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> that the world does not run algorithmically Sure it does: moving gold and commodities between countries in non-mutually-friendly regimes, very much resembles

by derefr 5y ago

> that the world does not run algorithmically Sure it does: moving gold and commodities between countries in non-mutually-friendly regimes, very much resembles crypto. Fiat finance is a system of contract law built on top of a de-facto "state of nature" of irreversible no-arbitrator commodity transfers. It exists in places where people can agree on who the arbitrating party should be. It does not exist outside of those places. It especially does not exist between powers that are actively at war. Cryptocurrency platforms are, at a base layer, a digital equivalent to the commodities-transfer "state of nature." Many crypto platforms also have the mechanisms within them to build fiat finance systems atop them. (The keyword to search here is "security tokens".) I personally think that's for the best. Build something that can simulate all the kinds of finance the real world operates on, rather than only some. Most people, most of the time, if they touch crypto at all, should be doing so using one of the fiat "layers" on top of crypto, rather than the commodities-transfer base layer. Just like people should be buying things using credit cards, rather than by sending gold bullion in the mail. But if the fiat layer were the only layer, then you'd have a system that only worked where contract law works, which would be no better than the existing fiat ecosystem, in the sense that it wouldn't enable many of the use-cases that cryptocurrency enables. Chief among those use-cases being securely transferring commodities to people in countries that your own fiat regime's financial infrastructure refuses to deal with, for them to then convert to local fiat money. (See e.g. the saga of this YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAPrhJwVweWZA8GEPoClSdw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAPrhJwVweWZA8GEPoClSdw trying to pay his employees/contractors in Nigeria, Liberia, etc. for their work.)

