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Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment. New: state-level actor(s) cannot s

Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment. New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments. Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However, since they (apparently) get funded by receiving Bitcoin, they continue to operate. In the meantime, grad students and professors get the convenience of using sci-hub's interface to easily retrieve journal articles. Even if sci-hub eventually gets taken down completely (or a researcher finds a catastrophic bug in all cryptocurrencies), the total time during which sci-hub served documents funded by Bitcoins was a benefit to society. ETH allows fancier transaction scripts than Bitcoin, but the same argument holds-- a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. Based on this article, I'd say there is value in ETH just as there is value in writing a complex, multi-threaded application in a memory-unsafe language. It's a bad idea, but for some special cases it may be better than doing nothing at all.

yorwba 9y ago
> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.
- Zpalmtree 9y ago
  This is why some cryptocurrency communities like monero push for people to use smaller mining pools so the miners are more decentralized.
  - dullgiulio 9y ago
    So we need some guidance. Oh that's what governments are for, definitely not a private company, which is not accountable by voters (with a wide voters base; if the voter base is not wide, made it so, don't discard democracy.) Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.
- jancsika 9y ago
  They won't get around to it, because stopping the mining of all cryptocurrencies that sci-hub could use to pay for uptime is more work than stopping sci-hub. Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.
lawlessone 9y ago
> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They've forked before they could be forced to again.
maeln 9y ago
Everytime I see the argument that smart contract allow for no third party payment I always think that people are diminishing the role of third party. In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime. If I get scamed, does the smart contract allow a chargeback ? Who is going to make sure I was scam and not abusing ? etc.
- jancsika 9y ago
  It's almost like you read the two words "third party" in my response, then triggered a canned reply based on the existence of those words. What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles? I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.

yorwba 9y ago

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

Zpalmtree 9y ago
This is why some cryptocurrency communities like monero push for people to use smaller mining pools so the miners are more decentralized.
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  So we need some guidance. Oh that's what governments are for, definitely not a private company, which is not accountable by voters (with a wide voters base; if the voter base is not wide, made it so, don't discard democracy.) Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.
jancsika 9y ago
They won't get around to it, because stopping the mining of all cryptocurrencies that sci-hub could use to pay for uptime is more work than stopping sci-hub. Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.

lawlessone 9y ago

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They've forked before they could be forced to again.

maeln 9y ago

Everytime I see the argument that smart contract allow for no third party payment I always think that people are diminishing the role of third party. In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime. If I get scamed, does the smart contract allow a chargeback ? Who is going to make sure I was scam and not abusing ? etc.

jancsika 9y ago
It's almost like you read the two words "third party" in my response, then triggered a canned reply based on the existence of those words. What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles? I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.