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Sounds to me as if you dont have any "blockchain project" ideas. That's fine do something else. If whatever you every wished to crate does not profit form this

by noxer 5y ago

Sounds to me as if you dont have any "blockchain project" ideas. That's fine do something else. If whatever you every wished to crate does not profit form this tech, it probably really just does not profit form it. Nothing wrong with that. It would be a shame to slap blockchain on a cool project that doesn't need it.

arcticbull 5y ago
No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't. And that's because there's a huge fundamental cost to trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness that substantially no project actually benefits from.
- noxer 5y ago
  The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits. Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions" Its not impossible to make it central it just not lucrative in any way. But if the middlemen is removed it doesn't have to be lucrative for that middlemen anymore and it turns out to be almost free because you just need to send p2p data packages to stream money. Its called interledger protocol (ILP) its not a blockchain its a protocol but like I said above you need to settle somehow and which bank or financial system lets you settle fractions of cents? No one because there is no money to be made from this so a system that does not generate money for the owner (a decentral system) works best.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits. Correct. > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions" Any wallet could offer the same thing. PayPal could offer it. But they don't because nobody wants micropayments. Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments, it's something they think they do, but in reality, they do not. This comes up from time to time. One of the crypto folks actually wrote a really good paper on it, I'll dig it up. You just build up the balance until it's over $1 and ACH/RTP it. Those transaction methods cost $0.0033 in bulk. Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.
    - noxer 5y ago
      >Any wallet could offer the same thing. No, its not a wallet at all its a protocol like TCP but for money. If you are interested go read about it first. There is no point in arguing about something you dont know what it is. >PayPal could offer it Yes, they could but its not lucrative and if it would be they would not be interested in using a public interoperable protocol where everyone can offer the same service and compete. So you have some sites that use PayPal and other sites use 15 other payment companies. You just recreated subscription hell. Its completely missing the point. If its decentral and standardized all systems work together. If I have the wrong token or currency the decentral system finds a way to swap them so I can use any services no matter what "wallet" or currency I use. I cold stream Netflix and Amazon Prime and only pay what I watch and when I watch. Also why would I want PayPal to know whom I stream money? If its central its impossible to hide such data. If its p2p no third party know what content I pay for. That's how it should be. >Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments We already have it.... its called ads. Ever page load, every click, every interaction and every data collected about you is a form of inefficient micropayment. One that does not respect your privacy, tires to maximize the time you waste and tries to trick you into buying stuff you dont need. And the cost of that is slapped onto the product you may buy. Don't you think there are tons of people out there who would rather not annoy their visitors with ads? They would rather have them pay a few fraction of a cent directly to them without the ad-mafia taking a huge junk out of the revenue. And dont you think there are people who would rather pay a few fraction of a cent than see ads or block ads knowing that the content creator does not get paid then? >Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything. That's your personal opinion. The facts are not on your side. People already pay to not see ads its just cumbersome because every service needs a subscription or pro app or whatever. It does not scale to the number or services the average user wants to use. And it hardly adjust to the actual use. Its objectively just so much worse than if you could stream for what you use in real time. You could go a long way without ads for a few bucks if you would replace them with the actual revenue they create. Only if your time is worthless you would rather watch a 15 second ad than pay 1/10 cent or whatever to not see it.
      - 5y ago
  - megameter 5y ago
    Exactly - a good use of a decentralized ledger doesn't leave so much room for speculative profit motives. However, my own investment thesis is that the "crypto" market is ultimately destined to march towards that useful and unprofitable outcome, kicking and screaming the whole way, by dint of the long-term market survivors being the civically oriented perennials. But this is a long journey, maybe another decade or two in the making(a epochal shift in tech). It will continue to have ups and downs.
    - noxer 5y ago
      The goal was to remove the middlemen to make stuff cheaper/unbiased/fair/private. The token prices going up an down is indeed just a side effete of speculation. but will definitely go away over time its not solving any problem and it hides the tech because people just see the money.
  - mtalantikite 5y ago
    > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. I’m sorry, what? Genuinely curious about what the use case is here, I’ve never heard of this before. I pay based on the amount of time I consume?
