I think most sensible people had figured this out already. The people that don't and honestly believe everything will be fixed by a DAO or whatever... they're beyond reason.
I think that eventually, anything that can be run by a DAO will be run by a DAO, just like with automation, any process that can be automated will, eventually, be automated.
I think I've given the concept of DAOs a good faith effort, but I cannot understand how anyone thinks they are going to work for anything substantial.
Even if "governance" is "decentralized," there are still going to need to be people in the DAO, day to day, doing the work that no one wants to do, making decisions that no one wants to make.
It seems to me like a DAO is just a college group project but if you add crypto it solves everything?
Organizational behavior and its challenges don't go away because you've issued tokens.
Honest question, what the heck am I missing? It has to be something!
I think this is right. The inevitable climate change-induced population crash will necessitate more automation, further accelerating an accelerating trend.
*DAO doesn't need to run on Ethereum blockchain, it can also be a sufficiently autonomous collection of ERP systems.
So far this does not seem to be true though. There are a great many processes which we could have automated but have so far not done yet, often in domains where safety is very critical and/or are very human-involved. One particular example is the automation of train and aircraft piloting, where humans are required by law and due to public demand but not actually necessary for the job.
In particular I'm thinking about some of the procedures aboard nuclear submarines where automated systems were tried and eventually rolled back, because the automation would be fine 99.9% of the time but when it failed it would cause disaster at computer speeds instead of just at human speeds. I can definitely imagine a bug in a DAO being completely unacceptable in some domains even if it is more efficient than doing the same job with humans. (For example, in national voting)
Finally even for those cases where automation is desired and could be done by some autonomous entity, I'm not sure why you would specifically need a Distributed AO instead of just regular cronjobs on a server somewhere. Any real-world system is going to need regular updates anyway, so you end up centralizing trust in whoever can update the code for the (D)AO.
It's worthwhile to note that there are currently driverless metro lines in the world. We do seem to be moving in that direction for automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system... As always, the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
The thing people generally don't want automated is exactly the the thing money is intended to do: allocate resources.
Very few people want a robot deciding how they spend their time, energy, and assets. Resource allocation will be the last unautomated job on the planet if we make it to post-scarcity. People want everything done for them except deciding what those things that need to be done are.
Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem.
The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all our progress and knowledge with them when they die. No more pretending to bow down to megalomaniacs and ideologues to achieve stability. No more vast centralized moral hazards that attract sociopaths like moths to a lamp.
I've taken to calling the zero-trust decentralization problem "computer science's fusion." It's perpetually N years away, but if we solve it the payoff is immense.
Edit: Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive that the real solution is somewhere nearby.
There will never be a utopia because when you eliminate one set of problems you reveal new ones. The fact that we are even discussing this is because we are not dying of cholera, starving, or being eaten by lions. The goal is to advance one step at a time.
Eliminating civilizational SPOFs would be a fairly large step.
> Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive
It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement. You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.
I think part of the problem is that DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is simply a poor way to describe what these new orgs are. Yes they're decentralized, but they are not fully autonomous, as they still require people writing code, making proposals, voting, etc. I think a much better term is "decentralized open organization" DOO. This captures better the fact that this revolution is about a new type of human coordination, not automation, even if a lot is automated. I think it helps to frame this as a social revolution to understand the full power of it.
Advances in the ability to coordinate humans often leads to great advances in society and technology. Now where crypto is immensely useful, is that in the past a decentralized group of people would have still had to be tied to a specific nation for banking. Now with crypto, a group of people from all over the world can run a company that's fully internet native that relies on no single nation for it's banking needs. You may not see it, but to me that is a ridiculously powerful concept.
I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completely unprofitable if it could get access to freshly printed money every quarter to prop it up. What then happens to all the other businesses who don't get access to that freshly created money? When we have situations like the BoJ owning more than 60% of the Nikkei 225 we really ought to be asking some serious questions about if we really have free markets? We also should be asking some questions about the properties we desire in money itself. If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities we can quickly have a situation whereby an unelected group of bureaucrats can damages the ability of money to be used as a means to convey information. Further there's questions about picking winners and losers that comes up there too. As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be. It seems that these difficult questions really fell out of favor a while ago and as a result things have been drifting in a direction that many people aren't comfortable with.
If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.
I'm not sure why you'd take from this that I'm ignoring the role of regulation when I'm commenting on a situation whereby the regulatory framework of central banks allows them to take actions that damage the signaling power of pricing. I most definitely think that banks and central banks must be carefully regulated because they have the special privilege of creating money and with this comes a lot of responsibility.
The other part though is that if money is corrupted it impacts the process of regulation itself. For example creating good regulation to tax companies is made far more difficult when there's fundamental differences between the nature of the money that those companies themselves have access to. I'm sure it would be possible with a large amount of effort to have regulations with non-fungible money but there's challenges there that would be substantially difficult to address and the complexity of that regulation would come with it's own non-zero costs to society.
In simpler terms, for any complaint you come up with, here's a regulation to fix it. Problem solved.
If the problem is a regulation, let's remove or modify that regulation. Problem solved.
If your problem is there are too many regulations, let's get rid of 20 of them and simplify down to just this one. Problem solved.
Oh, that simplification created its own problems? Let's create new regulations covering those three scenarios. Problem solved.
But if we are much slower at creating regulations than we are at creating new situations that require regulation, it creates the perception that regulations don't work, which leads to rapid de-regulation of everything. Our current legal and political framework simply wasn't designed for this. It was designed for 13 small colonies writing paper letters back and forth, where waiting 3 months for a court to make a decision or 1+ years for congress to pass a bill was considered quite timely and fine. We now live in a society where there is probably a need for 2-3 new regulations per day, and 1-2 adjustments to existing regulations, per day, and an AI chat bot that will tell you whether something is legal based on current regulations.
It would seem that the temptation to set the price of everything is increased when there are impediments to setting the interest rate (since this removes an important monetary policy lever). I think this has been seen lately as the zero-lower-bound on nominal interest rates has started to come into play in many places.
You're merely documenting how current regulations are inefficient at catching current abuses. With proper regulations, these kind of abuses could be mostly prevented. With anti-regulation sentiment permeating government and politics right now, this becomes much, much more difficult. People will use the failure of antiquated regulations that need to be updated as justification for removing or kneecapping them, because "clearly they don't work anyway".
All systems trend towards chaos eventually. The answer is always more or better regulation. Sometimes better means more, sometimes better means "take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes". We don't want a rulebook so large no one could ever read all of it (we already have that). We don't want the complexity of the regulations to spiral out of control along with the system -- regulations need to be adapted over time to handle the current (and near future) complexity of the system. And we don't want no regulations -- then the system itself will spiral out of control.
The whole idea of legal precedents works against this too -- the logic is inverted --- instead of constantly coming up with new takes and new rules to govern old and current situations, we hark back to a decision someone made 50 years ago and we say "this is set in stone", when we should be constantly updating and modifying those precedents to better fit the current state of the system. Eventually new laws get passed, but the judicial system itself is largely a damper on progress in this regard, dragging us into the past and making changes that could take 5 years take 50 years. We see this reflected in our astounding incarceration rate, and a number of other areas.
The pace of technological and societal evolution has grown to be much faster than the pace at which we upgrade our regulations. We are speeding towards a brick wall.
I'm trying to encourage a discussion about what money itself should be. I think without this discussion it will be very hard to make effective regulations around money and the implications this has on the operations of the banking system. Once people are more informed about these topics better regulation will be possible. Frankly I don't see people talk about the fundamentals of money much, the current monetary system is convenient enough for most people such that they don't have to think about the details of how it works in their day to day lives.
What money is in what sense though? In a centralized/decentralized sense? In a philosophical sense? Are we considering going back to bartering?
My point is, you see companies abusing bailouts and say "oh no, our fundamental concept of money is changing because bailouts". I see that same situation and say "oh no, our regulations are so antiquated that they are 50 years behind in terms of the abuses they are able to prevent, we need to update our regulations and create new ones, and create a framework for rapidly adjusting regulations going forward, because the current rate is untenable."
This problem extends well beyond money and touches every area of society. Society and technology are evolving faster than the legal frameworks that supposedly govern them. Limiting the scope of the discussion to just cover money would do just that, limit the scope of what should be a much wider discussion.
Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance.
Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up rivaling anarchy. Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance. Without precedents, every single legal case would turn into a gamble. Only fools and the insane would ever stick their necks out; not far from where we are now, I suppose.
Right, but society has accelerated. 50 and 100 year precedents used to make sense. Now it seems like they need to be updated at least every 10 years, because that's how long it takes for society to fundamentally change at the current rate of progress.
Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructurings that prevent the government from having the bad traits it currently has, or 2) the removal of existing regulations that are preventing the government from being better in your eyes.
If your statement is "I don't like the current state of the government" then you are simply for transforming it into something you do like. This can be done through a regulatory framework.
If you don't trust the government as it is, then you are one more voter for regulating X, Y and Z such that you do trust the government.
There is also a cultural element though. The laws and regulations may encourage corrupt behaviour, but if there was a strong cultural expectation that the most upstanding people go into government to serve their communities - and if that were actually who was attracted to the role - that wouldn't matter all that much.
I've been reading about the philosophy of Law, and how other cultures deal with legal codes. One of the most intriguing takeaways was critically examining our own system and just how verbose it is. American (and just about all Western Legal Codes) are extremely detailed and contain tons of clauses that are explicitly enumerated.
Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.
We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is that human behavior is inherently complicated and because legal systems need to account for human behavior there's no getting around the introduction of complexity into the system. There's just a question of where that complexity lives.
Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.
Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.
A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).
So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.
> But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.
The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".
We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).
Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.
Specifically, we need more regulatory coverage coming from a fewer number of regulations. That is the guiding star. More restrictions, more elegant / simpler rules / fewer actual rules.
It’s always refreshing to see a fellow skeptic of legal precedent in the wild. The precedent set by making the just ruling in one specific case may set up far greater injustices in the future.
Exactly. I watched read about 2009 watched the Big Short and watched all these USELESS tech companies thrive on empty promises and venture caps where rich people are basically playing the lottery.
The financial system captured our society a while ago.
> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be.
Yes! This is an incredibly important conversation and this conversation is already happening. You see MMT becoming mainstream. Because MMT is a description of how money works today. That it's a technology (and always has been) for governments to provision themselves.
In fact, I doubt you would have had the stimulus package we had with COVID without that conversation. And it helped millions of people. It also had the unfortunate side affect of growing inequality. We also have the euro, which is, in my opinion a bad implementation of money (central bank without democratic oversight). And of course bitcoin based on the idea of hard currency economics.
One discussion I don't see at the moment is a vision for society without money. That's a discussion the communists had over 150 years ago. It's a serious question because money IS a technology. Is the telephone the best communication technology? No, we moved on from the telephone. We should be asking the same thing about money. Because money is a technology designed around organizing economic activity. But is it the best technology?
Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
People need to have imagination if we are going to survive as a species.
> the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is measured in units of USD say, and the latter is measured in units of kg CO_2(e), say.
Suppose I go to shopping to buy a new CPU. Vendor A offers CPU_A for ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)) while vendor B offers an equivalent product CPU_B for ($198, 50 kg CO_2(e)).
In the current economy, where externalities of global warming caused by market participants are not priced or regulated, I will purchase CPU_B, as it costs me $198, and I save $2 . I choose the product with the additional CO_2(e) footprint of (50 - 15) = 35 kg CO_2(e). The negative impact of that additional 35 kg CO_2(e) pollution is amortized over 8 billion humans [1], so everyone in the world pays the price of an additional 35 kg CO_2(e) / 8 billion = 4.375e-7 grams CO_2(e) per person. Myself as the end-user and the counterparties in the transaction (merchant, distributor, manufacturer, suppliers, etc) get to share in the value generated from the transaction, but most of the 8 billion people in the world do not get a cut of the value or utility, they only pay the cost.
As well as making the prices vectors, it would be necessary to add some other kind of limited resource into the vector-money economy, to constrain individuals from making decisions with large carbon pollution externalities, otherwise we're back to the same situation where we started, but with a lot more bookkeeping that nearly everyone will ignore.
One way to do this could be introduce regulation for a greenhouse gas pollution rationing system: for argument's sake, suppose we allocate each of the 8 billion people in the world an equal quota of kg CO_2(e) / year pollution they are permitted to emit [2]. Suppose there's roughly 40 gigatons of CO_2(e) pollution per year, and roughly 8 billion people in the world. That gives a quota of 5000 tons of CO_2(e) pollution allowance per year per person. Assuming humanity manages to hold the rate of carbon emissions steady and hold population steady, that gives a quota of 5000 kg CO_2(e) per person per year. Each time you purchase a good or a service, the carbon cost is deducted from your personal carbon budget. For efficiency, suppose we also allow carbon quotas to be traded between market participants. Now we have a carbon market where people exchange $ for CO_2(e) carbon emission allowance.
Now, arguably, we can go back to having scalar prices: Instead of the price of CPU_A being the vector ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)), it can be the scalar $200 + carbon_price * 15 kg_CO_2(e) . Similarly for CPU_B .
If we assume a carbon price of around $200 / ton of CO_2(e) , as has been proposed in Canada for ~ 2030, that gives prices of $200 + 15 kg * $ 0.2 / kg = $203 for CPU_A , and a $198 + 50 kg * $0.2 / kg = $208 for CPU_B . So as a selfish individual trying to make choices that are good for me, now I am incentivised to pick CPU_B , which is also (relatively) a better choice for the rest of society.
[1] conservative working assumption that the current generation of 8 billion humans is the last generation, and no new humans are born. if we assume future generations, then there's even more humans to amortize the cost of pollution over.
[2] in the real world, not everyone is going to get an equal carbon quota. we don't have a world-scale regulator able to regulate a world scale problem. as has been demonstrated throughout human history, individuals and groups with more power will use that power to wrangle a better deal for themselves at the expense of others. we're not all in it together, even if it is a problem with a global pollution sink becoming full. e.g. i am an australian, in ...
Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics? See existing cross-border tariffs for a long list of physical properties which influence tariffs for a perceived and often disputed, social objective.
> Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics?
that's a good point. there's definitely other societal goals that can be nudged toward through prices.
but on another hand, i'm not sure thinking about prices as vectors is that helpful. to change behaviour a regulator needs a way to internalise the external costs into prices, or some equivalent mechanism, and some enforcement mechanism for non-compliance.
but if you have all that, it isn't clear what use price vectors are. and if you only had price vectors but the extra components weren't reflected in the price, with no enforcement mechanism, then they won't change behaviour.
There are glints, Rainbow Gatherings, for example, are small transitory communities that function entirely without money. There are "intentional communities" that operate (in various ways) without money (althoug usually not without some formal accounting?) And things like Ithaca Hours, a "local currency".
> Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
The whole value of monetary prices is that they're fungible - rather than having to compare the value of things in x different dimensions, you reduce everything to that scalar concept of value.
> In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
On the contrary, having value be a scalar is the solution, because it allows us to make tradeoffs between value and pollution. Cap and trade works (it worked for acid rain); the missing part is the will to actually do it.
All that said, you might be interested in China's "social credit" system - that's the main example I know of this concept of "vector value", because it exists to impose a standard of behaviour on individuals that's not tradeable and fungible.
> A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself.
Historically, Western democratic states owned a significant amount of assets as measured as a percent of national income - it was only in the period 1970-2008 that the value of total state-owned assets shrunk to near-zero (or even became negative in some cases). So the large increases in value of states' balance sheets (and corresponding impacts) is not at all unusual. That being said, you're correct to point out that Central Banks heading these trends is a little concerning, mostly because it basically represents democracy outsourcing these important decisions to unelected bureaucrats.
I think there's a massive difference between the government owning things and the central bank owning things for the reasons you mention about accountability.
I really don’t get why so many smart people come up with every possible theoretical solution and yet they fail to observe that Bitcoin was engineered to solve this exact problem
Bitcoin had design goals in mind to avoid certain downsides of centralized currencies. The cryptocurrency space however lives inside the broader economy and questions about what money is and the regulations around it don't go away just because a specific cryptocurrency thought about some of these aspects in it's design. Even if bitcoin were to solve everyone's problems as some maximalists would claim how do we even implement this? Considering much of the world doesn't have holdings in bitcoin what are we to do? Similarly what do we do about people who don't have the infrastructure to run full nodes? What about dealing with interference with using the cryptocurrency imposed by external actors?
There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
Assuming bitcoin fixes this like the maximalists claim, the way forward is to continue educating people on bitcoin and more importantly what’s wrong with the current monetary system. Way too many people buy into the narrative of bitcoin being harmful for the environment and being an outdated technology (“Blockchain, not bitcoin!”).
Much of the world doesn’t own bitcoin but as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, there’s a way to buy some. The technology’s been working for 12 years now and it can scale just fine, no need to tamper with anything. People don’t need to run full nodes, it’s already decentralized enough. I have one running off a raspberry pi and a 1TB hard drive, but it’s just because I want to and not because I think the additional node is needed for the network. Bitcoin is resilient against external actors by design, maximum decentralization and security. Remember when China finally cracked down on all bitcoin mining in May? The hashrate has recovered by now and China lost almost all of its 50% foothold on global bitcoin mining. The rest of the world’s bitcoin miners thanks China for its contribution.
