Amazing, this blockchain technology really just keeps on giving. I have to say, it's quite entertaining to watch. It's pretty much a car crash happening in slow motion at this point. At least it provides something else to nerd joke about by the watercooler that isn't brexit for once.
That's what it was like in 2016. I remember seeing the headline for the DAO hack on HN back then and thinking "Wow, good thing I didn't invest in this Ethereum thing". Someone had told me about it in 2015, I took a quick glance and passed thinking "Looks like a scam." Then 2017 happened and the joke was on me. Then 2018 happened and the joke was on them again.
New technologies are always shitshows when they get started. I remember DoubleClick ads hanging every copy of Netscape they ran on, ActiveX controls that could pwn your computer just by viewing a webpage, and unusable college Internet because the SQL Slammer worm had infected 50% of computers on campus and would reinfect anything as soon as it was plugged back in. The last was in 2003, 14 years after the Internet was introduced - put on the Bitcoin timeline, that's 4 years in the future, assuming cryptocurrency is adopted as fast as the Internet (and there're good reasons to believe it won't be).
The thing about disruptive technologies is that people continue to use them despite how shitty the technology is - they're so desperate for a solution that they put up with a solution that basically doesn't work.
> The last was in 2003, 14 years after the Internet was introduced - put on the Bitcoin timeline, that's 4 years in the future, assuming cryptocurrency is adopted as fast as the Internet
This is a common comparison but it’s based on a very dubious equation of the history. By 2003, the internet had transformed many industries — e-commerce was in the billions of dollar range (Amazon’s earliest business lines had been profitable for the better part of a decade by then); millions of people used it daily for tasks like research or customer service, software or media downloads, etc. Mainstream media and ads were full of URLs not just for internet companies but for existing companies which were increasingly focused on the internet.
In contrast, Bitcoin has almost no reason for anyone to care about it other than speculation and the few people who do use it regularly for anything else are largely using it as a replacement for PayPal with worse customer protections.
I had the XP service pack burned to a CD (or maybe DVD?) because on my college campus Code Red would infect a computer on install faster than you could download the patches.
"New technologies are always shitshows when they get started. "
A key difference is most of the new techs like Internet, email, Paypal, and so on improved on what people already had in a way that delivered obvious value. They also came with problems. Whereas, nobody I know in real life wants the drawbacks of these cryptocurrencies that come with giving up the benefits of their current, centralized offerings. The only folks I know out here doing crypto are speculators (esp day traders). That's the difference.
Now, if they wanted to solve those problems, they'd start with whatever tech/law/orgs already worked, identify their problems, and then mitigate them using proven methods. So, we're looking at credit unions, non-profits, or public-benefit companies chartered to make sure they do specific good things and don't do specific bad things. The most important stuff at least. These can be in the licenses and contracts, too, for re-enforcement. Then, centralized systems with decentralized checking of what's exchanged a la SWIFT all using existing high-performance tech we know how to secure. Open protocols and agreements for how disputes will be resolved in situations using decentralized mode with experts from both centralized and decentralized models weighing in on that. I've been talking about that in Gerard's threads on Lobsters:
I can't find the other ones sense the search feature is limited.
"they're so desperate for a solution that they put up with a solution that basically doesn't work. "
That's true when there's a need. This is part of a hype cycle pushing stuff people don't need to replace stuff that would meet their needs fine. Accelerated by massive amounts of money being thrown all over this area. Totally different kind of thing. The stuff that bubbles, bankruptcies, and broken dreams are made of.
> A key difference is most of the new techs like Internet, email, Paypal, and so on improved on what people already had in a way that delivered obvious value.
I'd argue that for most people the value was only obvious afterwards.
To put email in perspective, early adopters had to choose between what they already knew and all the hurdles involved in connecting to the internet and using the new technology. There was also a good chance the people they were trying to communicate with didn't even have email. Outside of a few niche areas, email provided no obvious value to the vast majority of people for decades.
The thing I was getting at is, if you had a computer and Internet, then email would be a free, fast alternative to traditional mail. That has obvious benefit. Whereas, these currencies are volatile, slower, often dont allow charge backs, use more energy, and accepted at fewer places. Worse in every way to checking accounts and credit cards. Esp if we have multiple cards or accounts to reduce risk of single institution.
> you just need your entire country to have a total meltdown
That happens more often than one might think. There are quite a few countries, that are currenly on the brink of collapse, so it is not unlikely that one or more of them will adopt a cryptocurrency some time in the not to far-off future.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you on that, and I do think a lot of the hype comes from speculation, its worth noting that many ubiquitous technologies we take for granted started as a narrow niche.