    - noxer 5y ago
      Currently Coil costs you 5 bucks a month and its distributed to the content creators that you consume on the basis of how long you consume them. The Creator must have a web monetization enabled website [1] to participate. And you need either an add-on or a browser that has it integrated. The creator can show/hide content based on whether you stream money or not (kinda like a paywall) Its obviously intentional very simplified ATM because its rather new. There is long way to go before we can actually pay for exactly what we consume. [1] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ Old (2018) but fun: A Raspberry Pi ILP power switch (Turns on a light if money is streamed) https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-powerswitch-howto/ https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-powers...
      - mtalantikite 5y ago
        Isn’t this roughly similar to what Spotify does? You get paid based on how many listeners you have? Or YouTube paying the content hosts a split on ad revenue? I guess I’m not sure what crypto solves here that doesn’t actually already happen. Isn’t Coil just another centralized place you pay that then pays out to its network, like everyone else?
  - mtnGoat 5y ago
    Re: coil.com, what they do is entirely possible on a centralized system. cam sites have been using token based internal payment systems based on minutes viewed, tips, etc at sub $0.01 levels for 20+ years now. and until the tubes came along, all sides profited handsomely. source: i helped build some.
    - noxer 5y ago
      That not what coil does. Coils is just payment provider for web monetization. You can use another (probably none exist so far) and more importantly you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms. The cam site thing maybe look similar on the surface but its not. It only works in very limited full controlled closed system. It can not scale to the web. You would need 100+ subscriptions in the end that not the goal. Or you would need one overlord that has the monopoly on web monetization and everyone is forced to use g$$gle. Obviously bad for all kinds of reasons like privacy, competition, censorship etc etc. Web monetization puts a payment pointer into the HTML meta tag The browser reads this and streams money there. See https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started
      - e12e 5y ago
        > you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms. Like you can use PayPal to sell (access to) digital assets? Or patron? I'm not sure which part of the core value proposition of coil has anything to do with blockchain? And small wonder: crypto/chains allows us to transfer trust (eg, I trust i can buy milk for my dollar, I buy bitcoin for a dollar, I give you bitcoin, if you can sell bitcoin for a dollar, we trust that I have given you the opportunity to buy milk). This could also go via bank transfer, or hybrid systems like PayPal,stripe or vipps[1]. I see some benefit to "magic crypto cash on the interwebz"- but untraceable tender is generally not what chains facilitate. Quite the opposite. When you realize crypto currency can go two ways: perfect taxation (billionaires and corporations will fight it, to the death), or: perfect money laundring/tax evasion (government will fight it, to the death) - the crypto future looks quite distant. [1] a Norwegian bank owned platform for instant digital settlement: https://vipps.no https://vipps.no
- baby 5y ago
  Honestly you don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean better results? What’s your metric? In terms of security it does achieve better result.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution The following > trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness Are better results. But I do admit, that they come at _performance_ trade-offs.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    but they don't achieve any of those, either. All of them rely on a centralised authority, as can be seen with the bitcoin & ethereum forks - if something goes bad, the people in control will step in and make it better. That means there are people in control. This is not trustless, decentralised or permissionless.
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      There's degrees in everything. Permissionless--nobody can stop a transaction from taking place because of ideology. Decentralised--the miners and the software devs have to agree on something to make a hard change. This has happened so rarely as to be a non-issue. When it does happen, the currency forks and those that want to use it can do so as they please. BTC became LiteCoin, BCH, and BSV from hard protocol forks. Ethereum forked from Ethereum Classic. Hive forked from Steamit as Tron tried a hostile takeover. Trustless -- Here trustless really mean visibility. I can verify everything is correct in the chain myself. I don't have to believe there are gold bars in a vault somewhere, but to a degree it also means I can trust there's no central authority that may be ponzi-ing or ready to abuse the protocol.
      - marcus_holmes 5y ago
        Yeah, but you probably rely on a wallet provider, which messes with most of this. The wallet provider can absolutely block a transaction for ideological reasons, and requires you to trust it, and so on. You need to be pretty techy to verify a transaction in the chain yourself, or do any of the other things you talk about. A non-technical person can't do this. They have to trust other people. This really isn't different from trusting that there are gold bars in the vault. It's been what, 5 years ish, since this all blew up? In 5 years you can name 5 hard forks in the major currencies. That's not "rare".
