This is on point. I've been saying for years that while decentralization is good in many contexts, it's not necessarily good in every context. This is why I'm bullish on Matrix and Mastodon but remain skeptical of cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc. The former seems like real power transfer to the people from centralized platform owners. The latter seems more like a speed run to teach Libertarians why we got all our financial regulations.
The libertarians have been going full speed ahead, and their system has not crashed yet. You can regulate the margins and the connections to tradfi but many teams and projects are anonymous, and cannot be stopped easily. The experiment is happening right now.
OP seems to have no idea about DeFI. You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like Polymarket. You can gamble. More on: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/. All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies, you just need an internet connection. How can you look at it and not be in awe? Especially if you're into technology.
The interesting technical feature isn't that it's a separate currency, it's permissionless transactions.
We're heading to a world where authoritarian governments want to eliminate cash. Handing the Stasi the ability to prevent people from so much as buying food from a grocer without their permission is catastrophic, much less the impact from such a comprehensive level of surveillance as takes place when every purchase made by everyone goes into a central database.
We need a digital technology that preserves the autonomy and anonymity people have always had since the beginning with cash. (And before the obligatory pedant comes in to say that everything on a blockchain is public, they're still not attached to your identity, and there are technical solutions to preserving anonymity there too.)
Well, permissionless transactions is the exact thing that is not going to happen in scale. With cash, you are required to deanonymize transactions unless they're small (<10k USD), and with the recently passed infrastructure bill changes to 6050I, the same would apply to cryptocurrencies.
In effect there would be a bifurcation - you can either have permissionless transactions, or you can interact with the real world; since all the legitimate businesses and law-abiding people would have to avoid the "permissionless" system unless they can break the anonymity of the transaction and verify that any required filters have been applied.
> With cash, you are required to deanonymize transactions unless they're small (<10k USD)
Nearly all transactions are that small, and the ones that aren't (predominantly vehicles and real estate) are already not anonymous for independent reasons.
It generally doesn't cost >$10,000 to buy a sandwich or a book.
In DeFi, most of the yield comes from speculators who are using your money as leverage to bet which cryptocurrencies will go up.
It's not like a regular loan, whereby a company uses your money to expand, innovate, hire and train new employees, to build and sell something people want.
1. If you think about it, there is no reason why banks should always offer free money to cash hoarders in the form of interest. During a recession, central banks lower interest rates to incentivize spending and productive investment, which benefits the rest of society.
2. DeFi yield relies on Greater Fools essentially gambling their money on cryptocurrency pairs. It might not last forever. I'd rather have 5% yield in corporate bonds, denominated in a currency that I can pay rent and groceries with, than 20% in a shitcoin which might be worthless tomorrow.
You can withdraw at any point, until suddenly you can't anymore. That is the very core of investing: being rewarded for taking the risk of not receiving your money back at all. In particular, the mechanisms most DeFi tools use are vulnerable to the contract being hacked and/or the devs doing a rug-pull. This is clearly a risk that most investors deem quite likely, because if it was a very low risk then the interest rate on DeFi products would not need to be quite that high.
> the mechanisms most DeFi tools use are vulnerable to the contract being hacked and/or the devs doing a rug-pull
Wouldn't this mean that most DeFi would be hacked or rug-pulled by now? Seems the opposite is true, as only a small percentage of DeFi sees hacks and/or rug-pulls.
Could you make the same argument you generally make towards banks as well? Seems like you could, and in that case you're just making an argument against investing in general, not against cryptocurrencies.
No, more like an argument that you'll see the exact same problems that got regulated with the banking industry. Like. You could make this argument.. in a history book. This has already happened.
Stephen seems to be a perfect example of how being an expert on one subject doesn't mean that someone has any kind of deeper insight or experience about unrelated areas. If you look at the history of his blog, for the entire last year his mind has seemingly only been filled with hatred for crypto - the man seems to have a serious ideological hatred of the technology and obstinately refuses to ever reconsider his position.
> If you look at the history of his blog, for the entire last year his mind has seemingly only been filled with hatred for crypto - the man seems to have a serious ideological hatred of the technology and obstinately refuses to ever reconsider his position.
If you take a look at what company he currently works at (and founded), it's pretty obvious where his hate for cryptocurrencies come from.
> All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies
Is that true? Is gambling now legal in jurisdictions where it wasn't before because it's being facilitated by unlicensed entities? Can I do an end-run against money-lending regulations in my country because I'm doing it online?
To me it simply seems that enforcement hasn't (yet) caught up.
Many of the laws against things like gambling apply to the gambling establishment rather than the participant.
When the internet was new, people set up offshore gambling sites and people used them. Then the government started harassing payment processors to prevent people from transferring money there. Which doesn't work if there is no payment intermediary to pressure to cut them off, so now they're back.
Whether this is illegal or not depends on which law and jurisdiction you're talking about, but the whole concept is kind of ridiculous. If you can go to Las Vegas and legally place bets, you should be able to place bets at a Las Vegas casino over the internet from anywhere. The ability to do this is a feature of the internet, not a problem to be "solved" with more authoritarian control over everything.
There's no free lunch. Just because regulators haven't caught up with things, that doesn't mean it will stay that way.
Here's how it's going to go down, like it always does:
1. Gov. tries to regulate and restrict usage
2. If that fails, they will go after bank accounts tied to brokerage accounts etc. Hell, in some countries it's extremely hard to use money made from crypto as a down payment for mortgage, auto loans, and what not - because how hard it is to prove that the money has been earned legally.
Some banks won't even touch crypto customers with a 10 feet pole, because all the regulatory uncertainty.
3. If that fails, they will start to lay down the law with even more drastic measures.
I love technology, I really do - but there's this extremely naïve and arrogant attitude in the community, that if you just power through in the name of technology, and ask for forgiveness later, then it's OK - it rarely if ever works that way. Regulators do not suddenly give in, and abolish "arbitrary" laws / regulations because someone found ways to circumvent or skirt them.
FWIW, I'm not saying that the technology is a dud - only that trying to circumvent regulations by "doing it with crypto" / "decentralized" is a flawed way to go on about things.
Mirrors my feelings on the crypto-craze. As "decentralized" as some may want crypto currency to be, there are some inherently "central" activities (exchanges being one of them) that tend to be skirted around by proponents.
Also, Decentralized Woo Hoo sounds like a great band name. Or something naughty from The Sims.
That centralized exchanges exists doesn't somehow make decentralized cryptocurrencies less decentralized. Just like how centralized social media doesn't make decentralized social media less decentralized.
Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind.
Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.
I will add my own: cryptocurrencies are useless without a legal framework, which requires a central entity with power ensuring that there is fairness, i.e. the government. Change my mind.
P.S. Banking will also still be needed.
In any case, these are social issues and Decentralized Woo Hoo is a great name for it, as decentralization does not solve any of these issues. There is value to "digital cash", but not in the capacity that all these projects claim.
Yup, because if shit hits the fan and you're up against a tyrannical government you have a lot more problems to worry about than exchanging goods for money via a physical crypto wallet (because they'll have already blocked communications by the time they're after you on the ground).
You're correct, I am opposed to crytocurrencies as implemented today. I'm horrified that we spend tons of resources and energy doing effectively useless work. Maybe a Folding at Home coin would be more palatable.
I'd also argue that bitrefill is, yet again, centralization being needed to make it useful. Once defi is accepted everywhere, suddenly people will want the law and central authorities to perform chargebacks, and end up reinventing our exact same system.
Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology.
I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies.
Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article feels less and less honest the more I look into it. "Stephen Diehl" (the author) apparently founded a company that has the following tagline on GitHub "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." (https://github.com/adjoint-io) but I didn't find this disclosed in the post. There is a clear conflict of interest, but it's not highlighted for some reason.
The company (Adjoint, Inc) is described as "digitises cash and settlement processes", something that cryptocurrencies aim to do as well. His company clearly doesn't use decentralization (since why would he make a post against it?), which cryptocurrencies do. How is that not a conflict of interest in this specific blogpost?
Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about cryptocurrencies and decentralization, but that's not true, as a founder he has a huge stake in the outcome.
"Conflict of interest" here would require that he's in a position that gives him some special power over whether people continue to invest in crypto (or "decentralization" generally). Writing a blog post is something anyone can do. The fact that he's put a financial stake in his views doesn't make it unethical to express them the same way as everyone else.
It's not that he shouldn't express his views in a blog. The part that feels shifty here is that he's not disclosing his position in the space in his articles. I think most people are at least somewhat susceptible to "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." so a disclosure of interest is useful to frame thoughts on a topic.
I didn't know about any of this until @capableweb brought it up. It explains a lot more about this series of blog posts.
