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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides
- mjamesaustin 9y agoIsn't he discussing cryptocurrencies in particular rather than blockchain in general? There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Correct me if I'm wrong - I'm not an expert in blockchain by any means.
- moocowtruck 9y agois there a spec for block chain? i'm confused by what people mean by block chain and the only thing i can find is this loosely written white paper
- icebraining 9y agoThe original Bitcoin paper is essentially a description of the blockchain.
- fruitzome 9y agoA blockchain is just 1 of the innovations that went into the bitcoin protocol. Finally people are seeing that a blockchain without POW or censorship resistance is bullshit. This is why bitcoin (cash) is more important than ever.
- cglace 9y agoIs bitcoin really important? I think most people have no practical use for it.
- fruitzome 9y ago2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them. I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin. Many other people are censored. Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation. Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)
- dlp211 9y agoSo these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market? Call me a skeptic.
- cachvico 9y agoYes. The implication is that the 2B unbanked will get access to a cheap Android, and therefore ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees, before the banana state fixes their massively corrupt government.
- acdha 9y ago> ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
- cachvico 9y agoEthereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network). There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
- acdha 9y agoFast and cheap are still not synonyms for instant and free but that’s at least possibly closer to one day being competitive with the existing mobile systems. Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.
- untog 9y ago> There are many uses for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency > What is a good spec for blockchain? > Bitcoin
- ropeadopepope 9y agoHere's a decent writeup on the blockchain: https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain
- EthanHeilman 9y agoThere is no consensus definition of what a blockchain is. In fact the Satoshi whitepaper that introduced Bitcoin does not even use the word blockchain it talks about a hash chain of blocks a concept which predates Bitcoin by ~30 years. The real innovation of Bitcoin was to use PoW to both limit Sybil attacks and to make additions to the hash chain computationally expensive to revert. Often however when people talk about blockchains they are talking about systems which don't use PoW at all. Like end-to-end encryption or peer-to-peer networks blockchain describes a cloud of concepts and technologies. A better terminology would be DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology).
- jason_slack 9y agoIf so many companies are doing things for the blockchain, are they storing in the same blockchain as bitcoin or are companies creating more blockchains and needing miners to help mine, etc,
- EthanHeilman 9y agoWe are still very much in the experimental phase of the technology and companies are taking many different approaches. Some companies are using Ethereum as their blockchain so they don't have to build and operate one. Other companies are launching blockchains by which they mean a ledger created by a set of trusted validators running a BFT algorithm (see Distributed Systems). Systems built on a trusted set of validators don't need miners as they don't use PoW.
- jason_slack 9y agoThat makes sense. Thanks for explaining. They really just mean a ledger. Doesn't one lose the trust if the ledger is not distributed and verified by outsiders? Using a trusted set of validators, I assume is an internal operation. They aren't asking "Joe Nobody" off the street to become a trusted validator...
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
- dozzie 9y ago> There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Well, yes, but most of them (my pet peeve being voting) are as bullshit as cryptocurrency. Do you have an example that is not a bullshit?
- ojr 9y agoonline poker will probably move towards blockchain and you can do things to prevent spam when people pay fees, theres virtually no adoption of blockhain tech, things move slower in an open source project so its understandable
- dozzie 9y agoI don't know a thing about poker, so I'll take it at a face value, but the spam prevention idea is bullshit. It's not new, it wasn't new even twenty years ago, from what I remember. It wouldn't fly back then, and nothing substantial changed since then.
- kthejoker2 9y agoCan you point me to some papers, books, etc to support this claim? Trying to understand the "block chain is BS" side of the argument, I'm fairly neutral but I rarely see any technical arguments against the concept.
- paulgb 9y agoSee Hashcash, which long predates the blockchain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- icebraining 9y agoThat's what people keep saying, but I'm yet to see one that is actually a blockchain (specifically, "private blockchains" are a nonsense concept, they're just merkel trees, like git uses), or isn't better solved by some other mechanism.
- bradfitz 9y agoGo just got native support for private blockchains today: https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/980332627159744512 https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/980332627159744512 (https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/103862 https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/103862)
- edwincheese 9y agoFor those who are unaware, it is April first today.