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  > No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't. Mind helping me with my assumptions?? From what I see, the classical solutions assume the central authority will always exist and provide its services at reasonable prices, that the authority will be benevolent and just, and the central authority is usually single purpose. Regarding survival, crypto space has a similar assumption that at least some people will run nodes - but I like it's robustness to being 'killed off' because only a few people need to participate in mining or validating. Regarding benevolence, I think there are plenty of examples of hostility towards users in the payments space specifically. Regarding single purpose, blockchains are fairly interesting as they allow for any purpose that's signed with the participating parties. Which is a wildly open means of coordination amongst groups -- which is also why blockchains look a lot like currency at outset, because currencies have been the tool for eons to coordinate human efforts. But looking at it closer, a lot of the world runs on IFFT logic, which seems ripe for smart contracts - the only issue is the interoperability between traditional world and blockchain world to become like Daniel Suarez's Dameon.
  - noxer 5y ago
    ILP is (could be) the "interoperability between traditional world and blockchain" but only for payment/money/value We dont really know yet what else there might be. NFTs is the current hype but who knows what/if that will turn out to be in the future.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- tjs8rj 5y ago
  I’m jaded with the crypto-scammery too, but isn’t lower fees with 24/7 instant transactions the selling point? (For low fees think Binance not Coinbase).
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    That doesn’t require the blockchain. The US is moving from ACH to RTP, which is 24/7 instant approximately free transfers between bank accounts. [1] My understanding is the reason it took so long was small banks wanted to figure out a risk management model. [1] https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp
    - noxer 5y ago
      These system do not work outside the justification where they are made. Domestic Tx are fast and cheap because all parties involved have agreements and the same laws etc. etc. Cheating between local banks is rather useless because there is some kind of overload (the sate/a judge) that can order stuff to be reversed. Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place. So if you send USD to Mexico for example. You exchange USD to crypto send crypto to Mexico and sell it there to get MXN. The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything. The receiver doesn't need any kind of trust relationship to the sender. Its either transacted or not and both sides can independently verify that. Its not just a real time transaction its also a instant settlement (clearing). Other way to make settlement is if you move physical cash or gold but there goes the "instant" part.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        > The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything. People keep saying this like it’s a good thing. It’s dreadful. > Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place. And exactly what situation are you transacting with somebody you do not trust and you cannot find a mutually acceptable intermediary? If no such situation exists you probably should not be transacting. You are exposed to too much counterparty risk. Do you have a concrete example of a time that this has been a problem for you? Because I can’t think of a single one.
- swensel 5y ago
  Bitcoin is a worldwide network storing $1 trillion in value without a central party or government. That has never happened before. Are you sure you're just not open to considering the technology at all? Ethereum is another one to look more into. Smart contracts are doing things that no classical solution has ever done. Have you done a deep dive on how the technology of Bitcoin or Ethereum actually work? FWIW, I think plenty of the altcoin tokens are garbage, but some of the top players, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are doing things that classical solutions simply do not allow today.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    There’s a difference between the cryptocurrency world’s definition of “innovation”, and solving longstanding problems for humanity. How does Bitcoin solve inequality? How does Bitcoin solve world hunger? How does Bitcoin solve disease? Bitcoin — and cryptocurrencies more broadly — do none of those things, with only one notable exception. Bitcoin — being a global currency of fixed supply — stands to usher in a global deflationary economic system. Investors in a deflationary environment have little incentive to invest in the future, and consumers have little incentive to spend. These two things could grind the caustic consumerism destroying our planet’s natural ecosystems to a halt. However, there’s room for interpretation even here; many humans would likely not trade off their own survivability for that of the planet’s natural ecosystems. All of the hullaballoo about “Defi” and Ethereum only amounts to a Wall Street reskin, i.e. better high brow gambling. This does nothing for humanity either. Very innovative (!), lots of money being made, nicely exascerbating inequality of course. But achieves nothing. (The S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [1]. Wall St is a carnival, and defi is just that carnival, squared.) [1]: https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/
    - kenneth 5y ago
      Cryptocurrencies by virtue of being digital money accessible anywhere in the world and not manipulatable by central banks can do a ton of good in countries that are experiencing currency mismanagement. It was particularly popular in Argentina, and right now Lebanon is experiencing hyperinflation as well. Controversial opinion — but I'm of the mind that the world is about to experience massive inflation due to the horrifying Covid response of massively expanding the money supply, so we might be able to see even more of a need worldwide.

