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All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past. It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems. And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.

agumonkey 5y ago
This DeFi thing is big, large, involves money, teh future; is probably bubbly. There's not a lot to understand IMO. It's a wave of emotions wrapped into "tech". It's wise to treat it like a ~thing and see how it evolves.
- anon9001 5y ago
  Is it possible that DeFi is not a wave of emotions wrapped into tech? I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend. It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    There's so much probabilities that I cannot help but see more dreams than reality so far. Even if some things manage to deliver .. who knows how it will evolve. Look at facebook, juggernaut, unstoppable.. already rotting. Then it's economy/finance tied.. there will be a lot of forces at play and few people that know who will influence the market more. Hence my message above.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
"Dying is easy young man, governing's harder." Something like that.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Certainly the Taliban is finding that out in Afghanistan. And there is tremendous suffering among people who don't deserve that situation.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Maybe they wouldn't be there without almost 5 decades of foreign invasions...
moolcool 5y ago
You're totally right, but this mentality doesn't totally invalidate the concept of DeFi. Like the state of DeFi today functions alongside the systems of today-- it's utility isn't contingent on burning the entire system to the ground.
shadowgovt 5y ago
If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days. Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.
- _9omd 5y ago
  But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the internet, it's powerful because the base layers are neutral, allowing for the free flow of information.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    >Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want the protections of our modern financial system...
_9omd 5y ago
You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).
- Joeri 5y ago
  Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite. I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    > Anyone can mine gold Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
    - Negitivefrags 5y ago
      Nothing is preventing you just going to a gold producing river and panning for gold. You will be just as effective doing that as someone who just runs the Bitcoin client at home. Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and capital intensive operations in both gold mining and Bitcoin mining.
      - aaronharnly 5y ago
        Interestingly enough, between 1933 and 1975, it was a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
moistrobot 5y ago
Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom
- notpachet 5y ago
  > Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Tell that to this Angular 1 app.
- Juliate 5y ago
  The "kingdom" as you say it, involves instutions AND people that depend on it, if only, by habit, but also by trust. Be these habit and trust be misplaced or not is not much relevant: a new system just does not have a hint of these either just because it's new.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed: - I had the money - money was transfered into the other person's account - I was not a scammer - that person wasn't a scammer - I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address) (a bunch of other stuff) So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    That is an exceptionally well designed purchase process. In my case, I had to go through 3-4 months of wrangling banks and other paperwork. I still don't understand my mortgage contract fully. I just hope it doesn't have any "surprises" in it.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    It improves that process in a disintegrating third world country, which many of us may find ourselves in within our lifetimes.
zapataband1 5y ago
I agree but it's one of these crazy sounding ideas that could actually have a use case. Like the author says these are just distributed systems and 'decentralized' 'web3' is really just a sophisticated way of coming to agreement. I think there's a lot that people can build with tech like this, but it's no silver bullet.
delusional 5y ago
I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against. I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  > Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights. Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
  - noahth 5y ago
    A very large fraction of DeFi supporters do not regard all of those as desirable progress.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      What is "very large"? What fraction of legacy bankers regard all of those as desirable progress? That's a pretty silly ad-hominem.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Are you talking about the same Decentralized Finance?
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate. I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.") I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
  - samhw 5y ago
    > none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Breton Woods and Visa/Mastercard were top level designs... But they were designed to make money. (For the US and Visa/Mastercard respectively.) Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
agallant 5y ago
I agree that it's similar to a hard fork (and has similar problems), but would argue that (due to the "interdisciplinary" nature of fintech) it's not incompetence or laziness but rather the blind spot/hubris of being a technical person looking at a social system. An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes. Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.
Hypergraphe 5y ago
I've worked, and still work, on large legacy codebases on a daily basis and I couldn't agree more that total rewrite is not the solution in most cases and a waste of time and money. But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting. Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.
- rubicon33 5y ago
  This strikes me as one of the pivotal responsibilities of a lead developer. It isn't just about pushing new features as fast as possible, but about ensuring the entire development stack is (as much as one can be) a pleasure to work on and in. Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive. Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
- winternett 5y ago
  Even considering the occasional refactor, it's still a lot less costly over time than this new throw-away microservices economy in many cases. First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life. The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness. The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors. Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.
jonstaab 5y ago
Broaden your historical context, and Keynes becomes the junior developer who thinks he can elegantly fix everything.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Thinking deeply about the system and finding the changes you can apply with minimal disruption and maximal impact is the opposite of what the GP is talking about.
  - jonstaab 5y ago
    Money printer go brrrr
circlefavshape 5y ago
Yes, yes, and yes again. This goes for every "revolutionary" thing, from a new codebase to DeFi to an actual revolution.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo. When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.
- jdmichal 5y ago
  Any process inscribed in the technology is part of a larger business process, and as such is also resistant to such change. You can do refactoring all you want, which by definition means not changing inputs and outputs. But you can't change the process without looping in business. And then it becomes about making a business case for spending the money and time and training and etc to make a change to the business process.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  a legacy codebase can be structurally resistant to being fixed. you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs. no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
  - Vetch 5y ago
    This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium. Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
generalizations 5y ago
I think you're probably right, however, it also seems like there's been value in those hard forks simply because we get to experiment with alternate ways to build the system. Often, it seems like the original project will take the best ideas from the fork and integrate them; those are ideas that might not have been created otherwise.
gaze 5y ago