- jayd16 9y agoIf you call it a block chain, you're almost certainly referring to cryptocurrency or some kind of monetary policy. If you want to talk about something useful you were probably calling it something like a signed/verifiable log.
- arisAlexis 9y agoyes ofc. don't read much onto biased hate posts
- pdpi 9y agoIn the strict sense? Git histories are blockchains, so there’s definitely a use. In the loose sense? People seem to conflate “blockchain” with “decentralised concensus”. At least nakamoto consensus doesn’t work outside of currency-like applications. PoS-based systems are probably bound by the same limitations there, too.
- umanwizard 9y agoI have never seen someone use “blockchain” to describe a structure which can be rewritten or tampered with. Git commit dags aren’t a blockchain by anyone’s definition, as far as I’m aware.
- pdpi 9y agoAgain — people tend to talk about Blockchain as a combination of the data structure and some sort of consensus algorithm but the term only properly refers to the data structure. The only difference between it and a git history is that git histories are dags instead of trees — The hash-of-parent-node structure is the exact same, except commits can have multiple parents. The tamper resistance of the data structure itself comes from the hashes: it serves as both a pointer and a checksum for the previous nodes.
- asfgjadfgionoin 9y ago>There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Name one.
- as300 9y agoGlobal computer and storage system
- Fnoord 9y agoGit?
- lojack 9y agoI didn’t realize git was Turing complete
- Fnoord 9y ago"Turing complete" wasn't part of GP's suggestion; my reply therefore still applies. On top of that, Ethereum's "turing complete" relies on an unsafe, unproven and likely broken programming language. And I didn't realise the secrets I gave to my notary were out in the open. Hint: they're not, and that's legally enforceable. The blockchain is nothing because data is [legally] [1] nothing. You might as well just use public key cryptography and release your data over BitTorrent, like Wikileaks did. It'll get distributed based on supply & demand, and using BitTorrent is still cheaper & efficient than blockchain. [1] At least, in the EU.
- lojack 9y agoWith the wonders of cryptography, you don't necessarily need to put secrets out in the open to notarize something on the blockchain. You can quite easily use a one way hash on the secret document, allowing you to verify the authenticity and the timestamp, but preventing someone from reversing the operation and seeing your secret information. Turing completeness was sort of assumed with "Global computer". Neither myself nor the poster mentioned Ethereum at all. He just mentioned "global computer" as one application of blockchain that isn't a cryptocurrency. I could have just as easily been talking about NEO, which uses a number of languages, including C# and Java. Further, while Ethereum does frequently use a new language (Solidity), it doesn't rely on it. Ethereum is a virtual machine, and the first implementation of the virtual machine was Solidity. Others have been made as well, its turing complete after all.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoThis specific presentation seems to work perfectly even if you replace all occurrences of "cryptocurrency" with "blockchain" and vice versa.
- xwvvvvwx 9y agoAll public blockchains require a cryptocurrency. The open nature of the protocols is only possible because of the built in system of financial incentives.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoThis is an exceptionally terrible 'presentation'. He says something about distributed trust and then puts 'THIS IS A LIE'. That's not evidence and it isn't an argument. He states that developers act as a central authority, which as it relates to the rules of creating new units and where they go to, is not true, since those rules are already established for the given chain. He says there is a fee auction death spiral, which also is demonstrably false. Even bitcoin, with it's ludicrous restriction of throughput by political means, hasn't actually gone through a death spiral from fees which rationally should have made anyone think very hard about its future. He says almost every exchange is full of fraud. This is debatable, but does not actually have anything to do with crypto-currencies (which is what he is actually talking about instead of "blockchain"). The last slide is basically just venting about stupid things people have done and bought in to, but also has nothing to do with crypto-currencies not working. It's amazing to me that people seem so certain of themselves while having such hollow arguments.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoIt's a presentation deck not a paper.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoI'm not sure how that changes the fact that everything he says is either completely untrue or irrelevant. If you want to point out an inaccuracy in what I've said, feel free.
- ropeadopepope 9y ago> I'm not sure how that changes the fact that everything he says is either completely untrue or irrelevant. I don't see how you have enough information to make that determination. It's a presentation deck. Those are just bullet points, not the arguments you would (presumably) hear in the full presentation.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- angel_j 9y agoStill preferable to governments printing fiat to finance war and capital crimes, while devaluing you and your generation's labor with institutionalized pro-inflation economics
- jayavanth 9y agoApril fools?
