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Frozen money. Doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me.
by SubiculumCode 9y ago
Frozen money. Doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me.
- jsonhero 9y agoBanks get hacked all the time
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoBanks have government backstops and other provisions in place to ensure that a hack doesn't result in customer loss of funds. No equivalent here
- fleitz 9y agoSuddenly lots of people with guns to go get your money back is a very useful feature compared to some cryptographic guarantees that people with guns can't get your money back.
- EGreg 9y agoOh please, consider the freedom of people to lock up their money and not get it back! These men{!} with guns first send a letter to an ETH autonomous corporation, then when it doesn't respond, they threaten it with guns. That's the State. {!} Thanks to today's progressive reforms the State now also employs women with guns. We should just say people with guns to not be sexist.
- derefr 9y agoA given "ETH autonomous corporation" might not have any controlling entities that are accessible to the wronged State. Foreign shell companies are already hard enough for most governments to deal with—and that's with trade agreements that enable them to compel disclosure of ownership. DACs are foreign shell companies without a governing state to point guns at. Sure, if the DAC does business in the US, the US government can shut that business down—much like the US government can shut down a domain name associated with foreign illegal activity. But that doesn't stop the business from operating anywhere else. Nobody has the ability to shut down the whole business.
- jcoffland 9y agoThere is an equivalent with Ethereum. When millions were stollen from the DAO they hard forked the currency to take it back. That's why there is Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Some people didn't approve of forking to correct a bug in a high profile crypto contract. I've been wary of Ethereum ever since. There are bound to be many more incidents such as this in various cryptocurrencies. There are now thousands of them. But it would be ignorant to dismiss the technology for a lack of understanding it.
- SilasX 9y agoThat accomplishes the same thing, but that doesn't make it equivalent in the important senses. That requires everyone to change their core interface with the currency. It's not a trivial thing! The analog in national currencies would be if everyone had to immediately stop using the old notes and replace them with new ones that a new anti-counterfeit feature. Or migration to the Euro. When banks are hacked or whatever, they have some kind of insurance that just replaces the money. They don't have to get the rest of the system to update anything.
- Someone1234 9y agoIs Ethereum FDIC covered?
- mbrock 9y agoIt's like if you have a bunch of cash, and then you see an ad on TV: Get your Amazing Super Safe Cash Box today! With loads of advanced features that may or may not be useful in the future! Made by some of the cleverest people in the world! You decide to store your cash in this amazing device, so of course you do a bit of due diligence on the construction and find that well, while there was a huge catastrophic construction failure causing millions of dollars of loss a few months ago, the new version was quickly released fixing the specific issue... so it should be fine, right? It definitely probably won't set all my cash on fire... Never mind the lack of independent audits, and the fact that the whole thing is way too complicated for its purpose...
- um_ya 9y agoEthereum's biggest problem, is that it has way too many moving parts, leaving too many points of failure. Even Bitcoin has a lot of moving parts, but Ethereum is a circus in comparison.
- mbrock 9y agoThe moving parts is kind of the whole point, but yeah. I hope and predict that these disasters become million dollar lessons on what kinds of autonomous functions you can trust with money, and what "security auditing" actually means, so that in a couple of years, given that the notion of a smart contract is actually useful, people won't put funds into bad, faulty logic.
- derefr 9y agoMind you, these digital currencies aren't much like a safety-deposit box (i.e. the actual Super Safe Cash Box.) They're more like a bank. Safety-deposit boxes are dumb stores for objects. They've never been marketed on features; in fact the opposite, they're marketed partially on the idea that nobody can open them but you. Therefore, no services (e.g. automatic transfers) can be built that depend on someone being able to automatically do things to your safety deposit box without you there to watch. Banks (specifically, checking and savings accounts) are not dumb stores of money. They don't even hold onto your money; they leverage it into investments. Banks have always been built on "loads of advanced features" like compound interest, wire transfers, cheques, etc.—things the bank can do to your money because it is not, in fact, a Super Safe Cash Box. It's a convenient, maybe-safe money-management agent. Bank accounts are only really trustworthy because of 1. a long track-record, and 2. being insured against losses (in banks' case, by the government.) Those are the same requirements I would put on any digital-currency+contracts system before I considered it trustworthy. Digital-currency+contracts is trying to do banking with banking features, so hold it to the expectations of a bank.
- billmalarky 9y agoEthereum is not meant to be a currency in any sense of the word. It's the backbone for a large distributed infrastructure network.