like enforceable data privacy laws, offers any real solution.
[+] [-] ziddoap|3 years ago|reply
Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
They continue to scream open-source as if it helps everyone that they can be trusted, but it is only by talk or if the tool, company is shutdown; and everything else is closed-source and not free software. This is why the FSF has failed to stopping all of it as it's co-existing with closed-source software.
Now what we are seeing here is the same tech bros are now trying to stop all cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their projects which i'm afraid that they will end up being very disappointed just like the FSF was with stopping all non-free software. And no, the crypto maxis thinking that it will takeover the current system or all crypto projects will succeed will also be very disappointed with that expectation.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
> In our letter, we write: “By its very design, the internet is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as e-commerce and information-at-your-fingertips to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated services and are not an improvement on the existing mailing system.”
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dqpb|3 years ago|reply
This guy wants the US government to regulate what data structures, algorithms, and protocols you’re allowed to use in your software.
Sorry, but I don’t think anyone really wants the US congress and a baby boomer with a blog to be the ceiling of technology progress.
[+] [-] asah|3 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=ken+olson+quote+personal+com...
[+] [-] sktrdie|3 years ago|reply
It’s anonymous Las Vegas and people love it.
It’s a programmable Wall Street stock market where new kind of invisible wolves can Ponzi scheme the hell out of others in a new kind of scary unstoppable way.
You can argue this is bad for the world (in fact I think it is), but in my opinion this is why blockchain still exist.
Not because it’s a value storage system, or programmable money.
The scary part is that it’s built to be unstoppable so people will continue to gamble and get rich/poor over it.
A new more interesting discussion could be: is it inherent within humans to be able to gamble in this unhealthy way and what can we do to raise awareness about its real nature? (Similar to having facilities where people can get help on gambling or drug addiction)
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkramer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whitepaint|3 years ago|reply
There seriously should be a requirement for anyone writing an article or a comment about how crypto is useless to install MetaMask and go play with Defi protocols for a few days: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ (You can use all of this if you have an internet connection, no arbitrary restrictions by governments or companies imposed can stop you - how on earth does it not blow your mind?!?! Not only that, countries that will have digital stablecoins (like USDC) will gain tremendous benefits; to the similar extent as Petrodollar has). I honestly can't get the short-sightedness of tech people in this area. This is a revolution. Obviously.
[+] [-] soco|3 years ago|reply