12 ms·

> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains:

> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains: who you trust. Governments have resolved the question long ago (by enforcing trust), cryptocurrencies are just now starting to face the same question. You are correct however that who you Trust remains the greatest issue behind creating a currency.

dullgiulio 9y ago
Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The typical person's understanding of economics is similarly extremely limited. This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests. The growing control that government exerts over society, seen in everything from the emergence of a mass-surveillance system of unprecedented scope, to the number of regulations on the books, to the percentage of GDP made up of government spending, is not healthy, and needs a counter balance in privacy technology that empowers the individual and limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people. Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?
    - redy 9y ago
      > People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. What's remarkable is the historical ignorance that drives such arguments. Citizens of the West enjoy access to information today that would seem like a dream even just 10 years ago. And while the mass surveillance policies of today suck hard they are absolutely nothing compared to the surveillance abuses of the 1970s which were uncovered by the Church or Pike committees. But combine historical ignorance and fantastic propaganda and you get exactly this sort of nonsense.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      You're absolutely right. I should clarify that I mean that the societies in the advanced world have grown more unfair over the last 120 years. >laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. Laws against interracial marriage in the US were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony. But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed. On the other hand, new laws have been created that force individuals to pay for the costs of other people's personal choices. If a person engages in rampant promiscuity for instance, and contracts a sexually transmitted disease, others are forced, at pain of imprisonment, to pay the costs of their medical care. Just as laws prohibiting homosexuality were once popular, laws mandating that individuals pay the costs of others' medical care are very popular today. Popularity is not a measure of justice. Occupational licensing is another area that has grown increasingly unjust. In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today it's over 25 percent. The growing restrictions on economic participation have harmed millions of people and exacerbated income inequality. [1] Government spending meanwhile is increasingly creating a set of haves and have-nots. The majority of the wealthiest counties in the US are now suburbs of Washington DC. [2] The average Congressperson in the US makes well over ten times more once they become a lobbyist than they did while they were in office. [3] The pay gap between federal employees and workers in general continues to increase. [4] The power of public servants continues to increase thanks to unionization and collective bargaining, resulting in this class of workers extracting more economic rent, while the quality of the public services suffers. [5] And then we have privacy rights. The Snowden revelations showed us that society has never before been subject to such extensive surveillance of its private activities and interactions. This is an extreme systemic danger, and very likely has numerous malignant effects that are unknown, e.g. contributes to the centralisation of economic power, as a result of the information asymmetry it creates. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States#2010_Census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie... [3] https://www.thenation.com/article/when-congressman-becomes-lobbyist-he-gets-1452-percent-raise-average/ https://www.thenation.com/article/when-congressman-becomes-l... [4] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-0605-35.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-06... [5] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
  - o- 9y ago
    I fully agree with your analysis. But cryptocurrencies are just the latest tool that will serve well the interests of the demagogues. Technocracy will not improve affairs that we don't resolve as a society in the first place. More powerful tools means just more power to those who can afford the longest lever. Any other interpretation is just a blatant neglect on the history of technology.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      Cryptocurrencies, growing pains aside, will arrest the trend toward economic centralization. They are not just more powerful tools. They are tools that shift the control over money from large trusted third parties to individuals. They literally allow an individual to be their own bank. They are a counter-force against the trend toward eliminating cash, and with it, financial privacy [1]: >Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge. These statements from an executive at MasterCard are a great window into the company's designs on cash and its electronic corollaries: >There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy -https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s >If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous? -http://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s http://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s [1] https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
      - wdewind 9y ago
        > They literally allow an individual to be their own bank. The main function of banks is issuing debt, not holding cash.
  - redy 9y ago
    This is paranoid fantasy. Back over here in reality the citizens of the West enjoy unparalleled freedom, peace and prosperity unlike anything that has ever occurred before in the history of the planet. The idea that people are less safe or less free simply has no basis in reality. We can discuss trends and certainly some trends are very concerning (rapidly growing inequality) while others are probably nothing (any advanced economy will probably have a government GDP share of 30-40%. This is not new, not unique to the USA, and is mostly considered a sign of an advanced economy[1]). But when you start with the fantasy that the government is engaging in widespread oppression of its own citizens (and the irony of reading this on Hacker News!) it's difficult to seriously consider any secondary points you raise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_percentage_of_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce...
