5 ms·

The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects. Our entire civ

The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects. Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly. To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense. We technical people have an odd way of falling into these kind of traps - we're trapped in theory, unable to map to the real world pragmatically. DNS on the internet works on the basis of 'partial decentralization' and it works very well. There wouldn't be that much point in making it 'fully decentralized'. We could push it maybe a few inches more that way, but there's zero requirement to go 'fully decentralized' for it. You get vastly diminishing marginal returns to effort when you start to go absolutist. Much like Rust, which has some very nice outcomes but trades absolutely everything for those outcomes, some small tradeoffs in decentralization for Blockchain would yield probably some big benefits.

wmf 5y ago
There are a ton of newer blockchains using "progressive decentralization" or "minimum viable decentralization".
c01n 5y ago
But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators because we don't trust each other. Now we invented blockchains (distributed ledgers) so we can see all the changes being made on the ledger because we don't trust each other.
- jollybean 5y ago
  First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny. While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections. We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely. When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere. Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc.. Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value. Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them. They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'. Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke. 'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing. 'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it. And those are just the obvious points. So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable. Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was. I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.
  - c01n 5y ago
    Thank you for the reply. I think you misread my comment, I never said 'we don't trust the banks', I wrote that we invented banks to act as third party arbitrators because we (humans) don't trust each other.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. That's wrong. Debt existed before money and barter didn't exist at all without a medium of exchange like metals or spices. When you give someone a chicken and the other side gives you bread you remember or even write down that this person owes you more bread in the future and you trust that this person will uphold his promise, the same way you trust that his bread is not rotten.
noxer 5y ago
The XRPL was invented shortly after some BTC devs saw that BTCs approach was "to extremist" and could never scale. It went online in 2013. To this day most crypto people will tell you it is centralized and some buggy-man can turn it off/delete/revert etc. While in reality it started as a cluster of nodes run by a single entity (centrally controlled just like BTC did) and moved to continually enlarge the number of entities to the point where the original nodes have absolutely no special permission or power left. There was even a software update amendment that was accepted by all other nodes but the original nodes so they overrules them. The system isn't based solely on trust however the people who run a node can pick trusted nodes[1]. This is important for reliability. If you trust crappy nodes that go offline your node could miss Tx and fork off with no way to detect that and if trusted nodes collude they could halt your node. However the validation is done locally there is no need to trust any other nodes to check if the Tx are valid. You see if a node lies and if you previously trusted that node you would simply remove it. You dont have to trust a single node you have to trust the majority of all nodes you trust. There is no way around the "trust the majority" anyway. In BTC for example you are forced to trust that 51% of hashing comes form honest people who do not collude. the difference here is you dont know who they are and you can neither pick the ones you trust nor exclude the once you dont trust or misbehave. Needless to says the this system outcompetes all the other systems for decentral consensus. But Guess what. People still says the XRPL its centralized. Most people simply dont understand the tech in this space. They are in it for the gambling. [1] https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validation https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validat...
vbuterin 5y ago
Blockchain base layers have a stronger need to be close to absolutely decentralized than most other things. This is because base layers aren't applications, they're _the places where all the applications talk to each other_. So if a base layer has a trust dependency, that requires the entire ecosystem to be willing to agree on the same trust dependency. Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.

wmf 5y ago

There are a ton of newer blockchains using "progressive decentralization" or "minimum viable decentralization".

c01n 5y ago

But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators because we don't trust each other. Now we invented blockchains (distributed ledgers) so we can see all the changes being made on the ledger because we don't trust each other.

jollybean 5y ago
First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny. While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections. We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely. When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere. Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc.. Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value. Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them. They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'. Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke. 'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing. 'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it. And those are just the obvious points. So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable. Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was. I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.
- c01n 5y ago
  Thank you for the reply. I think you misread my comment, I never said 'we don't trust the banks', I wrote that we invented banks to act as third party arbitrators because we (humans) don't trust each other.
imtringued 5y ago
>When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. That's wrong. Debt existed before money and barter didn't exist at all without a medium of exchange like metals or spices. When you give someone a chicken and the other side gives you bread you remember or even write down that this person owes you more bread in the future and you trust that this person will uphold his promise, the same way you trust that his bread is not rotten.

noxer 5y ago

The XRPL was invented shortly after some BTC devs saw that BTCs approach was "to extremist" and could never scale. It went online in 2013. To this day most crypto people will tell you it is centralized and some buggy-man can turn it off/delete/revert etc. While in reality it started as a cluster of nodes run by a single entity (centrally controlled just like BTC did) and moved to continually enlarge the number of entities to the point where the original nodes have absolutely no special permission or power left. There was even a software update amendment that was accepted by all other nodes but the original nodes so they overrules them. The system isn't based solely on trust however the people who run a node can pick trusted nodes[1]. This is important for reliability. If you trust crappy nodes that go offline your node could miss Tx and fork off with no way to detect that and if trusted nodes collude they could halt your node. However the validation is done locally there is no need to trust any other nodes to check if the Tx are valid. You see if a node lies and if you previously trusted that node you would simply remove it. You dont have to trust a single node you have to trust the majority of all nodes you trust. There is no way around the "trust the majority" anyway. In BTC for example you are forced to trust that 51% of hashing comes form honest people who do not collude. the difference here is you dont know who they are and you can neither pick the ones you trust nor exclude the once you dont trust or misbehave. Needless to says the this system outcompetes all the other systems for decentral consensus. But Guess what. People still says the XRPL its centralized. Most people simply dont understand the tech in this space. They are in it for the gambling. [1] https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validation https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validat...

vbuterin 5y ago

Blockchain base layers have a stronger need to be close to absolutely decentralized than most other things. This is because base layers aren't applications, they're _the places where all the applications talk to each other_. So if a base layer has a trust dependency, that requires the entire ecosystem to be willing to agree on the same trust dependency. Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.