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Yet Another Rant About Blockchains
- bipvanwinkle 8y agoI'm likely guilty of being a naive technologist. I appreciate this different perspective.
- beaner 8y agoOne of the author's points seems to be decentralized technologies tend to have large points of centralization, so why does it matter that they're decentralized? For me, the answer is the ability to opt out. When it comes to crypto currency specifically, it doesn't matter to me if 99% of users store their money on coinbase, as long as I individually have the ability to remove myself from the system. The point isn't to force decentralization on everyone, it's to provide an opt-out ability to those who want it.
- Qworg 8y agoThere's no ability to opt out if Coinbase (for example) dominates all the other exchanges into nonexistence.
- fiatjaf 8y agoWhat if you create your own exchange? Eureka!
- beaner 8y agoThat's not how it works. They could be the only exchange anywhere, but they'd still only be one node in the network. Exchanges greatly help the transition to crypto but they are not necessary for it's existence
- Qworg 8y agoWhat is value? Without an exchange, how do you secure it?
- improv32 8y agoExchanges facilitate liquidity between crypto and other common currencies. This has obvious value. But just like any currency, the value of a crypto is what you can get for it. So in the hypothetical where there are no exchanges, there would still be value in terms of the things you can buy with crypto directly.
- chrisco255 8y agoI mean if I give you X BTC for Y products or services, no exchange need be involved.
- wpietri 8y agoThis is the theory that has been expressed for years, but it is in practice still a fantasy. Somebody tried earlier this year to live on it for 36 hours; even in a major city it's not practical: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-living-on-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
- beaner 8y agoActually dark net markets work this way.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoWe need more developments and time to move away from the hodl mindset to where crypto can be seen as currency not an asset. How much time this will take? I'm not sure, after all we are talking about some very powerful and ingrained institutions involved.
- chrisco255 8y agoUSD has a 225 year head start...not surprised BTC hasn't hit that level of adoption yet. Credit cards took a few decades to hit mainstream too to the point where you could literally use them everywhere.
- 8y ago
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoYou can opt out of baking with cash far easier than away from exchanges with crypto.
- beaner 8y agoI don't know what you mean. Baking?
- schrodinger 8y agoI think it was a typo for banking.
- rlpb 8y agoIt's not possible to opt out of banking with cash and still be able to transfer cash over the Internet.
- CyberDildonics 8y agoGetting out of exchanges is trivial. You transfer your money to an address you control. That's it, it isn't tough. Then you can use your money electronically, which is why it has different use cases than cash.
- darawk 8y agoYes, but cash has different properties than crypto. Some of those properties are better, some are worse. Depending on what you want to do, crypto may be more useful than cash.
- skybrian 8y agoThis isn't really about Coinbase as an exchange. It has a bit more to do with 51% attacks by miners. They are either possible or they aren't, and either way is bad because you're screwed if your money gets stolen. Might it be better to accept the risk of centralization and be able to dispute transactions? Preferably without the drama that happened with Etherium when they did that. Another possibility is the Linux/DNS model where you have a central authorities who commit public transactions that are closely watched. Though this is only possible for things done in public.
- beaner 8y ago> This isn't really about Coinbase as an exchange It is though. The author's examples are about end-user consolidation on platforms that are built on the decentralized network, not the consolidation of the network itself.
- wpietri 8y agoI'd like to address this bit: > The classic rebuttal against blockchains and other distributed technologies goes something like this: there's nothing a blockchain can do that a plain old SQL database can't do cheaper and more efficiently. That's true, but it's also missing the point, and I'll leave it at that. That is definitely not missing the point when it is raised in response to things that are sold as "OMG blockchain!" but do not need (or often, even make use of) what makes blockchains unique. Which is, IMHO, at least 95% of the things that I come across marketed as involving blockchains.
- darawk 8y agoIt's missing the point in the sense that plain SQL has properties that are not desirable for blockchain's (valid) use cases. Consider Git. Git could be implemented using plain SQL, but it's not. It's not implemented with SQL because SQL would be centralized. One entity would have to own the truth of a codebase. This is an unacceptable property for many open source projects, which is why Git was created. The essential use case of a blockchain is when you have something where you want an immutable history, and where, for whatever reason, it is either undesirable, or difficult to converge on a single entity to own that history. This arises in many, many places. Financial assets, source code, legal documents, etc.. It is not that you can't implement say, legal document version control without a blockchain. You absolutely can. But to do so, you have to trust a single entity to warehouse that truth for you. Blockchains are a way of solving that problem, just like Git was a way of solving it for open source.
- hobs 8y ago> It's missing the point in the sense that plain SQL has properties that are not desirable for blockchain's (valid) use cases. Consider Git. Git could be implemented using plain SQL, but it's not. It's not implemented with SQL because SQL would be centralized. One entity would have to own the truth of a codebase. This is an unacceptable property for many open source projects, which is why Git was created. Huh? "SQL would be centralized" At no point is git required to use anything over a network or somehow is more decentralized than a database you pass around and insert data into. A push request is a request to push the same data I pushed into my database into yours, whether its SQL or not makes no meaningful difference.
- legionof7 8y agoOff topic but doing blogs on Notion seems like a really good idea. I like the format.
- CharlesW 8y agoWhat's interesting about it?
- elvinyung 8y agoYeah! Using Notion as a publishing method seemed like the natural choice to me. It's basically zero effort to share my notes in a nice presentable way.
- rajekas 8y agoI was thinking the same thing. If only Notion allowed custom domain mapping - I will be the first person to shift my public content to Notion, having already done so with much of my private content.
- keyle 8y agoHuh someone is typing in that post as I read it. Pretty cool, but confusing.
- elvinyung 8y agosorry :P
- fernly 8y agoHe quotes Scott Alexander on "Moloch" (an essay I haven't read yet), "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out.... The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." Is this not a fancy way of describing what's usually called the Tragedy of the Commons? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- wycs 8y agoIt is about the tragedy of the commons and what it implies when self-modification becomes possible, such as genetic engineering in humans and recursive self-improvement in potential future AIs. That essay is a hell of a piece or writing. It didn't so much change my object-level policy opinions for the here and now, but it ripped the heart out of my Libertarianism. I've always found markets and selection beautiful and fascinating and powerful, which is all true. But I also thought they had a teleology that was humanistic. This is false. To the extent this seems true now, it is only because humans are the current hardware markets are running on. Fundamentally, they are not our side in the long term. I have found few pieces of writing more powerful: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ Nick Bostrom explores similar themes in The Future of Human Evolution: https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html
- sooheon 8y agoLoved this rabbit hole. Thanks!
- elvinyung 8y agoMoloch isn't just the tragedy of the commons. It's a generalization of it that applies to many more classes of decentralized behavior.
- pdimitar 8y agoThis is why I am very hesitative to accept a job in the "blockchain area", and I am still not convinced that I should. Every single time I asked the question "how do you guys make your money?" it has been evaded ("we work in the finance area", thanks, that explains everything!) or has been paraphrased into "is my job secure?" which was then answered positively. I mean yes, my main motivation to ask is indeed about if my job is secure for at least a year -- in an area where people secure investor money by promising basically thin air, but I am also asking the question to gain an understanding of the company's business culture. And I haven't got the slightest idea of that after 7 interviews in the last 5 months. I simply cannot wrap my head around this mass halucination. How are investors even agreeing with giving several million bucks to an enthusiastic young person with zero business planning? And zero ideas how will they repay the investment? The pitchers (future CEOs) are just like "we are totally gonna revolutionize area X with blockchain!" and then money starts rolling in. I am sure I am over-simplifying but still, can somebody explain this process to me? I am still baffled to this day.