- kbenson 9y agoEthereum smart contracts are million dollar bug bounties? That sounds about right to me, and seems historically accurate.
- TTPrograms 9y agoBy this logic so is every financial software system, though.
- JeremyBanks 9y agoMost are built on reversible foundations. Mind you, Ethereum apparently was too. :P
- TTPrograms 9y agoThe important question is if you think it's possible to create impervious functions of ~100 lines of code. I tend to think that with modern formal verification systems this is a feasible goal. Otherwise you have to stick with closed-source security-through-obscurity and rely on legal reversal. This seems pretty weak to me, though - ex, if a stock exchange was hacked, sure you could reverse it legally, but the market disruption would take years to recover. Regardless of the specific nature of crypto, I think formally verifiable open systems are both achievable and a worthwhile goal.
- mannykannot 9y agoI am not sure what your position here is: that you can do whatever you want, or at least a lot of useful things, in ~100 lines of code? That if your software is broken down into functions no bigger that ~100 lines of code, and they have each been individually verified, then their composition has also been verified? Or something else? There is also the matter of verifying the platform itself.
- CryptoPunk 9y agoRegarding your last point, the platform itself can be fixed if it has any malfunctions. The issue is only with an application built on top of the platform malfunctioning while the platform operates exactly as it's supposed to. In that case there is no redress as the platform is for all intents and purposes immutable when it's working correctly.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoIn my travels across the country, one angle of cryptocurrencies I take solace in is its relative confinement to younger urban coastals (note: I'm one of these). Its proponents can, for the most part, afford to lose their investment. In a decade's time we'll have a generation of investors with a healthy sense of wariness.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoThat is not true in either case. Cryptocurrencies have gone mainstream recently, receiving a lot of attention by the mainstream press. Additionally, there's no proof that being burned by cryptocurrency shenanigans leads to greater wariness in the group as a whole.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Cryptocurrencies have gone mainstream recently, receiving a lot of attention by the mainstream press They receive a lot of press attention because people like me, who don't own any cryptocurrencies and never plan to, find them fascinating. When I'm in San Francisco or certain bars in my Manhattan neighborhood, people talk about owning them. When I'm at a restaurant in Phoenix or Salt Lake City or Raleigh, it's people observing the phenomenon just like I am. > there's no proof that being burned by cryptocurrency shenanigans leads to greater wariness Fair enough. My basis is the general wariness that followed the Great Depression. (Counterfactual: no such enduring effect followed the dot-com bust nor the financial crisis.)
- arisAlexis 9y agoamazing how much hate. this is a tech social phenomena. given that only select people can downvote imagine the censorship.
- charlesdm 9y agoI stopped reading when I saw the first slide. Seriously, who puts so much text on a slide?
- jayd16 9y agoBrutally concise. This thread is going to get rough.
- thriftwy 9y agoSo, what is that you propose instead? If nothing then disregard you.
- thriftwy 9y agoAlso, I wouldn't need 4 slides to show why Microsoft or Facebook are bad for you. Doesn't prevent them from their multi-billion worth. Markets can stay irrational indefinitely.
- HappyKasper 9y agoThat’s a bit of a fallacy - you can legitimately point out the shortcomings of something without needing to name an alternative (e.g. criticizing Ponzi schemes). In this case, though, you could actually have an alternative of simply not using blockchain. The world was just fine for a long time without it.
- thriftwy 9y agoFor Ponzi scheme, alternative is banks and stock exchanges, not "nothing".
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoFor cryptocurrencies, the alternatives are the dozens of alternate ways of transferring funds.
