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> your fiat currency wins out in that cash doesn't require anything but people's faith they can trade it Disagree. Fiat money requires an enormous expenditure

> your fiat currency wins out in that cash doesn't require anything but people's faith they can trade it Disagree. Fiat money requires an enormous expenditure to maintain its economy. You literally need an army and authorities to protect its use, prevent stealing, prevent counterfeits, track it and tax it. This "fiat" is huge in man-hours and time. With blockchain you have that for basically free. It takes an enormous amount of effort and preparation to roll out a fiat (like the Euro) while a kid in a basement can roll out her own ICO and (even though the coins are useless) people can still trust that they wont lose them.

salawat 7y ago
Except your cryptocurrency is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial product that requires extensive infrastructure to build and keep operational to the point you can start moving to the crypto currency as a means of exchange. Think about it. In terms of both physics and logistics, you need a functioning economic landscape in order to bootstrap your cryptocurrency based economic landscape; and even then, what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a copy of everyone else in the ecosystems financial transactions. A prospect really only palatable to those who have something to gain by being able to parse all of that data and extract meaning. Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. Me paying Joe 5 bucks should not be causing bit flips to have to happen in Japan. That feels free nowadays, given, but there is real and tangible cost there, even if it isn't necessarily physical. Furthermore, what about your failure modes? How do you reconcile partitions in the network leading to divergent branches over time? Throwing out 24 hours worth of transactions by half your users isn't a terribly good model. How about manual reversion? Care to do a blockchain transaction on paper? No processor mind! Something I've learned about evaluating technological impacts is that the "Loop on! Shiny! Cool!" aspects start to give way more and more as you scale up to get replaced with "Well, crap, we really painted ourselves into a corner here." I can see the applicability of blockchain to niche applications; however, I'm simply not sold at all as to it's desirability as an overarching means of common economic exchange (e.g. currency). It's a ledger, and a token. It's great for assigning some value to the token, equating it to the national currency, and then tracking your economic exchanges with the population of users who use your stuff. In fact, I'm not so sure the big obsession with blockchain and crypto hasn't been subverted from it's anti-establishment/anti-regulation roots because tech companies have started to realize how valuable the giant chunks of financial transaction data will become given enough other information to reason from. I mean hell, this is just off the top of the head kinda stuff.
- buboard 7y ago
  > is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial product that requires extensive infrastructure You can deploy a TCP/IP network on a moon base powered by solar cells. Infrastructure wise cryptos are way easier to deploy and maintain than having to print paper, create banks, ATMs, safes etc etc. > what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a copy No what you have gained is that instead of needing an entire army so people can trust your currency, you have an algorithm. Cryptos are the google of money: people trust the algorithmn because they can't trust each other. > How about manual reversion? Of course ideal cryptocurrencies are immutable. It should be impossible to reverse anything. But, markets usually build insurance services on top of it, which cover for all the things that the blockchain does not - at a cost of course. Still better than fiat. > Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. And yet most of europe has either moved into the Euro, or pegged to it. And global central banks are more in sync than ever before. Localization is impossible and incompatible with globalized market. Look at the Euro crisis, it was really caused by the lack of "local" central banking, where none of the countries had the option to devalue their currency. There was a lot of talk and pressure about getting out of it , yet it did not happen and people still overwhelmingly support the euro , despite the austerity. I think this shows the resilience of a deflationary currency (the euro is close to it). IMHO, the euro proved to be a slightly better option than devalued currencies , the devaluation of which would cause much more severe problems in today's globalized, self-insufficient economies than it would in the past.

salawat 7y ago

Except your cryptocurrency is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial product that requires extensive infrastructure to build and keep operational to the point you can start moving to the crypto currency as a means of exchange. Think about it. In terms of both physics and logistics, you need a functioning economic landscape in order to bootstrap your cryptocurrency based economic landscape; and even then, what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a copy of everyone else in the ecosystems financial transactions. A prospect really only palatable to those who have something to gain by being able to parse all of that data and extract meaning. Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. Me paying Joe 5 bucks should not be causing bit flips to have to happen in Japan. That feels free nowadays, given, but there is real and tangible cost there, even if it isn't necessarily physical. Furthermore, what about your failure modes? How do you reconcile partitions in the network leading to divergent branches over time? Throwing out 24 hours worth of transactions by half your users isn't a terribly good model. How about manual reversion? Care to do a blockchain transaction on paper? No processor mind! Something I've learned about evaluating technological impacts is that the "Loop on! Shiny! Cool!" aspects start to give way more and more as you scale up to get replaced with "Well, crap, we really painted ourselves into a corner here." I can see the applicability of blockchain to niche applications; however, I'm simply not sold at all as to it's desirability as an overarching means of common economic exchange (e.g. currency). It's a ledger, and a token. It's great for assigning some value to the token, equating it to the national currency, and then tracking your economic exchanges with the population of users who use your stuff. In fact, I'm not so sure the big obsession with blockchain and crypto hasn't been subverted from it's anti-establishment/anti-regulation roots because tech companies have started to realize how valuable the giant chunks of financial transaction data will become given enough other information to reason from. I mean hell, this is just off the top of the head kinda stuff.

buboard 7y ago
> is bootstrapped on a highly-developed industrial product that requires extensive infrastructure You can deploy a TCP/IP network on a moon base powered by solar cells. Infrastructure wise cryptos are way easier to deploy and maintain than having to print paper, create banks, ATMs, safes etc etc. > what have you really gained except that now everyone else is maintaining a copy No what you have gained is that instead of needing an entire army so people can trust your currency, you have an algorithm. Cryptos are the google of money: people trust the algorithmn because they can't trust each other. > How about manual reversion? Of course ideal cryptocurrencies are immutable. It should be impossible to reverse anything. But, markets usually build insurance services on top of it, which cover for all the things that the blockchain does not - at a cost of course. Still better than fiat. > Localization isn't a bug. It's a feature. And yet most of europe has either moved into the Euro, or pegged to it. And global central banks are more in sync than ever before. Localization is impossible and incompatible with globalized market. Look at the Euro crisis, it was really caused by the lack of "local" central banking, where none of the countries had the option to devalue their currency. There was a lot of talk and pressure about getting out of it , yet it did not happen and people still overwhelmingly support the euro , despite the austerity. I think this shows the resilience of a deflationary currency (the euro is close to it). IMHO, the euro proved to be a slightly better option than devalued currencies , the devaluation of which would cause much more severe problems in today's globalized, self-insufficient economies than it would in the past.