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I've done published research in cryptocurrencies in its earlier days when I was in academia and I was very open-minded about it, but ultimately I came to the sa

I've done published research in cryptocurrencies in its earlier days when I was in academia and I was very open-minded about it, but ultimately I came to the same conclusion: it's difficult to think of much that it does better than more straight-forward solutions and easy to think of downsides. As I've gotten older and had to interact with various bureaucracies and paperwork, I've only become more convinced that lauded cryptocurrency features, such as (purported) immutability and decentralization, are a bug, not a feature. In my relatively short time on this mortal coil I've probably had to contravene some codified system four or five times by getting the right person in the loop so some rule, regulation, or contractual obligation can be lifted. No matter how hard we try, we can't anticipate everything. People will die, keys (and other vital paperwork) will be lost or destroyed, contracts will have mistakes, fraud will be perpetuated, money will be mistakenly transferred to the wrong parties, etc. All of these have happened to me and all were resolved by a sometimes annoying but ultimately effective system set up to handle such cases with some backstop authority empowered to fix things. All of us will eventually get into some hell where we need a human to override the computer and just make the sensible thing happen. How often is it that we're on a support line just trying to get an exception to some stupid corner case into which we've gotten ourselves. It's always a relief when you can finally plead your case to the higher authority, whatever that may be, and get some damn relief. Why aren't more people concerned about a world where this isn't possible? It's an honest question. It totally baffles me.

arcticbull 5y ago
The iron law of blockchain is that if you think blockchain is a solution to a given problem, you don't know enough about the problem.
knownjorbist 5y ago
My takeaway from Web3 so far has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, having a wallet means you already have a pseudonymous account with payments for every dApp that has ever and will ever exist, and conversely the developers of said app reap the benefits of that fact for basically free. But this dynamic opens a whole can of worms in terms of risk.
southerntofu 5y ago
Very good points. That's also my experience so far, and i think even the most dedicated ETH crowd will acknowledge they had to apply human authority to the source code when they found that "code is law" meant they would loose all their savings due to a bug. However, i'm personally curious about mixed systems with crypto-identity and human-administered discovery. The best example i have in mind is the GNU Name System, where you can delegate specific names in your zone to someone else's public key, and each zone is administered by the associated public key. This way, you get technical reliability when addressing the public key directly, while still retaining user-controlled delegation of human-friendly names to build a global tree like DNS or a local friend-to-friend mapping (eg. `fatoumata.bob` to reach Fatoumata, whom you know is a friend of your well-known friend Bob advertised in his zone). As someone who was involved in research in cryptocurrencies, what's your take on such developments?
- arghnoname 5y ago
  I've never looked into the GNU name system in any detail, but it does seem to afford a reasonable degree of flexibility by allowing you to publish trust relationships and then delegate to different zones. If I'm interpreting things correctly, I can imagine people generally delegating names in their zone to ICANN in order to have something similar to existing DNS and its robust management, but additionally delegate to other entities for improved censorship resistance. For instance, dissidents could delegate to some private zone that likely offers fewer guarantees. Clients would need to be configurable and perform queries in some priority ordering. Under this scenario, the ICANN zone could just refuse to publish an entry generated by a key that is deemed invalid (e.g., key is hacked, original private key lost, so revocation cannot by issued but authenticity verified in real life), so you'd probably end up in some situation where government blessed sources are canonical, but there's a reasonable fallback when official sources are not trusted. When these sources aren't trusted users would have to decide for themselves or do independent verification, which seems sensible to me. I'd like to be able to have some indication that some private non-government controlled "root" zone and the canonical zone diverged so that I can then see if this is something I need to worry about. Realistically, many buying a domain on something like godaddy would probably have their key managed by godaddy or perhaps tied to their credit card issuer, but more technical people would have the option of safeguarding their own keys. There are other downsides to this approach in that a DHT is going to have different failure modes and scalability issues than DNS, but at least the obvious ones that occur to me are probably mostly solvable.

arcticbull 5y ago

The iron law of blockchain is that if you think blockchain is a solution to a given problem, you don't know enough about the problem.

knownjorbist 5y ago

My takeaway from Web3 so far has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, having a wallet means you already have a pseudonymous account with payments for every dApp that has ever and will ever exist, and conversely the developers of said app reap the benefits of that fact for basically free. But this dynamic opens a whole can of worms in terms of risk.

southerntofu 5y ago

Very good points. That's also my experience so far, and i think even the most dedicated ETH crowd will acknowledge they had to apply human authority to the source code when they found that "code is law" meant they would loose all their savings due to a bug. However, i'm personally curious about mixed systems with crypto-identity and human-administered discovery. The best example i have in mind is the GNU Name System, where you can delegate specific names in your zone to someone else's public key, and each zone is administered by the associated public key. This way, you get technical reliability when addressing the public key directly, while still retaining user-controlled delegation of human-friendly names to build a global tree like DNS or a local friend-to-friend mapping (eg. `fatoumata.bob` to reach Fatoumata, whom you know is a friend of your well-known friend Bob advertised in his zone). As someone who was involved in research in cryptocurrencies, what's your take on such developments?

arghnoname 5y ago
I've never looked into the GNU name system in any detail, but it does seem to afford a reasonable degree of flexibility by allowing you to publish trust relationships and then delegate to different zones. If I'm interpreting things correctly, I can imagine people generally delegating names in their zone to ICANN in order to have something similar to existing DNS and its robust management, but additionally delegate to other entities for improved censorship resistance. For instance, dissidents could delegate to some private zone that likely offers fewer guarantees. Clients would need to be configurable and perform queries in some priority ordering. Under this scenario, the ICANN zone could just refuse to publish an entry generated by a key that is deemed invalid (e.g., key is hacked, original private key lost, so revocation cannot by issued but authenticity verified in real life), so you'd probably end up in some situation where government blessed sources are canonical, but there's a reasonable fallback when official sources are not trusted. When these sources aren't trusted users would have to decide for themselves or do independent verification, which seems sensible to me. I'd like to be able to have some indication that some private non-government controlled "root" zone and the canonical zone diverged so that I can then see if this is something I need to worry about. Realistically, many buying a domain on something like godaddy would probably have their key managed by godaddy or perhaps tied to their credit card issuer, but more technical people would have the option of safeguarding their own keys. There are other downsides to this approach in that a DHT is going to have different failure modes and scalability issues than DNS, but at least the obvious ones that occur to me are probably mostly solvable.