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> Yet every day there are stories (such as this article) showing crypto becoming more deeply ingrained in mainstream circles. Check out Attack of the 50-foot b

> Yet every day there are stories (such as this article) showing crypto becoming more deeply ingrained in mainstream circles. Check out Attack of the 50-foot blockchain by David Gerard. He goes through many of those articles and debunks them. They are misleading articles written by crypto enthusiasts to promote their own agenda. > I doubt there is much middle ground for this. There is a middle ground. There are few areas where cryptocurrency can add real value. Consider the example of origin / provenance tracking. That's not a problem that needs to be solved by blockchain unless the company can't trust its own audit logs and database team. Would you want give your credit card to a company that thought it needed blockchain technology to prevent tampering? It sounds like incompetence to me. There are businesses that the public doesn't trust that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. Take a look at the studies on trust in casino and poker games. The public is very skeptical.

n-exploit 8y ago
Couldn't the same argument be made against fiat currencies? Nations don't have a great track record for trust. I don't see why a data-backed currency wouldn't completely flip the economy. I mean, the definition of fiat currency is basically: "it has value because you say so"
- nickbauman 8y ago
  It has never been "it has value because you say so" by itself. It has value because it has a huge war machine behind it. Why does the gold coin of the realm have the king's face on it? Why didn't the king just keep the gold instead of using it to pay his soldiers and demand the coin be used to pay him his taxes from the formerly free peasants? Money _is_ trust. I really wonder if people trust a traditional banking system less than an algorthm implemented by a group of programmers whose code they either can't read or can't understand or both.
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    Cryptocurrency seems to have struck a chord with those who do not see much chance for advancement in the current state of affairs and perceive it as a way out - this seems to be common among all the people involved I've seen interviewed from South Korea to Eastern Europe. There's little discussion of the advantage of system of traditional money versus cryptocurrency, though that may be a function of how short the quotes used in the article are. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/how-the-tiny-nation-of-georgia-became-a-bitcoin-behemoth https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/... http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/technology/south-korea-bitcoin-mania/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/technology/south-korea-bitco...
  - stale2002 8y ago
    A single person working at bank can flip a switch and take my money. A developer can't do that with my Bitcoin.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      The government can ban anybody from converting those bitcoins into something useful. The value of your digital baubles is now zero.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        And then I transfer that to a different country and convert it their. You don't need 1 government to do this. You need EVERY government to do this. This is useful, in the sense that someone in venezuela is at serious risk of the government taking their money if it is in a bank, but they really couldn't do that to their Bitcoin. Yes, if it is the US government doing the banning, you are significantly less likely to get around the ban. But the world is not US centric. There are many governments would try to oppress their population by using the power of the banks, but would be significantly less effective against crypto transactions. People are using crypto right NOW to get around many currency control laws implemented by governments. So they are successful getting around financial censorship that is already happening.
        lern_too_spel 8y ago
        So now you have currency in another country. As long as your country doesn't allow you to repatriate, you still have nothing. It's the same as holding US dollars in a US bank while living in another country that regulates getting the money out (except worse because fewer people will accept BTC vs. USD). As long as you cannot spend it, it is worthless.
      - mythrwy 8y ago
        They are still spendable. Or sellable to private party.
        8y ago
  - freeflight 8y ago
    > I really wonder if people trust a traditional banking system less than an algorthm implemented by a group of programmers whose code they either can't read or can't understand or both. To be fair: How many people do actually understand the fiat money system that's going on, with all of its finer points and at scale? I wouldn't be too surprised if quite many people only understand the "Government prints money" part but nothing else about it, which is pretty much my extent of understanding. Compared to that something like BC seems actually rather simple and straightforward to wrap your head around (at least for me): A finite amount of coins, coins need to be farmed, once they are all farmed people will make money through transaction fees. Don't need to understand all of the math to understand the basic principles at work. Just like you don't need to understand everything about the fiat money system to use it.
    - rtpg 8y ago
      Simplicity is kinda nice, but it's not very indicative of a good solution all the time. Especially given the counterintuitive results behind fiat currencies and the relatively low correlation between all the moving parts, it's difficult to even say if the simpler model is better because the complicated model has so many side effects. I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike.