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > Your Whig history As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Either because they have read those pamphlets and eye-roll, or because they haven't and figure you're a rambling extremist. It's literally equivalent to communists beginning propaganda pieces with "Attention all Comrades!" That said, I disagree with you, so feel free to keep talking this way. > ever progressing political system Literally no one claims politics is monotonically improving. Unless Clinton has been singing Trump's praises recently, you're attacking a straw-man. > the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic. Seriously, even most early adopters don't understand what their crypto currency is doing. And certainly don't have any hope of understanding even a mildly complex contract. Code comprehension is difficult for trained software engineers!. All of the serious proposals in this thread call for some sort of formal verification, which even most trained software engineers aren't currently capable of using. And hell, if we learned anything form this, it's that even the ostensible experts don't have an air-tight understanding! So, what? Instead of teaching every citizen how to read and interpret legislation and regulation, we'll just train them all as professional software engineers with formal methods expertise?!?! And even that's no silver bullet. Contracts can and will grow just as complex as e.g., current tax law. Because the underlying humans won't have changed! In the long run, you're merely adding complexity. Now I have to understand software and also tax policy. Things get strictly worse. > This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests As opposed to manipulation by "whichever guy finds a bug in the cryptocurrency". You can argue that these are equivalently bad things (I'd disagree), but you'll be hard-pressed to convince most rational folks that "rando dude" is better. Stick to the devils you know and all that. > limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society. I'll end my comment in the same way I started it: you're preaching to the choir. Besides which, what're you going to do when it turns out the majority of people still don't agree with you about how society should be, and still control all the guns and natural resources? Because that's what will happen. Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
  - ameister14 9y ago
    >Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations. In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing. Their understanding of economics was extremely limited, as well. I wouldn't argue that US society is much more unfair than it was in 1903 - would you?
    - splintercell 9y ago
      > Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. The thing he's experiencing which makes him say that we are growing more and more unfair, that's exactly what you're experiencing when you say that we've grown more unfair than 60's. But let's really see how things are today, in the 60s, there was no Internet, so majority of the opinions were dominated by what was in the mass media, so that served as a Schelling point of opinions. Today because of free exchange of ideas on the Internet, people are just holding more precise and wider set of opinions. Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. You can find a blogger who would talk about how eliminating DoE would work, and nurture this idea in your head, and once you have enough people, you can get politicians (who are playing a game of prisoner's dilemma) who are willing to represent your opinion in order to get an edge on their opponent. Similarly, it would and should be unimaginable and unfeasible for someone in the 60s to hold an opinion like an average Tumblr SJW holds, but today it's perfectly feasible. But is society really more unfair than 1960s? What about 1980s? What about 1990s? When you look from the perspective of minorities, it clearly isn't. However, a lot of young people have economic conditions in mind (which people on the left describe as 'rising economic inequality' and people on the right describe as "America losing it's place in the world"), but both these things are essentially the effect of increased globalization, observed differently, which has resulted in immense amount of prosperity for the poor people in the rest of the world. Now since the gates are open, an average American has to compete with a Chinese worker or an Indian software engineer, the true place of an American is being realized. Being the largest business in America is definitely worse than being the largest business in the world. If Facebook wasn't able to operate all over the world, then clearly Zuckerberg would be less richer than now. But at the end of the day, the world is moving towards a more fair place. Is China more fair now? Yes, but if you believe that the role of Chinese party is to facilitate the arrival of Communism via maintenance of Socialism then you would obviously think that China is growing more unfair.
  - sciyoshi 9y ago
    Under growing complexity, average understanding will decrease and tend to become centralized. How many people really understand the dynamics of Bitcoin's current scaling debate? In that scenario, you have a return to manipulation by special interests (in this case, "important" nodes like miners, exchanges, and wallets).
  - loceng 9y ago
    If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this. Because a new technology seems exciting - and gains adoption because early adoption means potential for an individual to turn $1000s of into $1,000,000s with very little individual effort of working towards mass adoption; along with the ecosystem of VCs pumping $100s of millions into creating platforms to support this speculation - doesn't mean we give up on the existing system. If you don't think the same demagogues, special interest groups, or simply evil/bad actors won't attempt to takeover - then you're already proven wrong by this blackhat 'abuse' of sending themselves money. And it can get much worse than that. The value of the blockchain is the public ledger IMHO, and the way $100 can because $70 million just because demand is higher, that has too strongly incentivized it and has and will attract very bad people - even if there are good people involved in the ecosystem.