- cornholio 9y agoThere is some truth in the slides but it's well mixed with falsehoods and misunderstandings. * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. When they are used as such, there exist mechanisms to commit to a certain fiat price and minimize market exposure to the point where transactions are almost free, in fiat terms. * The disbursement of tokens and the distributed consensus rewards do not need to be tied together like in Bitcoin. A premined token like Stellar can offer very strong security guarantees without needing mining pools (but of course, any kind of imaginable database is vulnerable to majority attacks, so that means nothing by itself) * The limited block capacity is a Bitcoin-specific problem that incidentally motivated interesting results in off-chain transactions (Lightning). * The sorry state of the distributed financial markets says nothing about the technology and more about human greed and the slow capacity of regulators to adapt; critically, smart contracts and distributed algorithms enable control mechanism and hard guarantees that have no old world equivalent, they can eliminate counterparty risks, guarantee solvency and fair arbitration etc. That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> smart contracts and distributed algorithms enable control mechanism and hard guarantees that have no old world equivalent, they can eliminate counterparty risks, guarantee solvency and fair arbitration etc. The required nexus between the blockchain and the tangible and legal worlds means every limitation that exists today will exist for a "smart contract". It's the same plumbing with a paint job.
- lojack 9y agoThis risk can be mitigated by bridging the real world and the blockchain using oracles. This risk mitigation can be somewhat decentralized using a voting or reputation mechanism. This is by no means perfect, and I'm not aware of any trustless mechanisms for this, but its a problem people are currently working on, and I think there will eventually be a good solution. I also don't think this is a false dichotomy. Most likely we'll end up at a place with some improvement over what we have today (I'd actually argue we're currently at this point now) but not without all of the limitations.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoSeems fair. Would be nice to have a fifth slide explaining friction cost and why it might be a very bad idea to embed ever increasing friction as your formal verification method.
- darawk 9y ago> Cryptocurrencies are provably inferior when you don't require censorship resistance A) This isn't true. They also have predictable monetary policy and anonymity (or pseudonymity, in the case of Bitcoin). These can be useful properties, whether or not you agree with their uses. B) Even if it were true, so what? Censorship-resistant money seems like a pretty cool technology to me. > Any volatile cryptocurrency transaction requires two currency conversion steps. Sure, in the absence of merchants accepting the currency that is true. But that's sort of like decrying the internet as useless when it came out because nothing was on it. And listen, if you want to go ahead and make a case that cryptocurrencies are structurally incapable of becoming commonly accepted - by all means, go for it. That is how you attack the concept. You don't attack a new technology by saying it isn't adopted yet: "Cars can never work because there are no paved roads" "Credit cards are stupid because nobody accepts them" If you want to try to make some intrinsic, fundamental case that there is some structural barrier preventing the adoption of cryptocurrencies, that's a perfectly reasonable line of argument to make. Simply stating the obvious, that they are not yet widely accepted, is not. > Any lottery-based reward creates mining pools, which means a few entities can and do control things. While true in a certain sense, an analogy here might be useful: Capitalism is centralized, because people organize into corporations, which end up aggregating capital. This is an accurate description of capitalism. However, capitalism is still distinct from what's commonly known as 'top-down economic planning', e.g. communism. The fundamental difference is that the process is organic, and for the most part, empirically, the organic version of this process leads to better outcomes. Again, perfectly fine to argue that this particular one doesn't lead to good outcomes for such and such reasons. However, to argue that it is centralized, is kind of missing the point. Yes, powerful entities do form, but their power is not guaranteed. Their power is highly contingent upon their continued performance of their duties, and the collective desire to let them keep their place. This powerfully aligns their incentives with the well-being of the ecosystem. Now, does this mean that that alignment is perfect? Definitely not. Just like in a capitalist economy, those incentives can and do deviate from each other. However, these things do not exist in a vacuum. All tradeoffs must be considered as alternatives to competing mechanisms. And I think the tradeoff made here by crypto-currencies is a good one, relative to alternative options. > Limit capacity fee death spirals This whole slide just ignores the existence of payment channels. The author is sufficiently educated to know he's being disingenuous here, so there's no need to respond to it beyond that. In summary, and I want to be totally clear on this: There are great reasons to be skeptical of crypto-currencies. There are lots of things they don't do well, and there are lots of very serious tradeoffs that they make that are different than the ones we make with government-backed fiat currencies. They pose real risks to certain pillars of civilization and it's not clear that they are on balance good things. But our criticisms of them should be couched in an understanding of those risks and tradeoffs. They offer real benefits in some dimensions, and they have real costs in others. If someone is telling you that a politically neutral, censorship-resistant world currency is, a priori, useless, you may want to re-evaluate the source. We may or may not like what something like Bitcoin will do to the world - but the idea that it doesn't have the potential to do anything is really quite silly.