All you'd have to do to look at their website and see that they offer a product to banks, it has nothing to do with decentralization. http://adjoint.io/
The article is about how the term decentralization has become a generic buzzword for good and in fact could describe a range of technologies that are either good or bad, hence we should be immediately skeptical whenever we see the term decentralized used to describe something as good and innovative and look more closely at the details.
It’s about the authors distaste for decentralized woo given human society literally falls apart without centralization.
Why do we need a literal Matrix running 24/7 when humans themselves can fill in the network gaps SMS doesn’t?
It’s about uneconomical, fantasy driven technology creation by a minority who seek to monopolize it for their social goals.
Shut the computers off and the power of the system is none. It’s not real unless we spend a lot of effort on it. Who is that empowering?
I’d like you to divulge any crypto holdings, crypto business associates, profits, you might have, since you seem to believe full disclosure is a requirement of every post online. I need to know if you have skin the game, leading you to question others motives.
Edit: to down voters; I don’t care. It’s such an impotent flex. “Oh look it me click button get dopamine carrot. I have stabilized reality!” Internet culture is sad af
Normally when we use the phrase "conflict of interest," we use it to imply a conflict between parties. One of the parties in your account is the blog author and/or their company; who is the other? The cryptocurrency community? They aren't a party in the traditional sense, and the concept weakens further when we consider the press campaign among cryptocurrency fans to rebrand their schemes as transaction substrates.
Framed as such, this seems more like an impassioned technical rebuke from an informed individual than a "conflict of interest."
I think it's safe to assume that we're seeing a post-hoc rationalization here in our commenter.
The commenter has tasked themselves with discrediting the author. So, the commenter is thus tasked with either taking umbrage against a conflict-of-interest, or not-having-experience-in-the-field. Whichever state of the binary switch the author is configured in. That's where the foul will be.
Also note that the commenter takes umbrage with the person, not the ideas. Which, is mostly just amusing to me, at this point.
Rather than argue semantics, I'm just going to thank you for pointing out this person has other motivations for their position. I'd wondered why they go on such long anti-crypto rants.
The argument that "observer" as used in physics is misunderstood by laypeople makes sense. He then argues the same is happening with the word "decentralized" which makes no sense because laypeople don't know that word. I guess he's arguing that people see "decentralized" and read "democratized," but he fails to make that argument.
He makes more an analogy of quantum woo and decentralization woo, and i kind of agree with that. Honestly, this idea that you can pinpoint 1 similarity in a very humanly important thing and a technincal complicated, precise and solvable problem (like the consciousness and quantum or like social issues and decentralization (as he writes here) also, human intelligence and AI comes to mind) and then blow that similarity way out of proportion is a very interesting thing to think about and a thought this article presents quite well.
Yes, I certainly agree that there's woo going on in both, and enthusiastic misunderstanding of technical things is a powerful and problematic phenomenon.
I watched a video by a surf instructor the other day who kept talking about the Bernoulli Principle breathlessly and it was clear that the instructor had no idea what it was (he was actually talking about cohesion / adhesion of water)... and I'm sure most of his audience just ate it up and will be repeating it.
Read the first paragraph, thought, interesting, I hear this type of thing in conversations with fellow scientists but instead it's "blockchain woo". Then read on...
Criticisms here are correct: Look, decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. I think for - not just the people he's critcizing, but ALSO FOR HIM, "decentralized" really means "centralized differently."
True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it. Ironic, since a lot of it is built on free/open source (which is true decentralization).
(Which is to say, cryptocurrency isn't valueless, bills gotta get paid and I think fungible crypto can help. But trying to leverage to create new forms of ownership, which is centralization, is exactly backward.)
> decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest.
That's a bit much. There is a bunch of weird crypto hype surrounding web3, but when I can use a website without having to create a login, and my data that its showing doesn't exist on their servers, that's fundamentally a different Internet than the one we've come to know.
But not fundamentally different from the one we had 20 years ago! Maybe that's my issue here. So many of these Web3 clowns are promising slightly worse versions of the web we already had a while ago (which, fair, might be necessary) -- but while pretending it's something new and, perhaps this is the worst part, apparently aggressively ignoring the extent to which "Information wants to be free"/ GNU Manifesto/etc" type ideas are at least PARTLY true.
Same thing happened when VPS hosting started being branded as this brand new thing called the cloud and now look at where we are with that. Go figure out how and where smart contracts get executed, and how web3 does decentralize things via a wallet, and tell me there isn't something there, hidden behind all of the marketing fluff of crypto conmen.
> True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it.
"True" decentralization is a voluntary framework where both exclusivity and ownership can coexist with other (less capitalist) ideologies. What I find interesting is that there is an emerging global sandbox for people to experiment with novel technologies and try out new ideas that were simply not possible before.
It's certainly a fair criticism that the most popular (and most profitable) projects are lacking in creativity and disproportionately rewarded for questionable utility, but that is a criticism of the people who are building (and paying) with this technology.
Crazes come and go, and after this current Cambrian explosion winds down and all the NFT hype, DeFi scams, and almost-ponzi schemes implode, I believe that the truly interesting (and useful) projects will not only remain, but continue to grow and evolve over time.
I agree, though I think the current one or ones being hyped now is far less interesting that the projects that have already done much of the same pre-Crypto. They ALL seem like "stuff we've done before but lets add on more payments."
See e.g. Deviant Art, Wikipedia, Roblox, Minecraft, Second Life, the list goes on.
The solution crypto assets propose is creating incentives for collaboration. Items on IPFS only remain lively as long as someone is willing to pin a particular bit of content and is ultimately doing so on a charitable basis. That's not nothing, but you can't scale to the whole internet that way.
If you can create incentives to collaborate and participate in the storing and caching of those bits, now you've got a mechanism to scale far beyond what you could achieve on benevolence alone.
I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but facebook is still free to use that sale data to sell me things.
This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.
> But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data.
I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk.
But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets?
We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.
I think we're on the same page. That's kind of what I was saying about how you're essentially open sourcing the "read" on data.
Also, I'm not trying to sell the write side short! Owning writes is the major value proposition of a blockchain. I just feel like people conflate the two when talking about on chain ownership
This is true! But it's also hard to think of a situation in which you would need to store that encrypted data on chain. Why not store it on a central server? Or, encrypted on a p2p network? And if order of events is important, you could just store a hash of the data on chain.
this guy automatically associates for me with crypto-fudster and of course the very next post of his i see is more "criticism" of crypto.
not that there's nothing to criticize crypto projects for, but this particular argument is very meh. projects that advertise as being decentralized but aren't will eventually collapse. projects that advertise as decentralized and do attempt to be decentralized - are solving some truly hard problems, both technically and socially. something to learn from, not dismiss hand-wavingly.
I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games.
However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as "decentralization" but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized.
This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace.
To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn't have tons of other problems will take time.
> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation
I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” are out there, somewhere, while ignoring the fact that the blockchain/crypto space is absolutely drowning in meme tokens and obvious cash grabs.
The superiority of blockchain solutions seems to be assumed for many believers, so it’s natural to assume that superior solutions will eventually arise from this superior blockchain technology.
But the superiority of blockchain isn’t obvious for most problems. Moreover, if someone does build a superior solution on top of a blockchain, what’s stopping a centralized player from duplicating the benefits of that superior solution at a lower cost in a centralized platform?
This is the conundrum of blockchain and token projects: For them to be superior to the consumer they must eventually have lower fees and costs. Yet blockchain is inherently more expensive than equivalent centralized solutions and, even worse, the token investors expect astronomical (to the moon) returns on their investments, which necessitates extracting a lot of money from the users after the speculative frenzy has died off. At least currently, most blockchain/crypto/token schemes are built with the assumption that the consumer is the person they will sell the tokens to as a speculative investment, not the person who will actually use the service itself.
Decentralized solutions actually have a lot of problems that proponents avoid talking about. For example, DAOs are promoted as ways of decentralizing ownership, but we're supposed to ignore the fact that a well-capitalized player could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO by purchasing up enough tokens. And unlike with real-world companies, the ownership can be purchased anonymously in a way that makes it appear to come from a lot of organic traction. A well-funded company could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO and neither regulators, users, nor consumers would even know. We're supposed to believe this model is a boon for decentralization, but it's a dream come true for surreptitious takeovers.
The projects reshaping the economy are named. The good ones are Ethereum and L2s. Their goal is to become planetary infrastructure for the global economy.
There's such an abundance of VC money that funding isn't scarce. Developer talent is however.
Doesn't the thought of "something that is supposedly/hypothetically going to change the fundamental economic system of the planet" built on back of VC money (I realize not all of crypto started from VC funding) seem to likely have some fundamental flaws? That and quality developer talent is rare that the final products shipped are going to be poor?