    - justadeveloper2 9y ago
      If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can. My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.
      - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.
        Jabanga 9y ago
        We will not benefit from fewer people working..
        wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        How do you know?
  - sunir 9y ago
    I know it's popular in America to be cynical about politics, but maybe it is worth realizing other countries have their shit together and maybe just maybe it is the American cynicism that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      No, I'm cynical about all developed countries. Almost none of them have shit together. The cost disease affects the entire developed world, and I suggest it's due to the government playing an increasingly dysfunctional role in society. Do you think mass-surveillance is a uniquely American phenomenon?
      - sunir 9y ago
        In the OECD? Yes.
        Jabanga 9y ago
        You're wrong..
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - bloominglotus 9y ago
    In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true. That's all it takes to completely change how much money is in my account in a "distributed" bank. I don't own it, and it's certainly not robust against demagogues. Demagogues are by definition political opportunists who play on populism to advance their politics. If democratic elections have a vulnerability to them, so certainly do "distributed systems" where a simple majority has enough power to control "history"
    - Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
      So if a majority of participants (50% + 1 of the network) wanted to say, "rob" the wealthy top 1% of wallets and redistribute wealth by rewriting the history of the blockchain, nothing could stop them?
      - bloominglotus 9y ago
        Technically the unit of measurement is hashing power, rather than % of nodes or participants, but there is an underlying 51% problem with blockchain. The attack surface is similarly limited; they couldn't really "rob" the wealthiest wallets, but they could prevent their transactions from ever happening. They could also spend cryptocurrency they don't really have. Here's an intro: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Dagger2 9y ago
        You can't just transfer money however you like, even if you had complete control of the blockchain. Transactions still need to be signed by the private key of the wallet involved. You could put a transaction with an invalid signature into the blockchain, but then the chain would be rejected by clients because of the invalid transaction.
        9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
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- return0 9y ago
  Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Some people don't trust a government elected by only half the population, for example. Some others may prefer to trust an elite of "enlightened hackers" than hordes of plebs. You might be right that governments are more evolved and have more history but that doesn't make them universally better.
  - harryh 9y ago
    Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Oh come on. It absolutely is an empirical choice. Crypto-currencies have a very short history and that history is CHOCK FULL of people losing their money due to various forms of incompetence and graft. Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. Please.
    - meepmorp 9y ago
      >Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. While I agree with your overall point, I think you're glossing over the historical instabilities in the banking system. Bank runs, failures, and physical robberies were pretty common until comparatively recently (in the US, at least - the 19th century was chock full of them).
      - harryh 9y ago
        Even in the dark days before the FDIC losses in US banks were rarer than what we see in cryptocurrencies today.
    - return0 9y ago
      Cryptocurrencies offer the opportinity to test the waters with new models. If we go by the thinking "keep what works", society would have never changed. I agree that they have big failures to show, but i think it's still early to tell.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Remember the trillions that went missing due to fraud and sly bookkeeping in 2008, and how no one was held accountable?
- nilved 9y ago
  > Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances Hahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahah
- jMyles 9y ago
  > Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. I think this is where you're losing people. For the most part, it isn't true, and the trend seems to be shaped as a downward slope. The "government" of the US still imprisons 2 million people, mostly because it has a list of plants and chemicals it doesn't like and won't negotiate on. That's just one example of its ongoing dysfunction. It's completely reasonable, in a mature and thoughtful society, to try doing things in a completely different way. I'm not sure that cryptocurrencies are a good answer, but they're at least a good question.
- andrepd 9y ago
  No, no, one thousand times no. History is not a linear progression, as far as societal and political developments are concerned. Our current government system is not the pinnacle of development so far, let alone the ultimate, final system. And even by that view, as you say yourself the current system, if satisfactory, took hundreds of years to develop. Crypto currencies were invented 7 years ago.
brazzy 9y ago
I think that is a bit too simplistic a view, and the better question is: when things go wrong, what is your fallback? Modern governments provide an elaborate system of fallbacks: checks and balances, a justice system with multiple levels of appeals. Those may be complex and fallible, but they are at least reasonably good at dealing with unexpected problems. When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks.
- CoryG89 9y ago
  > When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks. Sure there is. As the DAO hack showed us, if you can get enough of the network to agree to it, you can literally rewrite history and create an alternate universe where the contract never went wrong.