- logicallee 9y agoThat's not why blockchain is bs. Let me tell you a little story you might want to remember, so you can tell your grandchildren. This is how you might tell them: "You think algorithms are hard, little children? You don't want to stay up to date? Well gather round, gather round, let gramps give you a sense of human folly and just how far we have come. Maybe that will let you appreciate how lucky you have it. "Way back before all these modern doodads, gizmos, and doohickeys, back in aught 9, or "two thousand and nine" as we called it, mathematicians were so clueless about algorithms that they made distributed databases resistant to sybil attacks through proof of work doing random-ass hashes. What that meant is instead of figuring out how to prove nodes weren't colluding, we made them prove they were burning oil - or gas - or coal - or sunlight, or whatever they wanted. But they had to throw their hands up and come up with a random hash, to prove that they were really all working on the problem. "By 2018, the resulting worldwide bitcoin database used 30.1 terrawatt-hours of power per year to perform the work that a $20 dedicated chip could do in the size of a container of tic-tacs. And that $20 includes 100 gb, a dedicated microcontroller, and 5 years worth of alkeline batteries. The database size borders on nil. "All because we didn't know any better. That is something like $3,848,100,000 in 2018 money - three billion dollars spent on doing $20 worth of work. "To put this into perspective, imagine that in 1802, Merriam Webster had purchased fifty thousand tumblers, into which it put printed plates, and then hired fifty thousand workers to open each one every few minutes, and count to see if it had managed to assemble the plates into alphabetical order. (This is called bogosort.) "Well, if you don't know that there is such a thing as a sorting algorithm, if it's unknown to science, then perhaps bogosort is the best you can do. Such was the state of distributed blockchains in 2018. "So you need to be thankful for what you have. Oh but it's tough! You have to think it through! Well in my day nobody thought it through. We just shoveled thirty terawatts of coal into furnaces and made little kids cry when they couldn't afford gaming equipment anymore, since all of it was being used to get around the fact that nobody sat down and did the math for a $20 distributed database. "you kids have it printed in black and white. sit down and learn. we had to take electricity from schools and hospitals, to raise the sealevel to where parts of Hawaii had to be evacuated. This stuff has consequences. Learn your algorithms. Trillions of watts died for them."
- wellboy 9y ago
- booomagnolia 9y agoThe slides make a number of decent points, but the general tone ends up being self-defeating, which is a shame because many of these points are actually worth debating in depth. Specifically, on governance of blockchains (as in: trustless distributed consensus systems, and not as in: merkle chains), I do tend to agree with the tweets that devs have a huge amount of pull, and that this is both grossly under-estimated and under-discussed.
- EthanHeilman 9y agoDisagree with slide three on "private blockchains". Weaver underestimates the difficulty of reaching consensus among a fixed set of participants by assuming there is just one party that signs blocks. If there is more than one party you end up in the land of BFT. Distributed systems are hard to build. Additionally a solution which is trivial to implement makes that solution good. I wish we had more trivial solutions to these problems.
- gweinberg 9y agoHas anyone not heard all of this before? And the counterarguments also?
- KirinDave 9y agoThere aren't many compelling counterarguments. That's why people haven't heard them.
- kikimora 9y agoThere is one such argument and I don't think you would need another one. If you trust your government to control your money good for you. But most of worldwide population does not trust their governments and for a good reason. If you live in Iraqi or Syria or Somalia would you prefer your central bank to control your money or do it yourself? Blockchain gives you that option. Wealthy people in these countries use offshore locations to secure their money from their own corrupt governments. With blockchain everybody can have such option and thus motivate governments to create better environments for ordinary people. And it is not surprising to see that democratic countries embrace cryptocurrencies and try to regulate them but more authoritarian regimes just ban cryptos.
- wellboy 9y agoSlide 1: Obviously you need to convert from and to Fiat since crypto isn't used by the majority of people duh. Slide 2 & 3: Yes, 1st generation blockchains are slow and have high fees. That's why Bitcoin has just implemented the Lightning Network and there are 3rd generation blockchains like Nano and IOTA that have zero fees and instant transactions. Duh. Slide 4: False dichotomy. Yes, there are a couple of scams in the crypto sphere, even 5% of the top 100 are scams, e.g. Eos, Verge, Veritaseum. Is 5% 100%? No. Duh + Facepalm.