I really don't see how this thing shakes out well for humanity (not even including carbon costs)
@delaaxe: "Their goal is to become planetary infrastructure for the global economy."
Seeing as this "planetary infrastructure" will consume more energy than it produces. A better description would be "planetary snakeoil". The economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Tons of things consume more energy than they produce. Humans for one. I don't even know what 'energy' you're thinking crypto produces here, or that dollars produce in comparison (The only electricity I've seen dollars generate is static electricity). I'm guessing you're being metaphoric here, but your comment is too vague to be useful.
Tezos will be a big competitor. Its self amending mechanism allows developers to inject proposals on which the bakers are invited to vote on. Every ~3 months improvements are made. Its language allows formal verification. But the most important of all it upgrades itself without forks. It is liquid PoS since the beginning. Transactions or contract calls cost below 1 cent, due to steady implemented gas fee optimizations. This month 30M contract calls will be reached whereof almost all were done this year. More and more serious businesses are joining. https://tezos.com/https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/15/entrepreneur-first-launche...
"what’s stopping a centralized player from duplicating the benefits of that superior solution at a lower cost in a centralized platform?" - This has been my strategy as of late. There are some real cool concepts being built. But once you factor in gas/technology costs and the idea that they don't rely on anonymous p2p transactions, a centralized concept makes sense.
> I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named.
There are two good reasons for that:
1) The culture around careful discussion of crypto currencies does well to keep seperated financial advice and claims about economics, incentives and technology (or in the crypto space you call of these 'the protocol' or something else to refer to the complete package a distributed ledger technology aims to achieve) - these claims can quickly get mixed up with lies to make money using buzzwords. You don't want this discussion to turn into people shilling what they personally own, trust me, and refraining from naming good projects when off the metaphorical sale's floor is simply good manners.
2) Crypto is still very nascent. Smart contract platforms that are fast and cheap are only starting to be rolled out and stress tested - without that most of the auxiliary functions people envision are only aspirations. If that's where basic smart contracts are right now, then more advanced protocols you can easily tell are much less far along. Because of the lack of industry proven protocols to do what believers pretty much know will happen someday, recommending any means imparting risk on people like you who expect others to tell you "what's up." Its not that fun giving someone risky investment advice when they refuse to look into it themselves and shoulder that risk.
> I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named.
I don't know about politics, but there are definitely coins reshaping the economy. Hell, bitcoin by itself is reshaping the economy, being considered by many major institutions to officially be a new asset class now[1]. It doesn't mean a total replacement of the economy, if that's what you're thinking, but it's definitely reshaping it.
DeFi is already taking a nice chunk out of central banks' lunch. Celsius, USDC, BlockFi, etc, are able to credibly offer 6% or higher yield[2], whereas banks can only offer, at best 0.6%, nowhere close to beating inflation.
That's just two use cases, and if I had more time this morning I could go into more (didn't even touch on smart contracts at all). Wouldn't be surprised if you'll dismiss them out of hand as bad projects according to whatever internal criteria you have, and if so, I don't think you'll ever be able to convinced that anything a good project.
It just gets annoying to hear people dismiss the entire space all the time without spending more than a few minutes looking into it, and/or assuming that the space never evolved from 4-5 years ago, where you could safely make those claims.
Your last point (everything in smart contracts) I just can't understand. I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where the "computer says no", and even if a court and Jury disagrees, it's impossible to change.
Similarly (and it's already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say "Oh, well that's what the smart contract said, so bye bye country?"
I agree, you wouldn't want a world where either of those two scenarios you mention are possible. But are those examples inescapable risks inherent to having smart contracts? Or does the design of current smart contracts lack maturity in such a way that allows for problems similar to the ones you mention? Maybe better smart contract design could arise that prevents these issues.
I think the case that they are inescapable risks is pretty strong. I think the history of formal design and software engineering is pretty clear that the designing a foolproof system is effectively and practically speaking impossible except for extremely small, extremely isolated problem spaces.
I don't think smart contracts are in that space and I don't think any level of maturity is going to get you there.
The smart contracts you are seeing now are relatively simple programs and are woefully insufficient for nation-state level use.
Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.
But, if there is a "court intervention" clause that just lets you say "Transfer X money from Y to Z", then why bother with full blockchain/crypto? You have effectively central control.
No. Better than the current system of laws we have.
Currently, the current system requires lengthy court intervention with interpretation done after the fact.
Smart contracts can allow for a fixed number of resolutions with a timeframe defined up front. Smart contracts won't work for everything, but they might be a better fit for some things.
One thing I've realized is that it's best to think about crypto and smart contracts as a foundation to build upon. They're tools in our toolbox. What we build is up to us.
In the future, I don't think we'll see many monolithic contracts like you're describing (no USA smart contract). Instead I think we'll have a bunch of small, simple, and battle tested smart contracts that we can fit together like lego bricks.
This is what people said about objects in the context of object-oriented programming and it never really happened. Currently software doesn't really feel like lego bricks, it feels more like the mix of legos, mega blocks, duplos, kaplas and playmobiles that I played with when I was younger. You can build lots of stuff with it, and they can kind of go together, but not as easily as things from the same brand.
Yes, and it's full of little packages that are made to make sure one package will work with the other. In my example, this would be duplo to lego connectors, duplo to mega blocks connectors, lego to mega blocks connectors, etc. I also often write myself glue code between two packages.
In Kim Stanley Robinsons Ministry for the Future carbon coins seem to act in this way kinda sorta without depending on a complete decentralization of society or anything particularly revolutionary. They become popular as an investment opportunity because they act like 100 year high yield bonds and then they make tax avoision more difficult because of the record of the blockchain. Anyway its all dependent on the support of national banks in the book but it comes to mind reading this in any case. I just finished the book finally so Im still figuring out what I think of the whole thing...
This is why I support crypto. I view it as a laboratory where we can experiment with ideas around finance and governance.
Many of the currently accepted ideas around these topics came from a pre-internet world. However, myself and others think that certain technologies have changed the game.
Maybe we need government or maybe we don't. Maybe we need a centralized currency, maybe we don't. The thing is we won't really know what we need until we run the experiments.
Personally I think these experiments are too important to silence them.
Yes, the laboratory would be fine if it weren't for BTC and ETH.
Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects that consume ungodly resource as a byproduct of securing the network (which is a financial problem in any case)
> Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects
Are you familiar with any methods to achieve the same characteristics of Bitcoin but without PoW? Perhaps the energy is not the issue, perhaps it's your view to the importance of it.
Yes like the fact that Solana and Cardano are more centralized than, say, Ethereum.
It takes 128gb of RAM just to run a Solana node. Higher system requirements = less decentralized. Fewer people can join the network. They also pump up their transactions-per-second numbers since they count proof-of-stake votes as transactions.
Cardano has a centralized development team. Whereas Ethereum invests in multiple, independent development teams. This means that a software bug is less likely to take out the entire network. Additionally the founder of Cardano is known to be a bit of a pathological liar and was kicked off the Ethereum team because of this and the fact that he wanted to take Ethereum private.
No one who appreciates the unique characteristics of Bitcoin will want anything to do with anything else. Bitcoin is closer to a religion than anything.
In any case, the "unique characteristics of Bitcoin" are what makes it abhorrent.
I just mentioned the two top PoS crypto, but anything that doesn't gobble resources as a byproduct of the network security cost is fine. I agree that Cardano is run by a maniac and Solana is centralized and too affiliated with scammers (SBF)
PoS Ethereum would be fine by me, but they've been saying they'll switch forever, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Abhorrent is how environmentalists aren't pushing for nuclear energy. The people in power don't want a solution that'll essentially solve the power problem. They want a continuous battle over renewables.
I think it's perfectly relevant that this whole discussion about BTC waste could have been avoided if we just switched to nuclear. I'm pointing out that environmentalists are actually partially responsible for creating these problems.
Regarding GPUs did it ever occur to you that YOU are wasting electricity? From my perspective I'm trying to use crypto to create a better world.
You could say "finance of last resort" or you could call it a new paradigm of finance. You are simply dismissing something that you have no personal connection to.
When you can't open a bank account, are discriminated against by institutions, live in highly authoritarian environments etc. This type of finance is not a "last resort" it's your first resort.
The reason it's not "popular" however you want to define it is simply a matter of time and not function.
Ethereum is moving to a new algorithm that will reduce energy consumption by 99.95%. This is happening in a matter of months.
Asking about use-cases for crypto is like asking for use-cases for the internet in the 90s. It's so general purpose that there isn't a specific use-case to sell you on but instead a set of smaller use-cases that add up to a large use-case.