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I can't tell if this is a joke or not but the example of moving gold between non-friendly countries (do you mean smuggling?) is probably the least algorithmic thing out there... It's something where you absolutely will fail if you don't have tolerance for faults and flexibility to recover potential losses or change course while transacting... The parent comment's real point was that the world isn't run algorithmically. An enterprise which tries to smuggle goods may not be able to reverse transactions if they transfer too much, but they should be able to react to an overcharge and shut down operations before they lose everything. Or they should be able to stop a shipment before it reaches the border. Or they should be able to change the rules of their trade if government rules change in between. That's the kind of stuff smart contracts tend to ignore or forget about. They have little flexibility in them in a world that's constantly in flux.
jtbayly 5y ago
So... sending money to where your own government forbids you to send it? It sounds like you're admitting that the point of cryptocurrency is simply to break the law, while pretending like the purpose is much bigger.
- derefr 5y ago
  There is more than one "law." Each fiat ecosystem is its own system of financial law, each mutually-incompatible with any other fiat ecosystem. Cryptocurrency gives an alternative arbitrator that allows for these mutually-incompatible systems of law to be bridged. Also, to be clear, in the example I mentioned, the government of the US does not forbid trading with Nigeria/Liberia/etc. Traditional money-transfer services (Paypal, Western Union, most savings banks, etc.) are just unwilling to do it, because of the frequency of those transactions being scams. But this prevents people who "know what they're doing" (like people employing people in those countries!) from having any means to send money there. This is a gap in the market, in some sense, but it's one that couldn't really be filled by any other fiat "retail" solution, as that solution would then be what scammers use to bilk people. So you really need something that's "complex and finance-nerdy" in the way that crypto is, to ensure that it's hard enough for regular people to use it to transfer money, that scammers just don't bother to try talking people through it. (Such a product would then never find product-market fit, as it would have no retail customers. Only a system run "for its own sake", like cryptocurrency systems are, can really be a good base platform to enable such transfers over the long term.)
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Wait, so BitCoin's benefit now is that it's too hard to use? lol edit: And that's why it can't be used for scams! Oh my. I'm not sure what universe you live in, but it's different from mine.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Crypto is too hard to use — or more specifically, requires too much financial and technical acumen to understand — to make it profitable for someone to operationalize a mass-market "volume" scam (a scam involving stealing small amounts of money from a large number of people) based on it. "Volume" scams are the really successful scams — the ones that fly under the radar for years/decades because no individual person is ever out for enough money to make large institutions upset to the point of pursuing them. Tons of "volume" scammers get their start every day. The opposite kind — the scams where large sums are stolen from relatively small numbers of people — are flashy, but ultimately futile, as high-value scammers almost always get caught, and quickly.
seoaeu 5y ago
> Chief among those use-cases being securely transferring commodities to people in countries that your own fiat regime's financial infrastructure refuses to deal with, for them to then convert to local fiat money. Ah, the "I want to break laws" use case for cryptocurrencies.
res0nat0r 5y ago
At least to me, and possibly others, any system which I have my money invested and I can lose everything I own with no recourse due to some exploit is completely laughable and something I will never ever touch. There's a reason folks keep their life savings in a Chase bank account, because if something like this happens you have recourse to recover your money.
- fastball 5y ago
  People have never lost their life savings when held in a bank account?
  - craftinator 5y ago
    I'm just gonna leave this here: https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E It's a dark comedy sketch that has an answer to your question.
- UIGYUIUYG 5y ago
  Then don't put your money in a newly created contract? You yourself say you keep it in a Chase bank account, you sure as hell wouldn't put your life savings in a newly created bank and trust everything to them would you? Look at what you put your money into, has it had any audits done (this applies to both tax / financial audits for brick and morter stores, and code audits to smart contracts). I will never ever invest my money with HSBC, they have shown time and time again to willfully break the law and soley gain monetarily from it, the governments or financial institutions don't do anything about it. Just like I will never ever invest my money into USDT, I think it's a massive scam and don't touch it in the slightest, doesn't stop millions of others investing though.
  - res0nat0r 5y ago
    I'll take an FDIC insured bank over some new cool crypto project any day of the week.
    - 5y ago
8note 5y ago
The defacto state of nature is reversible transactions. Unless the things have been destroyed, the trade can be undone
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
skytreader 5y ago
I think your position is essentially at odds with parent. > Sure it does: moving gold and commodities between countries in non-mutually-friendly regimes, very much resembles crypto. Parent is talking about a legal framework and yet your counter-example is a transaction between two jurisdictions/parties/legal entities that are in less-than-legal agreement with each other. Apples to oranges. Also, I'm quite certain you and parent interpret "the world" differently. You seem to interpret it in the sense of a pre-formalized economic framework society. Whereas parent (with whom I side with), use the term "the world" to refer to that sector of society with a codified economic framework. > Many crypto platforms also have the mechanisms within them to build fiat finance systems atop them. (The keyword to search here is "security tokens".) That might very well be the case but parent's argument is that our legal economic system is not purely algorithmic. Crypto might have features that are analogous to our current fiat systems but those features do not describe the whole fiat system; it misses some features (or "bugs", depending on how you look at it). To paraphrase parent's statement, having someone able to override transactions is a feature of our existing systems, for better and for worse. Conversely, a system without this arbitrator has pros and cons too. You pick your poison.

by derefr 5y ago

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

I can't tell if this is a joke or not but the example of moving gold between non-friendly countries (do you mean smuggling?) is probably the least algorithmic thing out there... It's something where you absolutely will fail if you don't have tolerance for faults and flexibility to recover potential losses or change course while transacting... The parent comment's real point was that the world isn't run algorithmically. An enterprise which tries to smuggle goods may not be able to reverse transactions if they transfer too much, but they should be able to react to an overcharge and shut down operations before they lose everything. Or they should be able to stop a shipment before it reaches the border. Or they should be able to change the rules of their trade if government rules change in between. That's the kind of stuff smart contracts tend to ignore or forget about. They have little flexibility in them in a world that's constantly in flux.

jtbayly 5y ago

So... sending money to where your own government forbids you to send it? It sounds like you're admitting that the point of cryptocurrency is simply to break the law, while pretending like the purpose is much bigger.

