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What are you talking about? Fiat currency isn't reprogrammable--how would you implement a consumer protection mechanism on it? Pick your favorite consumer prot

What are you talking about? Fiat currency isn't reprogrammable--how would you implement a consumer protection mechanism on it? Pick your favorite consumer protection mechanism, and I'll pick my favorite cryptocurrency and let's compare: A) the up front implemention cost of the protection mechanism in fiat currency B) the up front implemention cost of the protection mechanism in the crypto C) the year-over-year cost in fiat D) the year over year cost in crypto I bet A and C are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, while B is going to be in the tens of millions and D is going to be in the thousands of dollars. Here's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about: https://www.ccn.com/cardano-to-help-ethiopia-grow-coffee-using-blockchain-tech/ https://www.ccn.com/cardano-to-help-ethiopia-grow-coffee-usi... Consider the recent news regarding contaminated black market vape cartridges--that's going to be insanely expensive to fix, because there's nothing about high schoolers passing around dollars after school that gives those students any insight into the supply chain of the cartridges they're buying. But if some vape company did with their supply chain what Cardano is trying to do with coffee, they could provide consumers (and authorities) a way to trace their products back to their origins, a capability that already would have saved several lives. It's not surprising that Libra is a dumpster fire, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

aiCeivi9 7y ago
> they could provide consumers (and authorities) a way to trace their products back to their origins, a capability that already would have saved several lives. Why would blockchain be required for that? In case of drugs and food there recalls are being done using batch number of day of production.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
  Suppose somebody named Mary wants to sell you a vape cartridge which has a serial number, and they also give your a website which accepts the serial number and tells you: > Joe runs the factory and gave this cartridge to Bob. Bob have it to Mary. The assumption is that if you buy it then the site will then say: > And Mary gave it to aiCeivi9 What reason do you have to believe that the website contents are accurate or that people accepting vape cartridges from Joe Bob and Mary are still alive? In the blockchain case, you can see that Joe Bob and Mary have sold thousands of these and that very few of the transactions are in dispute over authenticity. Also, rather than trusting some faceless 4.6 star rating you can see which of the people that supplied the rating are ones that you know, and which of those are ones that you trust. You can also see if you trust people who trust Joe Bob and Mary. This let's you make a more informed decision about the quality of the thing you're buying.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jayd16 7y ago
>I bet A and C are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, while B is going to be in the tens of millions and D is going to be in the thousands of dollars. Bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. If we're talking about digital transactions we already have credit cards and digital transfers. A block chain isn't required for those benefits. Supply chain tracking is interesting but literally no one is talking about that. Its also an even harder problem. Its really not verifiable at all because you're now relying on data from outside the chain, ie how many widgets were created, whether the label on the real life widget is unique or forged, etc.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
  I expect the waste of Bitcoin will not carry forward into its successors. Nobody has yet proven that high value proof of stake currencies can scale, but I bet they will. Also, what kind of consumer protections would you want to see in a currency? It seems to me that ensuring that you actually got what you paid for pretty much sums it up but I'm probably overlooking something.
Retric 7y ago
Yea, having third parties capable of reversing transactions has an associated cost. But, it’s Billions relative to fraud, so Billions ends up being cheap.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
  Yeah, for now it's all we have, so I guess the juice is worth the squeeze. But in a world where our cryptocurrencies are a bit more mature I think we can stop being reactive by reversing transactions and start being preventative by using their structure to build chains and webs of trust that make fraud harder to commit up front, rather than just making it harder to get away with.
  - semiotagonal 7y ago
    The amounts to giving the advantage to fraudsters until something that doesn't exist is invented. Blockchains are irrevocable and unalterable, which removes two useful tools (reversing and changing transactions), and replaces them with nothing workable.
    - __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
      The initial question was whether cryptocurrencies have the capacity for consumer protection measures, not whether those measures are ready for prime time. I'm just arguing that when they're ready, they'll be more efficient than what we have, so we should encourage their development in the meantime (though maybe not in Libra's particular case). Also, there are limits on how old a transaction can be when a bank goes and rewrites history. In my experience the limit is about six months. Transactions older than than are considered settled. If this is a feature that people want in a cryptocurrency, it shouldn't be hard to achieve with smart contracts. The problem right now is just that you need a solid settlement layer before you work on features supporting the politics of rejiggering unsettled transactions. Also, provided there is community consensus (this differs based on whether your currency is proof of work or proof is stake) blockchains can be altered after-the-fact to undo a threat. It happens: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereum-blockchain-forks-to-return-stolen-funds https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereu... It's just that for most currencies, it's currently a political affair that occurs at a risk to the stability of the overall system. But there are (what appear to be) good technical solutions to that (decred, for example, has a neat approach to post-fork-attempt stability https://medium.com/decred/detailed-analysis-of-decred-fork-resistance-93022e0bcde7 https://medium.com/decred/detailed-analysis-of-decred-fork-r...). As far as deciding whether a transaction ought to be settled in the first place, people are experimenting with some really interesting approaches (https://particl.wiki/learn/market/mad-escrow https://particl.wiki/learn/market/mad-escrow for instance). It's probably not time to forget your bank password and switch to crypto, but if we want to eventually have good solutions to our fraud problems then we should be working to shape crypto into the system we want, not dismissing it as inflexible.
bennyelv 7y ago
You've made some assumptions here about the impact of a verified supply chain for vape cartridges, and it sounds like you're proposing a solution to a non-existent problem. A reputable supplier of vape cartridges gains nothing from having a verified supply chain - people trust them anyway and they maintain a supply of good cartridges to protect that reputation. A non-reputable supplier of vape cartridges doesn't care, and only sells to people who don't care what they're buying. Their lack of good reputation doesn't matter, and their lack of a verifiable supply chain won't matter either. If the customer wants a dodgy black market vape cartridge, that's what they'll buy. If they want a quality one from a reputable source, they can already do this.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
  That's a fair point. But I mentioned high schoolers in my example because they can't buy from a reputable source since they're not old enough (not that I think they should be vaping at all, but supply and demand...). But still, the perpetrators here are not technically capable of pulling off a convincing forgery, so if the kids were sensitive to this issue in the first place then I guess there would indeed be no reason to insert a blockchain into the situation. So let's take a scenario where the middle men are indeed capable of convincing forgeries: sneakers. Cardano is working on a supply chain integration there too: https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology-to-fight-counterfeits/amp/ https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology... And my wife's students (she's a teacher) are really into their sneakers. They're also largely unaware that chain/web of trust type measures exist at all for validation of product authenticity--but if Nike started doing this, they'd become experts overnight. And then, after school, when offered a sketchy vape product, they might think twice. Maybe that's a weak argument too. Still, I like the ability to use the same channels you money would flow through to determine if your upcoming purchase came from where you think it did, and I think that that's a capability that's going to be hard for fiat currency to mimic.