- trisimix 9y agoA lot of what you said was crap and it devalues ther correct things you said. That said I assume you used these as a visual aid and maybe delved more than what you posted here, a lot is very extreme.
- arisAlexis 9y agojust name another technology that can offer immutability and transparency
- majewsky 9y agoGit.
- arisAlexis 9y agoI will pay you 10K in USD if you make a smart contract on Git. Publicly committed
- dimgl 9y agoI'm not a fan of cryptocurrency and even these slides were horrendous. Seriously, way to make your point so poorly that not even people who agree with you want to read it. Also, this guy didn't even discuss blockchain tech. Just cryptocurrency.
- KirinDave 9y agoBecause without cryptocurrency, as he says, it's a merkle tree and THAT IS NOT NEW. Github already did it. It works. Revolutionary? No.
- cozicoolmail 9y ago*Git already did it. GitHub is just a site running a Git server for people to use.
- KirinDave 9y agoI choose Github just because of its indisputable scale and financial success. Github pushed git to where it is now. Not linux (we don't even use git remotely like the kernel devs do), not Linus, or any previous system. Github did it. Say what you will about their ethics, their structure, their politics, that company did this thing and they're now more important to the world of software products than any prior company in that role ever has been.
- augbog 9y agoTotally off topic but for his bio says for secure messages use Signal/iMessage. Signal is great but iMessage?
- Fnoord 9y agoiMessage is more popular. You want people to use Signal, but if they don't want or cannot use that, iMessage is his preferred alternative. For a similar reason, I use Signal and WhatsApp. (All 3 are E2EE.) Nicholas Weaver covered iMessage's strengths and weaknesses before: (20150804) iPhones, the FBI, and Going Dark [1] (20150806) Nicholas Weaver on iPhone Security [2] (20150908) Apple's iMessage defense against spying has one flaw [3] (20171211) Is Apple Fully Complying With iMessage and FaceTime-Related Court Orders? [4] I also remember a technical analysis on iMessage by either Matthew Green or Nicholas Weaver. [1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/iphones-fbi-and-going-dark https://www.lawfareblog.com/iphones-fbi-and-going-dark [2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/nicholas_weaver_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/nicholas_weav... [3] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/apple-fighting-privacy-imessage-still-problems/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/apple-fighting-privacy-imessag... [4] https://www.lawfareblog.com/apple-fully-complying-imessage-and-facetime-related-court-orders https://www.lawfareblog.com/apple-fully-complying-imessage-a...
- ricardobeat 9y agoiMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and a good bet that the app publisher is safe. Apple has a strong record of strict security and anti-government-snooping policy.
- tylerhou 9y agoiMessage is end-to-end encrypted as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Donzo 9y ago"Every tradeable ICO is really an unregulated security." I disagree with this claim. It depends on whether the token constitutes an investment contract. If the token has utility, was sold as a utility bearing token (rather than an investment opportunity), and if the project possesses an open codebase which token holders can theoretically modify, then I don't believe said token is an unregulated security. Yet, the vast majority of tokens do in fact function as unregulated securities, which is why these waters are muddled.
- KirinDave 9y agoIf it's a utility then why ICO? Strictly as a fundraising method? To enable resale? None of that requires a centralized consensus chain even in a trustless world. No, you ICO a utility token because you hope it'll go superluminal by interacting with an ecosystem full of unregulated securities.
- Donzo 9y agoThat may be why you would do it, but many motivations exist in this world. To reduce all these projects to greed-tunnels is to reduce these many motivations and over-simplify the world. You are approaching the ICO as though there were some Boolean value as to whether they are "good" or "bad," and have returned "bad" for you. In reality, to throw them all in the "bad" bin is lazy and the opposite of due diligence. Let me give you some examples of other motivations beyond fast cash that might power an ICO: 1. Ideology 2. Community spirit I will not attempt to encapsulate what these motivations mean to various actors, but I can tell you that it's not "just about money" for everyone. However, I will fully concede that most ICOs are scams. Advertising networks are not being overly cautious by restricting adbuys on ICOs. And most people are not equipped to tell the difference between a scam project and a real one.