      - freeflight 8y ago
        > I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike. That's an interesting comparison: - The car might work better by certain metrics (speed, distance, force) but the bike can still outperform it in some situations (high traffic, cost efficiency on shorter distances, terrain) - If the car breaks I'd need help fixing it, with the bike, I could probably fix most issues myself. That's why both, cars and bikes, do coexist as each of them fills a specific need/niche. Trying to apply this to monetary systems sure seems difficult to imagine, but maybe something like that might be the actual solution?
        rtpg 8y ago
vageli 8y ago
> There are businesses that the public doesn't trust that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. Take a look at the studies on trust in casino and poker games. The public is very skeptical. I would love to read those studies. Do you happen to have a link or even a list of authors I could look up?
- atomical 8y ago
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/048a/195bcf921fdd25f267eab224e46570b70bf2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/048a/195bcf921fdd25f267eab2...
ericb 8y ago
> Consider the example of origin / provenance tracking. That's not a problem that needs to be solved by blockchain unless the company can't trust its own audit logs and database team. It is if: * you want if you want more than one company to cooperate * you want participation to be permissionless * you want it outlive the life of the particular corporations involved. * you want join ownership * It is also desirable if you think they could be hacked, or have downtime--ie, to remove the company as a single point of failure.
- geofft 8y ago
  A bitcoin-style blockchain outsources trust to the participants with the most computing power. It does not magically eliminate trust. This means that it's only a good idea if either a) you can limit the participants, and you somehow trust the participants with the most computing power than (e.g.) a simple majority of authorized participants, or b) you do not limit the participants, and you trust anyone in the world with the most computing power more than you trust anyone you would pick for some other reason. For some applications - e.g. money for people who don't trust their governments or aren't well-served by the inter-government norms around currency exchange - they're legitimately in situation B. Sending and receiving bits to literally anyone is better than not being able to send and receive currency at all, and since a 51% attack will be noticed, it's unlikely to be used on any individual small-time user. For provenance tracking between a set of companies identified in advance, I have difficulty understanding how you can be in situation B, and you're not in situation A. If you instead want a cryptographically-verified immutable append-only log, there are lots of non-blockchain structures for immutable append-only logs that permit only a finite set of writers. Certificate Transparency is one of them: issued certificates cannot leave the log, and there are mechanisms for pre-logging certificates before issuance, but the only things worth logging are certificates from trusted (or partly-trusted) certificate authorities. Anyone can participate in the trust process, but transactions themselves only come from a limited set of participants, so you get to completely bypass proof-of-having-more-computers-than-everyone-else.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    If you instead want a cryptographically-verified immutable append-only log, there are lots of non-blockchain structures for immutable append-only logs that permit only a finite set of writers Yes. I actually like the concept of Bitcoin, but it's very annoying how so many of its fans seem to think Satoshi Nakamoto invented Merkle trees.
geofft 8y ago
> There are businesses that the public doesn't trust that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. Take a look at the studies on trust in casino and poker games. The public is very skeptical. Why is blockchain more useful here than a commitment scheme (e.g., the dealer publishes a salted hash of the order of cards, plays the game, then reveals the salt once all the cards are played)? The commitment scheme doesn't involve waiting for proof-of-work calculations or interacting with an existing global network / file. It makes sense to use a stateful structure for a ledger of money, because the question of how much money I have depends on how much money was transfered to me since my account was opened. But how one poker game is played is not affected by how any previous poker game was played.
- dnautics 8y ago
  beautifully explained.
- atomical 8y ago
  Where is the automated dispute resolution in the system you are describing? What is preventing the house from cheating?
  - geofft 8y ago
    The commitment scheme solves "cheating" in the sense of "dealing cards in a different order depending on how the game goes". There are other types of cheating, e.g., leaking the order to players and perhaps picking a non-random order in advance. Those will take longer than a parenthetical in a conversation about Bitcoin to address. Do you think that a blockchain is capable of solving any of these types of cheating more than some offline stateless scheme could?
    - atomical 8y ago
      Does the process you are referring to automatically give a refund to the player? It's hard for me to follow your logic because you mention Bitcoin which doesn't have a smart contract language like Ethereum. Check out the FunFair project. https://funfair.io/how-it-works/whitepapers/ https://funfair.io/how-it-works/whitepapers/