It seems to me like Bitcoin is dismissed too easily by people who haven’t done enough unbiased research on it. For me, it’s not so much that Bitcoin is such an awesome invention and everyone should worship it like a cult. My question is what happens after fiat currencies collapse? Every single government backed currency has collapsed from hyperinflation in the past, and there’s still a good number of countries with hyper inflating currencies today. Historically, after chaos and war, some people’s debts are flushed away at the expense of everyone else and a new currency is issued by the affected jurisdiction. Do we just want to repeat that cycle when the USD collapses? I think that a free market currency that cannot be controlled by any organization (including governments) deserves more limelight.
> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be.
Money is not some concrete thing that has some inherent value. It's never been that. It's always been a promise, an abstract thing backed by collective trust.
Fractional reserve banking was not a coup d'etat of an elite few performed to disenfranchise the 99% in order to ballast the 1%. It was a considered decision by rational actors and was necessary to enable economic growth since its introduction.
In many ways it's wonderful that the current generation is questioning the old ways of doing things. This is how progress is made. I'm down. But money, government, everything which is the product of historical trial-and-error is a Chesterson's Fence: you really do need to understand why it's there before you try to rip it out and replace it with something else. And it's just so clear to me that basically nobody trying to replace fiat currency with crypto or whatever actually understands why fiat came to be.
> Everyone seems to have an increasingly horrifically misguided idea of how distributed systems work.
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.
This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
It looks like the author is thinking while writing, which is fine. But that alone is not going to change people's minds. I'd look forward to an article where the author, after having gotten thoughts in order, comes back to write an article talking about something specific.
> This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
The author is probably just trying to avoid attacks from the cryptocurrency proponents.
Maybe there is already a better alternative that is enjoying meteoric success along many dimensions. Maybe that alternative already dominates the supply of physical goods and supply chains. Or maybe not.
China. Though I am no fan of the system, the trend line is clear. This author lumped their system in with central control and dismissed them in the service of making their point. I suggest they are not some outlier to be excluded from the dataset.
The first step in solving a problem is realizing there actually is a problem. If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time. That thought really doesn't help much when you are fighting with a big bank about $261 in random fees, though.
>If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time.
That is such a vague statement it is essentially meaningless. Better how? How is it not better? What do you mean by humanity? How is your life better? How is it worse?
When you go back thousands of years, it's pretty easy assertion to make. How about the last 40? Are we really better off in totality or just different? I can think of some things that are better, but I can think of a bunch of things that are much worse.
Why focus on the last 40 years as opposed to the last 4, 400 or 40000 years? Anyone can pick two convenient points on the timeline and argue that things got worse over that period, but larger trends are harder to overlook. Stock prices have fallen a bit this week compared to last week, and some stocks are doing worse than others. It doesn't mean the market generally hasn't been rallying for the last decade or so.
> How about the last 40? Are we really better off in totality or just different?
IMO in the last 40 years it has become harder (more expensive) for those who have had it a bit better off to separate themselves both physically and culturally from those who are a lot worse off (regardless of why they are worse off).
All the while the cost and accessibility of erstwhile public goods that temper that desire for that separation, like safety and education, have skyrocketed.
That separation and the inequality behind it has doubtlessly been enabled by a heap of injustices. The effects of this are seen in situations spanning from police brutality to current refugee migration crises.
We haven't been able to as effectively outsource pain and chaos to others (whether in our own backyard or the other side of the planet) while shielding ourselves from the blowback like we once did.
Therefore people feel worse off, not because they are necessarily worse off, but because they fear that the nearing chaos will make them permanently worse off.
The richest <1% don't have to directly deal this problem, since they can easily still pay for that separation.
Length of life and comfort don't mean much once you reached the bare minimum. If you have running water, central heating, a mattress and own any kind of motorised vehicle you live a more comfortable life than any medieval king.
So yeah, sure, we have netflix, smart bulbs and food delivery. Can you sustain a family as easily as your grandparents ? Will you retire as early as them ? Will you acquire an house as easily and as early ? How meaningful is your job ?
The endgame of "length and comfort" is to live in some kind of coma pod like in The Matrix, you'd probably live to 150 years in absolute comfort
There's an old bluegrass song called "I'll Fly Away," the music is very happy and upbeat. When you listen to the lyrics, you realize it's a slave song about how the narrator is looking forward to death so they can escape the horrible life they are living. The point of that is just because we live longer doesn't mean we live better.
1) A ton of bluegrass sets grim, sad lyrics to bouncy major music - it's pretty much how the genre works
2) I'll Fly Away is a Christian song, so it's not exactly "looking forward to death" so much as "looking forward to heaven and communion with God". Granted, those two things are closely linked in the religion.
When people say that on HN I read it as: "as a young, healthy and well paid tech worker living in _tech hub of a western country_ life is really good and getting better". We have it really easy indeed, but you can't project that on "humanity"
By every measurable metric, Humanity has gotten better. Longer lifespan, lower child mortality, better education, easier access to basic life neccessities and goods, (ironic to say at this time but yes even) better health, etc etc etc.
We live in an age where every problem is weaponised and we are hyperaware of the problems now so that we don't see all the progrees that is done.
https://www.openculture.com/2020/05/16-ways-the-world-is-get...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
Every measurable metric? How about median wealth? How about levels of debt? How about job satisfaction? How about median income per household? Per person? How about access to healthcare and cost? How about suicide rates? How about drug overdose rates? How about corruption? How about cost of higher education? How about homelessness? I mean cmon, you're looking at thing with rose colored glasses.
As long as we're "howaboutin" let's talk about genetic diversity. DNA is self-replicating, self-repairing, etc. But what it doesn't do is create new information. With human procreation methodologies we lose bits of data, and just living life our data undergoes entropy. The outcome is less genetic information available every generation.
And one more "how about testosterone levels in men?" These have been falling for the last 60 or 70 years. Men in the West will be impotent by 2040ish at current rates of decline.
Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
Healthcare cost? Probably worse.
Suicide rates? Probably worse.
Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
Corruption? Probably better, though more publicized (maybe better because more publicized).
Cost of higher education? Worse if you go to an expensive school. But there's never been a time when it's easier to educate yourself, for free, if you don't care about the piece of paper.
Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
The very fact we are talking about this shows a great progress. 100 years ago, you had a job -> you were satisfied.
> Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
It's better for the poorest too. in Planetary scale.
>Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
this is a recent metric, can't be used to prove or disprove Humanity advancement.
> Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
Not only is 1930 fair but when we are talking about Humanity progress, the comparison must go even further in 1800s...
Talking about humanity progress makes sense only in grand scale of time and planet. not on specific countries and 50 years...
I feel food is immeasurably better than in the 1990's when I grew up. I'd partially attribute that to faster and better communication -- i.e. if you take the Internet away from a chef or farmer, I think their universe of ideas and ingredients would be dramatically smaller.
Speakers you can get for just $500 have made a big jump since even 2015 (though this is a tiny niche; in general audio quality is worse than in the 1970's.)
Combat sports are also having a renaissance and many people attribute that to YouTube!
That said, I totally agree with this article, and with the premise. There is rising economic inequality, and regulation has a place in imposing values on the market. Markets where nobody trusts each other aren't efficient or useful.
I think the area where that really hits home and is made tangible is architecture. If you just let the market run wild with architecture, you're going to get really ugly boxy buildings that make everyone miserable. We live in a shared space, so you need cooperation to make good architecture. Unfortunately it does seem like that's been on the decline. Architecture is worse than it was in the past.
I'd also agree that computing is worse than it was 20 years ago in many important ways. I wouldn't say it's worse overall, e.g. being able to handle video is a big improvement. Wireless is pretty good although there are many flaky incarnations of it. But I'd say both user interfaces and latency are worse, products are more user hostile, and the web is filled with ads and low quality information. Hardware is now proprietary software, so a Linux system is less open than it used to be.
Most of the items read like specific 2nd order effects of Capitalism 101. We were always aware of the pros/cons and the cons have overtaken the pros in our current incarnation.
Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.
Or skip paying your utility bill. Or your property tax.
Maybe if you set up on an abandoned oil platform and called it Freedomtopia, but that only lasts until your own money runs out and your equipment breaks down.
What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough:
- We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so.
- One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how new (human-designed) systems affect society. And that's not for lack of trying - economics, sociology, psychology - they are just insanely hard because people always lie, keep changing and are so damn inventive.
"To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so."
While I agree that it's not obvious our current systems will continue to work, I don't think the system is born out of luck. The system is largely based on trial and error in the pursuit of what the majority wants. Yes, there are those with outsized influences and corruption at every level. However, if we look at history, we are moving slowly towards what we all want.
Luck was not what created the current system, but luck was what left it working for so long. This idea is of course not new, it's the essence of "ages of discord" etc.
I'll go even nerdier. Having implemented raft and paxos many times over (don't ask why, and also don't ask what implementing paxos means, no one really knows) The most efficient distributed systems rely on _not_ having Byzantine faults[1] -- effectively there's a certain amount of trust you need to delegate to the network. The network itself is the substrate in which these algorithms can work efficiently. Short of that you'll need to move to a system that is tolerant to Byzentine faults. The cost of moving there is very expensive transactionally-speaking.
For markets the analogy is the same: a regulatory environment provides the substrate in which an efficient distributed system can rely on to prevent Byzentine faults.
How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value? How many other institutions in the US are tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of 300 million people and do it for less?
It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in this article to get to the real work of helping to solve these problems.
M1 is the sum of currency held by the public (i.e., currency outside the Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions); traveler's checks of non-bank issuers; and transaction deposits at depository institutions.
The M1 Money Supply was $3.964 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted). Of that, $1.705 trillion was currency and the rest of the amount was deposits.
The M2 Money Supply includes M1 along with savings accounts, money market accounts, money market funds, and time deposits under $100,000. It does not include IRA or Keogh retirement accounts. $9.769 trillion was in savings accounts; $1.003 trillion was in money markets; $591 billion was time deposits; and the rest was M1.
M2 was $15.327 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted).
By the end of 2021, the federal government had $28.43 Trillion dollars in federal debt.
To answer your question: “How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value?”
I’d say not spending almost 2x the money supply would be a sign of better value.
One start is to download the budgets and spending bills of your country and others and see if you can balance the budget. The exercise of balancing the budget makes a good project for macroeconomics classes. I had to do it for my final macroeconomics project.
> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.
It seems to me that it's a little bit of hubris to have human's running the Federal Reserve and setting monetary policy.
It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.
Markets can be seen as regulatory institutions in themselves, though they exhibit many undesirable side effects. The inherent "decentralisation" in Western societies is enabled by markets. Producers meet consumers in a constant feedback loop, production follows demand. Some producers are weeded out, new classes of products and their corresponding market types appear. Consumers can choose what, when and where to buy. What would be political decisions in a centralised society are market mechanisms in a market society.
It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.
I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What
apenwarr concludes is true:
All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.
Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").
There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:
Paul Frazee (of Beaker Browser) had a thread that got some good reach on distributed without consensus (but often some ability to see people break their contracts). Holo did come up. :)
> Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code
As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.
One key observation leading to Holochain, is that the systematic breaking of the assumptions of a "Smart Contract" (the shared DNA code, in Holochain terms) is a valid form of agreement.
If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.
"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny."
I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am.
With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.
Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos.
"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."
This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"
This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws.
Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
It's possible to craft laws that don't explicitly fail to bind one group, but do in practice. Other times, it's more explicit.
A recent example of the former would be some of the voting security laws that have been popular lately. A recent example of the latter would be disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentencing (I think this is no longer the case? God, I hope not. But was not that long ago) and that's just the de jure part—in all cases, the de facto enforcement is what matters.
Historical examples abound, obviously.
[EDIT] another example is mentioned by someone else in this thread, as abortion laws, but it's worth noting why those are an example: the rich never have trouble obtaining abortions, and there's a history of pro-life advocates doing so when they "need" to, for themselves or for family members (I'm sure their case is different, of course eyeroll). In fact a major factor in the Republican legislature of New York passing early abortion rights laws was precisely this disparity, which was that anti-abortion laws in effect only existed for the poor.
"The law" in gp's quote is not referring to codified (abstract) laws, but rather their application in reality. To wit: we refer to police officers as "the law" because they represent, and wield, the law, and in the moment it doesn't matter what the codes say, the living breathing officer ("of the law") takes precedence.
You need to broaden your view from American political culture. Conservatives exist in many different types of governments and many different cultures. This explanation makes no sense.
I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.
Woah cool! Thanks for sharing, this actually reminds me of this quote:
The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx
> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees.
This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees.
I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.
In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.
In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient.
Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all.
From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making:
> The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance".
As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is:
majority agree
minority disagree...
but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.
You can certainly get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, if the premise is that there's no lunch at all until they agree on what to have. There will be some compromising involved, so not everybody might get the dish that is their first choice, but the more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate.
That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by decentralizing, you make that domain smaller - and thus make consensus easier. Federation can be used to replicate this process on as many layers as needed for decentralized organization of larger societies.
Invite people to abandon their preferences and then organize those people so they show the world how many more needs it meets than not doing it. In particular, abandoning preferences allows the need for not to get met more easily.
> I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive.
And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond?
You have three basic options:
1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no)
2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink)
3. Force people to say yes
The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.
I agree. I dont think all systems require consensus and its likely most things do not. When it comes to things that optimizes for survival, it is likely we will need consensus to be productive.
Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
I don't think technology has to bring us closer together.
I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want.
I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules.
Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
4. "How about we have a conversation, perhaps if we think about it we can find a compromise that works out for both of us?" Note also that such conversations can even be had that don't involve the disagreeable party (if they're that difficult), but if they are of high enough quality and visibility (such that they can get public momentum) they can change the person's mind based on them seeing which way the wind is blowing.
4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. That only works for up to N parties. You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.
You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.
But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".
> That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.
Very nice!
Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?
And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.
> But you can't solve everything with consensus...
Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.
> ...and you're welcome to play word games...
As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.
> ...but forcing people is not "consent".
Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.
This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).
> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.
> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish.
That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.
2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.
"someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical."
100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.
> it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government
The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.
Why is liability -- which can only kick in after some damage has been done, possibly displacing someone from their home -- a better solution than a process by which dying/dead trees can be compelled to be removed?
This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?
> Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).
Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).
There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).
> FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner
This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.
In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.
Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.
Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.
Liability is a good deterrent in many situations but is far inferior to cooperation. Let's take an extreme example: the death of a child by a irresponsible corporation. Even with generous compensation, the family will not be made whole with the loss of a child's life.
Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.
>That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.
Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.
I see it more as idealism vs pragmatism. We need both. I think older people tend to be conservative because they've become jaded by idealists and/or politics in general. To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.
“ To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.”
Which is a point of view funded by the large corporations actually funding the political screwups and bribing the politicians, particularly the ones who pretend to be conservative. (I.e. Manchin or McConnell)
Rural voters received their messaging primarily through TV and radio, and then go down to the local bar and regurgitate it to each other with lots of “good ole, good ole, ye olde goode ole” and self congratulation.
I’ve noticed this pattern in rural areas around the world. I see the rural urban divide as more fundamental than the national divisions.
Closer to nature? Yeah, but in a frontline of battle antagonistic sort of way, conquer the big scary nature, even the person referencing the above had a human vs nature framing. I’ve been burned out of my house in bushfires, wrestled with solar panels in hurricanes and I’ll still call the most dangerous thing on earth a group of self assured humans doing their job.
> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish
WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.
> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.
"That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy."
My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.
"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "
Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.
I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus.
All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.
You're conflating Western leftism with liberalism. Wikipedia defines liberalism as "a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law." [1]. Liberals are interested in individual rights and often are opposed to collectivist ideas such as those espoused by state socialists. Your position on global consensus is a more collectivist perspective, not necessarily a liberal perspective.
> We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions.
What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought.
Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces.
Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:
> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.
The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.
what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now).
i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf
I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overwhelming those who valued the open culture and structure which came before.
Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.
I think it's rather disingenuous to complain about vague and un-named "internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world" in a thread about explicitly enumerated problems that capitalism has directly led to.
The internet didn't become capitalist because socialism is inherently bad. The internet became capitalist be we live in a society run by capitalists and they realized they could exploit it.
Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.
> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.
We definitely do broad-strokes central planning in the US and every other developed country with tax system design, social support systems, and industrial policy.
The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.
The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
I think it's more that you need layers. A centrally planned layer of regulation and safety nets that provide a base level to keep things running (and people alive), but without the cost and inefficiency of trying to control everything, and then a more efficient, free market–like layer on top that relies on the lower layer to provide the "free" in "free market".
I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)
> The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.
Less than a century is not "an extremely long time," and its citizens majorly suffered under the central planning. There was nothing successful about the Soviet Union.