For example, I would love for charities to be built on crypto. Many of the larger charities only use a small percentage of their funds on the problem they're trying to solve. I'd love to see exactly what my charitable donation is being used for. Luckily crypto is public and therefore publicly auditable.
I could list off similar use-cases and each one doesn't seem to be a big deal. But put together it's a huge change in how we view the world.
And as for your other arguments like crime, these don't match up with actual data. Crypto being public is a large turn-off for criminals so they tend to prefer cash instead.
Ethereum has been moving to proof of stake for the past 4 years. Everytime these threads come up people bring up that ETH is *just about* to move to PoS, but it never happens.
You're presumably in software, you should know major software upgrades take years and always longer than expected. Doubly so when it's already being used for millions of transactions daily. Triply so when you're altering the fundamental nature of the underlying protocol.
They have already released the first of three phases. It's live now. I currently have some ETH on the new Proof of Stake chain. Second phase (where they merge it with the rest of the network) got pushed back a few months recently, but it's still expected Q1/Q2 2022[1].
I see and expect this argument from people who aren't in software, who expect everything to happen perfectly and instantly. But you should have been involved in enough projects to know you can't just Thanos snap a major software upgrade into existence.
> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized.
That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?
As others have noted, and indeed the author might point to, this kind of response is sort of a quantum woo dodge. It asserts that some of the quantum woo is genuinely helpful and useful and functional with clear mechanisms, but by coincidence fails to point to any in particular or specify mechanisms.
Can you point me to something more specific? It looks like he was part of some major cryptographic advances before sailing off into snowballscheme land.
One idea is that whatever you build on top of a platform like Ethereum will persist; if you build on top of Facebook or IOS your app can be removed without recourse.
The idea of non-deletion seems to keep coming up again and again in technology. From Usenet spam to abusive Facebook apps, I find myself wondering if being forever saddled with every abusive smart contract someone ever wrote is really a desirable trait in a long-term planetary-scale system.
Remember the 1990s and early 2000s when there were tons of easily discoverable forums? Moderation was less of an issue -- each forum was someone's fiefdom, but there was an abundance of choices and communities available at each choice.
The solution to censorship definitely isn't non-deletion. Usenet died for a reason and 4chan is fringe for a reason. The solution to censorship is a healthy choice of venues, good discoverability, and low/no switching costs. Basically, modern phpbb forums or discord but searchable.
I am actually a rare breed excited about the potential about cryptocurrency here on HN. That said, when I go through your example, I don’t see much difference from the current system despite the illusion that it’s different.
> appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract
So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for.
> everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open
Tax laws are public knowledge. So are spending decisions. For example, the infrastructure bill that just passed. Anyone can see exactly the allocation of funds to where.
> by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status
So, senators. Which we have already. Or direct democracy without senators, which the founding fathers (US-specific) agreed was bad because most people do not understand how taxes and budgeting work.
I want to be convinced that this is somehow different from the current system, but any example I see is either the same (but looks very different) or worse (this part is arguable, but I don’t think proportional voting on tax law would end well. Most people would certainly just end taxes if given the choice with little regard to the long-term consequences of this.)
"So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for."
Laws are not mechanisms, proof of transaction, records etc..
'Smart Contracts' as something unassailable in courts are ridiculous obviously.
But 'smart contracts' that facilitate micro-transactions, every day purchases, and flow through the system without human interaction seem like a good idea.
Imagine when you buy that thing on your Business Visa, and the 'smart contract' is signed, sent to head office, sent to your accounting software, balanced, money in your bank account immediately etc.. All with a series of signed elements.
I understand that's not exactly what it's supposed to look like, but that's the kind of thing I see happening.
While you could say 'there should be a standard for that' it might be that the standards are not nimble enough, and a more generic 'start contract' system could work to tie it all together.
And maybe importantly: to skip VISA and classical banks while we're at it.
This part is interesting, the idea that enforcement and legislation are one in the same. However, for taxes, this would only just prevent tax fraud, right? There’s not really “mechanisms” for taxes. Congress passes the laws. You follow them when you file your taxes, or you may be audited later and fined/jailed.
> to skip VISA and classical banks while we’re at it
Loan pools and such are interesting, basically community lending. I’m not sure how much we could skip VISA. It’s a payment processor. You need someone to submit your transactions to nodes. In reality, they are of course going to charge a fee because they can make money. Just like VISA. One advantage is I guess they won’t have VISA’s prudish objections to certain kinds of transactions.
> Imagine when you buy that thing on your Business Visa, and the 'smart contract' is signed, sent to head office, sent to your accounting software, balanced, money in your bank account immediately etc.. All with a series of signed elements.
This already happens at every company I've ever worked for, modulo the "in your bank account immediately" part. But that's down to how cash flow works, which is fundamental to most businesses/industries and can't be solved by anything other than time travel or teleportation. No amount of crypto is going to change the fact that the restaurant needs to sell a completed before it can pay the cook for their prep work. Even if bank transactions were immediate, most people would have to wait until their next paycheck to get reimbursements.
The underlying technology is a 90s relational database, some html/javascript/php, a bunch of java, and probably some cobol somewhere.
> And maybe importantly: to skip VISA and classical banks while we're at it.
As much as I hate the privacy invasion of cc companies and banks knowing everything I buy, the idea of my entire financial life being published on a public chain is waaay more creepy. Like most normal humans, I am mildly creeped out by big companies knowing things about me but would be seriously angry if my manager, pastor, or mother-in-law knew those same things.
'The way it works today' is a bit cludgy and there's actually no reason you couldn't have the reimbursement instantly. The 'non tech' reason would be related to internal approvals, but with the right tech, it would be streamlined.
It's also possible that the government could get some of their taxes right away. Obviously not in call cases due to varying accounting issues, but it could work.
FYI there's no reason for 'all your transactions to be on the blockchain' - that's just the way it works today but that can change.
Regular expenses are generally not burdened by cash flow. You get your regular expenses at the 'end of the month' as a matter of process, not because the company is waiting for customers to pay for stuff, so they can pay you.
As an employee, you're not there to provide working capital for your company, so if you're buying something really that the company should be paying for, they should be able to pay for it immediately.
> Regular expenses are generally not burdened by cash flow. You get your regular expenses at the 'end of the month' as a matter of process, not because the company is waiting for customers to pay for stuff, so they can pay you.
Again, this may be true in Corporate America, but it's far less true in small businesses (which are a huge fraction of any economy).
> As an employee, you're not there to provide working capital for your company
No, that's the role of my credit card company (and what's more, they pay me for the pleasure & my only real expense is divulging my employer's spend).
> Or direct democracy without senators, which the founding fathers (US-specific) agreed was bad because most people do not understand how taxes and budgeting work.
To be fair, people were MUCH dumber back then, and the capability to access information was a modicum of what it is today. Direct democracy was also impossible back then given the slow speed of communication and population distributed across vast territory. Today, I don't think it's fair to paternalize the general public as such - we have the system we have due to legacy and inertia, not its merits.
This is very obviously the case if you take time to read old books.
A lot of the supposedly dumb things that people believed in the past were actually quite well supported and derived theories with the information they could get at the time.
Of course there were a lot of people who believed dumb things on blind faith, but this is just as true today as it was then.
This criticism should really end - yes, it misleads many people!
Creating a decentralised app, or a token, is permisssionless! Yes, anyone anywhere can do it. Much like publishing a website, or writing a blog article, the costs are negligible. The fact that there are a lot of useless websites and blog articles does not invalidate the usefulness of the web!
The existence of shitcoins means absolutely nothing.
I liked the Haskell content on his blog, I'm not sure about his new political line against crypto. This started a bit more than a year ago with this post https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/crypto.html, which ends on a bizarre claim about a link between crypto and right-wing extremism:
> David Golumbia’s excellent book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism outlines the rabbit-hole effect that this ecosystem is having on software engineers onboarding them into deeper forms of right-wing extremism.
This is not crypto-specific, I'd rather read software blogs than political blogs in general. In the spirit of Drew DeVault (https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...), I'll disclose my stake in cryptocurrency: I currently own ~1000€ in Bitcoin, that I bought for something like 800€ earlier in the year. Those ~200€ are the only profit I made on crypto. I use Monero from time to time for stuff where Monero is useful.
When honest articles draw ire, it is a tell-tale sign.
Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, crypto fans claim "Calmer than you" while internally seething at The Dude's honest callout of their inconsistencies.
Maybe rather than coming at the author from every possible angle to somehow discredit his observations, stop and consider he's making an extremely valid analogy: all of us have encountered at least one "quantium woo" acolyte in our lifetime, and realizing that you might be that person but with a different woo is upsetting, but important.
