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As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.

• kovek 9y ago
  Why? Do you understand Ethereum? I'd like to understand it better
  • herbst 9y ago
    At this point it is either a magic buzzword to get investors throwing money at you or actually a smart thought of putting cryptographical proof into something. Usually its the first tho.
• macawfish 9y ago
  Call me zealous, but I'm the same way. I'm wary of the potential for monetary incentives to skew actual demand. I've seen how digital advertising has more or less destroyed much of the internet. Hopefully decentralization will prevent monopolies or oligopolies from forming, but I'm not so sure about that. At this point, it's hard to say what actual distributions of wealth might look like if people start using cryptocurrencies in their daily lives, for example to route traffic over a network. But at the moment, the distributions of wealth are quite nuts. But if there is an overall "unfair" atmosphere in the crypto-economy, it's could make depending on this system of routing kinda suck in the long term, especially if peoples actual livelihoods are under the pressure of massive ad gaps. People "sell out" when they're perceiving some stress. If we go 'all-in' on this kind of system, it might actually end up creating the same kinds of de-facto power imbalances we see today with conventional social media. I'm not anti-cryptocurrency either. I actually own a little bit of cryptocurrency. I'm curious about its potential to dissolve existing dominance relationships non-violently. That said, I don't see it as an end. Moreso, I see it as a potential conduit of healthy, non-violent economic chaos. I also recognize that this strange new alien could be "out of the frying pan and into the fire".
  • storge 9y ago
    I read your comment and I picture a sort of information balkanization via endless whack-a-mole of privacy tech and organizational surveillance. It may just be how it will ever be.
    • macawfish 9y ago
      Information is the real resource.
  • CryptoPunk 9y ago
    The main design goal of cryptocurrency protocols and the like is immutability, so that the protocol operates according to formal specs and not according to the whims of economic stakeholders. This is why the Finnish central bank's paper on Bitcoin called it a 'monopoly without a monopolist'. I think the immutability of these kinds of protocols is certainly an improvement over the total control that economic stakeholders have in a centralized server-client architecture, with respect to power distribution.
• dang 9y ago
  Could you please not post unsubstantive comments here?
  • macawfish 9y ago
    I didn't see that comment as unsubstantive. Although it was definitely brief, it was potent enough to prompt me to respond in a more drawn out way. Part of the reason I love to read hacker news is to get a read on peoples basic sentiments about tech.