People constantly forget that large multinationals like Amazon are bigger that many countries, are purely authoritarian structures and work as 100% centralized economies.
> Central panning doesn't scale
On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
The problem is that dictatorships (both countries and private companies) exist to benefit those in power. When push comes to shove everybody else is expendable.
I don't know about the internal workings of Amazon specifically, but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within: selling their products and services within the company. There's still a market, not everything is determined centrally.
> On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
China grew much faster after it instituted market reforms. I'm not as familiar with Soviet Russia, but I'd be surprised if it grew faster than similar market-based countries during the same time period.
Sears mostly collapsed because they decided to make their internal departments independent competing companies. The departments acted more in their own interests rather than in the interests of the whole company...
Soviet Russia actually had to reintroduce markets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy) to dig itself out of the economic hole caused by the hyper-centralized planning of "military communism".
> but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within
The overwhelming majority of companies, including Amazon, does not allow different units, departments or teams to compete with each other by providing the same service.
Essentially each BU or even team is a little monopolist.
You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
Amazon has competitors, a central government do not. If the central planning fails to deliver a product then there is nobody there to deliver the product, if that product was food then people starve. This lack of competition is both bad for robustness as I described, and bad for efficiency since it means that people has to get their goods from the government and can't choose to get it somewhere else, so there is no selective pressure to keep the government deliver goods people want. You could say that other countries pressured them via war, but the people couldn't choose to buy American, the competition happened at a way too high level to matter.
Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.
Take Walmart as an example. If a country, it would rank 25th economically (above 188 other countries and the likes of Austria, Argentina, Norway, Ireland, and South Africa).[1] Walmartian central planning scales at least that far.
Nobody is claiming the central planning doesn't produce value - i think the language is ambiguous as to the meaning of "doesn't work".
Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages).
Central planning in a communist regime is exactly the same - it enriches the regime, at the expense of the people.
Central planning is the ultimate version of monopoly. It is what happens when a single company owns the entire country and no longer has to compete for anything. It is the only employer and the seller of goods, for every good. They banned the import of other goods, so they are all you get. Also they make the laws, so you can't even protest without having tanks moving you down.
"I really hate these corporate overlords, what can we do to fix it? I know, what about giving the corporate overlords all the power in the entire country? Yeah, that will fix it!"
How are the current economic agents solving the NP-hard problem of economy? It seems like they are are just as incapable as a computer (assuming the substrate independence of computation).
What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them.
Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.
>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves
Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.
Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.
Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.
The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.
But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
>But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely:
>All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast.
Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.
Yes, the original US idea was that of a central government that had very restricted power, and a bunch of states that could reach different decisions within that framework. And that the people being governed had more influence over what the state did than over what the country did, so the state was more responsive to the peoples' needs, wants, and desires.
I would argue that over the years, we have moved away from that. We now have a much more powerful national government, that is more ruler over the states. And I think in doing so, we have gained some things, but we have also lost some things.
I think there is merit to the idea of a multi-level hierarchy, where the higher levels have more restricted areas of power, but are also harder to change. But there's one other piece that's needed: Mobility between lower-level domains. If I don't like what California's doing, I can move to Texas, and we need similar things (hopefully easier than physically moving) in other systems.
No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work.
But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.
> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost...
That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.
While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.
The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.
A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).
> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.
Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.
This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.
What we actually have is representative democracy, where the choice is often nominal, and leaders generally come from the same class in practice (and represent the interests of that class). So the fact that people don't "vote them out" is not an indication that they don't care enough - they might care but not have the choice that would reflect it.
It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.
They can't do whatever they want. They can do more than you'd want them to be able to do, but they can't just take billions of dollars and put them in their own pockets. Company bribes makes every American politician a multi millionaire, sure, but if they could do what they wanted they would be multi billionaires like the rulers of Russia and China.
One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.
I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?
No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.
This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.
Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.
Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.
Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution
Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.
If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually
I guess you could argue the set of laws is the central authority that produces a two-party system, even though it may not have been intentional. Presumably you could adjust the laws so that other constellations would emerge.
Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.
I didn't say you should run society like that. I only provided an example to prove that centralized control is not necessary to enforce rules.
Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.
It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.
Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.
Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor.
It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant.
In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.
Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.
It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.
This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).
> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour)
yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.
whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.
wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.
one more example to drive this home:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."
> people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of
the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".
It's a matter of how much we all have to agree to.
Agreeing to contract law is fine, for example.
It's possible to go too far. If you're going to use force to get people to do things they don't want to, you might be going too far. Naturally, there are such things that aren't tyranny: taxes for example. Even with taxes there are levels of taxation that are tyrannical. For example, a 100% property tax would be tyrannical.
People are going to disagree about where the boundary between tyranny and not-tyranny lies. If you have a very sizeable minority saying "this is tyranny", well, it probably is (but doesn't have to be).
The notion of "using force" to get someone to agree is interesting.
If someone wants to pay me $X for Y. Then you think there's force involved there somewhere? If is X is too large, is that force? If I'm very poor and will accept a really low X, is that force?
As long as you're free to say no, and as long as your poor circumstances aren't caused by the person or entity offering you $X for Y, then no, that's not force.
I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.
I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.
- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]
- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
Just to make a point, it's fine if something's audience is entirely composed of computer nerds or academics at first. After refinement it can gradually make its way into consumer world; e.g., the internet, the most successful distributed system.
Yep there is so much overhead to making things decentralized. Take a look at filecoin sealing. Its a super cool system with a bunch of fun cryptography and math, but generating the proofs requires a lot of time and compute power and adds a whole bunch of restrictions to how you can upload data.
If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.
Nope, Holo / Holochain has nothing to do with Ethereum; HOT is just the place-holder token (issued during the ICO used to fund the project, initially, a couple of years ago).
When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
Out of which 12 millions went to the Ethereum foundation. The other 60 millions were given to people who crowdfunded the project (and they did it using BTC). The ETH supply has more or less doubled since now. The Ethereum foundation holds today about 10% of all Ethereum and as far as I know they are "locked" in a smart contract.
One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.
Ethereum Foundation had at most 6 percent of tokens, and today has less than 0.3 percent, because it liquidated the vast majority to fund various software projects that made the Ethereum network possible.
The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.
A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?
> Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital.
most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'.
also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/)
anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/
Is it a hosting marketplace or did they also secretly break the CAP theorem and forget to mention it on the front page?
Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.
How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?
> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?
Well, if "excited" and "shilling" are synonyms, then maybe! ;)
But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/)
So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel.
Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible.
So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound".
You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets.
My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.
The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live.
Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus.
apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.
Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.
I think the US doesn't understand this enough: Mature capitalism IS socialism (democratic socialism, as seen in European countries).
Mature capitalism is not what we have today. What we have today is capitalism that has not been allowed to evolve to its natural state.
It's been recorded many times in history that in the late stages of a mature economy, wealth is accumulated by landowners / elite / nobles / ruling class / billionaires / whatever you want to call it this iteration.
It's also known that as markets mature and competition becomes fiercer, it gets harder and harder to participate in it. In 1910, I could be a basketball player because the competition was that low. Now if I wanted to, I would not even make the tryouts. Apply this to every mature industry, which most all of them are (consolidated, hyper competitive, and dominated by a few players). The skill to participate in them has to be greater, which means that more and more people not gifted to be 2-3 standard deviations above the mean are left out.
Socialism is the natural, expected evolution of capitalism to maintain a high functioning society. It says, we ADMIT the above two things are happening (wealth is accumulated by the rich, poor people are left hanging). It also says, we KNOW that this is wrong, both morally as all human beings should be cared for under modern society, and societally, as if there are too many unhappy people (consumers in this iteration), it will up-end society as we know it (riots and revolts).
Capitalism is the growth spurt of a healthy country, but socialism is the adult stage.
Only in the "No True Scotsman" definition of Socialism.
Because making everyone else to do what you want (eg. give something that they have to someone who you deem deserves it more) will always require force.
So, decide right now: how much force are you willing to apply?
The answer will have to be sufficient force to ensure they yield: lethal force.
How is this different than getting everyone to adhere to capitalism or democracy? Lots of people die under this system, doing things they do not want to do.
Is force not linearly related to the gravity / undesirability of the mandate?
Are increasingly draconian mandates not rebuffed by more and more people?
Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?
If people are allowed to leave such systems for ones more to their liking, do they not flee, unless forced not to?
If those who don't "give their fair share" try to leave and are forced to stay, and staying means that they or their children may die, will they not fight to the death to escape?
>Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?
You mean like if you don't pay taxes you go to jail? or if you don't work you live on the street?
There are certainly harsher places to be, but the US is not friendly to people who do not "give their fair share." It's already mandatory.
I guess, but "completely free to leave" is a bit of an illusion... it's not at all easy to do so, and even if you do... you still owe taxes until you renounce citizenship.
I also don't really see barring people from leaving as an inherent requirement to socialism, if that's what you were saying.
The problem with this interminable argument about government and force is that it implicitly involves unreasonable people.
What allows the government to collect taxes? Lethal force!
But also...
What keeps people from driving on the wrong side of the road? Lethal force!
What keeps people from dining and dashing? Lethal force!
What keeps from using park benches as toilets? Lethal force!
For the most part people are reasonable and if you indicate that they need to do something or refrain from doing something, they go along. If they don't, you can write a law with some enforcement mechanism, and then they go along. If they still don't, you can increase the bite of the enforcement mechanism. Rarely do you have Bartleby the Scrivener types who simply refuse to cooperate, and even then, the consequence for them, like for Bartleby, is generally fines or time in state custody, not lethal force.
The government, through its agents, often does employ lethal force with tragic consequences, but this is usually the result of the agents enforcing their own special laws -- respect my authority or I will kill you -- not the actual laws and their legal enforcement mechanisms. Many nations have no death penalty. Many have police officers who vary rarely kill their citizens. These nations are often very nice countries to live in.
Or use subtle force, like it is done today in capitalism. You just need to leave people with no choices.
Pay the rent, or you and your family end up on the streets. Pay your insurance, or you will be left to bleed out and die. You have no other choice but to take any job, no matter how bad it may be.
Then foster a culture that gives everyone the hope that they also have a chance to get a good life, but only on the condition that they must only think for themselves and compete with the other poor to ascend the social pyramid. That's meritocracy.
This is how the rich (the capitalist ruling class) gets everyone else to do what they want, which is to trickle up enormous amounts of value from everyone to a handful of people.
Then if we want to talk about lethal force, capitalists used overwhelming amounts of it troughout recent history, in order to preserve the status quo that advantages them. It's not a secret and it just takes some honest study to know it.
What does socialism mean to you, because it seems to me that you aren't talking about the same socialism I'm thinking of (social ownership of the means of production). It sounds like you are talking about the opposite of that (tyrannical control of the means of production).
> as all human beings should be cared for under modern society
Why on earth would you conclude that? What's wrong with Darwinian processes? Why must people be protected from the cost of their own misfortune, failure or inadequacy? Why must this cost be born by others?
Basically that people cannot be expected to accept their own fates with dignity? I would make the case that overwhelming violence is an appropriate consequence for violating the peace. Good policing techniques are very effective in maintaining social order, in spite of economic inequality - see Japan.
Why do you think the only weak people that deserve protection are the wealthy? The idea that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the status quo is strange, and in a world where everything is assigned an owner is a maxarchism not a minarchism.
In a real Darwinian world, rich people wouldn't be able to walk the streets without a huge amount of security, and eventually that security force would kill them, take what they have, and pass it to their children. The idea that the people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions of the world is a version of the efficient market hypothesis within a idealized police state whose only duty is to keep these people from falling to their level. It's really just a neofeudalism that will result in neohapsburg lips in 100 years and infant kings.
I'm saying that "society" is basically an agreement to peacefully coexist, using due process to resolve disputes. It's not an agreement to cooperate. Just because the processes by which some some succeed and some fail are non-violent doesn't mean that those successes and failures shouldn't be total.
> people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions
They're not, and I never said they were. All I said was that if they acquired their wealth through legitimate means (ie without the use of force), then they are entitled to keep all of it and do with it what they please.
Say we live in a society with 10 people, each with one dollar. Now say one member of this society invents something useful and sells it to the other nine for 75¢. The wealth gap in this society will have grown dramatically. What exactly entitles the other nine to any of their money back? What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?
> What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?
Lets take your scenario one step further. The entrepreneur now uses his newly gotten weatlh, buys up some neccessary infrastructure that everyone relies on (for sake of argument lets the food supply) and raises the price to 26ct, everyone in the society but him starves to death and no violence was used. At what point, if any, should a hypothetical state step in?
Nowhere? If you sell your only milk-giving cow, don't be surprised if the prices of milk increases. You're using "buys up" like the people selling had no choice. They have plenty of choices: they can refuse to sell, they can refuse to cooperate with the new owner, they can go and build new infrastructure. Ultimately, a property owner is not a monarch, and can't force anyone to do anything. These techniques have been used in to remarkable effect in the past to peacefully compel good behavior. See Charles Cunningham Boycott or Mahatma Gandhi.
Since two other commenters answered your question, I’d like to add to your 10 person society example.
What if a government taxed every one of their transactions by 25%, spent or redistributed 80% of those dollars within the society, and uncharitably donated 20% of all dollars away to another society. How long would it take for that society to have a rounded $0 and the other society to have a rounded $10?
This is an orthodox Marxist view that wasn't borne out by history. There was the objection that was foreseen: that socialism in one country was impossible because capitalism in other countries would just destroy it. There was also the one that wasn't: the ability of domestic capitalists to collaborate and collectively give concessions when society seemed as if it were about to upend, then to withdraw those concessions as the crisis died down and gradually replace them with violence.
There's no inevitable historical process that results in utopia. Nominal "socialisms" tend to combine the political outlook of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism with the Whig history of liberalism, resulting in the worst of both worlds; the belief that 1) all answers have already been discovered, and 2) that they will inevitably be implemented as the people recognize these answers to be truths and decide that in the world of technologically provided abundance created by capitalism, there's no reason to wait.
They believed that the ultimate expression of history is democratic socialism, and that capitalism is a necessary step to get to there from feudalism. To believe that democratic socialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism itself is very strange - capitalism has no moral center that needs to be expressed. It's a physics metaphor that believes that the greater good can be emergent without a moral center.
Democratic Socialism, as seen in European countries, is a system granted and implemented by the US after the devastation of WWII, intended to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. It was funded by the intense military expenses of the US which allowed Europe to ignore military expenditure (for social expenditure), and regulated in the beginning through intense covert operations in Europe using the stick of assassinations to break up parties and eliminate influential people ambivalent about or friendly towards the Soviets, and the carrot of employing well-known socialist intellectuals through unprofitable foundations and public expenditures on their weirdest art and expressions as counter-programming to a Nazi-redolent (i.e. degenerate art) Socialist Realism and Stalin's hatred of modernism.
European democratic socialism was a strategy of capitalism to suppress change, not to encourage it.
> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.
> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
Seriously? These problems are not remotely in the same ballpark.
I don't even know what is the point of this article. A handwavey call for better regulation of "Western society, economics, capitalism, finance, government, the tech sector, the cloud". Oh, and free daycare too. Gee thanks doc, I'll get right on it.
All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.
It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.
You're totally right, but this mentality doesn't totally invalidate the concept of DeFi. Like the state of DeFi today functions alongside the systems of today-- it's utility isn't contingent on burning the entire system to the ground.
If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days.
Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.
But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the internet, it's powerful because the base layers are neutral, allowing for the free flow of information.
You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).
Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite.
I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
Interestingly enough, between 1933 and 1975, it was a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins.
I agree that gold and Bitcoin have some very key similarities, but gold and crypto in general are quite different. With regards to Bitcoin, yes they're both stores of value, but Bitcoin has the added ability to transact globally and be much more divisible. Bitcoin seems to have settled into two roles within the greater crypto ecosystem; store of value and reserve currency for the entire crypto economy. Now there are also things happening in the Bitcoin payments space using lightening, but I don't think there will ever be a large appetite for payments using a deflationary currency (It's your savings account, not your checking account).
But outside of Bitcoin there is a ton of cool stuff happening in the DeFi space which could have big implications for our financial systems. One example is stablecoins which has a much better chance of being used in payment systems than a store of value like Bitcoin. In general I don't see this stuff replacing the financial system so much as finance companies slowly adopting crypto on the backend. Just like companies adopted internet technology as it allowed them to run more efficiently.
Crypto blockchains are a technical boondoggle in a financial system that already has trusted institutions. The whole costly & complex system of blockchain transactions is designed to simulate trust without authorities, I don't see any technical reason why it would be more efficient than a simple encrypted packet + an optimized database that a regulated institution can implement when it doesn't need to simulate trust. Even Proof of Stake is totally unnecessary in a regulated financial system.
You'll still end up in the room regardless. Most governments are pretty interested in people who carry large amounts of gold through borders! They might make you forfeit that gold if they don't like your answers, or if you have too much.
