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I brought arguments. It should be easy for you to take part in this discussion by using my arguments and showing they are wrong. I have no clue why you would s

by Hermio 5y ago

I brought arguments. It should be easy for you to take part in this discussion by using my arguments and showing they are wrong. I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different. "who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him" I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Ah well, if English is not your primary language I suppose I could have been a bit harsh. I'll give one example and expand. You wrote: >No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments. Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content. Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  > Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups'). Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives. However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point. People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing). > As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.

by Hermio 5y ago

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

Ah well, if English is not your primary language I suppose I could have been a bit harsh. I'll give one example and expand. You wrote: >No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments. Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content. Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.

chriswarbo 5y ago
> Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups'). Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives. However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point. People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing). > As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.