n-exploit 8y ago

Couldn't the same argument be made against fiat currencies? Nations don't have a great track record for trust. I don't see why a data-backed currency wouldn't completely flip the economy. I mean, the definition of fiat currency is basically: "it has value because you say so"

nickbauman 8y ago
It has never been "it has value because you say so" by itself. It has value because it has a huge war machine behind it. Why does the gold coin of the realm have the king's face on it? Why didn't the king just keep the gold instead of using it to pay his soldiers and demand the coin be used to pay him his taxes from the formerly free peasants? Money _is_ trust. I really wonder if people trust a traditional banking system less than an algorthm implemented by a group of programmers whose code they either can't read or can't understand or both.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  Cryptocurrency seems to have struck a chord with those who do not see much chance for advancement in the current state of affairs and perceive it as a way out - this seems to be common among all the people involved I've seen interviewed from South Korea to Eastern Europe. There's little discussion of the advantage of system of traditional money versus cryptocurrency, though that may be a function of how short the quotes used in the article are. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/how-the-tiny-nation-of-georgia-became-a-bitcoin-behemoth https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/... http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/technology/south-korea-bitcoin-mania/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/technology/south-korea-bitco...
- stale2002 8y ago
  A single person working at bank can flip a switch and take my money. A developer can't do that with my Bitcoin.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    The government can ban anybody from converting those bitcoins into something useful. The value of your digital baubles is now zero.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      And then I transfer that to a different country and convert it their. You don't need 1 government to do this. You need EVERY government to do this. This is useful, in the sense that someone in venezuela is at serious risk of the government taking their money if it is in a bank, but they really couldn't do that to their Bitcoin. Yes, if it is the US government doing the banning, you are significantly less likely to get around the ban. But the world is not US centric. There are many governments would try to oppress their population by using the power of the banks, but would be significantly less effective against crypto transactions. People are using crypto right NOW to get around many currency control laws implemented by governments. So they are successful getting around financial censorship that is already happening.
      - lern_too_spel 8y ago
        So now you have currency in another country. As long as your country doesn't allow you to repatriate, you still have nothing. It's the same as holding US dollars in a US bank while living in another country that regulates getting the money out (except worse because fewer people will accept BTC vs. USD). As long as you cannot spend it, it is worthless.
    - mythrwy 8y ago
      They are still spendable. Or sellable to private party.
      - 8y ago
- freeflight 8y ago
  > I really wonder if people trust a traditional banking system less than an algorthm implemented by a group of programmers whose code they either can't read or can't understand or both. To be fair: How many people do actually understand the fiat money system that's going on, with all of its finer points and at scale? I wouldn't be too surprised if quite many people only understand the "Government prints money" part but nothing else about it, which is pretty much my extent of understanding. Compared to that something like BC seems actually rather simple and straightforward to wrap your head around (at least for me): A finite amount of coins, coins need to be farmed, once they are all farmed people will make money through transaction fees. Don't need to understand all of the math to understand the basic principles at work. Just like you don't need to understand everything about the fiat money system to use it.
  - rtpg 8y ago
    Simplicity is kinda nice, but it's not very indicative of a good solution all the time. Especially given the counterintuitive results behind fiat currencies and the relatively low correlation between all the moving parts, it's difficult to even say if the simpler model is better because the complicated model has so many side effects. I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike.
    - freeflight 8y ago
      > I don't understand how my car works but it sure works better than my easy to understand bike. That's an interesting comparison: - The car might work better by certain metrics (speed, distance, force) but the bike can still outperform it in some situations (high traffic, cost efficiency on shorter distances, terrain) - If the car breaks I'd need help fixing it, with the bike, I could probably fix most issues myself. That's why both, cars and bikes, do coexist as each of them fills a specific need/niche. Trying to apply this to monetary systems sure seems difficult to imagine, but maybe something like that might be the actual solution?
      - rtpg 8y ago

vageli 8y ago

atomical 8y ago
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/048a/195bcf921fdd25f267eab224e46570b70bf2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/048a/195bcf921fdd25f267eab2...