The most potent statement of the article: "There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws."
> ... But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet like with quantum woo, without a reference to a mechanism.
Decentralization by itself has no value. In fact, it has negative value because decentralized systems by their nature tend to be less efficient and more complicated than their centralized counterparts.
Bitcoin's value proposition rests not on decentralization, but on censorship resistance. Censorship resistance means that in Bitcoin, it's difficult to impose rules designed to prevent specific groups or individuals from transacting. This approach is the polar opposite of the one taken by most of the world's governments.
This is the point that zooms over the heads of just about every Bitcoin critic. They either don't grasp the value of censorship resistance or reject it because they've lived a life of financial and/or political privilege. Their world view tells them that censorship only happens to those who deserve it. By definition, only criminals and evil-doers seek censorship resistance.
Financial repression and censorship are on the rise. The worlds governments now have not only the motive but the means for large-scale control by selectively shutting off access to financial services. Those who don't subscribe to this view are some of the harshest critics of Bitcoin.
I don't think critics don't "get it", it's just that money exists in meatspace and if you're goal is to stop people with guns then you're gonna have a rough time unless you also have guns.
All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-board business would legally be able to transact with you and no individual would dare touch you because their wallet would get poisoned, and your coins would be stuck in limbo. You couldn't send your coins to another wallet because that would be immediately blacklisted as well.
Money you can't spend anywhere except black markets is basically the same as having your assets frozen for basically everyone.
Edit: You could destroy it even more with KYC requirements.
I have been participating in the Ethereum community for many years and I agree that there is a widespread belief that decentralized tech and economies run on smart contracts can substantively address social problems. Additionally, in the wider crypto community there is a widespread belief that these networks are a way to restore fair money.
In most cases I don't think that these beliefs are post-hoc rationalization. Rather, it is simply motivating to think this way. "woo" is a longstanding feature of any new human endeavor because most of us are psychologically wired to think that what we work on is going to be helpful, and we build a little religion with each other in order to cohere and quickly get the work done.
Regarding the question whether decentralized tech will make the world "better": it can and will in some cases -- for very specific reasons -- but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems.
As is the case for every major technology unleashed on our world.
Focusing on the over-positive views of enthusiasts won't stop them, and certainly won't stop the progression of the tech. People will keep building on something new when it can be built, when it is wildly interesting, and when the endeavor is sustainable.
What we need to put more attention on is what to do with the outcomes. It is our responsibility to do so! How to replace the services the tech will disrupt with options that have qualities we desire: more fair, less expensive, more secure, less arbitrarily alterable, etc.
And we need to put more attention on the ways it could all go wrong and bring widespread harm.
> but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems
So glad you said this - I've also been in the Ethereum community for a while and have significant trepidation about the impact of this technology. But also I see it as unstoppable so we have a duty to participate and try to ensure the positive outweighs the negative.
I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.[1]
A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol.
Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blockchains are currently decentralized.
Governance is about how the rules and decisions are made. I guess fairly linked to the logical/code layer. Also heavily centralized in the blockchain world.
And they never will the third. Never. Once again, this is thinking you can make humans act like robot computer code. You can't. So-called "smart contracts" (which are neither) will never helpfully substitute for humans doing dispute resolution by talking to each other.
> I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.
This is even worse than it sounds. Crypto projects like DAOs actually make hidden centralization a breeze for well-funded adversaries.
If someone has enough money, they can simply take over a DAO by buying enough tokens to swing the votes in the direction they want. Thanks to the way most blockchain solutions are implemented, they can even accumulate all of these tokens in ways that appear decentralized across many unique wallets that are nevertheless controlled by a central party.
Big players can acquire centralized control of decentralized projects in ways that consumers and regulators wouldn't even be able to detect.
Decentralized, tokenized ownership structures are definitely not "power to the people" structures. They are "power to the money" structures, where whoever can spend the most money is guaranteed to win and all of the participants have given up their ability to ever even know when it's happening.
This is true, but at some point the community will figure out what's going on, and either leave to a more promising and uncompromised project, or find a way to limit the voting power of the attacker. You can see this happening now with the Curve Wars.
DAO just means decentralised organisation. Like token, also a very generic term, it can come in many forms. There is nothing inherent about a DAO that even includes tokens, let alone tokens that are fungible or even acquirable.
The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, they seem to have a pretty decent - though often imperfect - idea what they're talking about.
I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware.
There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.
Critically fails to distinguish between decentralization technologies (a wider category) and cryptocurrency. Does not understand the term he is criticizing.
There is another deeper primary failure here shared by much of the HN community. That is the inability, despite so much evidence, to comprehend that technology IS an ally to society. In fact, it has always been a core part of progress in human society.
But the above, and the article, are just laying out worldviews, which is not constructive since beliefs are very broad and quite difficult to change. What IS possible to discuss are specific types of problems and technological or non-technological solutions to them. The article provides nothing specific to discuss. It is simply idealogical flamebait and should be removed.
Do you have a browser extension that replaces the word "technology" with "Ayn Rand"? Have no idea what you are talking about.
I was a fan of Ayn Rand when I read her as a kid. At this point I am close to the opposite of an Ayn Rand fan. Again, don't see how you possibly brought Ayn Rand into my comment.
Seen many people conclude the low hanging fruit of technology has all been obtained, and there's little left to build. But with web3 we're only getting started. There's so much you can do with it.
Trustless is another word that gets the same rhetorical slight of hand and IMO is more dangerous in terms of individuals getting scammed. All these terms specific in context get sold as general in application when crypto is marketed. Same thing with other rallying cries like removing middlemen.
Some good points here. If the author is reading the comments, I spotted the following typos:
1) "that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either" should probably say "that tries to rationalize their existence by appealing to either"
2) "like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness" should probably say "like that quantum mechanics and consciousness"
The sentence in the second last paragraph reads "They all have their idea about how to “make the world a better place” and to do it they need you to tithe and purchase their ponzicoin today to buy a stake in a better tomorrow." and is the anthem of this video I saw posted on reddit.com/r/bitcoin called "Bitcoin is Generational Wealth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rnqst5qCgA A lot of fluff and no details regarding the implementation of the ideal future except that one must get on the Bitcoin train now to be part of it.
Another half billion or more in Africa have been happily using mobile payment systems such as M-Pesa for years now as well, sending more money than the Bitcoin "market cap" each year.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadWe're heading to a world where authoritarian governments want to eliminate cash. Handing the Stasi the ability to prevent people from so much as buying food from a grocer without their permission is catastrophic, much less the impact from such a comprehensive level of surveillance as takes place when every purchase made by everyone goes into a central database.
We need a digital technology that preserves the autonomy and anonymity people have always had since the beginning with cash. (And before the obligatory pedant comes in to say that everything on a blockchain is public, they're still not attached to your identity, and there are technical solutions to preserving anonymity there too.)
In effect there would be a bifurcation - you can either have permissionless transactions, or you can interact with the real world; since all the legitimate businesses and law-abiding people would have to avoid the "permissionless" system unless they can break the anonymity of the transaction and verify that any required filters have been applied.
Nearly all transactions are that small, and the ones that aren't (predominantly vehicles and real estate) are already not anonymous for independent reasons.
It generally doesn't cost >$10,000 to buy a sandwich or a book.
It's not like a regular loan, whereby a company uses your money to expand, innovate, hire and train new employees, to build and sell something people want.
2. DeFi yield relies on Greater Fools essentially gambling their money on cryptocurrency pairs. It might not last forever. I'd rather have 5% yield in corporate bonds, denominated in a currency that I can pay rent and groceries with, than 20% in a shitcoin which might be worthless tomorrow.
Wouldn't this mean that most DeFi would be hacked or rug-pulled by now? Seems the opposite is true, as only a small percentage of DeFi sees hacks and/or rug-pulls.
Could you make the same argument you generally make towards banks as well? Seems like you could, and in that case you're just making an argument against investing in general, not against cryptocurrencies.
If you take a look at what company he currently works at (and founded), it's pretty obvious where his hate for cryptocurrencies come from.
Is that true? Is gambling now legal in jurisdictions where it wasn't before because it's being facilitated by unlicensed entities? Can I do an end-run against money-lending regulations in my country because I'm doing it online?
To me it simply seems that enforcement hasn't (yet) caught up.
When the internet was new, people set up offshore gambling sites and people used them. Then the government started harassing payment processors to prevent people from transferring money there. Which doesn't work if there is no payment intermediary to pressure to cut them off, so now they're back.
Whether this is illegal or not depends on which law and jurisdiction you're talking about, but the whole concept is kind of ridiculous. If you can go to Las Vegas and legally place bets, you should be able to place bets at a Las Vegas casino over the internet from anywhere. The ability to do this is a feature of the internet, not a problem to be "solved" with more authoritarian control over everything.