Cryptocurrency's digital nature makes it much more useful than gold. It can be stored like gold in a vault, but it can also be transmitted over the internet like a bank transfer. It's pretty incredible stuff.
Not totally disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but we haven't had a gold standard for awhile now, and that’s the problem. Lifting fiat off gold lets institutions play games with fiat to increase their fiat with the appearance of being a good steward of fiat. This is what people don’t trust.
You're right, but it's because we made the conscious decision to not have a totally-open playing field after seeing how it went.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.
I don't think crypto will replace the financial systems we have or that we should burn down what's already there. I think the way it will play out is that it will increasingly get used on the backend of the legacy financial system. So the front end will appear similar to the consumer with the same usability and protections they're used to, while the backend will be settling transaction using a variety of crypto networks. The consumer will then have the option of using the centralized front ends or communicating directly with the decentralized crypto protocols.
Well of course there's no way to prove it now. Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? You have to be open minded and extrapolate from the principles of the new system and its interactions with society at large to _guess_ how impactful it may be. I believe the fundamental principles of crypto (open, permissionless, decentralized, global, neutral, etc.) make it highly likely to revolutionize finance.
All of these are as interesting as working at a bank or at a stock exchange (and those can be significanty more interesting due to amount of data they process).
Unless, of course, you're interested in outright scams like NFT. Yup, those are "interesting".
> This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort.
It isn't if you cared to at least read the link I provided
As to your use cases. First the obvious ones:
- event tickets. Have literally zero need for blockchain. NFTs are scam, and nothing but scam. All the fictional properties ascribed to ticketing via NFTs I've covered in my to responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
- synthetic assets, decentralized asset exchange, decentralized prediction markets. Require neither bitcoin, nor blockchains nor crypto. Used almost exclusively for trading fictional tokens, scams, and pretending it's innovation.
The less obvious ones:
- sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
"Let's convert our value into a fictional token that has no value outside the fictional world, and can't be used for anything but buying other digital tokens".
Buy food? Oh, you have to convert it to real money (because no one in the world, especially not in the world where government sucks, accepts these fictional tokens). Or if someone does accept it, oops, random transaction fees just doubled your cost.
Buy actual physical assets? "When your government sucks", people prefer dollars and euro to fictional tokens.
- permissionless payments
This is a very tiny part that is arguably useful, but it comes with a plethora of issues that make them unusable for wide adoption. Among them, reversibility, enforcement.
The point makes sense since a lot of the complexity of the current financial system isn't because of the money, it's because of the /people./
The complexity comes from the rules enacted to shield people from bad actors, and that's just going to be re-applied to crypto in some way shape or form.
The "kingdom" as you say it, involves instutions AND people that depend on it, if only, by habit, but also by trust. Be these habit and trust be misplaced or not is not much relevant: a new system just does not have a hint of these either just because it's new.
> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom
Three years ago I bought an apartment.
I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly.
In the end, all of the following was guaranteed:
- I had the money
- money was transfered into the other person's account
- I was not a scammer
- that person wasn't a scammer
- I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address)
(a bunch of other stuff)
So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
How does it improve the process in a disintegrating third world country right now? Lay it out, which steps in the process does it improve or replace? Do you know anyone who's utilized it that way, or are there case studies?
That's nice and I hope it works out for them, given how difficult it can be to get physical objects properly tracked in a digital system when the people responsible for entering data into the system can be corrupt. But getting the third world digitized is the very opposite of the "very interesting innovation" that everyone else in this thread keeps referring to; it is just making some thing that already exists again. That is not innovation, that is an incremental improvement at best.
For those of us living in prosperous Western countries (and let's not kid ourselves, that is at least 90% of HN), the biggest attraction of cryptocurrencies seems to be "if you buy this, it might be worth more in the future". Which is nice, but hardly innovative.
If you wake up one day and find that your society is disintegrating with that speed, you're going to need food, water, ammo - all of which are tradeable - and a good support network - not a bunch of fake computer monopoly money tokens.
You don't wake up into a disintegrating society, you wake up into a society that's a little worse every day for decades. See: other highly developed countries that are no longer considered highly developed.
All of those guarantees are under threat of legal punishment enforced through court systems.
All of those guarantees are given to you based on good standing with various institutions. The bank, the intermediary, the seller.
If you were a person who was not in good standing with a bank, but you still had the money, could you have completed the transaction?
Technology has a trend of destroying middleman industries, as they don't provide value and take a portion of the proceeds for themselves.
DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders. Does that mean this process is smooth? or ready for mass adoption? Not necessarily, but the destruction of banks by technology is inevitable. It's just a matter of when
If I'm a person who has money but is in bad standing with the banks, maybe I shouldn't be able to do financial transactions at all. It's that, or I'm imagining the wrong reasons why a person with money would have trouble with banks.
Totally agree, as long as the reasons the banks have are valid.
The problem is that that decision is made by people. Standards of conduct are not universal. What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
It is I think vastly better for people to make those decisions than for them to be made by smart contract. The institutions we discuss now are at their core social systems.
Even within crypto/defi, it's still people making the decisions. People wrote the algorithms. The only advantage I see there is that, in theory, you should be able to see what rules are encoded in that algorithm, so it's slightly more transparent in that sense.
On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
> Even within crypto/defi, it's still people making the decisions. People wrote the algorithms. The only advantage I see there is that, in theory, you should be able to see what rules are encoded in that algorithm, so it's slightly more transparent in that sense.
Agreed. People still create the system, but they have zero to little sway in each individual transaction. So, the system can be biased, but with increased transparency, that should become apparent.
> On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
> In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
At least in the US, this is not the case for payment processors. Banks may be under more strict regulation. Visa/Mastercard can revoke the ability for anyone to process transactions on their network, even if the activity is completely legal. E.G. OnlyFans/Pornhub recently.
> > On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
Could you elaborate how you think this problem will be fixed for mainstream adoption?
I wish I could. If I knew how, I would be implementing this as fast as humanly possible. The first person to fix this problem will make $1 billion, easy
Could you get more specific about the reasons or the definition of a financial transaction? Not being able to do financial transactions seems like a slow-motion death sentence.
Unfortunately very few people live in a democratic country with the rule of law like Sweden. For the rest, crypto can be a good place to keep their funds without the fear of losing.
The overwhelming majority of people live in countries with representative government and functioning legal systems. Yes, the US and Russia and China and India and Brazil all meet this description. Why do you believe otherwise?
That is an exceptionally well designed purchase process. In my case, I had to go through 3-4 months of wrangling banks and other paperwork. I still don't understand my mortgage contract fully. I just hope it doesn't have any "surprises" in it.
I agree but it's one of these crazy sounding ideas that could actually have a use case. Like the author says these are just distributed systems and 'decentralized' 'web3' is really just a sophisticated way of coming to agreement. I think there's a lot that people can build with tech like this, but it's no silver bullet.
I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different.
I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.
I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.
Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason?
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
Health insurance is what holds back universal health care, along with hospitals themselves. Both of them are incentivized to raise costs for consumers.
Not OP, but I assume the argument is something to the tune of: healthcare should be universal to make progress, universal healthcare would disproportionally benefit the poor, the poor are disproportionally of color.
You lost the word “universal” in “universal healthcare” in the comment you’re replying to. There are many ways racism impedes the push for universal healthcare. One is the classic fact that it is a welfare program, and that spurs the comments and thoughts about welfare queens and “young bucks.”
When I hear "welfare queen," I think of a black woman. Because I'm racist (sadly).
From that, the racist idea that free services (e.g. universal healthcare) are unduly exploited by black people (or immigrants).
Reagan pretty much popularized the terms ("welfare queen", "strapping young bucks") with racist intent[1]: those were the images he wished to conjure-up in listener's minds, and not a creation of the media. Just as the word "thug" is currently used by certain personalities/networks today.
I didn’t say it was a creation of the Media. I said they use it that way. It’s good to trace it back to Reagan.
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
You write as if one's passive racism and one's past exposure to racist sentiments are entirely separate. I think the former largely reflects the latter.
I don’t think they are entirely separate. I do think that exposure to racist sentiments has a very different effect depending on who you are.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
Johnathan Metzl explores it a bit in his book Dying of Whiteness[0]. Here's an example of something he described in an interview[1] about the book and his other work:
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
I think it's naive to call politicians stupid. It's clear it's the incentives, particularly the health insurance industry that blocks any effort for universal healthcare; and in the American system it's too easy for one senator to completely stonewall any legislation. For example, it was Joe Lieberman, a senate in Obama's own party, the completely gutted many of the socialized aspects of Obamacare.
It was one politician who blocked a full national health service back in the 70s despite bipartisan support for it - IIRC he used his position as ranking member on the Ways & Means committee to stonewall the whole thing. American political parties are probably some of the weakest in the world, they have almost zero ability to control what their members do or even who their members are.
I interpret the events as Obama did pass the Heritage foundation version and it passed because it was more acceptable than any public option let alone universal healthcare.
Having health care tied to employment is a corporate interest. Corporations need workers and everyone needs health care, so by making health care come chained to employment it keeps workers stuck in their jobs.
I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)...
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
That sounds politically dumber. "Marriage" has been normalized for centuries/millennia but now you think you can just quickly normalize another term before we solve this equal rights thing? You know, just a quick errand before we restore equal rights: change the prevailing culture and change definitions throughout a complex set of laws.
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
I'm just trying to be pragmatic that one side doesnt seem to be willing to cede any ground, we could just simply move the fight elsewhere.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
Yeah I'm saying it's not pragmatic, it's the opposite of pragmatic. Of course people want governmental recognition, many hetero married couples want it and already rely on it. Gay couples also want equal rights on top of that. They want both.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I think what seems really off is just that we've legislated a single concrete version of something instead of it's abstraction (a person capable of making good choices). It makes sense to give people a way to indicate they intend to give a person legal rights, but it doesn't make sense to imply (by the concrete choice of "marriage") that it's basically going to be a person that you're having sex with, or monogamous with, or that they're of a certain set of sexual pairings (ie heterosexual)... And before you suggest it's not about monogamy, see that in many states have laws around adultery and fault/no-fault divorce...
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
The people who fought gay marriage argued that expanding the institution to include same sex pairings would demean what they consider sacred and what they think all of their countrymen should consider sacred too. A common meme was "next you'll be saying we can marry X" with the clear implication that we should not be able to just marry X.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
i think somewhere along the conversation i either misrepresented myself or you missed something though...
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
> i think somewhere along the conversation i either misrepresented myself or you missed something though...
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
I'm with the McGuffin on this: Marriage existed long before Christianity, so if anyone gets to give up the word, it's the religionists. Or, heck, let's be generous and let them keep using the term, provided they use it with a qualifier: "Religious marriage", or something. As long as everybody knows that's not what actually counts for anything in the real world... But the word "marriage" in itself is part of language just like any other word, and there's no sensible reason to let the religionists co-opt even some small part of that.
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
I mostly agree with you but there are certain useful functions. It’s an optional service the state provides to many many* people with negligible transaction fee, as with, for example, maintaining the roads, air traffic control, or food safety. Those things help you even if you never leave your home or never fly.
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
> It’s an optional service the state provides to many many*
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
I think the difficulty is that for the vast majority of American history, marriages weren't really performed without any religious connotation. Hell, even legally, from what I understand, there was a time where marriages _had_ to be performed by a clergyman of some kind. Now, you're right, the religious association is technically optional, but it's worth remembering that for a very, very long time, marriage was as much a religious agreement as it was contractual.
Got married in the '00s in the US and IIRC in that state it was still the case that, to be valid, you had to have an ordained minister or certain officials (a judge) sign the paper.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
There was once a time (and still some places) when religion played a role in regulating other aspects of society, like dietary regulations. Nobody says "keep religion out of my kitchen" when the local health department insists that you don't cross contaminate other foods with utensils used on raw meat.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses. I get that government, via the courts, has involvement when there's a dispute, but it's not like two companies wanting a contractural relationship have to file the contract with the government when it's created.
Sure they do, in that the framework for writing those contracts is guided by the governments guidelines for what constitutes a valid contract. Just because a government isn't micromanaging the process doesn't mean it isn't "regulated".
That's note quite true; the entire framework for those contracts is set (regulated) but the jurisdiction they are in. It's also why companies have lawyers on staff and/or retainer.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
Regulation is a different matter. Two companies can work under a non-legal contract for years - until there's a dispute, then the courts get involved and those regulations are enforced.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
> But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
Sure, there are regulated processes around some types of contracts. There are regulations about what's legal to put in a contract, but here's no government employee who shows up to the meeting to make sure it's all perfectly legal. You certainly can form a non-legal contract. The government may never become aware until there's a dispute and it goes to court.
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
Still, this is not different than other contracts. Negotiability is not an essential element of any other contract. Nor can other contracts contradict law.
No contract can contradict the law, so marriage is not unique there. Employment and purchasing are examples of other contract areas governed by shifting laws, that can be changed without any of the parties renegotiating terms.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
> or some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government?
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
> I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
I think there’s a nuance here in the sense that progress happens both inside the established system and outside it - grassroots campaigns, protests, local initiatives, etc. I think the key issue is that it seems like so many smart people are looking to solve things from the outside rather than involve themselves with the current system, and we need to move that pendulum back quite a bit.
I'd argue that all the things you are listing are also on the inside of the system. There's certainly an element of rebellion to protests for example, but it's also a consolation price. Elon Musk doesn't have to protest, neither does Jeff Bozos. They just call up their preferred politician and the system dances for them. Protests are an opium fed to the disenfranchised masses to keep them from fundamentally changing the system. It's the last pressure valve. Kept just out of reach so that people won't use it, but highlighted to make sure that you aren't allowed to change the system without first doing it.
I think the system is whack, and that's the reason people don't want to fight it. They've given up.
Grassroots campaigns and protests let you change the small stuff around the edges. The system provides you with just enough knobs to play with to keep you oblivious to all the ones you can't.
Nonviolent protests don't seem to get much change.
People get angry over years of absolute no change.
It seems like there's a happy medium, as long as no one is killed.
(The media usually sensationalizes the protest too. Hell---CVS planned on closing 200 California stores years ago. How do I know? I just know. I heard a spokesman for CVS claim that theft was the reason. When asked about which exact stores were hit hard--she didn't have an answer.
When there's a violent protest, and the disenfranchised guys break a window and steal. The tv stations play the same isolated incident over, and over again.)
Occupy had a chance to maybe actually change something. Then one night, all the significant leaders were disappeared and nobody ever heard about it again, really.
and perhaps more frustrating to smart people looking to do good realize they are just one person. Huge, structural changes to society involve everyone.
This feeling of frustration is familiar. What helped me was shifting the way I approached the problem. Rather than tasking myself with manipulating social structures directly, I've found joy in teaching others to recognize the structures, recognize the processes by which their reality is maintained, and formulate tools to expose their weaknesses and dismantle them. Ideas spread like seeds in the wind. Our collective mental soil is so ready to accept them.
Really appreciate this sub-thread, including @Zoo3y and @teucris' comments. I share a similar perspective. In the case of this article, I feel like a lot of the behaviors come back to rent-seeking — here's a perspective that might resonate with you:
This is a strategy commonly known as "Dual Power" among the left, as named by Lenin. The far left have obviously thought a lot about how to change social systems and, if you are interested in doing so, there is a lot of good theory in their literature as some have thought very deeply about it.
There is so much out there that I really think it's best to find what works well for you, like something written in a style you could get into. Some punk anarchist type stuff might read cool and edgy or sound whiney to you, whereas reading original Lenin or Bakunin might sound dry or maybe you like the old timey aesthetic. Personally, I'd recommend Murray Bookchin's ideas of Social Ecology. They came out of an attempt to apply a more scientific approach to the problem of how to change society as a whole, including taking into account our lived and natural environment and the looming natural catastrophes. Bookchin tries to adopt the "best" parts of all the leftist ideologies and combine them into a framework for an ideology that can adapt with the times and with new understandings as they arise from each attempt at change.
I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is:
1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.
Here is another version of that story, as told by Idries Shah. He attributes it to the Middle Eastern Mulla Nasrudin figure, and gives it a metaphysical interpretation.
I usually refer to the streetlight effect as the statisticians' error, or the economist's error---those being two major fields where the data you can get may only be a very poor proxy for the problem.
I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good. As underdogs, we can't afford to out-hire the banks, so the only way forward is to be more effective on a smaller manpower budget--which probably means leaning on crowd-sourced solutions mediated by software.
It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
Perhaps even more relevantly, how would any sort of decentralization help when the issue is an excessively unregulated market simply moving to the logical conclusion of its evolution?
I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.
Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a month. If the transaction costs are close enough to nil to make that worthwhile for everyone involved, that's a different web than we've grown up with, with 30-cent per-transaction fees being the industry standard for credit cards.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
Micropayments are an interesting topic. I don't want to pay 5 cents per article I read, I'd much rather pay $10 a month for unlimited articles, even if I end up paying more than I would with the first scheme just because with the first one, I make a decision to spend money with every click. I know there are projects trying to streamline this, but it really should be as close to the UX of the latter as possible, pay a set amount and never think about how many things I can read.