by noxer 5y ago

arcticbull 5y ago

No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't. And that's because there's a huge fundamental cost to trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness that substantially no project actually benefits from.

noxer 5y ago
The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits. Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions" Its not impossible to make it central it just not lucrative in any way. But if the middlemen is removed it doesn't have to be lucrative for that middlemen anymore and it turns out to be almost free because you just need to send p2p data packages to stream money. Its called interledger protocol (ILP) its not a blockchain its a protocol but like I said above you need to settle somehow and which bank or financial system lets you settle fractions of cents? No one because there is no money to be made from this so a system that does not generate money for the owner (a decentral system) works best.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits. Correct. > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions" Any wallet could offer the same thing. PayPal could offer it. But they don't because nobody wants micropayments. Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments, it's something they think they do, but in reality, they do not. This comes up from time to time. One of the crypto folks actually wrote a really good paper on it, I'll dig it up. You just build up the balance until it's over $1 and ACH/RTP it. Those transaction methods cost $0.0033 in bulk. Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.
  - noxer 5y ago
    >Any wallet could offer the same thing. No, its not a wallet at all its a protocol like TCP but for money. If you are interested go read about it first. There is no point in arguing about something you dont know what it is. >PayPal could offer it Yes, they could but its not lucrative and if it would be they would not be interested in using a public interoperable protocol where everyone can offer the same service and compete. So you have some sites that use PayPal and other sites use 15 other payment companies. You just recreated subscription hell. Its completely missing the point. If its decentral and standardized all systems work together. If I have the wrong token or currency the decentral system finds a way to swap them so I can use any services no matter what "wallet" or currency I use. I cold stream Netflix and Amazon Prime and only pay what I watch and when I watch. Also why would I want PayPal to know whom I stream money? If its central its impossible to hide such data. If its p2p no third party know what content I pay for. That's how it should be. >Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments We already have it.... its called ads. Ever page load, every click, every interaction and every data collected about you is a form of inefficient micropayment. One that does not respect your privacy, tires to maximize the time you waste and tries to trick you into buying stuff you dont need. And the cost of that is slapped onto the product you may buy. Don't you think there are tons of people out there who would rather not annoy their visitors with ads? They would rather have them pay a few fraction of a cent directly to them without the ad-mafia taking a huge junk out of the revenue. And dont you think there are people who would rather pay a few fraction of a cent than see ads or block ads knowing that the content creator does not get paid then? >Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything. That's your personal opinion. The facts are not on your side. People already pay to not see ads its just cumbersome because every service needs a subscription or pro app or whatever. It does not scale to the number or services the average user wants to use. And it hardly adjust to the actual use. Its objectively just so much worse than if you could stream for what you use in real time. You could go a long way without ads for a few bucks if you would replace them with the actual revenue they create. Only if your time is worthless you would rather watch a 15 second ad than pay 1/10 cent or whatever to not see it.
    - 5y ago
- megameter 5y ago
  Exactly - a good use of a decentralized ledger doesn't leave so much room for speculative profit motives. However, my own investment thesis is that the "crypto" market is ultimately destined to march towards that useful and unprofitable outcome, kicking and screaming the whole way, by dint of the long-term market survivors being the civically oriented perennials. But this is a long journey, maybe another decade or two in the making(a epochal shift in tech). It will continue to have ups and downs.
  - noxer 5y ago
    The goal was to remove the middlemen to make stuff cheaper/unbiased/fair/private. The token prices going up an down is indeed just a side effete of speculation. but will definitely go away over time its not solving any problem and it hides the tech because people just see the money.
- mtalantikite 5y ago
  > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. I’m sorry, what? Genuinely curious about what the use case is here, I’ve never heard of this before. I pay based on the amount of time I consume?
  - noxer 5y ago
    Currently Coil costs you 5 bucks a month and its distributed to the content creators that you consume on the basis of how long you consume them. The Creator must have a web monetization enabled website [1] to participate. And you need either an add-on or a browser that has it integrated. The creator can show/hide content based on whether you stream money or not (kinda like a paywall) Its obviously intentional very simplified ATM because its rather new. There is long way to go before we can actually pay for exactly what we consume. [1] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ Old (2018) but fun: A Raspberry Pi ILP power switch (Turns on a light if money is streamed) https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-powerswitch-howto/ https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-powers...