Here's how it's going to go down, like it always does:
1. Gov. tries to regulate and restrict usage
2. If that fails, they will go after bank accounts tied to brokerage accounts etc. Hell, in some countries it's extremely hard to use money made from crypto as a down payment for mortgage, auto loans, and what not - because how hard it is to prove that the money has been earned legally.
Some banks won't even touch crypto customers with a 10 feet pole, because all the regulatory uncertainty.
3. If that fails, they will start to lay down the law with even more drastic measures.
I love technology, I really do - but there's this extremely naïve and arrogant attitude in the community, that if you just power through in the name of technology, and ask for forgiveness later, then it's OK - it rarely if ever works that way. Regulators do not suddenly give in, and abolish "arbitrary" laws / regulations because someone found ways to circumvent or skirt them.
FWIW, I'm not saying that the technology is a dud - only that trying to circumvent regulations by "doing it with crypto" / "decentralized" is a flawed way to go on about things.
Also, Decentralized Woo Hoo sounds like a great band name. Or something naughty from The Sims.
Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.
P.S. Banking will also still be needed.
In any case, these are social issues and Decentralized Woo Hoo is a great name for it, as decentralization does not solve any of these issues. There is value to "digital cash", but not in the capacity that all these projects claim.
DAI and MIM are some examples of decentralized stable coins that could be used for payment.
https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/petco-usa/?hl=en
They don't have it at the payment terminal directly yet, because of the stigma you and others still have against cryptocurrency.
But after this cycle, the news will have normalized it enough that you WILL pay for your dog food and Taco Bell with Dogecoin — I'd bet 10 DOGE on it.
I'd also argue that bitrefill is, yet again, centralization being needed to make it useful. Once defi is accepted everywhere, suddenly people will want the law and central authorities to perform chargebacks, and end up reinventing our exact same system.
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/
> use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.
https://bitcoinist.com/doge-for-dogs-burger-king-brazil-now-...
https://imgur.com/kR1aNcP
...
Maybe not "Change my mind", but definitely a "Prove me wrong"
That was the "follow the money" moment, for me.
"Yep, this house is gonna be Woohoo Central."
http://jenba.net/sims2/?p=185
"I tried to woohoo everyone in The Sims 4"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oibAXV3vlo
"Missing Information: This article is missing information about How to initiate WooHoo. You can help The Sims Wiki by adding it."
"Sims usually desire to do a public WooHoo. Doing a public WooHoo will grant a special memory for the engaging Sims or a special moodlet and stride."
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/WooHoo
I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies.
Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article feels less and less honest the more I look into it. "Stephen Diehl" (the author) apparently founded a company that has the following tagline on GitHub "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates." (https://github.com/adjoint-io) but I didn't find this disclosed in the post. There is a clear conflict of interest, but it's not highlighted for some reason.
That's not a conflict of interest.
Reading the post it seems like he has no stake in the outcome of what people think about cryptocurrencies and decentralization, but that's not true, as a founder he has a huge stake in the outcome.
I didn't know about any of this until @capableweb brought it up. It explains a lot more about this series of blog posts.
If anything, that gives him credentials to talk about it?
Why do we need a literal Matrix running 24/7 when humans themselves can fill in the network gaps SMS doesn’t?
It’s about uneconomical, fantasy driven technology creation by a minority who seek to monopolize it for their social goals.
Shut the computers off and the power of the system is none. It’s not real unless we spend a lot of effort on it. Who is that empowering?
I’d like you to divulge any crypto holdings, crypto business associates, profits, you might have, since you seem to believe full disclosure is a requirement of every post online. I need to know if you have skin the game, leading you to question others motives.
Edit: to down voters; I don’t care. It’s such an impotent flex. “Oh look it me click button get dopamine carrot. I have stabilized reality!” Internet culture is sad af
Framed as such, this seems more like an impassioned technical rebuke from an informed individual than a "conflict of interest."
The commenter has tasked themselves with discrediting the author. So, the commenter is thus tasked with either taking umbrage against a conflict-of-interest, or not-having-experience-in-the-field. Whichever state of the binary switch the author is configured in. That's where the foul will be.
Also note that the commenter takes umbrage with the person, not the ideas. Which, is mostly just amusing to me, at this point.
I watched a video by a surf instructor the other day who kept talking about the Bernoulli Principle breathlessly and it was clear that the instructor had no idea what it was (he was actually talking about cohesion / adhesion of water)... and I'm sure most of his audience just ate it up and will be repeating it.
True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it. Ironic, since a lot of it is built on free/open source (which is true decentralization).
(Which is to say, cryptocurrency isn't valueless, bills gotta get paid and I think fungible crypto can help. But trying to leverage to create new forms of ownership, which is centralization, is exactly backward.)
That's a bit much. There is a bunch of weird crypto hype surrounding web3, but when I can use a website without having to create a login, and my data that its showing doesn't exist on their servers, that's fundamentally a different Internet than the one we've come to know.
"True" decentralization is a voluntary framework where both exclusivity and ownership can coexist with other (less capitalist) ideologies. What I find interesting is that there is an emerging global sandbox for people to experiment with novel technologies and try out new ideas that were simply not possible before.
It's certainly a fair criticism that the most popular (and most profitable) projects are lacking in creativity and disproportionately rewarded for questionable utility, but that is a criticism of the people who are building (and paying) with this technology.
Crazes come and go, and after this current Cambrian explosion winds down and all the NFT hype, DeFi scams, and almost-ponzi schemes implode, I believe that the truly interesting (and useful) projects will not only remain, but continue to grow and evolve over time.
See e.g. Deviant Art, Wikipedia, Roblox, Minecraft, Second Life, the list goes on.
If you can create incentives to collaborate and participate in the storing and caching of those bits, now you've got a mechanism to scale far beyond what you could achieve on benevolence alone.
This distinction appears to be lost on a lot of people who are new to the space, and leads to a lot of marketing fluff around projects that make no sense.
I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk.
But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets?
We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.
Also, I'm not trying to sell the write side short! Owning writes is the major value proposition of a blockchain. I just feel like people conflate the two when talking about on chain ownership
Unless you encrypt things you put on blockchain. Or use clever ways to hide information from others. There are cryptocurrencies like Monero.
not that there's nothing to criticize crypto projects for, but this particular argument is very meh. projects that advertise as being decentralized but aren't will eventually collapse. projects that advertise as decentralized and do attempt to be decentralized - are solving some truly hard problems, both technically and socially. something to learn from, not dismiss hand-wavingly.
However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as "decentralization" but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized.
This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace.
To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn't have tons of other problems will take time.
I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” are out there, somewhere, while ignoring the fact that the blockchain/crypto space is absolutely drowning in meme tokens and obvious cash grabs.
The superiority of blockchain solutions seems to be assumed for many believers, so it’s natural to assume that superior solutions will eventually arise from this superior blockchain technology.
But the superiority of blockchain isn’t obvious for most problems. Moreover, if someone does build a superior solution on top of a blockchain, what’s stopping a centralized player from duplicating the benefits of that superior solution at a lower cost in a centralized platform?
This is the conundrum of blockchain and token projects: For them to be superior to the consumer they must eventually have lower fees and costs. Yet blockchain is inherently more expensive than equivalent centralized solutions and, even worse, the token investors expect astronomical (to the moon) returns on their investments, which necessitates extracting a lot of money from the users after the speculative frenzy has died off. At least currently, most blockchain/crypto/token schemes are built with the assumption that the consumer is the person they will sell the tokens to as a speculative investment, not the person who will actually use the service itself.
Decentralized solutions actually have a lot of problems that proponents avoid talking about. For example, DAOs are promoted as ways of decentralizing ownership, but we're supposed to ignore the fact that a well-capitalized player could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO by purchasing up enough tokens. And unlike with real-world companies, the ownership can be purchased anonymously in a way that makes it appear to come from a lot of organic traction. A well-funded company could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO and neither regulators, users, nor consumers would even know. We're supposed to believe this model is a boon for decentralization, but it's a dream come true for surreptitious takeovers.
I know very little about this space, but I get a very strong "real deal" feel from Charles Hoskinson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoskinson
https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles
https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/
I am most optimistic about blockchain based innovation with respect to direct/liquid/etc democracy.
https://cardano.org/governance/
Please stop pushing this snakeoil!
There's such an abundance of VC money that funding isn't scarce. Developer talent is however.
I really don't see how this thing shakes out well for humanity (not even including carbon costs)
Seeing as this "planetary infrastructure" will consume more energy than it produces. A better description would be "planetary snakeoil". The economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
Is it a problem, though? Not according to the protocol.