I half agree. Yes I do think you have a bunch of technologists self-indulgently trying to apply the next shiny thing where bettering the world is second priority. However, I think changing the system from inside is largely a fool’s errand. There are indeed proven methods for political change. Unions, protest, organizing, these things. They’re unsexy and boring and tedious, much like you’ve described, but these do work.
- winternett 5y ago
  This is why I generally only interview for jobs that are seeking work within my tech stack, or projects which haven't yet formed into a developed solution. I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
- nprz 5y ago
  If you look at wealth inequality over the past 50 years it would seem to indicate that those methods don't actually seem to accomplish much.
  - wyre 5y ago
    Union membership is down drastically over 50 years which is why it isn’t accomplishing much. If you do an image search for ‘union membership wealth inequality’ you’ll find a graph of union membership imposed with a graph of income going to the top 10%. It’s incredibly negatively correlated.
amelius 5y ago
Your argument would make sense if the smartest people in the world were developing alternative, highly efficient systems to replace the current mess. Alas. Our smartest people are working on making people click ads ...
MrStonedOne 5y ago
People don't want to break free of regulators, they want to break free of visa and mastercard playing moral judge on who you can send money too.
cletus 5y ago
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin. I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often. Considerations for a rewrite: 1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem; 2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and 3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag. It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point. > And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").
auggierose 5y ago
I think Google has proven that you can change the system, dramatically. I am never going to try fixing an antiquated, broken software system. Just let it burn.
dcow 5y ago
This is why I’m bullish on Chia. Their philosophy is quite plainly: operate within the existing regulatory framework and existing social ground rules (i.e. as a traditional capitalist institution beholden to the SEC) to provide and be the steward of a better backend and tools for doing (as the article asserts) the fundamentally distributed operation of processing payments and supporting markets. There’s a pre-farm that supports the company, they’re going to make a lot of money for their investors (which you can participate in too if you want). That’s nothing new and so be it. That’s the world we live in. It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia. We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal. If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Of course. And it's often the same people. Or at least the same kinds of people. None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders. As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous. If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
I think your point is stronger than you worded it, by saying junior developers, as the observation holds for developers period, when faced with a mess.
ErrantX 5y ago
Working in finance myself, I totally agree with you on the regulators lint. Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority - not only from the outright criminals but also the slightly evil financial services companies (see the Wonga and payday loans debacle in the UK). Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to! We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.
- solveit 5y ago
  > Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
  - ErrantX 5y ago
    Well yes true. Arguably the whole NFT thing is an example of that already. But I get your point; it is reasonable for savvy people to have a play ground for more risk.
- tcgv 5y ago
  I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results: > Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to! In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.
mcculley 5y ago
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
freddref 5y ago
The lava layer anti-pattern springs to mind, where the new tech becomes another quirk of the old tech.
enchiridion 5y ago
Separate from the validity of your take, it shouldn’t surprise you. People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.
vkou 5y ago
> It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems. They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe. It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.
tcgv 5y ago
To be fair, this argument is only valid when targeting people from outside of the areas of expertise / niches involved: > All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.
- notpachet 5y ago
  Honestly in fairness to junior developers, I should have left the "junior" label out of my original post. We're all guilty of this by varying degrees.
_alex_ 5y ago
It's not a coincidence that a lot of cryptocurrency projects are started and maintained by relatively young and inexperienced programmers.
asdfman123 5y ago
And you must ask: who is really driving the public debate to throw out centralized banks? I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it. There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?
- edot 5y ago
  I want to be ruled by people who bought into Bitcoin in 2012 or earlier. They know how to govern best.
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    Be warned: any bitcoin post is deep within Poe's Law territory
    - edot 5y ago
      Haha, I sure hope no one takes my post seriously.
  - intuitionist 5y ago
    I believe Plato says something very similar.
varelse 5y ago
I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in your head. And if you're mindful of that, you can rebuild guided by what you have learned from the ground up and it will work. See John CarMmack's increasingly awesome series of 3D engines he wrote over the years. But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on
SassyGrapefruit 5y ago
>All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not... >so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework> Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better. In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today. I think what you are stating is a bit reductive.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
> They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence. Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking. It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it. Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction. It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life. PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.
Lamad123 5y ago
This comment is AWS-blessed and AWS-sponsored
bsanr2 5y ago
>the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems). In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.
amelius 5y ago
If what you say is true, we'd all be programming in COBOL still. Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic underlying principle.
pezzana 5y ago
Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may. Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
- grey-area 5y ago
  Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations. There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
  - pezzana 5y ago
    > Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples: - currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries) - civil asset forfeiture (citizens) These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
    - grey-area 5y ago
      These are not new developments, and diplomacy has always been war by other means, including using currency as a weapon of war against external and internal enemies. Currency has always been a system of control and has frequently been weaponised in the past, it has certainly always been a tool of the ruling class. To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfeiting-conspiracy/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfe... You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.
FooHentai 5y ago
>These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past. An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort. Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.
t2riRXawYxLGGYb 5y ago
It's true that rewriting everything is not always the right answer and that fixing existing systems is underrated. However, there are very few instances in history of systems being indefinitely fixed and upgraded. Most societies were not gradually improved and reformed forever: eventually they fell and were replaced with new societies. The same is true of technology and companies: most technology is eventually completely replaced with newer, better technology that is inspired by earlier technology but that is still new. The cool thing about DeFi is that it has built-in ways of upgrading itself. In traditional systems, upgrades are more centralized and have a single point of failure: once that point of failure (eg the developer/maintainer) stops upgrading, the system dies.