aiCeivi9 7y ago

> they could provide consumers (and authorities) a way to trace their products back to their origins, a capability that already would have saved several lives. Why would blockchain be required for that? In case of drugs and food there recalls are being done using batch number of day of production.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
Suppose somebody named Mary wants to sell you a vape cartridge which has a serial number, and they also give your a website which accepts the serial number and tells you: > Joe runs the factory and gave this cartridge to Bob. Bob have it to Mary. The assumption is that if you buy it then the site will then say: > And Mary gave it to aiCeivi9 What reason do you have to believe that the website contents are accurate or that people accepting vape cartridges from Joe Bob and Mary are still alive? In the blockchain case, you can see that Joe Bob and Mary have sold thousands of these and that very few of the transactions are in dispute over authenticity. Also, rather than trusting some faceless 4.6 star rating you can see which of the people that supplied the rating are ones that you know, and which of those are ones that you trust. You can also see if you trust people who trust Joe Bob and Mary. This let's you make a more informed decision about the quality of the thing you're buying.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jayd16 7y ago

>I bet A and C are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, while B is going to be in the tens of millions and D is going to be in the thousands of dollars. Bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. If we're talking about digital transactions we already have credit cards and digital transfers. A block chain isn't required for those benefits. Supply chain tracking is interesting but literally no one is talking about that. Its also an even harder problem. Its really not verifiable at all because you're now relying on data from outside the chain, ie how many widgets were created, whether the label on the real life widget is unique or forged, etc.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
I expect the waste of Bitcoin will not carry forward into its successors. Nobody has yet proven that high value proof of stake currencies can scale, but I bet they will. Also, what kind of consumer protections would you want to see in a currency? It seems to me that ensuring that you actually got what you paid for pretty much sums it up but I'm probably overlooking something.

