4 ms·

>Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my

>Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my money in fiat where the regulations are well-defined and I know I have recourse through the law. US fiat failed and was only rescued through ad hoc legislation. US fiat would not exist today if new rules (unknown at the time of failure) were not defined to essentially rollback prior transactions.

lunula 10y ago
I do not know what you are referring to, but I point out that fiat means "by decree". So US fiat only exists through legislation. When is legislation not ad hoc?
- mablap 10y ago
  Well in absolute everything is ad hoc but think about it this way: You are pretty much guaranteed that, modulo some events, any US president from any party will honor their predecessors' decisions, pacts, treaties, etc. And you can be assured that the whole nation will follow them, because of of the Rule of Law! What you've just witnessed in Ethereum is a bunch of rich, moderately intelligent, technocratic and very technologically literate (but not necessarily well educated ("who would want a government when you have code bah!")) visionaries and mostly speculators crying to get their money back by abandoning the very characteristic (immutability) that distinguished them from traditional systems of governance! They had a modus operandi that "Code is Law", and they've now turned against it. "Code is Law unless X". Why have that when you can just have plain and simple "Law"?
NhanH 10y ago
Yes, and if ETH is behaving the same as US dollars then there is no reason not to just stick to US dollars.
cjslep 10y ago
Thank you for exactly making my point. There is a legislative process, no matter how ad hoc and pressing the issue is, that can attempt to rescue US fiat. There's no way to divine every rule which is needed for a fiat currency to keep succeeding. And rules change over time with the ebb and flow of balance of power between nations, their trade, their military might, etc. Legislation provides a well-defined process for changes to be made. Whether you trust that legislative process seems to be a key point in choosing a cryptocurrency. Now take Ethereum: suddenly changes to the transaction history needed to be made which violates the one law of cryptocurrency that's been shoved down my throat ever since Bitcoin hit mainstream media. So with no process set (because it should not have been needed in the first place), a sudden reversal of intent for one arbitrary contract, and no way to have the original intent stay binding, Ethereum made its choice. It didn't even have a legislative process, just an authoritative one guised as a democratic vote. The way that choice went down shatters all trust. If US Treasury suddenly decided it didn't need to follow any US legislation and redistributed wealth across the world, trust in USD would equally be shattered. I'm not a gambling man, but at this point in time my money stays in USD.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Uh, you're welcome? I don't think I made your point, though. The laws that were passed to rescue the previously failed rules were utterly unknown at the time the failure was occurring. Instead of those rules being followed through (resulting in the complete destruction of debt-currency), a political elite was able to force a rescue of the failed actors. Wealth was redistributed across the world as USD should have ceased to exist and all debt vanished, but was allowed to be propped up at the whims of technocrats (Fed buyers).
  - cjslep 10y ago