agumonkey 5y ago

This DeFi thing is big, large, involves money, teh future; is probably bubbly. There's not a lot to understand IMO. It's a wave of emotions wrapped into "tech". It's wise to treat it like a ~thing and see how it evolves.

anon9001 5y ago
Is it possible that DeFi is not a wave of emotions wrapped into tech? I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend. It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  There's so much probabilities that I cannot help but see more dreams than reality so far. Even if some things manage to deliver .. who knows how it will evolve. Look at facebook, juggernaut, unstoppable.. already rotting. Then it's economy/finance tied.. there will be a lot of forces at play and few people that know who will influence the market more. Hence my message above.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

"Dying is easy young man, governing's harder." Something like that.

beebmam 5y ago
Certainly the Taliban is finding that out in Afghanistan. And there is tremendous suffering among people who don't deserve that situation.
- oblio 5y ago
  Maybe they wouldn't be there without almost 5 decades of foreign invasions...

moolcool 5y ago

You're totally right, but this mentality doesn't totally invalidate the concept of DeFi. Like the state of DeFi today functions alongside the systems of today-- it's utility isn't contingent on burning the entire system to the ground.

shadowgovt 5y ago

If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days. Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.

_9omd 5y ago
But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the internet, it's powerful because the base layers are neutral, allowing for the free flow of information.
- twofornone 5y ago
  >Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want the protections of our modern financial system...

_9omd 5y ago

You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).