I've been using Blendle for a long time now, and one interesting thing that I've noticed is that it doesn't make me think hard about the decision to spend money every time I read some article, even though that's technically what it is.
How many people even say they want micropayments? It seems like a relatively niche position even in my circles — most people seem relatively happy with the idea that their monthly costs are fixed and they don't need to think about how much it'll cost to open a link.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
We've already had actually nil transaction costs for micropayments to eliminate ads offered by Google and... nobody used it. If advertising is driving facebook/twitter/youtube/etc to prioritize content that angers people then micropayments to support some small blogger isn't what is needed. Instead, what is needed is for facebook/twitter/youtube etc to operate on micropayments.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
If the entire platform (gmail, etc) is funded by ads, then removing the ads destroys the platform. In that space, advertising is a necessary evil, and the best we can do it try to make it less onerous.
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely.
And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
The reason you can't fork it is because the copyright owner wants to maintain control. That means that the content will never be on a blockchain even if we see the 8+ orders of magnitude efficiency improvements which would be needed to do so and when you've built the systems which would be necessary to hold and authorize access you don't get anything except expense and support burden from a blockchain.
Oh, my point was that we can and already have (ok, a DHT is not a blockchain, but it's the same sort of deal). I pay for Prime for the shipping, so I could stream it, but I still torrent the content because it's just more convenient to have the file.
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Frictionless payments are a relatively small part of it. The bigger part is figuring out who needs to be paid for what.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
Before internet advertising everyone was concerned with newspapers being all ads, subway ads, billboards, naming stadiums, ads on buses, flyers being put everywhere, mail advertising plus everything you see on tv.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
I get where defi is coming from, and the regulations are onerous, but also those regulations were hard-fought for, and came about on the backs of real problems for real people, often by being exploited by people most accurately described as conmen. Caveat emptor, sure, but on the way from "investing your play money" to someone close to retirement's 401k, there's a much bigger pitfall.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
I truly don’t think DeFi is, at its heart, anti-regulation. I do think a lot of early proponents are armchair anarchists, but that’s just the scene. I think it’s anti corruption/abuse of power by institutions too large to fail—often due to lack of meaningful regulatory political power, across the board. (You’ll probably easily find people playing with web3 dns also advocating for personal data regulations, for example.)
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
Right, so wouldn't it be nice if they were using an L2 sub-chain (a bank) that rolled up transactions so that this transaction could have been flagged and rejected. The need for these intermediaries to help the general public not get fucked is clear. The existing tech just kinda sucks. There's a world where the root chain is objective and transparent and distributed but where for most any practical application people interface with the chain at layer 2 and subject to any sort of social restraints and regulations they want to put in place.
For tall the clamoring about the issues with Big Tech or Big Government, some HNers seem all too willing to sign over essentially everything important just because it's more convenient when those powers have a backdoor to right wrongs.
I agree with a lot of this. A lot of techies are used to software and customer environments where vendors and customers work together for shared success. Finance is not that sort of space. Much of it is fundamentally zero-sum and adversarial. It needs a different style of oversight than SAAS.
Folks very quickly forget that regulations are written in blood.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
These people likely do not know of the lives destroyed by the wildcat banking era of the mid-1800's in the United States, which is what DeFi seems to become.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
The historical consensus behind this idea is not there. Here's [1] a good example of some scholarly dissent. I'm pretty sure the truth is more complicated than advocates of the "Wildcat Banks evil" idea keep parroting.
Not all regulations are written in blood, and not all regulations have their intended effect.
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Correct that was the whole point of my post. Regulations need to be constantly rethought. The positions of "regulation good" or "regulation bad" are just too simple to be practical.
> Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
Oh yeah, it's not that the new kids on the block need to be better than the old guard on all dimensions, but if we're really going to switch (rather than just having the disruptors as the occasional mistress), the switch has to be worth it. This is why I don't worry that crypto is going to release some kind of monster that can't be put back in its cage.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
I don't think you can aggregate all of society's changes into a single "worse" or "better" metric. It's like trying to decide if cheese is a better food than apples.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
And even more confusing, the positive and negative impacts are quite likely to be second or third order phenomena. Managing unintended consequences of complex systems is no easy task, even in hindsight.
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down.
> Things are better than ever for all progressive issues.
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Our forests are growing, wetlands protected and lakes cleaned up. We've done a great job cleaning up some of the heavy industry and part of that is exporting those jobs to clean. China has a massive pollution issue but things in the western world have been getting cleaner. More new species are being found than we lose. Our ability to save a population has increased not to mention the possible of bringing back species might exist.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
Or is it getting worse because of how the software is used? I will grant that some software seems to only be usable in weaponized ways (e.g., biometric identification at scale), but something like Facebook could be used for _good_ purposes (connecting people) if it weren’t driven by the wrong metrics (e.g., advertising, surveillance, etc.).
What you describe reminds me of the (phenomenally successful) work of Douglas Englebart. He described his motivation as something similar to what you have, but of course with a more optimistic perspective.
I think a better framing would be that the way to force society to fix itself is to use software to demonstrate how things could be different.
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks?
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
Processing data IS what thinking is. This literally what Turing intended to do: Find a way to automate thinking.
And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
Transparent to everyone able to read the code, perhaps. Those poor souls who have not learned to program in whatever defi language is hip this month will just have to accept that they will have no say in governance, nor even be able to discern what is happening and why. Bureaucracy is bad enough when it's made out of humans, let alone when you have unfeeling machines executing a (possibly buggy) script.
The point is that you CAN see the execution; wether you spend the time to learn to understand is your perogative. If you don't, you rely on experts, just like today. But unlike today, these experts can be independent of the process they explain.
> That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.
With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".
So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.
(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)
This DeFi thing is big, large, involves money, teh future; is probably bubbly. There's not a lot to understand IMO. It's a wave of emotions wrapped into "tech". It's wise to treat it like a ~thing and see how it evolves.
There's so much probabilities that I cannot help but see more dreams than reality so far. Even if some things manage to deliver .. who knows how it will evolve. Look at facebook, juggernaut, unstoppable.. already rotting. Then it's economy/finance tied.. there will be a lot of forces at play and few people that know who will influence the market more. Hence my message above.
Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate.
I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.")
I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.
I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.
Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
> none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system
I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
Breton Woods and Visa/Mastercard were top level designs... But they were designed to make money. (For the US and Visa/Mastercard respectively.) Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
> Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
This is a really good point.
There are some kinda exceptions[1] now and then, but there are many reasons why they tend to not work (not short term profitable being one of the main ones). Despite that, it seems we're pretty short even on good ideas lately, like our culture has lost the ability to dream big about positive things (we're excellent at doomsday dreaming, especially about our political outgroup members).
> Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
I second what the other guy said: this is an interesting point. But I'd also second the point about not knowing their intent (more with Bretton Woods than Visa/Mastercard; the latter is obviously fair enough). Also, I think it's telling that you left out Dodd-Frank when making that point, because it pretty clearly undercuts it.
Maybe it's just me, but we all place an awful lot of trust giving vendors essentially all credit card details possible AND where we live so that they're capable of skimming a self defined sum off by themselves. It's like an inherently insane system. We're supposed to be the one wiring the cash, not the vendor themselves with our data.
Because your contract here is with the subscription service, not the bank.
Just as you can’t cancel your brothers subscriptions, the subscription service has no reason to accept a cancellation request from your bank.
Even if the service was no longer able to charge your card, you would still owe the money. The debt you incurred monthly is separate from your choice of how to pay that debt.
Credit card issuers and processors only grant merchant accounts to vendors who have shown themselves trustworthy. While the system isn't perfect it works pretty well. If a vendor has many charge backs then they will be subject to higher fees and then account termination.
By that notion, the fact that almost all home locks are easily pickable and glass windows breakable is also insane. There's tons of valuables behind almost all of these!
We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing theft, which turns out to be largely sufficient even in face of fallible security. The exact same applies to card data in the hands of merchants.
Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts believe in it.
The fact is that we can and do find ways around flaws in a system. Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
> I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.
I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.
Cash transactions, by definition, are pretty much always in-person. Thus, the risk of fraud or "significantly not as described" goods are significantly reduced. On the contrary, the modern world depends on being able to transact remotely.
Even then, there is still recourse if you pay for something with cash and the thing you buy ends up being non-functional (e.g. small claims court). And since the transaction was in person it's less likely you have no idea who the seller is.
I agree that it's similar to a hard fork (and has similar problems), but would argue that (due to the "interdisciplinary" nature of fintech) it's not incompetence or laziness but rather the blind spot/hubris of being a technical person looking at a social system.
An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.
Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.
I've worked, and still work, on large legacy codebases on a daily basis and I couldn't agree more that total rewrite is not the solution in most cases and a waste of time and money.
But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting.
Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.
This strikes me as one of the pivotal responsibilities of a lead developer. It isn't just about pushing new features as fast as possible, but about ensuring the entire development stack is (as much as one can be) a pleasure to work on and in.
Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive.
Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
Even considering the occasional refactor, it's still a lot less costly over time than this new throw-away microservices economy in many cases.
First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life.
The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness.
The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors.
Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.
Thinking deeply about the system and finding the changes you can apply with minimal disruption and maximal impact is the opposite of what the GP is talking about.
The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed.
Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo.
When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.
Any process inscribed in the technology is part of a larger business process, and as such is also resistant to such change. You can do refactoring all you want, which by definition means not changing inputs and outputs. But you can't change the process without looping in business. And then it becomes about making a business case for spending the money and time and training and etc to make a change to the business process.
a legacy codebase can be structurally resistant to being fixed.
you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs.
no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium.
Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
in a vacuum yes, the legacy system doesn't have any of those agent-driven issues. given enough time and freedom from interference, you can incrementally fix it or rewrite the whole thing from scratch. but if you leave out the context of users and management, it doesn't really matter how you choose to fix it or whether you do at all.
in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects, you have other teams mad because they are triaging a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor, and you have management wondering why the fuck you have spent multiple months working on stuff that has no clear connection to a marketable feature. you might also have a couple of seniors/principals who actively oppose your efforts because they benefit from being the only people who really understand the mess you are trying to clean up. and of course, all of that messy people stuff is probably a large part of why the system is so tangled up to begin with.
I certainly don't think political systems are exactly like computer systems, but it seems like a lot of the high-level lessons are applicable to both.
> in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects...a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor
That's what I meant to capture by agreeing there is overlap in terms of backwards compatibility and entangled dependencies.
The difference is entrenched social systems have greater agency that goes beyond change induced instability and into being able to actively predict and favorably mold their environment.
> Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
>Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
Almost always. Re-implementing all the existing functionality from scratch will take much longer than you think or estimate. And attempting to remove/defer implementation of any will cause friction with business that rely on it.
There is a reason why we haven't replaced Excel/Word with google sheets/docs. It's true that most people only use about 60% of any software but everyone relies on a different set of 60%.
> The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL . . .
It just isn't! It really isn't. It is the way it is for good and historically motivated reasons. Can you elucidate those things? If you don't understand the rationale for the system as it exists, you can't propose an alternative that has any chance of success.
>The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed.
The key point here then is that the engineers and maintainers of that original (legacy) system probably did not properly take scalability and structure into consideration. Maybe the system was pre-SDLC, which is an important consideration, but each system is usually a different case, and some tech is often labeled as "legacy" because it's simply not part of a "bright and shiny new money-making solution" marketing plan... ehem.
It's important to not create the same issues in redevelopment, and reducing complexity is a key step in ensuring future compatibility.
Some systems are not as "legacy" as others. This is also a vital point to the discussion.
Most clients aren't concerned with overall cost and lifetime of service on solutions from what I've observed; Most clients are people working towards raises and their retirement and just concerned about not exceeding their max budget and not generating embarrassment for themselves or for their company.
This is why one of the first questions I ask of my customers is how long they intend for the system to be in service for.
There are several factors of why a proper solutions architect is necessary throughout the development process of major and mission-critical systems, but too many PMs decide to just use the tech stack a team agrees upon, or what's cobbled together and patched to work, or what worked as an MVP during early demos.
We suffer from environmental factors, because budgets are under-cut, deadlines are always too short, and because people only care enough to prevent their own headaches. This does not meet a mark for vital systems though. As we ignorantly rush towards more and more software dependent operations, the failures will become more and more amplified in all aspects (cost, loss, recoverability, technical debt... you name it).
Keeping everything as simple as possible is now, and always has been, the better ideal.
The "legacy financial system" exists in the way it does for specific reasons. Do you understand those reasons? It's a Chesterfields Fence situation: unless you can elucidate those things, you're not qualified to propose an alternative.
I think you're probably right, however, it also seems like there's been value in those hard forks simply because we get to experiment with alternate ways to build the system. Often, it seems like the original project will take the best ideas from the fork and integrate them; those are ideas that might not have been created otherwise.
I half agree. Yes I do think you have a bunch of technologists self-indulgently trying to apply the next shiny thing where bettering the world is second priority. However, I think changing the system from inside is largely a fool’s errand. There are indeed proven methods for political change. Unions, protest, organizing, these things. They’re unsexy and boring and tedious, much like you’ve described, but these do work.
This is why I generally only interview for jobs that are seeking work within my tech stack, or projects which haven't yet formed into a developed solution.
I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
Union membership is down drastically over 50 years which is why it isn’t accomplishing much. If you do an image search for ‘union membership wealth inequality’ you’ll find a graph of union membership imposed with a graph of income going to the top 10%. It’s incredibly negatively correlated.
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not
There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin.
I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often.
Considerations for a rewrite:
1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem;
2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and
3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag.
It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point.
> And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play.
I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").
I think Google has proven that you can change the system, dramatically. I am never going to try fixing an antiquated, broken software system. Just let it burn.
This is why I’m bullish on Chia. Their philosophy is quite plainly: operate within the existing regulatory framework and existing social ground rules (i.e. as a traditional capitalist institution beholden to the SEC) to provide and be the steward of a better backend and tools for doing (as the article asserts) the fundamentally distributed operation of processing payments and supporting markets. There’s a pre-farm that supports the company, they’re going to make a lot of money for their investors (which you can participate in too if you want). That’s nothing new and so be it. That’s the world we live in.
It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia.
We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal.
If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.
Of course. And it's often the same people. Or at least the same kinds of people.
None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders.
As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous.
If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.
I think your point is stronger than you worded it, by saying junior developers, as the observation holds for developers period, when faced with a mess.
Working in finance myself, I totally agree with you on the regulators lint. Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority - not only from the outright criminals but also the slightly evil financial services companies (see the Wonga and payday loans debacle in the UK).
Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.
> Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority
I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results:
> Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.
I think you're missing a key point that because of the 2008 crisis the regulations were updated. Bank reserves are higher now than pre-2008. So in fact this is basically like the OP said, regulators regularly mess up, and then update the regulation.
Separate from the validity of your take, it shouldn’t surprise you.
People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.
> It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe.
It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.
To be fair, this argument is only valid when targeting people from outside of the areas of expertise / niches involved:
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system
The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.
And you must ask: who is really driving the public debate to throw out centralized banks?
I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it.
There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?
I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in your head. And if you're mindful of that, you can rebuild guided by what you have learned from the ground up and it will work. See John CarMmack's increasingly awesome series of 3D engines he wrote over the years.
But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on
>All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not...
>so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>
Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better.
In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today.
> They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system.
You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence.
Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking.
It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it.
Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction.
It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life.
PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.
>the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within
Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems).
In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.
Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may.
Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations.
There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
These are not new developments, and diplomacy has always been war by other means, including using currency as a weapon of war against external and internal enemies. Currency has always been a system of control and has frequently been weaponised in the past, it has certainly always been a tool of the ruling class.
To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain.
You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.
>These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.
An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort.
Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.
It's true that rewriting everything is not always the right answer and that fixing existing systems is underrated. However, there are very few instances in history of systems being indefinitely fixed and upgraded. Most societies were not gradually improved and reformed forever: eventually they fell and were replaced with new societies. The same is true of technology and companies: most technology is eventually completely replaced with newer, better technology that is inspired by earlier technology but that is still new. The cool thing about DeFi is that it has built-in ways of upgrading itself. In traditional systems, upgrades are more centralized and have a single point of failure: once that point of failure (eg the developer/maintainer) stops upgrading, the system dies.
Bro, literally none of this stuff is inherent in the system. You can still make a Beowulf cluster. You can still network a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Computing has never been more accessible.
Writing software has never been more accessible.
But consumer standards have risen. The geeks are out there and will happily work from your source code if that’s all you want to share.
The old life is still available. It’s just that back then that was all that was available.
It turns out there are a whole bunch of superstar product designers out there. And now that the software nuts and bolts are easy, those guys are beating (in the market) all the guys whose skill was nuts and bolts.
That’s natural. It what comes from accessibility. That is good because the whole world is lifted by the fact that some fool can build a business on Zapier and Airtable.
“We don’t need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.”
