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>maybe blockchain will solve the problem of trust among humans Absolutely not. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www

>maybe blockchain will solve the problem of trust among humans Absolutely not. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...

hanniabu 6y ago
There's so much wrong with this post I'm not even sure where to start. Literally almost every paragraph starts something untrue. The whole article is written from a false understanding.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along if you want people to take your claim seriously.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    Well, he does think that one is unable to establish the integrity and authenticity of a message by using DKIM, so... He does seem to have a weird cult of personality around him but I can't really understand why. He has been irrelevant for quite a while now.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along… How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Look, I get it. I respect Schneier's knowledge on encryption but he is wrong about blockchains and about Bitcoin in particular. But he wouldn't be the first establishment technologist/economist/politician to be wrong about Bitcoin. As I write this, the market cap of Bitcoin is a little over $348 billion dollars [1]; there's no way it gets to this valuation if its distributed trust model didn't work. He's making social and process arguments, not technical ones. [1]: https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      > How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire. The market also convinced itself for nearly a decade that "housing prices never go down". Lots of people can be wrong for a surprisingly long time.
      - alwillis 6y ago
        Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire. Yes, bubbles are a thing, but Bitcoin appears to be something different. It's passed ever test and attack. It's now being taken seriously by mainstream financial professionals, CEOs of publicly traded companies and Wall Street. These facts themselves can't prove that Bitcoin is not a bubble but it does mean if you buy into that line of thinking, then encryption and math have to be suspect as well, since Bitcoin's functioning relies on them. Also, Bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past 10 years in which most people didn't take it seriously: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s-9-000-000-rise-this-decade-leaves-the-skeptics-aghast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s...
        oarsinsync 6y ago
        > Also, Bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past 10 years in which most people didn't take it seriously You're literally describing the bubble. An asset that is worth $20k one day, and worth $6k 6 months later, is worthless to anyone except speculators, speculating on... a bubble. Disclaimer: I am long BTC.
        alwillis 6y ago
        You're literally describing the bubble. An asset that is worth $20k one day, and worth $6k 6 months later, is worthless to anyone except speculators, speculating on... a bubble. This is short term thinking and a general mischaracterization. First, we've never seen a new form of money created in realtime, so it's hard to say how it's supposed to perform. However, nobody should expect something that will fairly soon have the same market cap as gold (about $10 trillion dollars) to not have a lot volatility as it grows. The tech darlings of today—Apple, Google, Twitter, etc. were also quite volatile as they grew. There's a lot of ups and downs for Apple as it went from darling startup to nearly going out of business in the mid-90's to a $2 trillion dollar market cap today. As you may know, the mantra in the bitcoin community is to HODL—hold on for dear life, not to time the market. For long term investors, the ups and downs don't matter. A publicly traded company that puts its treasury of $425 million into Bitcoin isn't speculating: https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin.
  - Cpoll 6y ago
    Schneier is good at times, but he doesn't always do as much due diligence as he should, and he never bothers to interact with his comment threads, answer questions, or publish retractions. As a result, I've had more than one experience of arguing with people who take his old blog posts as gospel without ever thinking critically about them. His article denouncing the XKCD password scheme is a gem, he doesn't bother (if it were anyone else I'd be less charitable and say doesn't know how) to calculate the entropy, and then he proposes an alternate scheme he invented that almost certainly provides less entropy and is more vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jonnytran 6y ago
  Can you please explain what those untrue statements are and what his false understanding is?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    The “false understanding” is most likely how he starts at the conclusion of “Bitcoin == bad” and works from that instead. But both types of essays are ok. The former is just an “argumentative” or “persuasive” essay, while the latter is akin to a “compare and contrast” one.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I’m actually curious what’s wrong about it? I read it from an outsider perspective and it’s full of very convincing arguments against “blockchains.” You’re absolutely correct that he’s writing from his understanding, but Schneider’s been in the field for decades (more than many Bitcoin proponents are old), so I’m more inclined to believe he knows what he’s talking about than some other random person on the internet.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    I think the main reason for the dissonance is that Schneier talks about the trust that happens (and maybe has to happen in real-world scenarios) while the bitcoin community likes to talk about the minimum amount of trust necessary. You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops. You don't have to trust exchanges, just exchange bitcoin for local currency with your neighbor. And even if you use an exchange you shouldn't store money there anyways. The minimum required trust is tiny (basically you yourself), but of course as Schneier points out the amount of trust involved in practise isn't nearly as low, and for many people the failure cases are much worse
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - spurgu 6y ago
      This is pretty much how I interpret it as well, in regards to trust. One detail Schneier misses though is: > Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money. The second statement contradicts the first. People who don't like/trust government-backed currencies aren't fanatics. The way the big banks handle money is quite reckless and dangerous, as we've seen time and time again. And buying drugs for your own personal use should be legal (IMO) but is not. Cryptocurrencies are useful. Maybe not to most people, or to Bruce Schneier, but that (blanket) statement is simply false.