Joeri 5y ago
Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite. I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
- jakub_g 5y ago
  > Anyone can mine gold Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
  - Negitivefrags 5y ago
    Nothing is preventing you just going to a gold producing river and panning for gold. You will be just as effective doing that as someone who just runs the Bitcoin client at home. Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and capital intensive operations in both gold mining and Bitcoin mining.
    - aaronharnly 5y ago
      Interestingly enough, between 1933 and 1975, it was a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act

moistrobot 5y ago

Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom

notpachet 5y ago
> Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Tell that to this Angular 1 app.
Juliate 5y ago
The "kingdom" as you say it, involves instutions AND people that depend on it, if only, by habit, but also by trust. Be these habit and trust be misplaced or not is not much relevant: a new system just does not have a hint of these either just because it's new.
dmitriid 5y ago
> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed: - I had the money - money was transfered into the other person's account - I was not a scammer - that person wasn't a scammer - I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address) (a bunch of other stuff) So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  That is an exceptionally well designed purchase process. In my case, I had to go through 3-4 months of wrangling banks and other paperwork. I still don't understand my mortgage contract fully. I just hope it doesn't have any "surprises" in it.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  It improves that process in a disintegrating third world country, which many of us may find ourselves in within our lifetimes.

zapataband1 5y ago

I agree but it's one of these crazy sounding ideas that could actually have a use case. Like the author says these are just distributed systems and 'decentralized' 'web3' is really just a sophisticated way of coming to agreement. I think there's a lot that people can build with tech like this, but it's no silver bullet.

delusional 5y ago

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against. I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.

robotresearcher 5y ago
> Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights. Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
- noahth 5y ago
  A very large fraction of DeFi supporters do not regard all of those as desirable progress.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    What is "very large"? What fraction of legacy bankers regard all of those as desirable progress? That's a pretty silly ad-hominem.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Are you talking about the same Decentralized Finance?

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate. I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.") I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.

whatshisface 5y ago
I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
- samhw 5y ago
  > none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Breton Woods and Visa/Mastercard were top level designs... But they were designed to make money. (For the US and Visa/Mastercard respectively.) Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.

agallant 5y ago

I agree that it's similar to a hard fork (and has similar problems), but would argue that (due to the "interdisciplinary" nature of fintech) it's not incompetence or laziness but rather the blind spot/hubris of being a technical person looking at a social system. An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes. Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.

Hypergraphe 5y ago

I've worked, and still work, on large legacy codebases on a daily basis and I couldn't agree more that total rewrite is not the solution in most cases and a waste of time and money. But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting. Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.

rubicon33 5y ago
This strikes me as one of the pivotal responsibilities of a lead developer. It isn't just about pushing new features as fast as possible, but about ensuring the entire development stack is (as much as one can be) a pleasure to work on and in. Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive. Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
winternett 5y ago
Even considering the occasional refactor, it's still a lot less costly over time than this new throw-away microservices economy in many cases. First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life. The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness. The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors. Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.

jonstaab 5y ago

Broaden your historical context, and Keynes becomes the junior developer who thinks he can elegantly fix everything.

marcosdumay 5y ago
Thinking deeply about the system and finding the changes you can apply with minimal disruption and maximal impact is the opposite of what the GP is talking about.
- jonstaab 5y ago
  Money printer go brrrr

circlefavshape 5y ago

Yes, yes, and yes again. This goes for every "revolutionary" thing, from a new codebase to DeFi to an actual revolution.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo. When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.

jdmichal 5y ago
Any process inscribed in the technology is part of a larger business process, and as such is also resistant to such change. You can do refactoring all you want, which by definition means not changing inputs and outputs. But you can't change the process without looping in business. And then it becomes about making a business case for spending the money and time and training and etc to make a change to the business process.
leetcrew 5y ago
a legacy codebase can be structurally resistant to being fixed. you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs. no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
- Vetch 5y ago
  This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium. Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.

generalizations 5y ago

I think you're probably right, however, it also seems like there's been value in those hard forks simply because we get to experiment with alternate ways to build the system. Often, it seems like the original project will take the best ideas from the fork and integrate them; those are ideas that might not have been created otherwise.