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    so, essentially there are no fallbacks. Unless you want to break one of the core founding values of cryptocurrency.
  - magnetic 9y ago
    I've heard this argument before and was wondering how it can be considered ok: 1) hacker steals massive amount of money from a crypto wallet 2) hacker cashes out and gets real money 3) network realizes the hack and "rewrites history" as if "the contract never went wrong" How is this a valid outcome? Somebody in here is out a large amount of real money.
    - ihattendorf 9y ago
      The whole reason the DAO hard fork worked was because the funds were locked until a certain date. The hackers couldn't access them until after that date, so the hard fork before that date resulted in no hacked ETH being traded for USD (or anything else).
      - CoryG89 9y ago
kerkeslager 9y ago
The hope for cryptocurrencies was that they removed the need for centralized trust entirely. As long as no entity can perform a 51% attack on the block chain, you don't need to trust anyone. This is why the successful 51% attack on the Ethereum block chain which was performed by the DAO should be viewed as a fundamental failure. The underlying cause is a generally shoddy design of the contract language: when you're writing code where it's imperative that it have no security flaws, writing it in a JavaScript-like language which provides so few protections is absurd. The Ethereum community is run by profiteering speculators rather than revolutionaries, however, so to them, performing a 51% attack on their own blockchain whenever they don't like how a contract turns out is an okay solution.
loceng 9y ago
So why and how do we trust those who have the power to reverse these thefts? Ethereum already did it once, why not again, and again, and again? Are we going to end up with 50 forks, and then how does that even work - do then people accepting these crypto-currencies need to decide which forks they're going to accept from? I may be using the wrong language here, however I hope my point is getting across. What happens if a crypto-asset becomes a legitimate currency and then an bad actor wants control and takes it using military-level force - or manipulation like blackmail, death threats of you or family members, etc? The Russian government being strongly against anti-crypto-currencies and then recently Ethereum being endorsed by Putin himself by a physical visit with Vitalik. Does that not ring warning bells to others? If someone evil - for a lack of better word - pumps $1 billion into the ecosystem early on, how much could they turn that into? What if then they use other $1 billion to lobby and pay off politicians, or get people into power who are "strong believers" in the crypto-assets, to then intertwine societies currencies with crypto-currencies. There is a lot of incentives for them to do this, and I'm not the only one aware of this issue. Even just pumping more $ billions into the ecosystem will create stronger believers - because their "$100 is now worth $70 million." This current investment-like incentive for creating a new currency is bad for society, the wealth transfer as it currently would happen needs to be worked out of a crypto-asset based currency.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > So why and how do we trust those who have the power to reverse these thefts? Ethereum already did it once, why not again, and again, and again? The argument for reverting the DAO was that 1) Ethereum was very new and there was still a lot of confusion about good community practice, 2) It would still serve as a cautionary tale even with the reversal, since it was the first big mistake, 3) A large percentage of all Ethereum early adopters were invested in it, so letting the money go would have a bad effect on adoption, 4) Because Ethereum was so new at the time, the DAO represented a large percentage of all outstanding Ethers. We just won't see another theft with all of those attributes in place. The community is diversified and better educated. > Are we going to end up with 50 forks Yes and no. Yes, in the sense of yes, there will literally be 50 forks. But that's the point of cryptocurrencies... anyone can fork them and run things their own way. No in the sense that No, we won't have Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and 48 other equally valid forks. Forks have to be based on ideas if they are to last. Ethereum is based on the idea that it's a startup platform and there's going to be a little jostling around as it gets going, but that in the long term interventions will only be made when there are clear existential threats to the network. Ethereum Classic is based on the idea that you never fudge the blockchain ever. What's written is written and what's done is done. For there to be a third big chain, there needs to be a third big idea. What's that idea? Reverse all clear instances of fraud or theft? OK, cool. That's a third chain. They'll fork off ETH and reverse this transaction. Maybe ETH keeps it, because it falls under "buyer beware" for them. Now we've got three forks. One currency where nothing ever changes, one where only existential threats are dealt with, and one where theft and fraud is actively policed with a big beurocrasy. Again: This is the point of cryptocurrency! You can set up different regimes with different ideas, and they will work differently. > and then how does that even work - do then people accepting these crypto-currencies need to decide which forks they're going to accept from? Yep. Just like how you can accept Dollars, Euros, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, you can also accept Ethereum Classic, and any other fork you like. It's all just currencies. They'll all be tracked on the exchanges and talked about endlessly on online forums. The difference is, instead of being tied to the political system within a geographic area, they're tied to an idea.