- Donzo 9y agoDid down-voters take issue with my position? Please explain. I'd love to learn more about your position. I seek the truth.
- Steeeve 9y agoThe whole cryptocurrency market is surreal to me for these reasons and many more. But I did think the same thing about Twitter, especially early on when it was constantly broken. And yet, while it was broken people were still talking about it and it was gaining mommentum. That's the parallel I see here. Enough of the right people are talking about it that it's going to be a thing for at least the near-term future. The whole eco-system can be flawed, but it has momentum. And even among those that have been scammed, it's in their best interest to keep pushing the virtues of cryptocurrency as long as they have any left to sell.
- ebbv 9y agoExcept the thing that kept twitter around through the problems was celebrities. People following celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian and comedians kept it relevant until it became used in the Arab Spring and then it became “legitimate.” I don’t see a parallel there for cryotocurencies. It’s just a bubble and I don’t see any Arab Spring type of event to legitimize it.
- xiphias 9y agoBitcoin network is with us for the last 9 years and more stable than any other internet service (except maybe internet itself). The slides don't have any prediction (price going to $0 in 3 months after a 9 year climb?). Without that it's a totally unuseful waste of time to listen to it. Maybe Bitcoin ,,shouldn't'' work on paper, but it IS working in practice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoWhat am I missing about Cryptokitties? It was on the last side. A16Z/USV invested $16M [1]. They claim digital collectibles is a viable business. [1]http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/cryptokitties-andreessen-horowitz-cryptocurrency-ethereum/ http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/cryptokitties-andreessen-horow...
- leroy_masochist 9y agoAccording to USV, the reason is that the underlying technology is really exciting and has lots of potential: > The (original) internet brought us a world where any site could link to any other site, and they could all be accessed from anywhere in the world. This was the first interoperability revolution. The next one will be with data and digital assets. For a long time, data has been the property of platforms — with cryptonetworks and cryptoassets, data can live outside of anyone platform, under the control of users. This has the potential to open up a lot of innovation. [0] Matt Levine as usual had a bit of fun with this: > Look: They are right, and I was wrong, and I am sorry. I thought that CryptoKitties was just a game that allows you to buy cartoon cats on the blockchain, and I thought it was silly. But I completely missed the point. CryptoKitties is actually a game that allows you to buy cartoon cats on the blockchain, and put little hats on them. [1] [0] https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/zombies-eating-kitties/ https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/zombies-eating-kitties/ [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-22/when-margin-loans-go-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-22/when-marg...
- kerng 9y agoI read some of the slides, but they are authored from an emotional standpoint, which makes it difficult to follow ideas and conclusions. Statements like "public blockchain security is a lie", are just not useful. If this content is used at Berkley I'm worried for peoples tuition. I'd expect more depth and logical statements for a presentation at a university.
- Fnoord 9y ago> Statements like "public blockchain security is a lie", are just not useful. The good news is the statement you quoted was not made. > I'd expect more depth and logical statements for a presentation at a university. The slides contain logic statements, depth, and e.g. historical comparisons. Since there's some character assassination in this thread (how sad): Nicholas Weaver's credentials can be found here [1]. [1] http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/ http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/
- kerng 9y agoSorry, I don't know the author and it shouldn't matter. Still think the slides are made up of emotional trigger words rather then arguments and content, you can grab content like this from random reddit threads. How sad indeed.
- Fnoord 9y agoThey're a summary (powerpoint presentation); not the actual argument(s). Emotional trigger words stick; empty abstract words don't.
- DennisP 9y ago> protection is limited to the amount of money wasted Somebody hasn't been keeping up with proof-of-stake research. > spammers who want to occupy space forever!!! Or Ethereum's storage rent proposals.
- 40four 9y agoForget the actual argument being made here, Can we all agree this is a garbage presentation? Every college student half paying attention knows this is a terrible power point. It's a power POINT not a power essay. This guy thinks he's awesome for fitting everything into 4 slides. Meanwhile the whole audience will miss everything he says out loud. They will be too busy reading & copying the massive amount of text in the sldies. This would be much better if he spread it out over more slides. Absolute Bush league power point skills.
