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Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the

Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized. I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.

gjulianm 5y ago
> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance) There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues. For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.
- prohobo 5y ago
  You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance. Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide. Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed. Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.
  - gjulianm 5y ago
    > You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance. You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code? > Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate. > Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed. That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.
    - prohobo 5y ago
      I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now. Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.
      - 5y ago
svennek 5y ago
Actually I agree with you that a "blockchain of law" would be great.. But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github... Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..
- Ekaros 5y ago
  It seems many of these ideas stem from failures of USA's political system. That is entrenched players fighting against government breaking their hold on their profit models even if that would be net benefit for general population. See taxation and even access to law, which I heard cost something 650$ a month from private provider. For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/ https://finlex.fi/en/ And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.
  - svennek 5y ago
    Hello fellow scandinavian. Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit. Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X. It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape. You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once. Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while. In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration. And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...
kreeben 5y ago
Maybe you just failed to explain to that person what the roadmap of going from coin to blockchain powered book of law looks like, because it's quite the road.
LispShmisp 5y ago
Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it? Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins. I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.
- prohobo 5y ago
  No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful. Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc. These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.
  - gls2ro 5y ago
    Out of curiosity how do you estimate this comparison: > Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does
    - prohobo 5y ago
      I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc. From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu: > American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year > Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year > Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year > Online advertising: 106 TWh per year > American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year
Applejinx 5y ago
It's inherently a political, not a technical, question. I think people on the whole recognize it as such, but it's often easier to try to invalidate the stuff on technical grounds, because for crypto to be beneficial it must satisfy BOTH the political and the technical requirements. Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve. Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.
Rd6n6 5y ago
> cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance) Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks. It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?
- prohobo 5y ago
  We don't really know. A lot of work has gone into trying to minimize incentive for 51% attacks though, and it continues. "Fork off" is a classic argument, that the attacker may take over the chain but then cause a fork where they're left with a worthless system anyway - meaning the 51% attack would only be profitable for a short duration before a fork devalues their winnings and everyone continues on the new system. Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.

gjulianm 5y ago

> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance) There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues. For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.

prohobo 5y ago
You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance. Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide. Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed. Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance. You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code? > Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate. > Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed. That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.
  - prohobo 5y ago
    I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now. Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.
    - 5y ago

svennek 5y ago

Actually I agree with you that a "blockchain of law" would be great.. But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github... Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..

Ekaros 5y ago
It seems many of these ideas stem from failures of USA's political system. That is entrenched players fighting against government breaking their hold on their profit models even if that would be net benefit for general population. See taxation and even access to law, which I heard cost something 650$ a month from private provider. For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/ https://finlex.fi/en/ And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.
- svennek 5y ago
  Hello fellow scandinavian. Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit. Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X. It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape. You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once. Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while. In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration. And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...

kreeben 5y ago

Maybe you just failed to explain to that person what the roadmap of going from coin to blockchain powered book of law looks like, because it's quite the road.

LispShmisp 5y ago

Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it? Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins. I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.

prohobo 5y ago
No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful. Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc. These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.
- gls2ro 5y ago
  Out of curiosity how do you estimate this comparison: > Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does
  - prohobo 5y ago
    I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc. From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu: > American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year > Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year > Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year > Online advertising: 106 TWh per year > American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year

Applejinx 5y ago

It's inherently a political, not a technical, question. I think people on the whole recognize it as such, but it's often easier to try to invalidate the stuff on technical grounds, because for crypto to be beneficial it must satisfy BOTH the political and the technical requirements. Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve. Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.

Rd6n6 5y ago

> cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance) Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks. It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?

prohobo 5y ago
We don't really know. A lot of work has gone into trying to minimize incentive for 51% attacks though, and it continues. "Fork off" is a classic argument, that the attacker may take over the chain but then cause a fork where they're left with a worthless system anyway - meaning the 51% attack would only be profitable for a short duration before a fork devalues their winnings and everyone continues on the new system. Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.