dullgiulio 9y ago

Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?

Jabanga 9y ago
Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The typical person's understanding of economics is similarly extremely limited. This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests. The growing control that government exerts over society, seen in everything from the emergence of a mass-surveillance system of unprecedented scope, to the number of regulations on the books, to the percentage of GDP made up of government spending, is not healthy, and needs a counter balance in privacy technology that empowers the individual and limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people. Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?
  - redy 9y ago
    > People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. What's remarkable is the historical ignorance that drives such arguments. Citizens of the West enjoy access to information today that would seem like a dream even just 10 years ago. And while the mass surveillance policies of today suck hard they are absolutely nothing compared to the surveillance abuses of the 1970s which were uncovered by the Church or Pike committees. But combine historical ignorance and fantastic propaganda and you get exactly this sort of nonsense.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    You're absolutely right. I should clarify that I mean that the societies in the advanced world have grown more unfair over the last 120 years. >laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. Laws against interracial marriage in the US were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony. But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed. On the other hand, new laws have been created that force individuals to pay for the costs of other people's personal choices. If a person engages in rampant promiscuity for instance, and contracts a sexually transmitted disease, others are forced, at pain of imprisonment, to pay the costs of their medical care. Just as laws prohibiting homosexuality were once popular, laws mandating that individuals pay the costs of others' medical care are very popular today. Popularity is not a measure of justice. Occupational licensing is another area that has grown increasingly unjust. In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today it's over 25 percent. The growing restrictions on economic participation have harmed millions of people and exacerbated income inequality. [1] Government spending meanwhile is increasingly creating a set of haves and have-nots. The majority of the wealthiest counties in the US are now suburbs of Washington DC. [2] The average Congressperson in the US makes well over ten times more once they become a lobbyist than they did while they were in office. [3] The pay gap between federal employees and workers in general continues to increase. [4] The power of public servants continues to increase thanks to unionization and collective bargaining, resulting in this class of workers extracting more economic rent, while the quality of the public services suffers. [5] And then we have privacy rights. The Snowden revelations showed us that society has never before been subject to such extensive surveillance of its private activities and interactions. This is an extreme systemic danger, and very likely has numerous malignant effects that are unknown, e.g. contributes to the centralisation of economic power, as a result of the information asymmetry it creates. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States#2010_Census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie... [3] https://www.thenation.com/article/when-congressman-becomes-lobbyist-he-gets-1452-percent-raise-average/ https://www.thenation.com/article/when-congressman-becomes-l... [4] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-0605-35.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-06... [5] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
- o- 9y ago
  I fully agree with your analysis. But cryptocurrencies are just the latest tool that will serve well the interests of the demagogues. Technocracy will not improve affairs that we don't resolve as a society in the first place. More powerful tools means just more power to those who can afford the longest lever. Any other interpretation is just a blatant neglect on the history of technology.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies, growing pains aside, will arrest the trend toward economic centralization. They are not just more powerful tools. They are tools that shift the control over money from large trusted third parties to individuals. They literally allow an individual to be their own bank. They are a counter-force against the trend toward eliminating cash, and with it, financial privacy [1]: >Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge. These statements from an executive at MasterCard are a great window into the company's designs on cash and its electronic corollaries: >There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy -https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s >If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous? -http://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s http://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s [1] https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
    - wdewind 9y ago
      > They literally allow an individual to be their own bank. The main function of banks is issuing debt, not holding cash.
- redy 9y ago
  This is paranoid fantasy. Back over here in reality the citizens of the West enjoy unparalleled freedom, peace and prosperity unlike anything that has ever occurred before in the history of the planet. The idea that people are less safe or less free simply has no basis in reality. We can discuss trends and certainly some trends are very concerning (rapidly growing inequality) while others are probably nothing (any advanced economy will probably have a government GDP share of 30-40%. This is not new, not unique to the USA, and is mostly considered a sign of an advanced economy[1]). But when you start with the fantasy that the government is engaging in widespread oppression of its own citizens (and the irony of reading this on Hacker News!) it's difficult to seriously consider any secondary points you raise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_percentage_of_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce...