- EGreg 9y agoSince we started intercoin.org I thought I would go through point by point and see how it applies to our project. It’s true that his points apply to many projects. 1) Two conversion steps - since Intercoin is designed to be used as actual currency and not just a store of value, people can pay each other anytime with zero fees. Given enough adoption, people stop cashing out (think PayPal, Venmo etc.) and just pay each other in that economy. They do this to save fees and time. 2) Entity to convert currency: Actually this entity can be a simple market maker on an exchange. Within its economy, Intercoin has sidechains for each community and deterministic pricing, with no market makers. And you don’t have to worry about eg PayPal or Cyprus banks freezing your money. 3) A “private blockchain” requires far more than that if it is to be used for crypto-currency. The main guarantee is that there are no forks of the log, aka double-spends. Intercoin lets every community run their own distributed ledger, so you don’t need to search the whole world for double-spends. That makes it so efficient you can even do micropayments (Netflix, Basic Attention Token etc.) 4) Proof of Work/Stake/blah. Intercoin letting communities run their own ledger the way Wordpress lets them run a blog, it comes with its own set of challenges as small communities can have very few computers. It has to be secure like your end-to-end encrypted email when you get on someone’s wifi. So we can’t use the traditional stuff. https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf 5) Lottery-based systems create mining pools: yep and in fact any kind of proof of stake creates centralization, while any kind of proof of work creates an arms race that leads to centalization. Intercoin takes inspiration more from XRP consensus protocol and SAFE network design. 6) “Code developers can and do act like central authorities.” If this refers to issuing the Unique Node List like Ripple, or reverting transactions like ETH etc. then that’s not good. If this means putting out a new client of server software and having decentralized adoption then that’s inevitable. Otherwise you get fragmentation like Linux. And even then, there are only a few major Linux distributions. I happen to prefer collaboration on a centralized codebase in this case, but decentralization in everything else. (eg I would be totally OK with WebKit being overseen by the W3C consortium and have new ideas begin as extensions that are finally adopted into the main codebase - think of all the wasted web developer man hours since multiple browsers launched). 7) Protection limited to money wasted - not sure what that means. A person knows their money can’t be stolen. In Intercoin our priorities are A) the overall network must never be corrupted, B) no one can steal your money C) no one can freeze your money permanently, in that order. 8) Transactions vs Capacity. VERY good points here, and all global networks are susceptible to this, as are public facing websites (DDOS etc.) This is why Intercoin is designed to be like the original Internet, with each community able to run its own network and set its own policies. That allows a theoretically UNLIMITED number of transactions per second, not 7 or 1000. Usually each validator includes a free tier for the first X transactions per day, to known members of the network. Networks run their own computers and the consensus algorithm is much cheaper and doesn’t waste half the world’s electricity to work. The validators - being off the shelf computers run by random people — fund themselves through the currency. But they earn money for actually processing transactions, not a lottery. 9) Bad economics - yes this is rampant in cryptocurrency circles (eg people including Satoshi thought Bitcoin being deflationary “sound money” will make people want to spend it, when the opposite is true). Intercoin has among its advisors world-famous economists from diff schools like MMT (Walter Mosler) and Austrian School, Chicago school, precisely for this reason. We want to let communities issue their own currencies and implement UBI on a community level through entirely voluntary means. It brings together people on the left and right. 10) “All ICOs are securities being sold fraudulently” - Intercoin Inc. has raised money through exemptions with the SEC (Regulations D and S) and is now working on registering Intercoin tokens with the SEC as securities ahead of a public offering. Not everyone shirks the law. In fact, we consider tech to be only one of the services we provide for communities. The others are turnkey solutions for regulations (securities, money transmission) and taxes (501c3 for UBI donations, capital losses etc.) so communities can install their currencies as easily as Stripe Atlas lets you open a company. I hope this addresses it point by point.
- a-dub 9y agoThe financial side is weird, but there are some clever implementations of cryptographic protocols in the crypto currency space that could be used for the design of semi-decentralized services that could make the internet better. This stuff could be the makings of /etc/passwd for the internet.
- known 9y agoBlockchain = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audit_trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audit_trail + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure