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This is a bit like saying that nobody needs a Linux desktop because Windows is good enough. Some people just care more than you do about certain principles, eve

This is a bit like saying that nobody needs a Linux desktop because Windows is good enough. Some people just care more than you do about certain principles, even if caring about those principles means that they have to endure a lower "quality" product. Most blockchains are strictly inferior to a modern financial system when it comes to things like speed and cost of transferring small sums of money - which is the use case that most people have. But, if you are running Wikileaks, blockchain payments are superior because the credit card companies can't decide to stop processing your payments. Does anyone else need it? Right now, I think the answer is "no". But nobody really needed a Linux desktop either, and 25 years on we have Chromebooks and Android. Ethereum allows you to upload complex scripts to it, where those scripts are executed by a variety of different nodes which compare results and ensure that the script was executed faithfully. Do I personally need this? Probably not, no. There's a competitive market in cloud hosting and very few circumstances where I would be afraid that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft is going to tamper with my computation, or refuse to execute it. But there are situations in which it is difficult to get multiple parties to agree on a trustworthy host for data and applications, and current political trends point toward that problem growing in significance. Maybe at some point we will want to use blockchain systems to maintain audit trails or even to coordinate our computations. If these systems can prove robustness and reliability over a long period of time, maybe it makes sense to write the rules for multi-party computations as Ethereum scripts, and it becomes a ubiquitous low-level part of the stack. Maybe everyone ends up having an Ethereum account and we use it in place of the current payment system. Who knows? These scenarios are unlikely, but then nobody in 1995 would have believed that in 2020 both the majority of the world's servers and the world's most popular personal computing devices would run Linux.

louwrentius 6y ago
I don't understand why this topic is in any way relatable to the Linux vs. Windows discussion, even as an analogy. > But, if you are running Wikileaks, blockchain payments are superior because the credit card companies can't decide to stop processing your payments. That's not a good example to justify any of this, in my opinion. > But there are situations in which it is difficult to get multiple parties to agree on a trustworthy host for data and applications, and current political trends point toward that problem growing in significance. Such as? I don't read anything I can relate to. > Who knows? These scenarios are unlikely, but then nobody in 1995 would have believed that in 2020 both the majority of the world's servers and the world's most popular personal computing devices would run Linux. I think that's just false equivalence.
- rjknight 6y ago
  > That's not a good example to justify any of this, in my opinion. It's a real example from recent history, where technology A was able to solve a problem that technology B could not. This should affect one's belief in the merits of technology A. > Such as? During the recent US election, Facebook has struggled to present itself as a neutral broker of information. There were occasions in which it appears that Facebook charged higher or lower rates to different parties for political advertisements. All of the major social media companies are now facing politically-motivated attacks, where political actors are attempting to undermine confidence in the neutrality and efficacy of moderation, ad allocation, and recommendation algorithms. There is a plausible argument that open, verifiable computing networks could be a useful tool in dealing with such situations. I put the emphasis on plausible because the standard for plausibility is not especially high. There are plenty of other solutions to this problem. I personally think that this is sufficient to make Ethereum interesting. > I think that's just false equivalence. What is false about it? My statement about how Linux was perceived in the early-mid-90s is definitely true. The key difference between Linux and its competitors was that it was an open system that could not be controlled by a single private actor, which was a serious concern given Microsoft's dominance of the OS market (which led to their antitrust trial). Ethereum has broadly similar positioning as a provider of computing services, whose only competitive advantage is that it cannot be controlled by a single private actor.

louwrentius 6y ago

I don't understand why this topic is in any way relatable to the Linux vs. Windows discussion, even as an analogy. > But, if you are running Wikileaks, blockchain payments are superior because the credit card companies can't decide to stop processing your payments. That's not a good example to justify any of this, in my opinion. > But there are situations in which it is difficult to get multiple parties to agree on a trustworthy host for data and applications, and current political trends point toward that problem growing in significance. Such as? I don't read anything I can relate to. > Who knows? These scenarios are unlikely, but then nobody in 1995 would have believed that in 2020 both the majority of the world's servers and the world's most popular personal computing devices would run Linux. I think that's just false equivalence.

rjknight 6y ago
> That's not a good example to justify any of this, in my opinion. It's a real example from recent history, where technology A was able to solve a problem that technology B could not. This should affect one's belief in the merits of technology A. > Such as? During the recent US election, Facebook has struggled to present itself as a neutral broker of information. There were occasions in which it appears that Facebook charged higher or lower rates to different parties for political advertisements. All of the major social media companies are now facing politically-motivated attacks, where political actors are attempting to undermine confidence in the neutrality and efficacy of moderation, ad allocation, and recommendation algorithms. There is a plausible argument that open, verifiable computing networks could be a useful tool in dealing with such situations. I put the emphasis on plausible because the standard for plausibility is not especially high. There are plenty of other solutions to this problem. I personally think that this is sufficient to make Ethereum interesting. > I think that's just false equivalence. What is false about it? My statement about how Linux was perceived in the early-mid-90s is definitely true. The key difference between Linux and its competitors was that it was an open system that could not be controlled by a single private actor, which was a serious concern given Microsoft's dominance of the OS market (which led to their antitrust trial). Ethereum has broadly similar positioning as a provider of computing services, whose only competitive advantage is that it cannot be controlled by a single private actor.