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It'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 ma

by mbrock 9y ago

It'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 ago
Ethereum'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 ago
  The 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 ago
Mind 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.

by mbrock 9y ago

um_ya 9y ago

Ethereum'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 ago
The 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 ago

Mind 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.