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > Your Whig history As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Either because they have read those pamphlets and eye-roll, or because they haven't and figure you're a rambling extremist. It's literally equivalent to communists beginning propaganda pieces with "Attention all Comrades!" That said, I disagree with you, so feel free to keep talking this way. > ever progressing political system Literally no one claims politics is monotonically improving. Unless Clinton has been singing Trump's praises recently, you're attacking a straw-man. > the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic. Seriously, even most early adopters don't understand what their crypto currency is doing. And certainly don't have any hope of understanding even a mildly complex contract. Code comprehension is difficult for trained software engineers!. All of the serious proposals in this thread call for some sort of formal verification, which even most trained software engineers aren't currently capable of using. And hell, if we learned anything form this, it's that even the ostensible experts don't have an air-tight understanding! So, what? Instead of teaching every citizen how to read and interpret legislation and regulation, we'll just train them all as professional software engineers with formal methods expertise?!?! And even that's no silver bullet. Contracts can and will grow just as complex as e.g., current tax law. Because the underlying humans won't have changed! In the long run, you're merely adding complexity. Now I have to understand software and also tax policy. Things get strictly worse. > This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests As opposed to manipulation by "whichever guy finds a bug in the cryptocurrency". You can argue that these are equivalently bad things (I'd disagree), but you'll be hard-pressed to convince most rational folks that "rando dude" is better. Stick to the devils you know and all that. > limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society. I'll end my comment in the same way I started it: you're preaching to the choir. Besides which, what're you going to do when it turns out the majority of people still don't agree with you about how society should be, and still control all the guns and natural resources? Because that's what will happen. Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
- ameister14 9y ago
  >Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations. In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing. Their understanding of economics was extremely limited, as well. I wouldn't argue that US society is much more unfair than it was in 1903 - would you?
  - splintercell 9y ago
    > Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. The thing he's experiencing which makes him say that we are growing more and more unfair, that's exactly what you're experiencing when you say that we've grown more unfair than 60's. But let's really see how things are today, in the 60s, there was no Internet, so majority of the opinions were dominated by what was in the mass media, so that served as a Schelling point of opinions. Today because of free exchange of ideas on the Internet, people are just holding more precise and wider set of opinions. Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. You can find a blogger who would talk about how eliminating DoE would work, and nurture this idea in your head, and once you have enough people, you can get politicians (who are playing a game of prisoner's dilemma) who are willing to represent your opinion in order to get an edge on their opponent. Similarly, it would and should be unimaginable and unfeasible for someone in the 60s to hold an opinion like an average Tumblr SJW holds, but today it's perfectly feasible. But is society really more unfair than 1960s? What about 1980s? What about 1990s? When you look from the perspective of minorities, it clearly isn't. However, a lot of young people have economic conditions in mind (which people on the left describe as 'rising economic inequality' and people on the right describe as "America losing it's place in the world"), but both these things are essentially the effect of increased globalization, observed differently, which has resulted in immense amount of prosperity for the poor people in the rest of the world. Now since the gates are open, an average American has to compete with a Chinese worker or an Indian software engineer, the true place of an American is being realized. Being the largest business in America is definitely worse than being the largest business in the world. If Facebook wasn't able to operate all over the world, then clearly Zuckerberg would be less richer than now. But at the end of the day, the world is moving towards a more fair place. Is China more fair now? Yes, but if you believe that the role of Chinese party is to facilitate the arrival of Communism via maintenance of Socialism then you would obviously think that China is growing more unfair.
- sciyoshi 9y ago
  Under growing complexity, average understanding will decrease and tend to become centralized. How many people really understand the dynamics of Bitcoin's current scaling debate? In that scenario, you have a return to manipulation by special interests (in this case, "important" nodes like miners, exchanges, and wallets).
- loceng 9y ago
  If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this. Because a new technology seems exciting - and gains adoption because early adoption means potential for an individual to turn $1000s of into $1,000,000s with very little individual effort of working towards mass adoption; along with the ecosystem of VCs pumping $100s of millions into creating platforms to support this speculation - doesn't mean we give up on the existing system. If you don't think the same demagogues, special interest groups, or simply evil/bad actors won't attempt to takeover - then you're already proven wrong by this blackhat 'abuse' of sending themselves money. And it can get much worse than that. The value of the blockchain is the public ledger IMHO, and the way $100 can because $70 million just because demand is higher, that has too strongly incentivized it and has and will attract very bad people - even if there are good people involved in the ecosystem.