    You did, I just think you are getting hung up way too much on the wording of this quote I said (emphasis mine): > I do not want to be subjected to the whims of an unregulated group operating under unknown rules[...] I read it as "operating under unknown rules", so I don't mean the laws as currently written but the legislative process used to change the laws so they can be fixed (this was my intended meaning). I agree with you fully: the rules can, do and will fail and the next set of rules are utterly unknown now. But rulemakers are currently operating under known rules: the legislative process. Always have been through all the US fiat changes. The lack of trust in the legislative process is what makes cryptocurrencies attractive. I infer (possibly incorrectly) you also share a healthy mistrust in the legislative process, just as I do. But Ethereum never laid out a formal process governing these sorts of changes (not a legislative, authoritative, nor democratic one) so the implication to the whole world was that none would ever be needed (because cryptocurrency) and people trusted that this fact would be respected. With this DAO reversal, Ethereum has broken that assumption many people hold, and lost that trust. This is why the OP in the article is upset: the process that resulted was an authoritative one disguised as a democratic vote in his or her eyes. And I am inclined to agree. Edit to remove typo "as as" to "as".
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      Hard fork and Soft fork were always part of the process. In fact, you can democratically vote through whatever you want in the ETH/DAO system, either through the established code for voting or by developing protocol extensions. People can freely choose what code they want to run, or not. The bailout of USD can also be described as an authoritative one disguised as a democratic vote. Congresspeople were told the world would end if they did not vote for the legislation they were handed.
pjc50 10y ago
> US fiat would not exist today if new rules (unknown at the time of failure) were not defined to essentially rollback prior transactions. [citation needed]
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  This should be common knowledge. Here is one Paulson quote: >You could just see it. We could see it and it was one of the most frustrating--when I look at the things I could have done better, there were a lot of them and they come out in the book, but the communications challenges were huge. I mean, I sat there when the capital markets froze, before we went to Congress, and the money markets weren't working, and I just tried to think about how to explain this. Because I knew--I was seeing major, blue-chip industrial companies that were having trouble raising financing, so I knew with $3.4 trillion of money market funds, and with everything that was just getting ready to break apart, that if the system had collapsed there'd be thousands and thousands and thousands of mainstream industrial companies--middle-sized companies, large companies--that wouldn't be able to raise their short-term funding, finance their inventories, pay their people. People wouldn't have been able to pay their bills. This would have rippled through the economy. We would then have had--well, today we have over 10% unemployment. That's terrible. And that's after everything we've done. If the system had collapsed, when we were on the brink, unemployement easily could have been at the 25% level that we saw at the Great Depression, and the value destruction--much greater than we've had in terms of home prices and in terms of people's savings accounts and stock portfolios and so on. >https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financial/dp/B0051BNTI8#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1469020764186 https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financia... And Bernanke: >He said that bailout was necessary because “we knew that the collapse of the firm would potentially destroy or at least paralyze the global financial system with tremendously bad consequences for everybody.” >http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chairman-ben-bernanke-tells-university-crowd-that/article_98fb276e-783f-11e5-abd3-8f27a8f12747.html http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chair...
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The clearing system is not the currency, although it's certainly important to daily functioning. Nor is the system of short-term trade credit the currency either. Also, where's the "rolling back of prior transactions"?