Ethereum (the one where "The DAO" hack happened) is project that initially released in July 2015 [1]. The Roadmap was provided in the beginning and it is clearly understood that it is a work in progress. It is not yet ready for general public use.
Bitcoin is an entirely different project. Although it is also a blockchain, it's like a calculator while the former is a fully programmable computer. These two projects are very different, two different groups of developers. I encourage you read into them more to educate yourself.
> Someone had told me about it in 2015, I took a quick glance and passed thinking "Looks like a scam." Then 2017 happened and the joke was on me. Then 2018 happened and the joke was on them again.
Pretty sure the joke is still on you when comparing to someone that told you about it in 2015.
The highest price for ETH in 2015 was $2.19, lowest in 2018 was $85. So even with the worst possible entry/exit in those years we're still talking about a 3881% ROI in 3 years. Again, that's the WORST possible ROI for entering in 2015 and leaving in 2018.
> That's like saying "this whole programming thing just keeps on giving" every time a bug is discovered in any program.
No it's not. Programming is a tool to create programs with. Block chain is a technological buzzword being used (and implemented) wildly inappropriately.
51% attacks are a fundamental vulnerability in decentralization. It would be like inventing programming when everyone pretends bugs don't exist at all. Bugs are inherent to the task, just like blockchains have a very narrow set of use cases, but everyone's too busy flying too close to the sun.
You won't find any disagreement from me that there is a LOT of garbage out there using blockchains and cryptocurrency tech inappropriately.
The extreme vast majority is trash, manipulative, and awful in most every way. Not to mention the charlatans and fanboys that hype it as able to do everything and anything perfectly.
But the few that use it well are doing fairly well, and innovation is happening. You shouldn't loop the entire ecosystem as one big unit making terrible choices together.
Are they though? I'm honestly curious as to what those things could be. A lot of people talk about good uses of blockchains, but all examples I've seen are either not actually good uses, or they have some flaw that makes practical implementation impossible (or at least highly unlikely).
What examples of good use of blockchains are you thinking of?
If the whole concept is trustless decentralized (fill in the blank ???) profit, meaning that you can make currency or a timestamp or whatever else using blockchain,
and a sufficiently large force can basically fork off of an earlier block, race ahead in secret and then take over the currency or timestamps or whatever else the blockchain's about,
does this not render the replaced fork useless? As in, if it's money it doesn't count and you lost everything, if it's a timestamp it's not proof because it's not the blockchain anymore, etc?
I guess this is one way to make it so raw power is the only thing that matters, expressed as 'ability to marshal computer resources on a massive scale', which costs money and so it becomes circular. Power/money gives you power/money and so on. Given enough power/money you can simply take over Bitcoin: could be happening right now.
Bitcoin not only doesn’t deliver on those claims, it’s actively dangerous because it leaves an immutable public record of your activities, as numerous court cases have shown. There’s a reason why the mob doesn’t publish their ledgers.
“Censorship resistant” is also a complex claim since the network is trivially blocked as a whole, and the inability to comply with legal demands means that anyone legitimate faces risks which will encourage them to stop participating, reducing the defense for allowing it at all and removing the traffic everyone else is hoping to hide behind.
That's why I said it's dangerous: telling people a word which sounds like anonymous but actually means “irrepudiable proof of identity” is setting them up to make decisions under the belief that they are closer to anonymous than they actually are. Given how proponents like to proclaim benefits for people in countries with repressive governments, that's just irresponsible.
> It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
What does that even mean? A government can block it easily because the design requires you to be on the network and the lack of anonymity means that anyone who attempts to bypass those restrictions has valid reasons to fear reprisal.
Well, they're two concepts with quite different meanings -- I'm not sure how you do better than explaining it that way. I've always explained bitcoin that way, and I think most people understand it that way now.
"the network" is a concept that doesn't necessarily mean "the public internet". Also, it really doesn't require everyone to be on the network -- it requires a network to exist. And pseudonymity can be "good enough".
The point was that the entire ecosystem can exist independent of cashing it out to fiat -- that point can be somewhat controlled, but it's not necessarily required.
Which is to say, it's not good enough for anything which matters, especially in any case where censorship is a relevant concern.
> "the network" is a concept that doesn't necessarily mean "the public internet". Also, it really doesn't require everyone to be on the network -- it requires a network to exist.