Retric 7y ago

Yea, having third parties capable of reversing transactions has an associated cost. But, it’s Billions relative to fraud, so Billions ends up being cheap.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
Yeah, for now it's all we have, so I guess the juice is worth the squeeze. But in a world where our cryptocurrencies are a bit more mature I think we can stop being reactive by reversing transactions and start being preventative by using their structure to build chains and webs of trust that make fraud harder to commit up front, rather than just making it harder to get away with.
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  The amounts to giving the advantage to fraudsters until something that doesn't exist is invented. Blockchains are irrevocable and unalterable, which removes two useful tools (reversing and changing transactions), and replaces them with nothing workable.
  - __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
    The initial question was whether cryptocurrencies have the capacity for consumer protection measures, not whether those measures are ready for prime time. I'm just arguing that when they're ready, they'll be more efficient than what we have, so we should encourage their development in the meantime (though maybe not in Libra's particular case). Also, there are limits on how old a transaction can be when a bank goes and rewrites history. In my experience the limit is about six months. Transactions older than than are considered settled. If this is a feature that people want in a cryptocurrency, it shouldn't be hard to achieve with smart contracts. The problem right now is just that you need a solid settlement layer before you work on features supporting the politics of rejiggering unsettled transactions. Also, provided there is community consensus (this differs based on whether your currency is proof of work or proof is stake) blockchains can be altered after-the-fact to undo a threat. It happens: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereum-blockchain-forks-to-return-stolen-funds https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereu... It's just that for most currencies, it's currently a political affair that occurs at a risk to the stability of the overall system. But there are (what appear to be) good technical solutions to that (decred, for example, has a neat approach to post-fork-attempt stability https://medium.com/decred/detailed-analysis-of-decred-fork-resistance-93022e0bcde7 https://medium.com/decred/detailed-analysis-of-decred-fork-r...). As far as deciding whether a transaction ought to be settled in the first place, people are experimenting with some really interesting approaches (https://particl.wiki/learn/market/mad-escrow https://particl.wiki/learn/market/mad-escrow for instance). It's probably not time to forget your bank password and switch to crypto, but if we want to eventually have good solutions to our fraud problems then we should be working to shape crypto into the system we want, not dismissing it as inflexible.

bennyelv 7y ago

You've made some assumptions here about the impact of a verified supply chain for vape cartridges, and it sounds like you're proposing a solution to a non-existent problem. A reputable supplier of vape cartridges gains nothing from having a verified supply chain - people trust them anyway and they maintain a supply of good cartridges to protect that reputation. A non-reputable supplier of vape cartridges doesn't care, and only sells to people who don't care what they're buying. Their lack of good reputation doesn't matter, and their lack of a verifiable supply chain won't matter either. If the customer wants a dodgy black market vape cartridge, that's what they'll buy. If they want a quality one from a reputable source, they can already do this.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
That's a fair point. But I mentioned high schoolers in my example because they can't buy from a reputable source since they're not old enough (not that I think they should be vaping at all, but supply and demand...). But still, the perpetrators here are not technically capable of pulling off a convincing forgery, so if the kids were sensitive to this issue in the first place then I guess there would indeed be no reason to insert a blockchain into the situation. So let's take a scenario where the middle men are indeed capable of convincing forgeries: sneakers. Cardano is working on a supply chain integration there too: https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology-to-fight-counterfeits/amp/ https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology... And my wife's students (she's a teacher) are really into their sneakers. They're also largely unaware that chain/web of trust type measures exist at all for validation of product authenticity--but if Nike started doing this, they'd become experts overnight. And then, after school, when offered a sketchy vape product, they might think twice. Maybe that's a weak argument too. Still, I like the ability to use the same channels you money would flow through to determine if your upcoming purchase came from where you think it did, and I think that that's a capability that's going to be hard for fiat currency to mimic.