  - justadeveloper2 9y ago
    If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can. My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        We will not benefit from fewer people working..
        wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        How do you know?
- sunir 9y ago
  I know it's popular in America to be cynical about politics, but maybe it is worth realizing other countries have their shit together and maybe just maybe it is the American cynicism that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    No, I'm cynical about all developed countries. Almost none of them have shit together. The cost disease affects the entire developed world, and I suggest it's due to the government playing an increasingly dysfunctional role in society. Do you think mass-surveillance is a uniquely American phenomenon?
    - sunir 9y ago
      In the OECD? Yes.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        You're wrong..
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- bloominglotus 9y ago
  In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true. That's all it takes to completely change how much money is in my account in a "distributed" bank. I don't own it, and it's certainly not robust against demagogues. Demagogues are by definition political opportunists who play on populism to advance their politics. If democratic elections have a vulnerability to them, so certainly do "distributed systems" where a simple majority has enough power to control "history"
  - Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
    So if a majority of participants (50% + 1 of the network) wanted to say, "rob" the wealthy top 1% of wallets and redistribute wealth by rewriting the history of the blockchain, nothing could stop them?
    - bloominglotus 9y ago
      Technically the unit of measurement is hashing power, rather than % of nodes or participants, but there is an underlying 51% problem with blockchain. The attack surface is similarly limited; they couldn't really "rob" the wealthiest wallets, but they could prevent their transactions from ever happening. They could also spend cryptocurrency they don't really have. Here's an intro: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Dagger2 9y ago
      You can't just transfer money however you like, even if you had complete control of the blockchain. Transactions still need to be signed by the private key of the wallet involved. You could put a transaction with an invalid signature into the blockchain, but then the chain would be rejected by clients because of the invalid transaction.
      - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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return0 9y ago
Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Some people don't trust a government elected by only half the population, for example. Some others may prefer to trust an elite of "enlightened hackers" than hordes of plebs. You might be right that governments are more evolved and have more history but that doesn't make them universally better.
- harryh 9y ago
  Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Oh come on. It absolutely is an empirical choice. Crypto-currencies have a very short history and that history is CHOCK FULL of people losing their money due to various forms of incompetence and graft. Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. Please.
  - meepmorp 9y ago
    >Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. While I agree with your overall point, I think you're glossing over the historical instabilities in the banking system. Bank runs, failures, and physical robberies were pretty common until comparatively recently (in the US, at least - the 19th century was chock full of them).
    - harryh 9y ago
      Even in the dark days before the FDIC losses in US banks were rarer than what we see in cryptocurrencies today.
  - return0 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies offer the opportinity to test the waters with new models. If we go by the thinking "keep what works", society would have never changed. I agree that they have big failures to show, but i think it's still early to tell.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
Remember the trillions that went missing due to fraud and sly bookkeeping in 2008, and how no one was held accountable?
nilved 9y ago
> Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances Hahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahaahahahahah
jMyles 9y ago
> Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. I think this is where you're losing people. For the most part, it isn't true, and the trend seems to be shaped as a downward slope. The "government" of the US still imprisons 2 million people, mostly because it has a list of plants and chemicals it doesn't like and won't negotiate on. That's just one example of its ongoing dysfunction. It's completely reasonable, in a mature and thoughtful society, to try doing things in a completely different way. I'm not sure that cryptocurrencies are a good answer, but they're at least a good question.
andrepd 9y ago
No, no, one thousand times no. History is not a linear progression, as far as societal and political developments are concerned. Our current government system is not the pinnacle of development so far, let alone the ultimate, final system. And even by that view, as you say yourself the current system, if satisfactory, took hundreds of years to develop. Crypto currencies were invented 7 years ago.

brazzy 9y ago

I think that is a bit too simplistic a view, and the better question is: when things go wrong, what is your fallback? Modern governments provide an elaborate system of fallbacks: checks and balances, a justice system with multiple levels of appeals. Those may be complex and fallible, but they are at least reasonably good at dealing with unexpected problems. When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks.

CoryG89 9y ago
> When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks. Sure there is. As the DAO hack showed us, if you can get enough of the network to agree to it, you can literally rewrite history and create an alternate universe where the contract never went wrong.
- holtalanm 9y ago
  so, essentially there are no fallbacks. Unless you want to break one of the core founding values of cryptocurrency.