derefr 5y ago
There is more than one "law." Each fiat ecosystem is its own system of financial law, each mutually-incompatible with any other fiat ecosystem. Cryptocurrency gives an alternative arbitrator that allows for these mutually-incompatible systems of law to be bridged. Also, to be clear, in the example I mentioned, the government of the US does not forbid trading with Nigeria/Liberia/etc. Traditional money-transfer services (Paypal, Western Union, most savings banks, etc.) are just unwilling to do it, because of the frequency of those transactions being scams. But this prevents people who "know what they're doing" (like people employing people in those countries!) from having any means to send money there. This is a gap in the market, in some sense, but it's one that couldn't really be filled by any other fiat "retail" solution, as that solution would then be what scammers use to bilk people. So you really need something that's "complex and finance-nerdy" in the way that crypto is, to ensure that it's hard enough for regular people to use it to transfer money, that scammers just don't bother to try talking people through it. (Such a product would then never find product-market fit, as it would have no retail customers. Only a system run "for its own sake", like cryptocurrency systems are, can really be a good base platform to enable such transfers over the long term.)
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Wait, so BitCoin's benefit now is that it's too hard to use? lol edit: And that's why it can't be used for scams! Oh my. I'm not sure what universe you live in, but it's different from mine.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Crypto is too hard to use — or more specifically, requires too much financial and technical acumen to understand — to make it profitable for someone to operationalize a mass-market "volume" scam (a scam involving stealing small amounts of money from a large number of people) based on it. "Volume" scams are the really successful scams — the ones that fly under the radar for years/decades because no individual person is ever out for enough money to make large institutions upset to the point of pursuing them. Tons of "volume" scammers get their start every day. The opposite kind — the scams where large sums are stolen from relatively small numbers of people — are flashy, but ultimately futile, as high-value scammers almost always get caught, and quickly.

seoaeu 5y ago

> Chief among those use-cases being securely transferring commodities to people in countries that your own fiat regime's financial infrastructure refuses to deal with, for them to then convert to local fiat money. Ah, the "I want to break laws" use case for cryptocurrencies.

res0nat0r 5y ago

At least to me, and possibly others, any system which I have my money invested and I can lose everything I own with no recourse due to some exploit is completely laughable and something I will never ever touch. There's a reason folks keep their life savings in a Chase bank account, because if something like this happens you have recourse to recover your money.

fastball 5y ago
People have never lost their life savings when held in a bank account?
- craftinator 5y ago
  I'm just gonna leave this here: https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E It's a dark comedy sketch that has an answer to your question.
UIGYUIUYG 5y ago
Then don't put your money in a newly created contract? You yourself say you keep it in a Chase bank account, you sure as hell wouldn't put your life savings in a newly created bank and trust everything to them would you? Look at what you put your money into, has it had any audits done (this applies to both tax / financial audits for brick and morter stores, and code audits to smart contracts). I will never ever invest my money with HSBC, they have shown time and time again to willfully break the law and soley gain monetarily from it, the governments or financial institutions don't do anything about it. Just like I will never ever invest my money into USDT, I think it's a massive scam and don't touch it in the slightest, doesn't stop millions of others investing though.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  I'll take an FDIC insured bank over some new cool crypto project any day of the week.
  - 5y ago

8note 5y ago

The defacto state of nature is reversible transactions. Unless the things have been destroyed, the trade can be undone

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

skytreader 5y ago

I think your position is essentially at odds with parent. > Sure it does: moving gold and commodities between countries in non-mutually-friendly regimes, very much resembles crypto. Parent is talking about a legal framework and yet your counter-example is a transaction between two jurisdictions/parties/legal entities that are in less-than-legal agreement with each other. Apples to oranges. Also, I'm quite certain you and parent interpret "the world" differently. You seem to interpret it in the sense of a pre-formalized economic framework society. Whereas parent (with whom I side with), use the term "the world" to refer to that sector of society with a codified economic framework. > Many crypto platforms also have the mechanisms within them to build fiat finance systems atop them. (The keyword to search here is "security tokens".) That might very well be the case but parent's argument is that our legal economic system is not purely algorithmic. Crypto might have features that are analogous to our current fiat systems but those features do not describe the whole fiat system; it misses some features (or "bugs", depending on how you look at it). To paraphrase parent's statement, having someone able to override transactions is a feature of our existing systems, for better and for worse. Conversely, a system without this arbitrator has pros and cons too. You pick your poison.