    - mtalantikite 5y ago
      Isn’t this roughly similar to what Spotify does? You get paid based on how many listeners you have? Or YouTube paying the content hosts a split on ad revenue? I guess I’m not sure what crypto solves here that doesn’t actually already happen. Isn’t Coil just another centralized place you pay that then pays out to its network, like everyone else?
- mtnGoat 5y ago
  Re: coil.com, what they do is entirely possible on a centralized system. cam sites have been using token based internal payment systems based on minutes viewed, tips, etc at sub $0.01 levels for 20+ years now. and until the tubes came along, all sides profited handsomely. source: i helped build some.
  - noxer 5y ago
    That not what coil does. Coils is just payment provider for web monetization. You can use another (probably none exist so far) and more importantly you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms. The cam site thing maybe look similar on the surface but its not. It only works in very limited full controlled closed system. It can not scale to the web. You would need 100+ subscriptions in the end that not the goal. Or you would need one overlord that has the monopoly on web monetization and everyone is forced to use g$$gle. Obviously bad for all kinds of reasons like privacy, competition, censorship etc etc. Web monetization puts a payment pointer into the HTML meta tag The browser reads this and streams money there. See https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started
    - e12e 5y ago
      > you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms. Like you can use PayPal to sell (access to) digital assets? Or patron? I'm not sure which part of the core value proposition of coil has anything to do with blockchain? And small wonder: crypto/chains allows us to transfer trust (eg, I trust i can buy milk for my dollar, I buy bitcoin for a dollar, I give you bitcoin, if you can sell bitcoin for a dollar, we trust that I have given you the opportunity to buy milk). This could also go via bank transfer, or hybrid systems like PayPal,stripe or vipps[1]. I see some benefit to "magic crypto cash on the interwebz"- but untraceable tender is generally not what chains facilitate. Quite the opposite. When you realize crypto currency can go two ways: perfect taxation (billionaires and corporations will fight it, to the death), or: perfect money laundring/tax evasion (government will fight it, to the death) - the crypto future looks quite distant. [1] a Norwegian bank owned platform for instant digital settlement: https://vipps.no https://vipps.no
baby 5y ago
Honestly you don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean better results? What’s your metric? In terms of security it does achieve better result.
reedjosh 5y ago
> there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution The following > trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness Are better results. But I do admit, that they come at _performance_ trade-offs.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  but they don't achieve any of those, either. All of them rely on a centralised authority, as can be seen with the bitcoin & ethereum forks - if something goes bad, the people in control will step in and make it better. That means there are people in control. This is not trustless, decentralised or permissionless.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    There's degrees in everything. Permissionless--nobody can stop a transaction from taking place because of ideology. Decentralised--the miners and the software devs have to agree on something to make a hard change. This has happened so rarely as to be a non-issue. When it does happen, the currency forks and those that want to use it can do so as they please. BTC became LiteCoin, BCH, and BSV from hard protocol forks. Ethereum forked from Ethereum Classic. Hive forked from Steamit as Tron tried a hostile takeover. Trustless -- Here trustless really mean visibility. I can verify everything is correct in the chain myself. I don't have to believe there are gold bars in a vault somewhere, but to a degree it also means I can trust there's no central authority that may be ponzi-ing or ready to abuse the protocol.
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      Yeah, but you probably rely on a wallet provider, which messes with most of this. The wallet provider can absolutely block a transaction for ideological reasons, and requires you to trust it, and so on. You need to be pretty techy to verify a transaction in the chain yourself, or do any of the other things you talk about. A non-technical person can't do this. They have to trust other people. This really isn't different from trusting that there are gold bars in the vault. It's been what, 5 years ish, since this all blew up? In 5 years you can name 5 hard forks in the major currencies. That's not "rare".