lunula 10y ago

I do not know what you are referring to, but I point out that fiat means "by decree". So US fiat only exists through legislation. When is legislation not ad hoc?

mablap 10y ago
Well in absolute everything is ad hoc but think about it this way: You are pretty much guaranteed that, modulo some events, any US president from any party will honor their predecessors' decisions, pacts, treaties, etc. And you can be assured that the whole nation will follow them, because of of the Rule of Law! What you've just witnessed in Ethereum is a bunch of rich, moderately intelligent, technocratic and very technologically literate (but not necessarily well educated ("who would want a government when you have code bah!")) visionaries and mostly speculators crying to get their money back by abandoning the very characteristic (immutability) that distinguished them from traditional systems of governance! They had a modus operandi that "Code is Law", and they've now turned against it. "Code is Law unless X". Why have that when you can just have plain and simple "Law"?

NhanH 10y ago

Yes, and if ETH is behaving the same as US dollars then there is no reason not to just stick to US dollars.

cjslep 10y ago

Thank you for exactly making my point. There is a legislative process, no matter how ad hoc and pressing the issue is, that can attempt to rescue US fiat. There's no way to divine every rule which is needed for a fiat currency to keep succeeding. And rules change over time with the ebb and flow of balance of power between nations, their trade, their military might, etc. Legislation provides a well-defined process for changes to be made. Whether you trust that legislative process seems to be a key point in choosing a cryptocurrency. Now take Ethereum: suddenly changes to the transaction history needed to be made which violates the one law of cryptocurrency that's been shoved down my throat ever since Bitcoin hit mainstream media. So with no process set (because it should not have been needed in the first place), a sudden reversal of intent for one arbitrary contract, and no way to have the original intent stay binding, Ethereum made its choice. It didn't even have a legislative process, just an authoritative one guised as a democratic vote. The way that choice went down shatters all trust. If US Treasury suddenly decided it didn't need to follow any US legislation and redistributed wealth across the world, trust in USD would equally be shattered. I'm not a gambling man, but at this point in time my money stays in USD.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
Uh, you're welcome? I don't think I made your point, though. The laws that were passed to rescue the previously failed rules were utterly unknown at the time the failure was occurring. Instead of those rules being followed through (resulting in the complete destruction of debt-currency), a political elite was able to force a rescue of the failed actors. Wealth was redistributed across the world as USD should have ceased to exist and all debt vanished, but was allowed to be propped up at the whims of technocrats (Fed buyers).
- cjslep 10y ago
  You did, I just think you are getting hung up way too much on the wording of this quote I said (emphasis mine): > I do not want to be subjected to the whims of an unregulated group operating under unknown rules[...] I read it as "operating under unknown rules", so I don't mean the laws as currently written but the legislative process used to change the laws so they can be fixed (this was my intended meaning). I agree with you fully: the rules can, do and will fail and the next set of rules are utterly unknown now. But rulemakers are currently operating under known rules: the legislative process. Always have been through all the US fiat changes. The lack of trust in the legislative process is what makes cryptocurrencies attractive. I infer (possibly incorrectly) you also share a healthy mistrust in the legislative process, just as I do. But Ethereum never laid out a formal process governing these sorts of changes (not a legislative, authoritative, nor democratic one) so the implication to the whole world was that none would ever be needed (because cryptocurrency) and people trusted that this fact would be respected. With this DAO reversal, Ethereum has broken that assumption many people hold, and lost that trust. This is why the OP in the article is upset: the process that resulted was an authoritative one disguised as a democratic vote in his or her eyes. And I am inclined to agree. Edit to remove typo "as as" to "as".
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Hard fork and Soft fork were always part of the process. In fact, you can democratically vote through whatever you want in the ETH/DAO system, either through the established code for voting or by developing protocol extensions. People can freely choose what code they want to run, or not. The bailout of USD can also be described as an authoritative one disguised as a democratic vote. Congresspeople were told the world would end if they did not vote for the legislation they were handed.

pjc50 10y ago

> US fiat would not exist today if new rules (unknown at the time of failure) were not defined to essentially rollback prior transactions. [citation needed]

jsprogrammer 10y ago
This should be common knowledge. Here is one Paulson quote: >You could just see it. We could see it and it was one of the most frustrating--when I look at the things I could have done better, there were a lot of them and they come out in the book, but the communications challenges were huge. I mean, I sat there when the capital markets froze, before we went to Congress, and the money markets weren't working, and I just tried to think about how to explain this. Because I knew--I was seeing major, blue-chip industrial companies that were having trouble raising financing, so I knew with $3.4 trillion of money market funds, and with everything that was just getting ready to break apart, that if the system had collapsed there'd be thousands and thousands and thousands of mainstream industrial companies--middle-sized companies, large companies--that wouldn't be able to raise their short-term funding, finance their inventories, pay their people. People wouldn't have been able to pay their bills. This would have rippled through the economy. We would then have had--well, today we have over 10% unemployment. That's terrible. And that's after everything we've done. If the system had collapsed, when we were on the brink, unemployement easily could have been at the 25% level that we saw at the Great Depression, and the value destruction--much greater than we've had in terms of home prices and in terms of people's savings accounts and stock portfolios and so on. >https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financial/dp/B0051BNTI8#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1469020764186 https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financia... And Bernanke: >He said that bailout was necessary because “we knew that the collapse of the firm would potentially destroy or at least paralyze the global financial system with tremendously bad consequences for everybody.” >http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chairman-ben-bernanke-tells-university-crowd-that/article_98fb276e-783f-11e5-abd3-8f27a8f12747.html http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chair...
- pjc50 10y ago
  The clearing system is not the currency, although it's certainly important to daily functioning. Nor is the system of short-term trade credit the currency either. Also, where's the "rolling back of prior transactions"?