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I think the point I was trying to convey is best expressed in the paragraph and not the isolated sentence: >My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies inte

I think the point I was trying to convey is best expressed in the paragraph and not the isolated sentence: >My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) I also discussed it a bit in my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27270693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27270693

wpietri 5y ago
Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. My best guess is you mean a different word than "democratic".
- meowface 5y ago
  It depends what layer you're considering and what properties you want. At the base layer, the core idea is that the community opts into the protocol and ideally has some say into future protocol changes. In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproportionate votes. However, the "voting" in this case is just "which blockchain is the valid one". Unless a group of powerful entities collude to 51% attack the network, this doesn't actually confer any direct influence over anything. (Though for PoW, miners do have some influence over what transaction fees people will have to pay.) In terms of systems built on top of the core network - especially if smart contracts are supported - you can create lots of interesting democratic governance systems. You can basically make whatever you want. So, is network consensus democratic? Not really. Then it's kind of a question of if it's more or less democratic than, say, money in the United States. One could make an argument it's way more democratic, since two single organizations control money issuance: the central bank and the treasury. (One partial counter-argument is that the Federal Reserve is - as the name implies - federated regionally through 12 sub-organizations. One could potentially say that it still effectively operates as one entity, though.) Or that it's way less democratic, since at least everyone in the country can vote for the president, and the president appoints the central bank governors and the treasury secretary. >Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. The claim: >My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) My only claim is that they intend to be democratic. At least Bitcoin did. I don't think that's too hard to support; Satoshi initially intended for everyone to be able to mine. I think he had a pretty democratic vision. The implied emphasis in that paragraph was on "Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter."
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Again, I think you must be using "democratic" to mean something entirely different than I am. I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you're suggesting he's the very dimmest of bulbs, unaware of basic facts about access to computation or somehow unable to think through the meaning. Maybe you want a word more like "individualist"? I can see how one might confuse that for "democratic".
    - meowface 5y ago
      Individualism is a feature, too, but I think he really cared about trying to be more democratic than the alternatives. The core precept and summary of the whole paper is the phrase he used: "one-CPU-one-vote". (Not as good as "one-human-one-vote", but the idea is that that's the closest he could get to it while preventing Sybil attacks.) I believe he thought that even if powerful entities bought a lot of CPUs, the end users of the network would still have a lot of consensus power distributed between themselves. As far as I can tell, it seems unclear if he foresaw just how huge of an advantage GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs would have and that no one else would be mining anymore. Perhaps he was fully aware and knew centralization problems would occur, but it's difficult to be sure.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        CPUs are not people. CPUs voting for blocks of transactions is in no way people having political power over the system. Even at the time, systems with hundreds of thousands of CPUs were operating, so even if voting for transactions were something akin to deciding on how to organize society, which it isn't, letting IBM outvote whole states is not democracy, it's oligarchy. Again, I don't think we have even vaguely similar definitions of what democracies are.
        meowface 5y ago

wpietri 5y ago

Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. My best guess is you mean a different word than "democratic".

meowface 5y ago
It depends what layer you're considering and what properties you want. At the base layer, the core idea is that the community opts into the protocol and ideally has some say into future protocol changes. In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproportionate votes. However, the "voting" in this case is just "which blockchain is the valid one". Unless a group of powerful entities collude to 51% attack the network, this doesn't actually confer any direct influence over anything. (Though for PoW, miners do have some influence over what transaction fees people will have to pay.) In terms of systems built on top of the core network - especially if smart contracts are supported - you can create lots of interesting democratic governance systems. You can basically make whatever you want. So, is network consensus democratic? Not really. Then it's kind of a question of if it's more or less democratic than, say, money in the United States. One could make an argument it's way more democratic, since two single organizations control money issuance: the central bank and the treasury. (One partial counter-argument is that the Federal Reserve is - as the name implies - federated regionally through 12 sub-organizations. One could potentially say that it still effectively operates as one entity, though.) Or that it's way less democratic, since at least everyone in the country can vote for the president, and the president appoints the central bank governors and the treasury secretary. >Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. The claim: >My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) My only claim is that they intend to be democratic. At least Bitcoin did. I don't think that's too hard to support; Satoshi initially intended for everyone to be able to mine. I think he had a pretty democratic vision. The implied emphasis in that paragraph was on "Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter."
- wpietri 5y ago
  Again, I think you must be using "democratic" to mean something entirely different than I am. I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you're suggesting he's the very dimmest of bulbs, unaware of basic facts about access to computation or somehow unable to think through the meaning. Maybe you want a word more like "individualist"? I can see how one might confuse that for "democratic".
  - meowface 5y ago
    Individualism is a feature, too, but I think he really cared about trying to be more democratic than the alternatives. The core precept and summary of the whole paper is the phrase he used: "one-CPU-one-vote". (Not as good as "one-human-one-vote", but the idea is that that's the closest he could get to it while preventing Sybil attacks.) I believe he thought that even if powerful entities bought a lot of CPUs, the end users of the network would still have a lot of consensus power distributed between themselves. As far as I can tell, it seems unclear if he foresaw just how huge of an advantage GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs would have and that no one else would be mining anymore. Perhaps he was fully aware and knew centralization problems would occur, but it's difficult to be sure.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      CPUs are not people. CPUs voting for blocks of transactions is in no way people having political power over the system. Even at the time, systems with hundreds of thousands of CPUs were operating, so even if voting for transactions were something akin to deciding on how to organize society, which it isn't, letting IBM outvote whole states is not democracy, it's oligarchy. Again, I don't think we have even vaguely similar definitions of what democracies are.
      - meowface 5y ago