This is similarly meaningless: if you're talking Bitcoin, you're by definition saying you need to be on the regular internet and if you're running some private network you either have the exact same problems with trust & monitoring or you don't need a blockchain in the first place because you have some other trusted communications channel.
No, it's good enough if precautions are taken. If you apply a moderate amount of care, your identity is not hard to protect when using it.
There are a variety of ways to have private transactions across either the public internet or other networks. There are a variety of coins that use tor, for instance.
It doesn't have to be bitcoin either.
My point was that if you can avoid cashing out to fiat using well known gateways, anonymity isn't difficult to preserve. It only becomes an anonymity problem if you are careless or if you cash out using known KYCd gateways.
> It only becomes an anonymity problem if you are careless or if you cash out using known KYCd gateways.
This means you can't use it for currency transactions, with anyone you don't trust, or on any system which might be compromised by the authorities you're trying to evade. If you ever make a mistake, all of that not only won't help you but will be strong evidence of intention. There are very few threat models where “use cash” is not a much safer answer.
It means you need to operate inside the cryptocurrency ecosystem instead of counting on cashing out all the time, or you simply use any of the many non-regulated means to cash in and out of the ecosystem.
> It means you need to operate inside the cryptocurrency ecosystem instead of counting on cashing out all the time, or you simply use any of the many non-regulated means to cash in and out of the ecosystem.
None of which has any bearing on the problems I mentioned earlier. If you're worried about a repressive government, the odds are high that other people in the system are compromised and will help reveal your identity. Those “many non-regulated means to cash in and out” are similarly not readily available and extremely likely to be compromised as well. People sometimes act like mixers solve this problem but they aren't effective against attackers who can see lots of traffic and even if they worked as well as advertised, simply using one is going to be considered proof that you were doing something illegal and attempting to hide it.
Finally, as we're already seeing you have the problem that in a repressive country simply being able to maintain software security is an unsolved problem: consider what the odds are that someone will manage to maintain perfect security of their devices and client trying to find software which is considered illegal and will attract attention simply by searching for it.
Read anything about the history of people living under regimes with black market economies and ask what a blockchain is adding other than a gift-wrapped transaction history for the authorities. It's simply irresponsible to tell people that you're not exposing them to more risk in the hope that it'll make some money for you.
Mixers are hardly the only form of dealing with anonymity. We have multiple privacy coins and ways of getting in and out of them that do a very good job of dealing with the problems you mention if you are concerned about mixers for some reason.
Somehow, people in China still manage to get on the internet, how do you think that happens? As it happens, the internet was designed to route around censorship, and it's done a very good job so far.
There are some cool things you can do with blockchains, they’re just a little over hyped. It’s pretty neat to send funds to someone without going via a 3rd party, it’s cool to run code on a global computer, it’s awesome to have digital assets that can’t be doled out on a whim by a central authority.
Nobody wants that, nobody is saying they want that, there are mitigations against that (like backups), and it's a stupid straw man that's not even trying to engage in a meaningful conversation on the topic.
Like how nobody wants to have their accounts frozen with no notice? Or how people don't want a private company to be able to dictate what they are allowed to buy and sell? Or how people don't want to have to be constantly vigilant to ensure their simple 16 digit number doesn't get into the wrong hands (or that the hands they are required to give it to don't misuse it) and if/when it does they quickly report it to the credit card company so they aren't on the hook for it.
All money systems have tradeoffs, cryptocurrencies are just another option.
> Like how nobody wants to have their accounts frozen with no notice?
This is not a concern for 99% of people. Nobody is getting their bank accounts frozen except for high profile criminals.
> Or how people don't want a private company to be able to dictate what they are allowed to buy and sell
Another fake problem. 99% of people can buy and sell whatever they want. There is a very very small intersection between what is legal and prohibited by the banks. Once again, this is only a use-case for criminals.
> don't want to have to be constantly vigilant to ensure their simple 16 digit number doesn't get into the wrong hands
Do you not see the irony in complaining about vigilance over a credit card number in a response about the work of having to back up your bank cryptocurrency private key? If your 16 digit card number is stolen just cancel the card and any fraudulent purchases will be remedied. Crpyocurrency is clearly worse in this comparison.
> All money systems have tradeoffs, cryptocurrencies are just another option
Cryptocurrency is not a "money system" with "trade offs", it's a hamstrung toy that facilitates some dark-market commerce and that's about it, it is otherwise demonstrably useless and certainly not an alternative for the incumbent financial system.
