7 ms·

As per your citation, ARPAnet came online in 1969 and emails were being exchanged by 1972, barely 3 years later. Blockchains have been around for 10 years now

by hudon 8y ago

As per your citation, ARPAnet came online in 1969 and emails were being exchanged by 1972, barely 3 years later. Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any.

xur17 8y ago
> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any. Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > without having to trust anyone has value There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera In practice, nobody wants to do these things. So we see centralization at exchanges. Precisely in the way people not wanting to handle cash use banks.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to have securely mounted your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money to will do what you're paying them to do. You have to trust the network to maintain the value of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera That's clearly not the point. The transfer itself does not require trust. That's the value.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > The transfer itself does not require trust Cash transfers and barters are trustless. Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk.
      - darawk 8y ago
        > Cash transfers and barters are trustless Yes, but they require physical presence. > Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Irrevocability is not the same as trustlessness. Your transaction is still being intermediated by an entity that can choose to appropriate your funds otherwise. > Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk. I think I agree with this statement literally. The question is what price are we paying for that reliability? And does blockchain offer an alternative tradeoff that we might like better?
        JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > Your transaction is still being intermediated by an entity that can choose to appropriate your funds otherwise The frequency of each of coins being stolen from wallets, being lost by exchanges or pilfered by ICO frauds is far, far higher than anything happening at proper banks. Blockchains are a neat technology which should have never been marketed as a currency.
        darawk 8y ago
        > The frequency of each of coins being stolen from wallets, being lost by exchanges or pilfered by ICO frauds is far, far higher than anything happening at proper banks. What does that have to do with what we're talking about?
        8y ago
  - m-i-l 8y ago
    > There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Good point. Although I would draw a different conclusion. Your point assumes this new technology is for direct human consumption. For me decentralisation, smart contracts and "the internet of money", along with AI, will allow autonomous agents operate and interact without human intervention. That will be transformative.
- lreeves 8y ago
  That's not really accurate though. Only in a perfect, unhackable world would you not have to trust anyone. People have their local wallets attacked and stolen through an incredibly diverse set of attacks, people fell for "mental wallet" concepts that were then easily stolen, and people have lost an enormous amount of value by trusting storage mechanisms and memory for passwords and wallets. Then on the flipside at least what, 80% of exchanges now have had compromises? Do you think this technology has really moved the bar forward around trust as a concept?
- hk__2 8y ago
  > Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. The value of a currency is based on nothing more than trust. It’s because people trust a (crypto)currency that it has a value; trust is the very thing that makes a dollar bill having more value than a random piece of paper.
- yc-kraln 8y ago
  This is wrong. The trust is still centralized, but on the developers of the platform/crypto chain/smart contract, rather than on an institution. This has the incredible downside that if something goes wrong, I have no recourse.
chrisco255 8y ago
Emails were being exchanged, to what extent? Could you email anyone in the world in 1972? No, like two people could e-mail each other. It's not like you had Gmail or even AOL in 1972. Yes, email was used for business purposes in the 80s...but it took a long, long time for the internet to reach mass adoption and maturity. Decades. Meanwhile, Ethereum was launched in 2015. Unless you think the tech has hit an evolutionary dead end...that it's not going to go any further, I think it's incredibly ignorant to criticize this nascent technology based on where it's at today.
- this_user 8y ago
  The rate of adoption of new technologies has sped up almost exponentially over time. You cannot compare email with Ethereum because of that. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to Docker which was introduced in 2013, and now containers are everywhere, because they are actually useful.
- notahacker 8y ago
  The fairer comparison might be between services intended and hyped for mass public use. In that respect the nine year old Bitcoin protocol and its much hyped offspring and first nine years of the "information superhighway" world wide web are, to put it mildly, not comparable in a manner remotely flattering to crypto. And crypto had the web as a vector to push adoption and didn't require a high proportion of users to buy their first personal computer. Sure, Ethereum will definitely have more things built on it, and attract new users and in all likelihood become more user friendly. But if you can write or evaluate bulletproof code, resolve oracle problems and trust the token's value to remain stable you can automate some transactions without third parties isn't a proposition as obviously universally appealing once bandwidth and adoption is there as anyone can be given access to anything that can be shared on a computer anywhere, any time.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  "Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott. In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET. " "Usenet gained 50 member sites in its first year, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma, and Bell Labs,[5] and the number of people using the network increased dramatically; " "UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984. More than 100 newsgroups existed, more than 20 devoted to Unix and other computer-related topics, and at least a third to recreation" Sites participating in Usenet were using UUCP, which also allowed email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network