Asserting that it is a problem is a political statement.
There are two good reasons for that:
1) The culture around careful discussion of crypto currencies does well to keep seperated financial advice and claims about economics, incentives and technology (or in the crypto space you call of these 'the protocol' or something else to refer to the complete package a distributed ledger technology aims to achieve) - these claims can quickly get mixed up with lies to make money using buzzwords. You don't want this discussion to turn into people shilling what they personally own, trust me, and refraining from naming good projects when off the metaphorical sale's floor is simply good manners.
2) Crypto is still very nascent. Smart contract platforms that are fast and cheap are only starting to be rolled out and stress tested - without that most of the auxiliary functions people envision are only aspirations. If that's where basic smart contracts are right now, then more advanced protocols you can easily tell are much less far along. Because of the lack of industry proven protocols to do what believers pretty much know will happen someday, recommending any means imparting risk on people like you who expect others to tell you "what's up." Its not that fun giving someone risky investment advice when they refuse to look into it themselves and shoulder that risk.
Projects like Uniswap, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc provide financial services similar to traditional exchanging and lending.
There are also things like ENS and TheGraph that provide more infrastructural benefit (i.e. name server and data indexing layer).
And many, many more in the space of games & collectibles.
Many of these had been used for years. Some of that usage is speculative, sure, but not all of it.
It's already there. It's just way too early to do 1:1 comparisons with established non-crypto projects.
I don't know about politics, but there are definitely coins reshaping the economy. Hell, bitcoin by itself is reshaping the economy, being considered by many major institutions to officially be a new asset class now[1]. It doesn't mean a total replacement of the economy, if that's what you're thinking, but it's definitely reshaping it.
DeFi is already taking a nice chunk out of central banks' lunch. Celsius, USDC, BlockFi, etc, are able to credibly offer 6% or higher yield[2], whereas banks can only offer, at best 0.6%, nowhere close to beating inflation.
That's just two use cases, and if I had more time this morning I could go into more (didn't even touch on smart contracts at all). Wouldn't be surprised if you'll dismiss them out of hand as bad projects according to whatever internal criteria you have, and if so, I don't think you'll ever be able to convinced that anything a good project.
It just gets annoying to hear people dismiss the entire space all the time without spending more than a few minutes looking into it, and/or assuming that the space never evolved from 4-5 years ago, where you could safely make those claims.
[1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-officially-a-ne...
[2]: https://defirate.com/usdc/
Similarly (and it's already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say "Oh, well that's what the smart contract said, so bye bye country?"
I don't think smart contracts are in that space and I don't think any level of maturity is going to get you there.
Imagine a future with multiple levels of smart contracts that allow for court intervention and arbitration. It starts to resemble the checks and balances we have in place now, but the rules are public and codified.
If, however, there are a limited number of known possible outcomes, then smart contracts offer advantages over court-based settlements.
You mean like, say, the current system of laws we have? (:
Sure, laws are strange and arcane and require expertise to translate them into understandable terms, but any form of code has the exact same problem.
Currently, the current system requires lengthy court intervention with interpretation done after the fact.
Smart contracts can allow for a fixed number of resolutions with a timeframe defined up front. Smart contracts won't work for everything, but they might be a better fit for some things.
In the future, I don't think we'll see many monolithic contracts like you're describing (no USA smart contract). Instead I think we'll have a bunch of small, simple, and battle tested smart contracts that we can fit together like lego bricks.
Its essentially people thinking "we're not getting a fair shake here from human law, let's try robot law".
Many of the currently accepted ideas around these topics came from a pre-internet world. However, myself and others think that certain technologies have changed the game.
Maybe we need government or maybe we don't. Maybe we need a centralized currency, maybe we don't. The thing is we won't really know what we need until we run the experiments.
Personally I think these experiments are too important to silence them.
All of that without a popular usecase yet. Except for financial speculation, finance-of-last-resort, and crime.
I would say that laboratory is not using the research grants well.
Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects that consume ungodly resource as a byproduct of securing the network (which is a financial problem in any case)
Are you familiar with any methods to achieve the same characteristics of Bitcoin but without PoW? Perhaps the energy is not the issue, perhaps it's your view to the importance of it.
CryptoA != CryptoB. Specifics matter, _a lot_
It takes 128gb of RAM just to run a Solana node. Higher system requirements = less decentralized. Fewer people can join the network. They also pump up their transactions-per-second numbers since they count proof-of-stake votes as transactions.
Cardano has a centralized development team. Whereas Ethereum invests in multiple, independent development teams. This means that a software bug is less likely to take out the entire network. Additionally the founder of Cardano is known to be a bit of a pathological liar and was kicked off the Ethereum team because of this and the fact that he wanted to take Ethereum private.
This is all stuff that anyone can look up.
In any case, the "unique characteristics of Bitcoin" are what makes it abhorrent.
I just mentioned the two top PoS crypto, but anything that doesn't gobble resources as a byproduct of the network security cost is fine. I agree that Cardano is run by a maniac and Solana is centralized and too affiliated with scammers (SBF)
PoS Ethereum would be fine by me, but they've been saying they'll switch forever, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Resorting to a such a fallacy is generally a sign you have nothing defensible to say about the absurd waste BTC produces
Even if you want to change the subject, I can't get a GPU because 1/5th of the GPU supply is shipped to ETH mines.
Regarding GPUs did it ever occur to you that YOU are wasting electricity? From my perspective I'm trying to use crypto to create a better world.
When you can't open a bank account, are discriminated against by institutions, live in highly authoritarian environments etc. This type of finance is not a "last resort" it's your first resort.
The reason it's not "popular" however you want to define it is simply a matter of time and not function.
Asking about use-cases for crypto is like asking for use-cases for the internet in the 90s. It's so general purpose that there isn't a specific use-case to sell you on but instead a set of smaller use-cases that add up to a large use-case.
For example, I would love for charities to be built on crypto. Many of the larger charities only use a small percentage of their funds on the problem they're trying to solve. I'd love to see exactly what my charitable donation is being used for. Luckily crypto is public and therefore publicly auditable.
I could list off similar use-cases and each one doesn't seem to be a big deal. But put together it's a huge change in how we view the world.
And as for your other arguments like crime, these don't match up with actual data. Crypto being public is a large turn-off for criminals so they tend to prefer cash instead.
They have already released the first of three phases. It's live now. I currently have some ETH on the new Proof of Stake chain. Second phase (where they merge it with the rest of the network) got pushed back a few months recently, but it's still expected Q1/Q2 2022[1].
I see and expect this argument from people who aren't in software, who expect everything to happen perfectly and instantly. But you should have been involved in enough projects to know you can't just Thanos snap a major software upgrade into existence.
https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/
Gamers: "No problem. Take the time you need to make it good."
Crypto developers (who are responsible for billions of dollars): "We need to push back the release date"
Techies: "How dare you. I'm going to imply you're incompetent even though I don't follow the development process at all."
That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?
As others have noted, and indeed the author might point to, this kind of response is sort of a quantum woo dodge. It asserts that some of the quantum woo is genuinely helpful and useful and functional with clear mechanisms, but by coincidence fails to point to any in particular or specify mechanisms.
Bankless | 90 - 5 Mental Models for Web3 | Chris Dixon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jezH_7qEk50
The solution to censorship definitely isn't non-deletion. Usenet died for a reason and 4chan is fringe for a reason. The solution to censorship is a healthy choice of venues, good discoverability, and low/no switching costs. Basically, modern phpbb forums or discord but searchable.
> appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract
So, like sales tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for. Or income tax. Which we have uniform and open laws for.
> everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open
Tax laws are public knowledge. So are spending decisions. For example, the infrastructure bill that just passed. Anyone can see exactly the allocation of funds to where.
> by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status
So, senators. Which we have already. Or direct democracy without senators, which the founding fathers (US-specific) agreed was bad because most people do not understand how taxes and budgeting work.
I want to be convinced that this is somehow different from the current system, but any example I see is either the same (but looks very different) or worse (this part is arguable, but I don’t think proportional voting on tax law would end well. Most people would certainly just end taxes if given the choice with little regard to the long-term consequences of this.)
Laws are not mechanisms, proof of transaction, records etc..
'Smart Contracts' as something unassailable in courts are ridiculous obviously.
But 'smart contracts' that facilitate micro-transactions, every day purchases, and flow through the system without human interaction seem like a good idea.
Imagine when you buy that thing on your Business Visa, and the 'smart contract' is signed, sent to head office, sent to your accounting software, balanced, money in your bank account immediately etc.. All with a series of signed elements.
I understand that's not exactly what it's supposed to look like, but that's the kind of thing I see happening.