hanniabu 6y ago

There's so much wrong with this post I'm not even sure where to start. Literally almost every paragraph starts something untrue. The whole article is written from a false understanding.

kstrauser 6y ago
If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along if you want people to take your claim seriously.
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  Well, he does think that one is unable to establish the integrity and authenticity of a message by using DKIM, so... He does seem to have a weird cult of personality around him but I can't really understand why. He has been irrelevant for quite a while now.
- alwillis 6y ago
  If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along… How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Look, I get it. I respect Schneier's knowledge on encryption but he is wrong about blockchains and about Bitcoin in particular. But he wouldn't be the first establishment technologist/economist/politician to be wrong about Bitcoin. As I write this, the market cap of Bitcoin is a little over $348 billion dollars [1]; there's no way it gets to this valuation if its distributed trust model didn't work. He's making social and process arguments, not technical ones. [1]: https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    > How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire. The market also convinced itself for nearly a decade that "housing prices never go down". Lots of people can be wrong for a surprisingly long time.
    - alwillis 6y ago
      Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire. Yes, bubbles are a thing, but Bitcoin appears to be something different. It's passed ever test and attack. It's now being taken seriously by mainstream financial professionals, CEOs of publicly traded companies and Wall Street. These facts themselves can't prove that Bitcoin is not a bubble but it does mean if you buy into that line of thinking, then encryption and math have to be suspect as well, since Bitcoin's functioning relies on them. Also, Bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past 10 years in which most people didn't take it seriously: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s-9-000-000-rise-this-decade-leaves-the-skeptics-aghast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s...
      - oarsinsync 6y ago
        > Also, Bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past 10 years in which most people didn't take it seriously You're literally describing the bubble. An asset that is worth $20k one day, and worth $6k 6 months later, is worthless to anyone except speculators, speculating on... a bubble. Disclaimer: I am long BTC.
        alwillis 6y ago
        You're literally describing the bubble. An asset that is worth $20k one day, and worth $6k 6 months later, is worthless to anyone except speculators, speculating on... a bubble. This is short term thinking and a general mischaracterization. First, we've never seen a new form of money created in realtime, so it's hard to say how it's supposed to perform. However, nobody should expect something that will fairly soon have the same market cap as gold (about $10 trillion dollars) to not have a lot volatility as it grows. The tech darlings of today—Apple, Google, Twitter, etc. were also quite volatile as they grew. There's a lot of ups and downs for Apple as it went from darling startup to nearly going out of business in the mid-90's to a $2 trillion dollar market cap today. As you may know, the mantra in the bitcoin community is to HODL—hold on for dear life, not to time the market. For long term investors, the ups and downs don't matter. A publicly traded company that puts its treasury of $425 million into Bitcoin isn't speculating: https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin.
- Cpoll 6y ago
  Schneier is good at times, but he doesn't always do as much due diligence as he should, and he never bothers to interact with his comment threads, answer questions, or publish retractions. As a result, I've had more than one experience of arguing with people who take his old blog posts as gospel without ever thinking critically about them. His article denouncing the XKCD password scheme is a gem, he doesn't bother (if it were anyone else I'd be less charitable and say doesn't know how) to calculate the entropy, and then he proposes an alternate scheme he invented that almost certainly provides less entropy and is more vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jonnytran 6y ago
Can you please explain what those untrue statements are and what his false understanding is?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  The “false understanding” is most likely how he starts at the conclusion of “Bitcoin == bad” and works from that instead. But both types of essays are ok. The former is just an “argumentative” or “persuasive” essay, while the latter is akin to a “compare and contrast” one.
colejohnson66 6y ago
I’m actually curious what’s wrong about it? I read it from an outsider perspective and it’s full of very convincing arguments against “blockchains.” You’re absolutely correct that he’s writing from his understanding, but Schneider’s been in the field for decades (more than many Bitcoin proponents are old), so I’m more inclined to believe he knows what he’s talking about than some other random person on the internet.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  I think the main reason for the dissonance is that Schneier talks about the trust that happens (and maybe has to happen in real-world scenarios) while the bitcoin community likes to talk about the minimum amount of trust necessary. You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops. You don't have to trust exchanges, just exchange bitcoin for local currency with your neighbor. And even if you use an exchange you shouldn't store money there anyways. The minimum required trust is tiny (basically you yourself), but of course as Schneier points out the amount of trust involved in practise isn't nearly as low, and for many people the failure cases are much worse
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - spurgu 6y ago
    This is pretty much how I interpret it as well, in regards to trust. One detail Schneier misses though is: > Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money. The second statement contradicts the first. People who don't like/trust government-backed currencies aren't fanatics. The way the big banks handle money is quite reckless and dangerous, as we've seen time and time again. And buying drugs for your own personal use should be legal (IMO) but is not. Cryptocurrencies are useful. Maybe not to most people, or to Bruce Schneier, but that (blanket) statement is simply false.