anonymouse008 5y ago
> No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't. Mind helping me with my assumptions?? From what I see, the classical solutions assume the central authority will always exist and provide its services at reasonable prices, that the authority will be benevolent and just, and the central authority is usually single purpose. Regarding survival, crypto space has a similar assumption that at least some people will run nodes - but I like it's robustness to being 'killed off' because only a few people need to participate in mining or validating. Regarding benevolence, I think there are plenty of examples of hostility towards users in the payments space specifically. Regarding single purpose, blockchains are fairly interesting as they allow for any purpose that's signed with the participating parties. Which is a wildly open means of coordination amongst groups -- which is also why blockchains look a lot like currency at outset, because currencies have been the tool for eons to coordinate human efforts. But looking at it closer, a lot of the world runs on IFFT logic, which seems ripe for smart contracts - the only issue is the interoperability between traditional world and blockchain world to become like Daniel Suarez's Dameon.
- noxer 5y ago
  ILP is (could be) the "interoperability between traditional world and blockchain" but only for payment/money/value We dont really know yet what else there might be. NFTs is the current hype but who knows what/if that will turn out to be in the future.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tjs8rj 5y ago
I’m jaded with the crypto-scammery too, but isn’t lower fees with 24/7 instant transactions the selling point? (For low fees think Binance not Coinbase).
- arcticbull 5y ago
  That doesn’t require the blockchain. The US is moving from ACH to RTP, which is 24/7 instant approximately free transfers between bank accounts. [1] My understanding is the reason it took so long was small banks wanted to figure out a risk management model. [1] https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp
  - noxer 5y ago
    These system do not work outside the justification where they are made. Domestic Tx are fast and cheap because all parties involved have agreements and the same laws etc. etc. Cheating between local banks is rather useless because there is some kind of overload (the sate/a judge) that can order stuff to be reversed. Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place. So if you send USD to Mexico for example. You exchange USD to crypto send crypto to Mexico and sell it there to get MXN. The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything. The receiver doesn't need any kind of trust relationship to the sender. Its either transacted or not and both sides can independently verify that. Its not just a real time transaction its also a instant settlement (clearing). Other way to make settlement is if you move physical cash or gold but there goes the "instant" part.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      > The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything. People keep saying this like it’s a good thing. It’s dreadful. > Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place. And exactly what situation are you transacting with somebody you do not trust and you cannot find a mutually acceptable intermediary? If no such situation exists you probably should not be transacting. You are exposed to too much counterparty risk. Do you have a concrete example of a time that this has been a problem for you? Because I can’t think of a single one.
swensel 5y ago
Bitcoin is a worldwide network storing $1 trillion in value without a central party or government. That has never happened before. Are you sure you're just not open to considering the technology at all? Ethereum is another one to look more into. Smart contracts are doing things that no classical solution has ever done. Have you done a deep dive on how the technology of Bitcoin or Ethereum actually work? FWIW, I think plenty of the altcoin tokens are garbage, but some of the top players, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are doing things that classical solutions simply do not allow today.
- atweiden 5y ago
  There’s a difference between the cryptocurrency world’s definition of “innovation”, and solving longstanding problems for humanity. How does Bitcoin solve inequality? How does Bitcoin solve world hunger? How does Bitcoin solve disease? Bitcoin — and cryptocurrencies more broadly — do none of those things, with only one notable exception. Bitcoin — being a global currency of fixed supply — stands to usher in a global deflationary economic system. Investors in a deflationary environment have little incentive to invest in the future, and consumers have little incentive to spend. These two things could grind the caustic consumerism destroying our planet’s natural ecosystems to a halt. However, there’s room for interpretation even here; many humans would likely not trade off their own survivability for that of the planet’s natural ecosystems. All of the hullaballoo about “Defi” and Ethereum only amounts to a Wall Street reskin, i.e. better high brow gambling. This does nothing for humanity either. Very innovative (!), lots of money being made, nicely exascerbating inequality of course. But achieves nothing. (The S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [1]. Wall St is a carnival, and defi is just that carnival, squared.) [1]: https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/
  - kenneth 5y ago
    Cryptocurrencies by virtue of being digital money accessible anywhere in the world and not manipulatable by central banks can do a ton of good in countries that are experiencing currency mismanagement. It was particularly popular in Argentina, and right now Lebanon is experiencing hyperinflation as well. Controversial opinion — but I'm of the mind that the world is about to experience massive inflation due to the horrifying Covid response of massively expanding the money supply, so we might be able to see even more of a need worldwide.