- magnetic 9y ago
  I've heard this argument before and was wondering how it can be considered ok: 1) hacker steals massive amount of money from a crypto wallet 2) hacker cashes out and gets real money 3) network realizes the hack and "rewrites history" as if "the contract never went wrong" How is this a valid outcome? Somebody in here is out a large amount of real money.
  - ihattendorf 9y ago
    The whole reason the DAO hard fork worked was because the funds were locked until a certain date. The hackers couldn't access them until after that date, so the hard fork before that date resulted in no hacked ETH being traded for USD (or anything else).
    - CoryG89 9y ago

kerkeslager 9y ago

The hope for cryptocurrencies was that they removed the need for centralized trust entirely. As long as no entity can perform a 51% attack on the block chain, you don't need to trust anyone. This is why the successful 51% attack on the Ethereum block chain which was performed by the DAO should be viewed as a fundamental failure. The underlying cause is a generally shoddy design of the contract language: when you're writing code where it's imperative that it have no security flaws, writing it in a JavaScript-like language which provides so few protections is absurd. The Ethereum community is run by profiteering speculators rather than revolutionaries, however, so to them, performing a 51% attack on their own blockchain whenever they don't like how a contract turns out is an okay solution.

loceng 9y ago

So why and how do we trust those who have the power to reverse these thefts? Ethereum already did it once, why not again, and again, and again? Are we going to end up with 50 forks, and then how does that even work - do then people accepting these crypto-currencies need to decide which forks they're going to accept from? I may be using the wrong language here, however I hope my point is getting across. What happens if a crypto-asset becomes a legitimate currency and then an bad actor wants control and takes it using military-level force - or manipulation like blackmail, death threats of you or family members, etc? The Russian government being strongly against anti-crypto-currencies and then recently Ethereum being endorsed by Putin himself by a physical visit with Vitalik. Does that not ring warning bells to others? If someone evil - for a lack of better word - pumps $1 billion into the ecosystem early on, how much could they turn that into? What if then they use other $1 billion to lobby and pay off politicians, or get people into power who are "strong believers" in the crypto-assets, to then intertwine societies currencies with crypto-currencies. There is a lot of incentives for them to do this, and I'm not the only one aware of this issue. Even just pumping more $ billions into the ecosystem will create stronger believers - because their "$100 is now worth $70 million." This current investment-like incentive for creating a new currency is bad for society, the wealth transfer as it currently would happen needs to be worked out of a crypto-asset based currency.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
> So why and how do we trust those who have the power to reverse these thefts? Ethereum already did it once, why not again, and again, and again? The argument for reverting the DAO was that 1) Ethereum was very new and there was still a lot of confusion about good community practice, 2) It would still serve as a cautionary tale even with the reversal, since it was the first big mistake, 3) A large percentage of all Ethereum early adopters were invested in it, so letting the money go would have a bad effect on adoption, 4) Because Ethereum was so new at the time, the DAO represented a large percentage of all outstanding Ethers. We just won't see another theft with all of those attributes in place. The community is diversified and better educated. > Are we going to end up with 50 forks Yes and no. Yes, in the sense of yes, there will literally be 50 forks. But that's the point of cryptocurrencies... anyone can fork them and run things their own way. No in the sense that No, we won't have Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and 48 other equally valid forks. Forks have to be based on ideas if they are to last. Ethereum is based on the idea that it's a startup platform and there's going to be a little jostling around as it gets going, but that in the long term interventions will only be made when there are clear existential threats to the network. Ethereum Classic is based on the idea that you never fudge the blockchain ever. What's written is written and what's done is done. For there to be a third big chain, there needs to be a third big idea. What's that idea? Reverse all clear instances of fraud or theft? OK, cool. That's a third chain. They'll fork off ETH and reverse this transaction. Maybe ETH keeps it, because it falls under "buyer beware" for them. Now we've got three forks. One currency where nothing ever changes, one where only existential threats are dealt with, and one where theft and fraud is actively policed with a big beurocrasy. Again: This is the point of cryptocurrency! You can set up different regimes with different ideas, and they will work differently. > and then how does that even work - do then people accepting these crypto-currencies need to decide which forks they're going to accept from? Yep. Just like how you can accept Dollars, Euros, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, you can also accept Ethereum Classic, and any other fork you like. It's all just currencies. They'll all be tracked on the exchanges and talked about endlessly on online forums. The difference is, instead of being tied to the political system within a geographic area, they're tied to an idea.