Ah, I guess the anarcho/libertarian crowd is stepping back from the abyss. But how is that going to make your EC2 SSD go faster? Cheapen your egress fees? Make you write software that actually has less exploits? Pay artists better?
As with many ideas here, how about a concrete suggestion? Here’s mine: software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
You don’t get to call yourself a professional and punt on responsibilities. We don’t let doctors or lawyers do it, why should we let coders?
> software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
Either you offer it completely free to anyone in the entire world, or this is just another barrier to prevent access to the developer "elite".
And btw, often it's not the developer that cuts on security features, but an executive that wants to get to market faster. How about we give compulsory security training to every manager/executive/ceo/etc AND we hold them legally responsible when damages are caused by their eagerness to cut on costs?
Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who put them there, enjoy the benefits of those systems and make damn sure these systems keep benefiting them no matter what. As long as one doesn't acknowledge this very simple fact, they have no hope of drastically changing society, not even conceptualize a solution IMHO
If the people in power are always 60+ years old with access to lots of money and airplanes, then no, global warming will not decimate them. They can just hopscotch around to wherever the climate is fine. Global warming really only affects people who lack mobility.
Money and airplanes only really work when there is a highly organized stable society. I think it's a mistake to assume that will be always the case at the extremes.
I think the acknowledgement is implicit in this piece - current structures have allowed this "power capture" and need to be improved. The point the author makes is that blockchain has very obvious avenues for the same power capture and that for this reason, it's not a better option than the difficult work of improving existing and well-explored systems of power/political order.
I agree with your point. Systems like governments get "too fat" and there are many issues with holding them accountable or at least creating more transparency around their actions.
Calling for more regulation by an entity that needs to be regulated itself is a modern paradox.
> Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed?
I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:
1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.
2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.
3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.
4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.
I agree with this, well put. Are people evil, or are our structures and systems so complex that we are unable to find best solutions?
Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.
>Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.
I dont know. I think you underestimate how difficult it is to make big organisations work well. As soon as any organisation grows large enough (say, a large municipality), it becomes an incredibly difficult task to run it perfectly. Everyone trying their best, but still people from office A have no idea what people in office B does, bosses make the wrong decisions because they dont have access to correct knowlegde and are overworked, employees stop taking responsibility because their bosses are overworked and the decicions making structures are opaque and feel futile.
None of this is evil or bad faith. Its simply very hard problems that are hard to solve individually. We try to organize or build systems to fix these things, but its a very hard problem.
I'm not denying that there are powerful people doing evil things to benefit themselves, and that this is huge part of why everything is bad. Im just saying we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that a lot of our troubles come down to our problems being extremely complex and human nature doesnt interact that great with that kind of complexity. Our biggest problem i think is not nefariouss badguys, but the immense scale of our issues and our inability to tackle them at the proper level.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadEven if "governance" is "decentralized," there are still going to need to be people in the DAO, day to day, doing the work that no one wants to do, making decisions that no one wants to make.
It seems to me like a DAO is just a college group project but if you add crypto it solves everything?
Organizational behavior and its challenges don't go away because you've issued tokens.
Honest question, what the heck am I missing? It has to be something!
*DAO doesn't need to run on Ethereum blockchain, it can also be a sufficiently autonomous collection of ERP systems.
In particular I'm thinking about some of the procedures aboard nuclear submarines where automated systems were tried and eventually rolled back, because the automation would be fine 99.9% of the time but when it failed it would cause disaster at computer speeds instead of just at human speeds. I can definitely imagine a bug in a DAO being completely unacceptable in some domains even if it is more efficient than doing the same job with humans. (For example, in national voting)
Finally even for those cases where automation is desired and could be done by some autonomous entity, I'm not sure why you would specifically need a Distributed AO instead of just regular cronjobs on a server somewhere. Any real-world system is going to need regular updates anyway, so you end up centralizing trust in whoever can update the code for the (D)AO.
Very few people want a robot deciding how they spend their time, energy, and assets. Resource allocation will be the last unautomated job on the planet if we make it to post-scarcity. People want everything done for them except deciding what those things that need to be done are.
https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm
Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem.
The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all our progress and knowledge with them when they die. No more pretending to bow down to megalomaniacs and ideologues to achieve stability. No more vast centralized moral hazards that attract sociopaths like moths to a lamp.
I've taken to calling the zero-trust decentralization problem "computer science's fusion." It's perpetually N years away, but if we solve it the payoff is immense.
Edit: Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive that the real solution is somewhere nearby.
Eliminating civilizational SPOFs would be a fairly large step.
It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement. You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.
EDIT: I am apparently too disconnected from the crypto crowd. Or depending on how you look at it, appropriately disconnected.
Advances in the ability to coordinate humans often leads to great advances in society and technology. Now where crypto is immensely useful, is that in the past a decentralized group of people would have still had to be tied to a specific nation for banking. Now with crypto, a group of people from all over the world can run a company that's fully internet native that relies on no single nation for it's banking needs. You may not see it, but to me that is a ridiculously powerful concept.
If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.
> If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities...
If that's a problem, prohibit it.
The other part though is that if money is corrupted it impacts the process of regulation itself. For example creating good regulation to tax companies is made far more difficult when there's fundamental differences between the nature of the money that those companies themselves have access to. I'm sure it would be possible with a large amount of effort to have regulations with non-fungible money but there's challenges there that would be substantially difficult to address and the complexity of that regulation would come with it's own non-zero costs to society.
If the problem is a regulation, let's remove or modify that regulation. Problem solved.
If your problem is there are too many regulations, let's get rid of 20 of them and simplify down to just this one. Problem solved.
Oh, that simplification created its own problems? Let's create new regulations covering those three scenarios. Problem solved.
But if we are much slower at creating regulations than we are at creating new situations that require regulation, it creates the perception that regulations don't work, which leads to rapid de-regulation of everything. Our current legal and political framework simply wasn't designed for this. It was designed for 13 small colonies writing paper letters back and forth, where waiting 3 months for a court to make a decision or 1+ years for congress to pass a bill was considered quite timely and fine. We now live in a society where there is probably a need for 2-3 new regulations per day, and 1-2 adjustments to existing regulations, per day, and an AI chat bot that will tell you whether something is legal based on current regulations.
Why bother with setting the price of bananas and everything else, when you can set one price and have a greater effect?
Heh, looks familiar. Usually goes between "Some people know..." and "...but the value of nothing".
All systems trend towards chaos eventually. The answer is always more or better regulation. Sometimes better means more, sometimes better means "take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes". We don't want a rulebook so large no one could ever read all of it (we already have that). We don't want the complexity of the regulations to spiral out of control along with the system -- regulations need to be adapted over time to handle the current (and near future) complexity of the system. And we don't want no regulations -- then the system itself will spiral out of control.
The whole idea of legal precedents works against this too -- the logic is inverted --- instead of constantly coming up with new takes and new rules to govern old and current situations, we hark back to a decision someone made 50 years ago and we say "this is set in stone", when we should be constantly updating and modifying those precedents to better fit the current state of the system. Eventually new laws get passed, but the judicial system itself is largely a damper on progress in this regard, dragging us into the past and making changes that could take 5 years take 50 years. We see this reflected in our astounding incarceration rate, and a number of other areas.
The pace of technological and societal evolution has grown to be much faster than the pace at which we upgrade our regulations. We are speeding towards a brick wall.
My point is, you see companies abusing bailouts and say "oh no, our fundamental concept of money is changing because bailouts". I see that same situation and say "oh no, our regulations are so antiquated that they are 50 years behind in terms of the abuses they are able to prevent, we need to update our regulations and create new ones, and create a framework for rapidly adjusting regulations going forward, because the current rate is untenable."
This problem extends well beyond money and touches every area of society. Society and technology are evolving faster than the legal frameworks that supposedly govern them. Limiting the scope of the discussion to just cover money would do just that, limit the scope of what should be a much wider discussion.
Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up rivaling anarchy. Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance. Without precedents, every single legal case would turn into a gamble. Only fools and the insane would ever stick their necks out; not far from where we are now, I suppose.
Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructurings that prevent the government from having the bad traits it currently has, or 2) the removal of existing regulations that are preventing the government from being better in your eyes.
If your statement is "I don't like the current state of the government" then you are simply for transforming it into something you do like. This can be done through a regulatory framework.
If you don't trust the government as it is, then you are one more voter for regulating X, Y and Z such that you do trust the government.
That sounds like the opposite of a risk to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk
Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.
We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.
Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.
Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.
A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).
So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.
But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.
The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".
We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).
Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.
Yes, corrupted a tad. :)
The financial system captured our society a while ago.
Yes! This is an incredibly important conversation and this conversation is already happening. You see MMT becoming mainstream. Because MMT is a description of how money works today. That it's a technology (and always has been) for governments to provision themselves.
In fact, I doubt you would have had the stimulus package we had with COVID without that conversation. And it helped millions of people. It also had the unfortunate side affect of growing inequality. We also have the euro, which is, in my opinion a bad implementation of money (central bank without democratic oversight). And of course bitcoin based on the idea of hard currency economics.
One discussion I don't see at the moment is a vision for society without money. That's a discussion the communists had over 150 years ago. It's a serious question because money IS a technology. Is the telephone the best communication technology? No, we moved on from the telephone. We should be asking the same thing about money. Because money is a technology designed around organizing economic activity. But is it the best technology?
Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
People need to have imagination if we are going to survive as a species.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is measured in units of USD say, and the latter is measured in units of kg CO_2(e), say.
Suppose I go to shopping to buy a new CPU. Vendor A offers CPU_A for ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)) while vendor B offers an equivalent product CPU_B for ($198, 50 kg CO_2(e)).
In the current economy, where externalities of global warming caused by market participants are not priced or regulated, I will purchase CPU_B, as it costs me $198, and I save $2 . I choose the product with the additional CO_2(e) footprint of (50 - 15) = 35 kg CO_2(e). The negative impact of that additional 35 kg CO_2(e) pollution is amortized over 8 billion humans [1], so everyone in the world pays the price of an additional 35 kg CO_2(e) / 8 billion = 4.375e-7 grams CO_2(e) per person. Myself as the end-user and the counterparties in the transaction (merchant, distributor, manufacturer, suppliers, etc) get to share in the value generated from the transaction, but most of the 8 billion people in the world do not get a cut of the value or utility, they only pay the cost.
As well as making the prices vectors, it would be necessary to add some other kind of limited resource into the vector-money economy, to constrain individuals from making decisions with large carbon pollution externalities, otherwise we're back to the same situation where we started, but with a lot more bookkeeping that nearly everyone will ignore.
One way to do this could be introduce regulation for a greenhouse gas pollution rationing system: for argument's sake, suppose we allocate each of the 8 billion people in the world an equal quota of kg CO_2(e) / year pollution they are permitted to emit [2]. Suppose there's roughly 40 gigatons of CO_2(e) pollution per year, and roughly 8 billion people in the world. That gives a quota of 5000 tons of CO_2(e) pollution allowance per year per person. Assuming humanity manages to hold the rate of carbon emissions steady and hold population steady, that gives a quota of 5000 kg CO_2(e) per person per year. Each time you purchase a good or a service, the carbon cost is deducted from your personal carbon budget. For efficiency, suppose we also allow carbon quotas to be traded between market participants. Now we have a carbon market where people exchange $ for CO_2(e) carbon emission allowance.
Now, arguably, we can go back to having scalar prices: Instead of the price of CPU_A being the vector ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)), it can be the scalar $200 + carbon_price * 15 kg_CO_2(e) . Similarly for CPU_B .
If we assume a carbon price of around $200 / ton of CO_2(e) , as has been proposed in Canada for ~ 2030, that gives prices of $200 + 15 kg * $ 0.2 / kg = $203 for CPU_A , and a $198 + 50 kg * $0.2 / kg = $208 for CPU_B . So as a selfish individual trying to make choices that are good for me, now I am incentivised to pick CPU_B , which is also (relatively) a better choice for the rest of society.
[1] conservative working assumption that the current generation of 8 billion humans is the last generation, and no new humans are born. if we assume future generations, then there's even more humans to amortize the cost of pollution over.
[2] in the real world, not everyone is going to get an equal carbon quota. we don't have a world-scale regulator able to regulate a world scale problem. as has been demonstrated throughout human history, individuals and groups with more power will use that power to wrangle a better deal for themselves at the expense of others. we're not all in it together, even if it is a problem with a global pollution sink becoming full. e.g. i am an australian, in ...
that's a good point. there's definitely other societal goals that can be nudged toward through prices.
but on another hand, i'm not sure thinking about prices as vectors is that helpful. to change behaviour a regulator needs a way to internalise the external costs into prices, or some equivalent mechanism, and some enforcement mechanism for non-compliance.
but if you have all that, it isn't clear what use price vectors are. and if you only had price vectors but the extra components weren't reflected in the price, with no enforcement mechanism, then they won't change behaviour.
There are glints, Rainbow Gatherings, for example, are small transitory communities that function entirely without money. There are "intentional communities" that operate (in various ways) without money (althoug usually not without some formal accounting?) And things like Ithaca Hours, a "local currency".
The whole value of monetary prices is that they're fungible - rather than having to compare the value of things in x different dimensions, you reduce everything to that scalar concept of value.
> In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
On the contrary, having value be a scalar is the solution, because it allows us to make tradeoffs between value and pollution. Cap and trade works (it worked for acid rain); the missing part is the will to actually do it.
All that said, you might be interested in China's "social credit" system - that's the main example I know of this concept of "vector value", because it exists to impose a standard of behaviour on individuals that's not tradeable and fungible.
Historically, Western democratic states owned a significant amount of assets as measured as a percent of national income - it was only in the period 1970-2008 that the value of total state-owned assets shrunk to near-zero (or even became negative in some cases). So the large increases in value of states' balance sheets (and corresponding impacts) is not at all unusual. That being said, you're correct to point out that Central Banks heading these trends is a little concerning, mostly because it basically represents democracy outsourcing these important decisions to unelected bureaucrats.
To actually have wasting energy as the base of a system must be the very definition of shitty engineering.
There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
Much of the world doesn’t own bitcoin but as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, there’s a way to buy some. The technology’s been working for 12 years now and it can scale just fine, no need to tamper with anything. People don’t need to run full nodes, it’s already decentralized enough. I have one running off a raspberry pi and a 1TB hard drive, but it’s just because I want to and not because I think the additional node is needed for the network. Bitcoin is resilient against external actors by design, maximum decentralization and security. Remember when China finally cracked down on all bitcoin mining in May? The hashrate has recovered by now and China lost almost all of its 50% foothold on global bitcoin mining. The rest of the world’s bitcoin miners thanks China for its contribution.
It seems to me like Bitcoin is dismissed too easily by people who haven’t done enough unbiased research on it. For me, it’s not so much that Bitcoin is such an awesome invention and everyone should worship it like a cult. My question is what happens after fiat currencies collapse? Every single government backed currency has collapsed from hyperinflation in the past, and there’s still a good number of countries with hyper inflating currencies today. Historically, after chaos and war, some people’s debts are flushed away at the expense of everyone else and a new currency is issued by the affected jurisdiction. Do we just want to repeat that cycle when the USD collapses? I think that a free market currency that cannot be controlled by any organization (including governments) deserves more limelight.
Money is not some concrete thing that has some inherent value. It's never been that. It's always been a promise, an abstract thing backed by collective trust.
Fractional reserve banking was not a coup d'etat of an elite few performed to disenfranchise the 99% in order to ballast the 1%. It was a considered decision by rational actors and was necessary to enable economic growth since its introduction.
In many ways it's wonderful that the current generation is questioning the old ways of doing things. This is how progress is made. I'm down. But money, government, everything which is the product of historical trial-and-error is a Chesterson's Fence: you really do need to understand why it's there before you try to rip it out and replace it with something else. And it's just so clear to me that basically nobody trying to replace fiat currency with crypto or whatever actually understands why fiat came to be.
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.
This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
It looks like the author is thinking while writing, which is fine. But that alone is not going to change people's minds. I'd look forward to an article where the author, after having gotten thoughts in order, comes back to write an article talking about something specific.
The author is probably just trying to avoid attacks from the cryptocurrency proponents.
That is such a vague statement it is essentially meaningless. Better how? How is it not better? What do you mean by humanity? How is your life better? How is it worse?
IMO in the last 40 years it has become harder (more expensive) for those who have had it a bit better off to separate themselves both physically and culturally from those who are a lot worse off (regardless of why they are worse off).
All the while the cost and accessibility of erstwhile public goods that temper that desire for that separation, like safety and education, have skyrocketed.
That separation and the inequality behind it has doubtlessly been enabled by a heap of injustices. The effects of this are seen in situations spanning from police brutality to current refugee migration crises.
We haven't been able to as effectively outsource pain and chaos to others (whether in our own backyard or the other side of the planet) while shielding ourselves from the blowback like we once did.
Therefore people feel worse off, not because they are necessarily worse off, but because they fear that the nearing chaos will make them permanently worse off.
The richest <1% don't have to directly deal this problem, since they can easily still pay for that separation.
So yeah, sure, we have netflix, smart bulbs and food delivery. Can you sustain a family as easily as your grandparents ? Will you retire as early as them ? Will you acquire an house as easily and as early ? How meaningful is your job ?
The endgame of "length and comfort" is to live in some kind of coma pod like in The Matrix, you'd probably live to 150 years in absolute comfort
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
https://www.wheelcouncil.org/stories/the-people-could-fly/
1) A ton of bluegrass sets grim, sad lyrics to bouncy major music - it's pretty much how the genre works
2) I'll Fly Away is a Christian song, so it's not exactly "looking forward to death" so much as "looking forward to heaven and communion with God". Granted, those two things are closely linked in the religion.
Every measurable metric? How about median wealth? How about levels of debt? How about job satisfaction? How about median income per household? Per person? How about access to healthcare and cost? How about suicide rates? How about drug overdose rates? How about corruption? How about cost of higher education? How about homelessness? I mean cmon, you're looking at thing with rose colored glasses.
And one more "how about testosterone levels in men?" These have been falling for the last 60 or 70 years. Men in the West will be impotent by 2040ish at current rates of decline.
You're being short sighted.
Levels of debt? Probably worse today.
Job satisfaction? Probably worse.
Median income per household? Better.
Per person? Better.
Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
Healthcare cost? Probably worse.
Suicide rates? Probably worse.
Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
Corruption? Probably better, though more publicized (maybe better because more publicized).
Cost of higher education? Worse if you go to an expensive school. But there's never been a time when it's easier to educate yourself, for free, if you don't care about the piece of paper.
Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
The very fact we are talking about this shows a great progress. 100 years ago, you had a job -> you were satisfied.
> Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
It's better for the poorest too. in Planetary scale.
>Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
this is a recent metric, can't be used to prove or disprove Humanity advancement.
> Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
Not only is 1930 fair but when we are talking about Humanity progress, the comparison must go even further in 1800s...
Talking about humanity progress makes sense only in grand scale of time and planet. not on specific countries and 50 years...
https://www.gwern.net/Improvements
I feel food is immeasurably better than in the 1990's when I grew up. I'd partially attribute that to faster and better communication -- i.e. if you take the Internet away from a chef or farmer, I think their universe of ideas and ingredients would be dramatically smaller.
Speakers you can get for just $500 have made a big jump since even 2015 (though this is a tiny niche; in general audio quality is worse than in the 1970's.)
Combat sports are also having a renaissance and many people attribute that to YouTube!
That said, I totally agree with this article, and with the premise. There is rising economic inequality, and regulation has a place in imposing values on the market. Markets where nobody trusts each other aren't efficient or useful.
I think the area where that really hits home and is made tangible is architecture. If you just let the market run wild with architecture, you're going to get really ugly boxy buildings that make everyone miserable. We live in a shared space, so you need cooperation to make good architecture. Unfortunately it does seem like that's been on the decline. Architecture is worse than it was in the past.
Related: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/wh...
I'd also agree that computing is worse than it was 20 years ago in many important ways. I wouldn't say it's worse overall, e.g. being able to handle video is a big improvement. Wireless is pretty good although there are many flaky incarnations of it. But I'd say both user interfaces and latency are worse, products are more user hostile, and the web is filled with ads and low quality information. Hardware is now proprietary software, so a Linux system is less open than it used to be.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5002/economics/pros-and-c...
Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.
> Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.
If you ran your database locally and with multiple reundant power sources, it wouldn't have this problem.
That's of course a bad idea, however it shows it's not impossible to do it without a single point of failure.
Maybe if you set up on an abandoned oil platform and called it Freedomtopia, but that only lasts until your own money runs out and your equipment breaks down.
What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough:
- We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so.
- One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how new (human-designed) systems affect society. And that's not for lack of trying - economics, sociology, psychology - they are just insanely hard because people always lie, keep changing and are so damn inventive.
While I agree that it's not obvious our current systems will continue to work, I don't think the system is born out of luck. The system is largely based on trial and error in the pursuit of what the majority wants. Yes, there are those with outsized influences and corruption at every level. However, if we look at history, we are moving slowly towards what we all want.
Luck was not what created the current system, but luck was what left it working for so long. This idea is of course not new, it's the essence of "ages of discord" etc.
For markets the analogy is the same: a regulatory environment provides the substrate in which an efficient distributed system can rely on to prevent Byzentine faults.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault -- for all intents and purposes byzentine == malicious.
edit: I should have read the article to the end, literally the next paragraph where I stopped to comment said what I just said, but better.
It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in this article to get to the real work of helping to solve these problems.
The M1 Money Supply was $3.964 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted). Of that, $1.705 trillion was currency and the rest of the amount was deposits.
The M2 Money Supply includes M1 along with savings accounts, money market accounts, money market funds, and time deposits under $100,000. It does not include IRA or Keogh retirement accounts. $9.769 trillion was in savings accounts; $1.003 trillion was in money markets; $591 billion was time deposits; and the rest was M1.
M2 was $15.327 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted).
By the end of 2021, the federal government had $28.43 Trillion dollars in federal debt.
To answer your question: “How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value?”
I’d say not spending almost 2x the money supply would be a sign of better value.
One start is to download the budgets and spending bills of your country and others and see if you can balance the budget. The exercise of balancing the budget makes a good project for macroeconomics classes. I had to do it for my final macroeconomics project.
I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.
It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.
It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.
I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:
The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").
There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:
https://holo.host
This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...
> Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code
https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640
As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.
If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.
I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am.
With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."
This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...
Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
A recent example of the former would be some of the voting security laws that have been popular lately. A recent example of the latter would be disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentencing (I think this is no longer the case? God, I hope not. But was not that long ago) and that's just the de jure part—in all cases, the de facto enforcement is what matters.
Historical examples abound, obviously.
[EDIT] another example is mentioned by someone else in this thread, as abortion laws, but it's worth noting why those are an example: the rich never have trouble obtaining abortions, and there's a history of pro-life advocates doing so when they "need" to, for themselves or for family members (I'm sure their case is different, of course eyeroll). In fact a major factor in the Republican legislature of New York passing early abortion rights laws was precisely this disparity, which was that anti-abortion laws in effect only existed for the poor.
The law isn’t like to explicitly favor one group over another, but the the systems of law have shown they do favor one group over another.
Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them.
Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.
The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx
At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees.
This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees.
I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.
In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.
Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all.
From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making:
> The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is:
majority agree
minority disagree...
but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.
That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by decentralizing, you make that domain smaller - and thus make consensus easier. Federation can be used to replicate this process on as many layers as needed for decentralized organization of larger societies.
Invite people to abandon their preferences and then organize those people so they show the world how many more needs it meets than not doing it. In particular, abandoning preferences allows the need for not to get met more easily.
but what if there's only a limited set of choices, and at least one person in the group would hate one of the available choices? What then?
And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond?
You have three basic options:
1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no)
2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink)
3. Force people to say yes
The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.
Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want.
I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules.
Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
5. Something neither of us have thought of.
You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
Submission and compromise may be similar in many cases, but they are not the same.
> That only works for up to N parties.
In the cases where it only works for N parties (which can vary wildly depending on the situation), agreed.
> You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.
That which is impossible is indeed impossible. However, that which is predicted does not always turn out so.
> You could also read 4 as an example of 3.
If you aren't concerned about accuracy, I suppose.
> If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
Depends which meaning of the word you're using, this is the first hit on Google:
authoritarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".
Very nice!
Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?
And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.
> But you can't solve everything with consensus...
Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.
> ...and you're welcome to play word games...
As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.
> ...but forcing people is not "consent".
Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.
This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).
Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.
> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.
1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.
2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.
100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.
The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.
This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?
Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).
Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).
There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).
This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.
In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.
Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.
Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.
Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.
Tree falls on house, tree owner doesn't want to pay their liability, what happens?
My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.
Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.
Which is a point of view funded by the large corporations actually funding the political screwups and bribing the politicians, particularly the ones who pretend to be conservative. (I.e. Manchin or McConnell)
Rural voters received their messaging primarily through TV and radio, and then go down to the local bar and regurgitate it to each other with lots of “good ole, good ole, ye olde goode ole” and self congratulation.
I’ve noticed this pattern in rural areas around the world. I see the rural urban divide as more fundamental than the national divisions.
Closer to nature? Yeah, but in a frontline of battle antagonistic sort of way, conquer the big scary nature, even the person referencing the above had a human vs nature framing. I’ve been burned out of my house in bushfires, wrestled with solar panels in hurricanes and I’ll still call the most dangerous thing on earth a group of self assured humans doing their job.
WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.
> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)
I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.
My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.
"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "
Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.
All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.
> We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions.
What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:
> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.
The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.
i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf
video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY
Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.
> there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown
i'm seriously not sure if this is a GPT-3 generated response used to waste my time... lol
The internet didn't become capitalist because socialism is inherently bad. The internet became capitalist be we live in a society run by capitalists and they realized they could exploit it.
Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.
Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.
The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)
Less than a century is not "an extremely long time," and its citizens majorly suffered under the central planning. There was nothing successful about the Soviet Union.
> Central panning doesn't scale
On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
The problem is that dictatorships (both countries and private companies) exist to benefit those in power. When push comes to shove everybody else is expendable.
I don't know about the internal workings of Amazon specifically, but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within: selling their products and services within the company. There's still a market, not everything is determined centrally.
> On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
China grew much faster after it instituted market reforms. I'm not as familiar with Soviet Russia, but I'd be surprised if it grew faster than similar market-based countries during the same time period.
The overwhelming majority of companies, including Amazon, does not allow different units, departments or teams to compete with each other by providing the same service.
Essentially each BU or even team is a little monopolist.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
Yes, that's my whole point.
> Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
...and why? The similarity is more than evident.
Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.
Countries engage in international trade and also go to war. If anything they compete more ruthlessly.
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524078
Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages).
Central planning in a communist regime is exactly the same - it enriches the regime, at the expense of the people.
"I really hate these corporate overlords, what can we do to fix it? I know, what about giving the corporate overlords all the power in the entire country? Yeah, that will fix it!"
Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.
>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves
Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.
Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.
Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.
The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.
But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely:
>All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast.
Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.
I would argue that over the years, we have moved away from that. We now have a much more powerful national government, that is more ruler over the states. And I think in doing so, we have gained some things, but we have also lost some things.
I think there is merit to the idea of a multi-level hierarchy, where the higher levels have more restricted areas of power, but are also harder to change. But there's one other piece that's needed: Mobility between lower-level domains. If I don't like what California's doing, I can move to Texas, and we need similar things (hopefully easier than physically moving) in other systems.
No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work.
But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.
That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time.
you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are.
your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control.
in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"
From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.
While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.
A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).
Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.
This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.
It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.
If this is possible, then it is equally possible to just hit anyone you please with stick so that they are forced to do what you want.
Which means, the most violent eager person gets to rule. Which is what people who prefer court system don't want.
This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.
https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/africas-top-10-dictator...
You need commanders for war.
Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.
Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.
and produce the court-based system we see today, with enforcement of the stick centralized to an authority that everyone agreed to (implicitly).
Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.
If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually
Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.
But that's not a society any of us want to live in.
Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.
It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.
Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.
It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant.
In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.
Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.
It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.
This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).
yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.
whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.
wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.
one more example to drive this home:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."
-- Wendy Liu, https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".
well yes, that's what happens when the means of production are privately owned: workers have to sell their labor.
This is a naïve claim which is disproved by all available evidence.
Markets without central regulation are always exploited by participants with more knowledge. Regulations are required to keep the playing field level.
Agreeing to contract law is fine, for example.
It's possible to go too far. If you're going to use force to get people to do things they don't want to, you might be going too far. Naturally, there are such things that aren't tyranny: taxes for example. Even with taxes there are levels of taxation that are tyrannical. For example, a 100% property tax would be tyrannical.
People are going to disagree about where the boundary between tyranny and not-tyranny lies. If you have a very sizeable minority saying "this is tyranny", well, it probably is (but doesn't have to be).
If someone wants to pay me $X for Y. Then you think there's force involved there somewhere? If is X is too large, is that force? If I'm very poor and will accept a really low X, is that force?
Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ )
Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.
> HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token
I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.
- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]
- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.
https://spec.filecoin.io/systems/filecoin_mining/sector/seal... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/
When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
72 million Ether were premined
One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.
https://i.ibb.co/54sS0NY/FFi-K9m-CVg-AETZNA-format-png-name-...
It holds 350K ETH at this point, or 0.3% of the ETH supply:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xde0b295669a9fd93d5f28d9ec85e4...
Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital.
most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'.
also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/)
anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/
think of Holochain like a Ruby on Rails framework, but for distributed applications instead of client-server: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[1] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
Are you certain of this?
Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.
pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0
How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?
> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?
But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/)
So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel.
Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible.
So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound".
You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets.
My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.
Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.
Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate.
This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.
apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.
Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.
Mature capitalism is not what we have today. What we have today is capitalism that has not been allowed to evolve to its natural state.
It's been recorded many times in history that in the late stages of a mature economy, wealth is accumulated by landowners / elite / nobles / ruling class / billionaires / whatever you want to call it this iteration.
It's also known that as markets mature and competition becomes fiercer, it gets harder and harder to participate in it. In 1910, I could be a basketball player because the competition was that low. Now if I wanted to, I would not even make the tryouts. Apply this to every mature industry, which most all of them are (consolidated, hyper competitive, and dominated by a few players). The skill to participate in them has to be greater, which means that more and more people not gifted to be 2-3 standard deviations above the mean are left out.
Socialism is the natural, expected evolution of capitalism to maintain a high functioning society. It says, we ADMIT the above two things are happening (wealth is accumulated by the rich, poor people are left hanging). It also says, we KNOW that this is wrong, both morally as all human beings should be cared for under modern society, and societally, as if there are too many unhappy people (consumers in this iteration), it will up-end society as we know it (riots and revolts).
Capitalism is the growth spurt of a healthy country, but socialism is the adult stage.
Because making everyone else to do what you want (eg. give something that they have to someone who you deem deserves it more) will always require force.
So, decide right now: how much force are you willing to apply?
The answer will have to be sufficient force to ensure they yield: lethal force.
As with most choices, the level of force required to achieve compliance is more or less linearly related to the harshness of the choice.
Pay a small amount of taxes? Little force required.
Give full authority over your life to a faceless central planner? Great force required.
Give full authority, with no chance of escape? Lethal force required.
I'm not sure why this is a concept that seems to be a mystery to advocates of "Socialism", though.
"Socialism would work great, if only you pesky rich, free people would just give up and let the state take everything and let your children starve!"
:)
Is force not linearly related to the gravity / undesirability of the mandate?
Are increasingly draconian mandates not rebuffed by more and more people?
Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?
If people are allowed to leave such systems for ones more to their liking, do they not flee, unless forced not to?
If those who don't "give their fair share" try to leave and are forced to stay, and staying means that they or their children may die, will they not fight to the death to escape?
You mean like if you don't pay taxes you go to jail? or if you don't work you live on the street?
There are certainly harsher places to be, but the US is not friendly to people who do not "give their fair share." It's already mandatory.
I think we're agreeing; perhaps I'm mistaken?
I also don't really see barring people from leaving as an inherent requirement to socialism, if that's what you were saying.
What allows the government to collect taxes? Lethal force!
But also...
What keeps people from driving on the wrong side of the road? Lethal force! What keeps people from dining and dashing? Lethal force! What keeps from using park benches as toilets? Lethal force!
For the most part people are reasonable and if you indicate that they need to do something or refrain from doing something, they go along. If they don't, you can write a law with some enforcement mechanism, and then they go along. If they still don't, you can increase the bite of the enforcement mechanism. Rarely do you have Bartleby the Scrivener types who simply refuse to cooperate, and even then, the consequence for them, like for Bartleby, is generally fines or time in state custody, not lethal force.
The government, through its agents, often does employ lethal force with tragic consequences, but this is usually the result of the agents enforcing their own special laws -- respect my authority or I will kill you -- not the actual laws and their legal enforcement mechanisms. Many nations have no death penalty. Many have police officers who vary rarely kill their citizens. These nations are often very nice countries to live in.
Pay the rent, or you and your family end up on the streets. Pay your insurance, or you will be left to bleed out and die. You have no other choice but to take any job, no matter how bad it may be.
Then foster a culture that gives everyone the hope that they also have a chance to get a good life, but only on the condition that they must only think for themselves and compete with the other poor to ascend the social pyramid. That's meritocracy.
This is how the rich (the capitalist ruling class) gets everyone else to do what they want, which is to trickle up enormous amounts of value from everyone to a handful of people.
Then if we want to talk about lethal force, capitalists used overwhelming amounts of it troughout recent history, in order to preserve the status quo that advantages them. It's not a secret and it just takes some honest study to know it.
Why on earth would you conclude that? What's wrong with Darwinian processes? Why must people be protected from the cost of their own misfortune, failure or inadequacy? Why must this cost be born by others?
In a real Darwinian world, rich people wouldn't be able to walk the streets without a huge amount of security, and eventually that security force would kill them, take what they have, and pass it to their children. The idea that the people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions of the world is a version of the efficient market hypothesis within a idealized police state whose only duty is to keep these people from falling to their level. It's really just a neofeudalism that will result in neohapsburg lips in 100 years and infant kings.
> people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions
They're not, and I never said they were. All I said was that if they acquired their wealth through legitimate means (ie without the use of force), then they are entitled to keep all of it and do with it what they please.
Say we live in a society with 10 people, each with one dollar. Now say one member of this society invents something useful and sells it to the other nine for 75¢. The wealth gap in this society will have grown dramatically. What exactly entitles the other nine to any of their money back? What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?
Lets take your scenario one step further. The entrepreneur now uses his newly gotten weatlh, buys up some neccessary infrastructure that everyone relies on (for sake of argument lets the food supply) and raises the price to 26ct, everyone in the society but him starves to death and no violence was used. At what point, if any, should a hypothetical state step in?
What if a government taxed every one of their transactions by 25%, spent or redistributed 80% of those dollars within the society, and uncharitably donated 20% of all dollars away to another society. How long would it take for that society to have a rounded $0 and the other society to have a rounded $10?
There's no inevitable historical process that results in utopia. Nominal "socialisms" tend to combine the political outlook of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism with the Whig history of liberalism, resulting in the worst of both worlds; the belief that 1) all answers have already been discovered, and 2) that they will inevitably be implemented as the people recognize these answers to be truths and decide that in the world of technologically provided abundance created by capitalism, there's no reason to wait.
They believed that the ultimate expression of history is democratic socialism, and that capitalism is a necessary step to get to there from feudalism. To believe that democratic socialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism itself is very strange - capitalism has no moral center that needs to be expressed. It's a physics metaphor that believes that the greater good can be emergent without a moral center.
Democratic Socialism, as seen in European countries, is a system granted and implemented by the US after the devastation of WWII, intended to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. It was funded by the intense military expenses of the US which allowed Europe to ignore military expenditure (for social expenditure), and regulated in the beginning through intense covert operations in Europe using the stick of assassinations to break up parties and eliminate influential people ambivalent about or friendly towards the Soviets, and the carrot of employing well-known socialist intellectuals through unprofitable foundations and public expenditures on their weirdest art and expressions as counter-programming to a Nazi-redolent (i.e. degenerate art) Socialist Realism and Stalin's hatred of modernism.
European democratic socialism was a strategy of capitalism to suppress change, not to encourage it.
> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.
> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
Seriously? These problems are not remotely in the same ballpark.
I don't even know what is the point of this article. A handwavey call for better regulation of "Western society, economics, capitalism, finance, government, the tech sector, the cloud". Oh, and free daycare too. Gee thanks doc, I'll get right on it.
It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.
Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.
It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want the protections of our modern financial system...
I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
You will be just as effective doing that as someone who just runs the Bitcoin client at home.
Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and capital intensive operations in both gold mining and Bitcoin mining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
But outside of Bitcoin there is a ton of cool stuff happening in the DeFi space which could have big implications for our financial systems. One example is stablecoins which has a much better chance of being used in payment systems than a store of value like Bitcoin. In general I don't see this stuff replacing the financial system so much as finance companies slowly adopting crypto on the backend. Just like companies adopted internet technology as it allowed them to run more efficiently.
Try carrying a bar of gold across a border and you'll end up in an interrogation room.
Cryptocurrency's digital nature makes it much more useful than gold. It can be stored like gold in a vault, but it can also be transmitted over the internet like a bank transfer. It's pretty incredible stuff.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.
This is a huge claim, and needs to have just as huge of a proof.
However, all cryptos can offer is poof (as in poof, and gone) than proof.
Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made public you already had things like France's Minitel.
Blockchains? They still have zero use cases: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
> You have to be open minded and extrapolate
Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is blindly believe in it.
sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
permissionless payments (funding wikileaks)
private/anonymous transactions (Monero)
event tickets (good use of NFTs)
synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA)
decentralized asset exchange - AMM
decentralized prediction markets
DAO - a new way for people to organize and form internet native companies
Unless, of course, you're interested in outright scams like NFT. Yup, those are "interesting".
It isn't if you cared to at least read the link I provided
As to your use cases. First the obvious ones:
- event tickets. Have literally zero need for blockchain. NFTs are scam, and nothing but scam. All the fictional properties ascribed to ticketing via NFTs I've covered in my to responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
- synthetic assets, decentralized asset exchange, decentralized prediction markets. Require neither bitcoin, nor blockchains nor crypto. Used almost exclusively for trading fictional tokens, scams, and pretending it's innovation.
The less obvious ones:
- sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
"Let's convert our value into a fictional token that has no value outside the fictional world, and can't be used for anything but buying other digital tokens".
Buy food? Oh, you have to convert it to real money (because no one in the world, especially not in the world where government sucks, accepts these fictional tokens). Or if someone does accept it, oops, random transaction fees just doubled your cost.
Buy actual physical assets? "When your government sucks", people prefer dollars and euro to fictional tokens.
- permissionless payments
This is a very tiny part that is arguably useful, but it comes with a plethora of issues that make them unusable for wide adoption. Among them, reversibility, enforcement.
The complexity comes from the rules enacted to shield people from bad actors, and that's just going to be re-applied to crypto in some way shape or form.
Tell that to this Angular 1 app.
Three years ago I bought an apartment.
I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly.
In the end, all of the following was guaranteed:
- I had the money
- money was transfered into the other person's account
- I was not a scammer
- that person wasn't a scammer
- I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address)
(a bunch of other stuff)
So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
For those of us living in prosperous Western countries (and let's not kid ourselves, that is at least 90% of HN), the biggest attraction of cryptocurrencies seems to be "if you buy this, it might be worth more in the future". Which is nice, but hardly innovative.
A disintegrating third world country will not be able to enforce anything. So, you've transferred your money and got a key to a non-existent place.
Good luck with your "improved process".
Argentina is the only one that comes to mind.
Planning for the apocalypse isn't really planning, but I guess we all need hobbies.
All of those guarantees are under threat of legal punishment enforced through court systems.
All of those guarantees are given to you based on good standing with various institutions. The bank, the intermediary, the seller.
If you were a person who was not in good standing with a bank, but you still had the money, could you have completed the transaction?
Technology has a trend of destroying middleman industries, as they don't provide value and take a portion of the proceeds for themselves.
DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders. Does that mean this process is smooth? or ready for mass adoption? Not necessarily, but the destruction of banks by technology is inevitable. It's just a matter of when
The problem is that that decision is made by people. Standards of conduct are not universal. What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
The advantage to people is that they can more flexible.
The disadvantage to people is that they can be more irrational.
On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
Agreed. People still create the system, but they have zero to little sway in each individual transaction. So, the system can be biased, but with increased transparency, that should become apparent.
> On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
> In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
At least in the US, this is not the case for payment processors. Banks may be under more strict regulation. Visa/Mastercard can revoke the ability for anyone to process transactions on their network, even if the activity is completely legal. E.G. OnlyFans/Pornhub recently.
> Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
Could you elaborate how you think this problem will be fixed for mainstream adoption?
So, these middlemen that "don't provide any value" guarantee that: my money isn't stolen, that I get the apartment I was shown etc.
So, you've removed these middlemen. How exactly is your technology going to solve this?
> DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders.
No, you don't. With banks I can revert a fraudulent transaction (I paid, but the goods never showed up). How is defi solving this simple case?
You mean, the absolute vast majority of people in this world live in contries with more-or-less functioning governments. Not perfect, but functioning.
> or the rest, crypto can be a good place to keep their funds without the fear of losing.
Ah yes. The only use case is hoarding. Even though I specifically provided a different case that doesn't involve hoarding.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-59069662
And on top of that, in this case, how will it help with the stolen house in Luton?
I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.
I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.
Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.
Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen with black woman? I’d have thought that was more connected to the media using it that way.
1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistak...
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/
It’s not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.
It's mind boggling how some people see eye watering profits and political donations and think that the whole thing is driven by stupidity.
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts, which is why prudent drafters include severability clauses
yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a pre/postnup cannot contradict law.
a) Prenuptial agreements help some.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing. Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out of that business.
Or just look at it the other (and IMO more correct) way around: It's actually family formation that is "marriage".
This truth used to be recognised by governments too, as witnessed by the ancient legal term "common law marriage".
If it's time for anyone to "get out of that business", it's everyone but the state.
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
> libertarian
Yeah, that explains it.
I think the system is whack, and that's the reason people don't want to fight it. They've given up.
People get angry over years of absolute no change.
It seems like there's a happy medium, as long as no one is killed.
(The media usually sensationalizes the protest too. Hell---CVS planned on closing 200 California stores years ago. How do I know? I just know. I heard a spokesman for CVS claim that theft was the reason. When asked about which exact stores were hit hard--she didn't have an answer.
When there's a violent protest, and the disenfranchised guys break a window and steal. The tv stations play the same isolated incident over, and over again.)
https://rebrand.ly/end-of-rent
If this interests, send me a note and let's connect/introduce!
1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin
A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.
"What have you lost, Mulla?"
"My key," said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?"
"At home."
"Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"
"There is more light here."
According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin
It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure what Web3 can offer.
OTOH, reintroducing the friction of having to decide whether the next click is worth your time and attention (i.e. money) is where it's at.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be untraceable/unauditable).
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins.
You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.
Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from misattribution of a people problem to tech.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
[1]: https://www.alt-m.org/2021/07/06/the-fable-of-the-cats/
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
How is software making society worse?
By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings.
By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours.
By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
If we're talking about a material object, there would be a more or less clear distinction between "what it is", "how it's made", "how it's used", etc.
If we're talking about software, I don't think that's the case any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...
And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress.
Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?
A: He works it out with a pencil.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.
With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".
So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.
(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)
I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend.
It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.
I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.")
I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.
Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
This is a really good point.
There are some kinda exceptions[1] now and then, but there are many reasons why they tend to not work (not short term profitable being one of the main ones). Despite that, it seems we're pretty short even on good ideas lately, like our culture has lost the ability to dream big about positive things (we're excellent at doomsday dreaming, especially about our political outgroup members).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
I second what the other guy said: this is an interesting point. But I'd also second the point about not knowing their intent (more with Bretton Woods than Visa/Mastercard; the latter is obviously fair enough). Also, I think it's telling that you left out Dodd-Frank when making that point, because it pretty clearly undercuts it.
How come our bank won't give us a dashboard with all of our monthly charges and cancel them at will?
Just as you can’t cancel your brothers subscriptions, the subscription service has no reason to accept a cancellation request from your bank.
Even if the service was no longer able to charge your card, you would still owe the money. The debt you incurred monthly is separate from your choice of how to pay that debt.
I wonder what happens if someone does that?
We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing theft, which turns out to be largely sufficient even in face of fallible security. The exact same applies to card data in the hands of merchants.
Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts believe in it.
The fact is that we can and do find ways around flaws in a system. Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
That's exactly the point of the article: You need some form of guardrail, and that has to be centralized.
> Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
How so? I am not under the impression that current financial providers have significant issues in consistently exchanging numbers...
I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.
Even then, there is still recourse if you pay for something with cash and the thing you buy ends up being non-functional (e.g. small claims court). And since the transaction was in person it's less likely you have no idea who the seller is.
An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.
Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.
But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting.
Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.
Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive.
Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life.
The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness.
The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors.
Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.
Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo.
When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.
you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs.
no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects, you have other teams mad because they are triaging a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor, and you have management wondering why the fuck you have spent multiple months working on stuff that has no clear connection to a marketable feature. you might also have a couple of seniors/principals who actively oppose your efforts because they benefit from being the only people who really understand the mess you are trying to clean up. and of course, all of that messy people stuff is probably a large part of why the system is so tangled up to begin with.
I certainly don't think political systems are exactly like computer systems, but it seems like a lot of the high-level lessons are applicable to both.
That's what I meant to capture by agreeing there is overlap in terms of backwards compatibility and entangled dependencies.
The difference is entrenched social systems have greater agency that goes beyond change induced instability and into being able to actively predict and favorably mold their environment.
Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
Almost always. Re-implementing all the existing functionality from scratch will take much longer than you think or estimate. And attempting to remove/defer implementation of any will cause friction with business that rely on it.
There is a reason why we haven't replaced Excel/Word with google sheets/docs. It's true that most people only use about 60% of any software but everyone relies on a different set of 60%.
It just isn't! It really isn't. It is the way it is for good and historically motivated reasons. Can you elucidate those things? If you don't understand the rationale for the system as it exists, you can't propose an alternative that has any chance of success.
The key point here then is that the engineers and maintainers of that original (legacy) system probably did not properly take scalability and structure into consideration. Maybe the system was pre-SDLC, which is an important consideration, but each system is usually a different case, and some tech is often labeled as "legacy" because it's simply not part of a "bright and shiny new money-making solution" marketing plan... ehem.
It's important to not create the same issues in redevelopment, and reducing complexity is a key step in ensuring future compatibility.
Some systems are not as "legacy" as others. This is also a vital point to the discussion.
Most clients aren't concerned with overall cost and lifetime of service on solutions from what I've observed; Most clients are people working towards raises and their retirement and just concerned about not exceeding their max budget and not generating embarrassment for themselves or for their company.
This is why one of the first questions I ask of my customers is how long they intend for the system to be in service for.
There are several factors of why a proper solutions architect is necessary throughout the development process of major and mission-critical systems, but too many PMs decide to just use the tech stack a team agrees upon, or what's cobbled together and patched to work, or what worked as an MVP during early demos.
We suffer from environmental factors, because budgets are under-cut, deadlines are always too short, and because people only care enough to prevent their own headaches. This does not meet a mark for vital systems though. As we ignorantly rush towards more and more software dependent operations, the failures will become more and more amplified in all aspects (cost, loss, recoverability, technical debt... you name it).
Keeping everything as simple as possible is now, and always has been, the better ideal.
I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
Alas. Our smartest people are working on making people click ads ...
There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin.
I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often.
Considerations for a rewrite:
1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem;
2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and
3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag.
It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point.
> And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play.
I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").
It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia.
We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal.
If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.
None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders.
As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous.
If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.
Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.
I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
But I get your point; it is reasonable for savvy people to have a play ground for more risk.
> Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.
Banks have reserves now because the government printed so much money to give them that they can't put it to any use.
People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.
They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe.
It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system
The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.
I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it.
There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?
But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on
>so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>
Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better.
In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today.
I think what you are stating is a bit reductive.
You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence.
Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking.
It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it.
Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction.
It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life.
PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.
Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems).
In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.
Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic underlying principle.
Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples:
- currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries)
- civil asset forfeiture (citizens)
These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfe...
You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.
An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort.
Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.
Writing software has never been more accessible.
But consumer standards have risen. The geeks are out there and will happily work from your source code if that’s all you want to share.
The old life is still available. It’s just that back then that was all that was available.
It turns out there are a whole bunch of superstar product designers out there. And now that the software nuts and bolts are easy, those guys are beating (in the market) all the guys whose skill was nuts and bolts.
That’s natural. It what comes from accessibility. That is good because the whole world is lifted by the fact that some fool can build a business on Zapier and Airtable.
That is very well put. I'm stealing it.
Ah, I guess the anarcho/libertarian crowd is stepping back from the abyss. But how is that going to make your EC2 SSD go faster? Cheapen your egress fees? Make you write software that actually has less exploits? Pay artists better?
As with many ideas here, how about a concrete suggestion? Here’s mine: software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
You don’t get to call yourself a professional and punt on responsibilities. We don’t let doctors or lawyers do it, why should we let coders?
Either you offer it completely free to anyone in the entire world, or this is just another barrier to prevent access to the developer "elite".
And btw, often it's not the developer that cuts on security features, but an executive that wants to get to market faster. How about we give compulsory security training to every manager/executive/ceo/etc AND we hold them legally responsible when damages are caused by their eagerness to cut on costs?
But one thing you are missing is that those in power are just like us. Deeply flawed people and what they build is flawed for their purposes too.
Global warming is a great example. They have absolutely no solution to it and it will decimate not just them, but everyone.
Well, if you define "work" as benefiting as many people as possible, then no they don't work. That's obviously the point the author was making.
Instead this a world-wide, centuries-old conflict for power and wealth. The kind of thing that people live and die for.
Calling for more regulation by an entity that needs to be regulated itself is a modern paradox.
I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:
1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.
2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.
3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.
4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.
Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.
Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.
None of this is evil or bad faith. Its simply very hard problems that are hard to solve individually. We try to organize or build systems to fix these things, but its a very hard problem.
I'm not denying that there are powerful people doing evil things to benefit themselves, and that this is huge part of why everything is bad. Im just saying we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that a lot of our troubles come down to our problems being extremely complex and human nature doesnt interact that great with that kind of complexity. Our biggest problem i think is not nefariouss badguys, but the immense scale of our issues and our inability to tackle them at the proper level.