>This is not a concern for 99% of people. Nobody is getting their bank accounts frozen except for high profile criminals.
I've had my credit cards frozen multiple times because I did something their fraud detection deemed shady. One time I was stuck in another country without any way to pay for things! Yes, I now know that I have to warn my credit card company where i'm going or they may turn my card off again on me, and I now know that I should bring cash with me (at the time I didn't have a ton of money to be able to take a bunch out in cash to carry around, not to mention that it would have cost me tens of dollars to withdraw all of my own money, and the bank can still deny me making it in one big withdraw!), but that is again a lot of work to have to do and worry about just to be able to spend my own money.
(Also, the whole premise there kind of freaks me out. You need to warn the bank where you are going, and then if they approve you are allowed to spend your money there, otherwise you could be stuck somewhere with no recourse... That's terrifying!)
>Another fake problem. 99% of people can buy and sell whatever they want.
And yet finding credit card processors for porn and other adult things is extremely difficult for most companies in that area. Not to mention that your agreement with your credit card company prohibits you from buying a lot of that stuff (porn, sex, donations to politically unfriendly sites like wikileaks, etc...)
And go ask a marijuana shop why they don't take credit cards, and how difficult it is for them to handle money and even pay their employees because they can't get a bank account in the US. How they need to hire armed guards because they have to work entirely via bundles of cash because of the blacklisting of their industry.
Hell, just LAST WEEK there was an article at the top of this very website about how Paypal banned a company and is holding their funds for 180 days. And that thread is FILLED with other examples not just from Paypal but other companies as well.
You can say it's unlikely, but you can't say it's a "fake problem".
>Do you not see the irony in complaining about vigilance over a credit card number in a response about the work of having to back up your bank cryptocurrency private key?
No, because you never have to give out your private key, but you do have to give out and protect your credit card number.
>If your 16 digit card number is stolen just cancel the card and any fraudulent purchases will be remedied.
Unless you waited too long to tell them, or they say you've disputed too many fraudulent purchases on your account, or they mess up the paperwork, or they say the fraudster used your pin and they don't cover charges where a pin is used.
>Cryptocurrency is not a "money system" with "trade offs", it's a hamstrung toy that facilitates some dark-market commerce and that's about it, it is otherwise demonstrably useless and certainly not an alternative for the incumbent financial system.
It's clear you've made up your mind, I don't even know why I'm typing this out, you aren't going to change your feelings.
But I'm not asking you to believe me, I'm asking you to let some of us make different choices. You say 99% of people don't have a concern about these things, what about the 1% of us that do? What about the 1% who are being failed by current money systems, the 1% who have to rely on cash which is EXTREMELY susceptible to fire, theft, and loss because they can't back it up, the 1% who want to try and transact safely without a middleman in some situations, the 1% who think that there is still improvements that can be made in cryptocurrencies and are working toward solving problems with them so that one day they may become more useful to a much larger portion of people.
Also:
>certainly not an alternative for the incumbent financial system.
I never said it was an alternative in it's current form. I don't believe it is. No cryptocurrency at the moment is ready for widespread usage, and I don't believe it is going to ever take over the incumbent financial system ever. But that doesn't mean we can't try to make it easier to use, better, safer, expand the usable situations, experiment with cryptographic protocols, and maybe eventually some of that tech can make it into other money systems in some way to make things better for everyone. Or maybe it will just stay a fringe system for some who have been burned or blacklisted by the current system to use in some situations where they would otherwise be stuck.
You don't need to be involved, you don't even need to like it, but don't make up straw men and act like nobody out there wants some of the benefits of it because you personally don't.
I didn't want to get into fucking arguments about cryptocurrencies today, especially with someone who just decides that the problems it's solving for some are "fake problems" and handwaves them away, so this is the last time i'll reply here.
> I've had my credit cards frozen multiple times because I did something their fraud detection deemed shady
A frozen credit card is not a frozen bank account. Your money is still available in the bank. You can try to paint fraud protection as a negative but the vast majority of consumers disagree with you. Not a real issue.
> No, because you never have to give out your private key, but you do have to give out and protect your credit card number
You're moving the goalposts. Giving out a credit card does not require a user to be vigilant about security, they simply leverage the number when they need to make a purchase, no back ups or additional work required.
> It's clear you've made up your mind, I don't even know why I'm typing this out, you aren't going to change your feelings.
Not an argument. It's clear you've made up your mind, I don't even know why I'm typing this out blah blah blah. See how pointless that is?