by hudon 8y ago

xur17 8y ago

> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any. Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> without having to trust anyone has value There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera In practice, nobody wants to do these things. So we see centralization at exchanges. Precisely in the way people not wanting to handle cash use banks.
- darawk 8y ago
  > There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to have securely mounted your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money to will do what you're paying them to do. You have to trust the network to maintain the value of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera That's clearly not the point. The transfer itself does not require trust. That's the value.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > The transfer itself does not require trust Cash transfers and barters are trustless. Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk.
    - darawk 8y ago
      > Cash transfers and barters are trustless Yes, but they require physical presence. > Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Irrevocability is not the same as trustlessness. Your transaction is still being intermediated by an entity that can choose to appropriate your funds otherwise. > Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk. I think I agree with this statement literally. The question is what price are we paying for that reliability? And does blockchain offer an alternative tradeoff that we might like better?
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > Your transaction is still being intermediated by an entity that can choose to appropriate your funds otherwise The frequency of each of coins being stolen from wallets, being lost by exchanges or pilfered by ICO frauds is far, far higher than anything happening at proper banks. Blockchains are a neat technology which should have never been marketed as a currency.
        darawk 8y ago
        > The frequency of each of coins being stolen from wallets, being lost by exchanges or pilfered by ICO frauds is far, far higher than anything happening at proper banks. What does that have to do with what we're talking about?
        8y ago
- m-i-l 8y ago
  > There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Good point. Although I would draw a different conclusion. Your point assumes this new technology is for direct human consumption. For me decentralisation, smart contracts and "the internet of money", along with AI, will allow autonomous agents operate and interact without human intervention. That will be transformative.
lreeves 8y ago
That's not really accurate though. Only in a perfect, unhackable world would you not have to trust anyone. People have their local wallets attacked and stolen through an incredibly diverse set of attacks, people fell for "mental wallet" concepts that were then easily stolen, and people have lost an enormous amount of value by trusting storage mechanisms and memory for passwords and wallets. Then on the flipside at least what, 80% of exchanges now have had compromises? Do you think this technology has really moved the bar forward around trust as a concept?
hk__2 8y ago
> Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. The value of a currency is based on nothing more than trust. It’s because people trust a (crypto)currency that it has a value; trust is the very thing that makes a dollar bill having more value than a random piece of paper.
yc-kraln 8y ago
This is wrong. The trust is still centralized, but on the developers of the platform/crypto chain/smart contract, rather than on an institution. This has the incredible downside that if something goes wrong, I have no recourse.

chrisco255 8y ago

Emails were being exchanged, to what extent? Could you email anyone in the world in 1972? No, like two people could e-mail each other. It's not like you had Gmail or even AOL in 1972. Yes, email was used for business purposes in the 80s...but it took a long, long time for the internet to reach mass adoption and maturity. Decades. Meanwhile, Ethereum was launched in 2015. Unless you think the tech has hit an evolutionary dead end...that it's not going to go any further, I think it's incredibly ignorant to criticize this nascent technology based on where it's at today.

this_user 8y ago
The rate of adoption of new technologies has sped up almost exponentially over time. You cannot compare email with Ethereum because of that. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to Docker which was introduced in 2013, and now containers are everywhere, because they are actually useful.
notahacker 8y ago
The fairer comparison might be between services intended and hyped for mass public use. In that respect the nine year old Bitcoin protocol and its much hyped offspring and first nine years of the "information superhighway" world wide web are, to put it mildly, not comparable in a manner remotely flattering to crypto. And crypto had the web as a vector to push adoption and didn't require a high proportion of users to buy their first personal computer. Sure, Ethereum will definitely have more things built on it, and attract new users and in all likelihood become more user friendly. But if you can write or evaluate bulletproof code, resolve oracle problems and trust the token's value to remain stable you can automate some transactions without third parties isn't a proposition as obviously universally appealing once bandwidth and adoption is there as anyone can be given access to anything that can be shared on a computer anywhere, any time.
jonhendry18 8y ago
"Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott. In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET. " "Usenet gained 50 member sites in its first year, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma, and Bell Labs,[5] and the number of people using the network increased dramatically; " "UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984. More than 100 newsgroups existed, more than 20 devoted to Unix and other computer-related topics, and at least a third to recreation" Sites participating in Usenet were using UUCP, which also allowed email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network