ericb 8y ago

> Consider the example of origin / provenance tracking. That's not a problem that needs to be solved by blockchain unless the company can't trust its own audit logs and database team. It is if: * you want if you want more than one company to cooperate * you want participation to be permissionless * you want it outlive the life of the particular corporations involved. * you want join ownership * It is also desirable if you think they could be hacked, or have downtime--ie, to remove the company as a single point of failure.

geofft 8y ago
A bitcoin-style blockchain outsources trust to the participants with the most computing power. It does not magically eliminate trust. This means that it's only a good idea if either a) you can limit the participants, and you somehow trust the participants with the most computing power than (e.g.) a simple majority of authorized participants, or b) you do not limit the participants, and you trust anyone in the world with the most computing power more than you trust anyone you would pick for some other reason. For some applications - e.g. money for people who don't trust their governments or aren't well-served by the inter-government norms around currency exchange - they're legitimately in situation B. Sending and receiving bits to literally anyone is better than not being able to send and receive currency at all, and since a 51% attack will be noticed, it's unlikely to be used on any individual small-time user. For provenance tracking between a set of companies identified in advance, I have difficulty understanding how you can be in situation B, and you're not in situation A. If you instead want a cryptographically-verified immutable append-only log, there are lots of non-blockchain structures for immutable append-only logs that permit only a finite set of writers. Certificate Transparency is one of them: issued certificates cannot leave the log, and there are mechanisms for pre-logging certificates before issuance, but the only things worth logging are certificates from trusted (or partly-trusted) certificate authorities. Anyone can participate in the trust process, but transactions themselves only come from a limited set of participants, so you get to completely bypass proof-of-having-more-computers-than-everyone-else.
- icebraining 8y ago
  If you instead want a cryptographically-verified immutable append-only log, there are lots of non-blockchain structures for immutable append-only logs that permit only a finite set of writers Yes. I actually like the concept of Bitcoin, but it's very annoying how so many of its fans seem to think Satoshi Nakamoto invented Merkle trees.

geofft 8y ago

> There are businesses that the public doesn't trust that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. Take a look at the studies on trust in casino and poker games. The public is very skeptical. Why is blockchain more useful here than a commitment scheme (e.g., the dealer publishes a salted hash of the order of cards, plays the game, then reveals the salt once all the cards are played)? The commitment scheme doesn't involve waiting for proof-of-work calculations or interacting with an existing global network / file. It makes sense to use a stateful structure for a ledger of money, because the question of how much money I have depends on how much money was transfered to me since my account was opened. But how one poker game is played is not affected by how any previous poker game was played.

dnautics 8y ago
beautifully explained.
atomical 8y ago
Where is the automated dispute resolution in the system you are describing? What is preventing the house from cheating?
- geofft 8y ago
  The commitment scheme solves "cheating" in the sense of "dealing cards in a different order depending on how the game goes". There are other types of cheating, e.g., leaking the order to players and perhaps picking a non-random order in advance. Those will take longer than a parenthetical in a conversation about Bitcoin to address. Do you think that a blockchain is capable of solving any of these types of cheating more than some offline stateless scheme could?
  - atomical 8y ago
    Does the process you are referring to automatically give a refund to the player? It's hard for me to follow your logic because you mention Bitcoin which doesn't have a smart contract language like Ethereum. Check out the FunFair project. https://funfair.io/how-it-works/whitepapers/ https://funfair.io/how-it-works/whitepapers/