> I'm asking you to let some of us make different choices
Nobody needs my permission to do anything. I can assert that cryptocurrencies are useless and you can ignore me if you like.
> What about the 1% who are being failed by current money systems
What about them? They can do whatever they want, I'm not trying to stop cryptocurrency enthusiasts from doing their thing, it doesn't mean I have to agree that its useful.
> Paypal banned a company
Paypal is a private company... what's your point? Coinbase bans people all the time for arbitrary use of their coins. Based on your logic here that means cryptocurrency is failure.
> marijuana shop
Marijuana is federally illegal. Using cryptocurrency doesn't solve any problems that cash doesn't already solve just fine. Cryptocurrency has literally zero advantages for these businesses.
> that one day they may become more useful
Yeah... when that actually happens you won't hear any arguments from me.
> You don't need to be involved, you don't even need to like it, but don't make up straw men and act like nobody out there wants some of the benefits of it because you personally don't.
Talk about a straw man. I never said "nobody out there wants some of the benefits" of cryptocurrency, I said THE VAST MAJORITY of people don't want it, which is absolutely true and something you've already understood based on your response, so I am not sure why you have decided to pull up a starwman argument even though you already responded to my actual argument regarding the "1% who are being failed by current money systems".
> I didn't want to get into fucking arguments about cryptocurrencies today, especially with someone who just decides that the problems it's solving for some are "fake problems" and handwaves them away, so this is the last time i'll reply here.
This is a silly rhetorical trick. You drop a gigantic wall of text and then sign it with a complaint that you don't want to get in an argument and use that as an excuse to avoid responding to criticism. I didn't do any handwaving, I gave detailed specific responses explaining my position, but if regarding my argument as "handwaving" makes it easier for you to ignore it, by all means.
This is not an effective argument - you are assuming that a user of digital currency will not keep multiple copies of their money, especially in meaningful amounts.
To be fair, as someone who is cynical and lived through the turn of the century dot-com crash we needed a few high profile failures after the pets.com sock puppet, myspace and cue-cats almost 20 years ago.... Thank goodness for Amazon...
But honestly I missed the crypto currency expansion completely. Bitcoin when I noticed it at $50, bah.... It hasn't lived up to its promise of an alternative form of payment, but it certainly increased in value rapidly. But I wouldn't count it out completely, there may be a use case that in hindsight is obvious, that we aren't seeing yet. I doubt it but it is possible (my track record is good but mixed. I was the proud owner of buy.com stock.. that didn't work out so well.. )
Plus the algorithms are kind of interesting, and the fact it works at all is kind of miraculous.
It will be crashing when the market caps start retracing previous years. Its still ridiculously high to what it was in 2016 or any year before that. We have a good five years of "evidence" to the get rich quick scheme that attracts money into crypto so a lot of ignorant naive people will keep slowly coming in to find their money lost.
I have to say, it's quite entertaining to watch. It's pretty much a car crash happening in slow motion at this point. At least it provides something else to nerd joke about by the watercooler...
The above part pretty much applies to humanity as a whole, going back at least 200k years.
Yeah, except a good portion of the errors made in those 200k years at least had the excuse of being new.
Blockchain stands apart as repeating every single problem the financial system solved over the last 300 years, while being driven by a community best defined by their arrogant dismissal of that very financial system they are reinventing, piece-by-piece.
Turns out civil society (i. e. laws, courts, institutions, economics, shared fictions of value, and trust) cannot actually be replaced by an algorithm quiet as easily.
Yeah, except a good portion of the errors made in those 200k years at least had the excuse of being new.
Blockchain stands apart as repeating every single problem the financial system solved over the last 300 years
Forgetting then repeating the mistakes of the past is yet another long standing hallmark of human beings. In every age, in every place, the deeds of people remain the same.
Turns out civil society (i. e. laws, courts, institutions, economics, shared fictions of value, and trust) cannot actually be replaced by an...
An algorithm. A new religion. A new social theory. A new lifestyle. A new understanding...
I've never seen SV. After I was assaulted over an iPhone project and complicated living situation, my ophthalmologist urged me to watch it. I actually stayed in a place billed as a "Hacker Hostel" when I first got to San Francisco. There is indeed a lot of fodder here for someone like Mike Judge.
i think it is evolving tho. somewhat like beliefs in: tribe shaman -> pharaon -> church -> state -> algo -> .... Is it a successful branch of evolution? Who knows, I would definitely not bet against or for it at this point.