While you could say 'there should be a standard for that' it might be that the standards are not nimble enough, and a more generic 'start contract' system could work to tie it all together.
And maybe importantly: to skip VISA and classical banks while we're at it.
This part is interesting, the idea that enforcement and legislation are one in the same. However, for taxes, this would only just prevent tax fraud, right? There’s not really “mechanisms” for taxes. Congress passes the laws. You follow them when you file your taxes, or you may be audited later and fined/jailed.
> to skip VISA and classical banks while we’re at it
Loan pools and such are interesting, basically community lending. I’m not sure how much we could skip VISA. It’s a payment processor. You need someone to submit your transactions to nodes. In reality, they are of course going to charge a fee because they can make money. Just like VISA. One advantage is I guess they won’t have VISA’s prudish objections to certain kinds of transactions.
This already happens at every company I've ever worked for, modulo the "in your bank account immediately" part. But that's down to how cash flow works, which is fundamental to most businesses/industries and can't be solved by anything other than time travel or teleportation. No amount of crypto is going to change the fact that the restaurant needs to sell a completed before it can pay the cook for their prep work. Even if bank transactions were immediate, most people would have to wait until their next paycheck to get reimbursements.
The underlying technology is a 90s relational database, some html/javascript/php, a bunch of java, and probably some cobol somewhere.
> And maybe importantly: to skip VISA and classical banks while we're at it.
As much as I hate the privacy invasion of cc companies and banks knowing everything I buy, the idea of my entire financial life being published on a public chain is waaay more creepy. Like most normal humans, I am mildly creeped out by big companies knowing things about me but would be seriously angry if my manager, pastor, or mother-in-law knew those same things.
It's also possible that the government could get some of their taxes right away. Obviously not in call cases due to varying accounting issues, but it could work.
FYI there's no reason for 'all your transactions to be on the blockchain' - that's just the way it works today but that can change.
Out in the Real Economy there's a thing called cash flow. You can't pay your employees before your customers pay you.
> FYI there's no reason for 'all your transactions to be on the blockchain' - that's just the way it works today but that can change.
You're right. There's no reason.
As an employee, you're not there to provide working capital for your company, so if you're buying something really that the company should be paying for, they should be able to pay for it immediately.
Again, this may be true in Corporate America, but it's far less true in small businesses (which are a huge fraction of any economy).
> As an employee, you're not there to provide working capital for your company
No, that's the role of my credit card company (and what's more, they pay me for the pleasure & my only real expense is divulging my employer's spend).
To be fair, people were MUCH dumber back then, and the capability to access information was a modicum of what it is today. Direct democracy was also impossible back then given the slow speed of communication and population distributed across vast territory. Today, I don't think it's fair to paternalize the general public as such - we have the system we have due to legacy and inertia, not its merits.
This is very obviously the case if you take time to read old books.
A lot of the supposedly dumb things that people believed in the past were actually quite well supported and derived theories with the information they could get at the time.
Of course there were a lot of people who believed dumb things on blind faith, but this is just as true today as it was then.
This criticism should really end - yes, it misleads many people!
Creating a decentralised app, or a token, is permisssionless! Yes, anyone anywhere can do it. Much like publishing a website, or writing a blog article, the costs are negligible. The fact that there are a lot of useless websites and blog articles does not invalidate the usefulness of the web!
The existence of shitcoins means absolutely nothing.
> David Golumbia’s excellent book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism outlines the rabbit-hole effect that this ecosystem is having on software engineers onboarding them into deeper forms of right-wing extremism.
This is not crypto-specific, I'd rather read software blogs than political blogs in general. In the spirit of Drew DeVault (https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...), I'll disclose my stake in cryptocurrency: I currently own ~1000€ in Bitcoin, that I bought for something like 800€ earlier in the year. Those ~200€ are the only profit I made on crypto. I use Monero from time to time for stuff where Monero is useful.
Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, crypto fans claim "Calmer than you" while internally seething at The Dude's honest callout of their inconsistencies.
Maybe rather than coming at the author from every possible angle to somehow discredit his observations, stop and consider he's making an extremely valid analogy: all of us have encountered at least one "quantium woo" acolyte in our lifetime, and realizing that you might be that person but with a different woo is upsetting, but important.
The most potent statement of the article: "There is no meme that you won’t find an answer for because how someone sees decentralization is like a Rorschach for their fears and tragic flaws."
Decentralization by itself has no value. In fact, it has negative value because decentralized systems by their nature tend to be less efficient and more complicated than their centralized counterparts.
Bitcoin's value proposition rests not on decentralization, but on censorship resistance. Censorship resistance means that in Bitcoin, it's difficult to impose rules designed to prevent specific groups or individuals from transacting. This approach is the polar opposite of the one taken by most of the world's governments.
This is the point that zooms over the heads of just about every Bitcoin critic. They either don't grasp the value of censorship resistance or reject it because they've lived a life of financial and/or political privilege. Their world view tells them that censorship only happens to those who deserve it. By definition, only criminals and evil-doers seek censorship resistance.
Financial repression and censorship are on the rise. The worlds governments now have not only the motive but the means for large-scale control by selectively shutting off access to financial services. Those who don't subscribe to this view are some of the harshest critics of Bitcoin.
All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-board business would legally be able to transact with you and no individual would dare touch you because their wallet would get poisoned, and your coins would be stuck in limbo. You couldn't send your coins to another wallet because that would be immediately blacklisted as well.
Money you can't spend anywhere except black markets is basically the same as having your assets frozen for basically everyone.
Edit: You could destroy it even more with KYC requirements.
Impossible with bitcoin's latest updates.
In most cases I don't think that these beliefs are post-hoc rationalization. Rather, it is simply motivating to think this way. "woo" is a longstanding feature of any new human endeavor because most of us are psychologically wired to think that what we work on is going to be helpful, and we build a little religion with each other in order to cohere and quickly get the work done.
Regarding the question whether decentralized tech will make the world "better": it can and will in some cases -- for very specific reasons -- but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems.
As is the case for every major technology unleashed on our world.
Focusing on the over-positive views of enthusiasts won't stop them, and certainly won't stop the progression of the tech. People will keep building on something new when it can be built, when it is wildly interesting, and when the endeavor is sustainable.
What we need to put more attention on is what to do with the outcomes. It is our responsibility to do so! How to replace the services the tech will disrupt with options that have qualities we desire: more fair, less expensive, more secure, less arbitrarily alterable, etc.
And we need to put more attention on the ways it could all go wrong and bring widespread harm.
So glad you said this - I've also been in the Ethereum community for a while and have significant trepidation about the impact of this technology. But also I see it as unstoppable so we have a duty to participate and try to ensure the positive outweighs the negative.
I suspect this as well. Would be curious to see your list of possible issues.
A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol.
Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blockchains are currently decentralized.
Governance is about how the rules and decisions are made. I guess fairly linked to the logical/code layer. Also heavily centralized in the blockchain world.
[1] https://youtu.be/LKbOPYnUlXs?t=369
This is even worse than it sounds. Crypto projects like DAOs actually make hidden centralization a breeze for well-funded adversaries.
If someone has enough money, they can simply take over a DAO by buying enough tokens to swing the votes in the direction they want. Thanks to the way most blockchain solutions are implemented, they can even accumulate all of these tokens in ways that appear decentralized across many unique wallets that are nevertheless controlled by a central party.
Big players can acquire centralized control of decentralized projects in ways that consumers and regulators wouldn't even be able to detect.
Decentralized, tokenized ownership structures are definitely not "power to the people" structures. They are "power to the money" structures, where whoever can spend the most money is guaranteed to win and all of the participants have given up their ability to ever even know when it's happening.
I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware.
There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.
There is another deeper primary failure here shared by much of the HN community. That is the inability, despite so much evidence, to comprehend that technology IS an ally to society. In fact, it has always been a core part of progress in human society.
But the above, and the article, are just laying out worldviews, which is not constructive since beliefs are very broad and quite difficult to change. What IS possible to discuss are specific types of problems and technological or non-technological solutions to them. The article provides nothing specific to discuss. It is simply idealogical flamebait and should be removed.
I was a fan of Ayn Rand when I read her as a kid. At this point I am close to the opposite of an Ayn Rand fan. Again, don't see how you possibly brought Ayn Rand into my comment.
PS: Is it not `woo woo` instead of `woo hoo`?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo-woo
1) "that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either" should probably say "that tries to rationalize their existence by appealing to either"
2) "like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness" should probably say "like that quantum mechanics and consciousness"
[1] https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy... "the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and
India's system which was launched in 2016 clocks in 4B+ transcations per month, grows 100% YOY.
A lot of developing countries have their mobile systems which are far better than Crypto.