gaze 5y ago

I half agree. Yes I do think you have a bunch of technologists self-indulgently trying to apply the next shiny thing where bettering the world is second priority. However, I think changing the system from inside is largely a fool’s errand. There are indeed proven methods for political change. Unions, protest, organizing, these things. They’re unsexy and boring and tedious, much like you’ve described, but these do work.

winternett 5y ago
This is why I generally only interview for jobs that are seeking work within my tech stack, or projects which haven't yet formed into a developed solution. I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
nprz 5y ago
If you look at wealth inequality over the past 50 years it would seem to indicate that those methods don't actually seem to accomplish much.
- wyre 5y ago
  Union membership is down drastically over 50 years which is why it isn’t accomplishing much. If you do an image search for ‘union membership wealth inequality’ you’ll find a graph of union membership imposed with a graph of income going to the top 10%. It’s incredibly negatively correlated.

amelius 5y ago

Your argument would make sense if the smartest people in the world were developing alternative, highly efficient systems to replace the current mess. Alas. Our smartest people are working on making people click ads ...

MrStonedOne 5y ago

People don't want to break free of regulators, they want to break free of visa and mastercard playing moral judge on who you can send money too.

cletus 5y ago

> All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin. I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often. Considerations for a rewrite: 1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem; 2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and 3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag. It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point. > And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").

auggierose 5y ago

I think Google has proven that you can change the system, dramatically. I am never going to try fixing an antiquated, broken software system. Just let it burn.

dcow 5y ago

This is why I’m bullish on Chia. Their philosophy is quite plainly: operate within the existing regulatory framework and existing social ground rules (i.e. as a traditional capitalist institution beholden to the SEC) to provide and be the steward of a better backend and tools for doing (as the article asserts) the fundamentally distributed operation of processing payments and supporting markets. There’s a pre-farm that supports the company, they’re going to make a lot of money for their investors (which you can participate in too if you want). That’s nothing new and so be it. That’s the world we live in. It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia. We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal. If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Of course. And it's often the same people. Or at least the same kinds of people. None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders. As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous. If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

I think your point is stronger than you worded it, by saying junior developers, as the observation holds for developers period, when faced with a mess.

ErrantX 5y ago

Working in finance myself, I totally agree with you on the regulators lint. Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority - not only from the outright criminals but also the slightly evil financial services companies (see the Wonga and payday loans debacle in the UK). Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to! We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.

solveit 5y ago
> Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
- ErrantX 5y ago
  Well yes true. Arguably the whole NFT thing is an example of that already. But I get your point; it is reasonable for savvy people to have a play ground for more risk.
tcgv 5y ago
I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results: > Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to! In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.

mcculley 5y ago

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

freddref 5y ago

The lava layer anti-pattern springs to mind, where the new tech becomes another quirk of the old tech.

enchiridion 5y ago

Separate from the validity of your take, it shouldn’t surprise you. People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.

vkou 5y ago

> It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems. They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe. It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.

tcgv 5y ago

To be fair, this argument is only valid when targeting people from outside of the areas of expertise / niches involved: > All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.

notpachet 5y ago
Honestly in fairness to junior developers, I should have left the "junior" label out of my original post. We're all guilty of this by varying degrees.

_alex_ 5y ago

It's not a coincidence that a lot of cryptocurrency projects are started and maintained by relatively young and inexperienced programmers.

asdfman123 5y ago

And you must ask: who is really driving the public debate to throw out centralized banks? I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it. There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?

edot 5y ago
I want to be ruled by people who bought into Bitcoin in 2012 or earlier. They know how to govern best.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  Be warned: any bitcoin post is deep within Poe's Law territory
  - edot 5y ago
    Haha, I sure hope no one takes my post seriously.
- intuitionist 5y ago
  I believe Plato says something very similar.

varelse 5y ago

I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in your head. And if you're mindful of that, you can rebuild guided by what you have learned from the ground up and it will work. See John CarMmack's increasingly awesome series of 3D engines he wrote over the years. But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on

SassyGrapefruit 5y ago

>All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not... >so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework> Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better. In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today. I think what you are stating is a bit reductive.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

> They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence. Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking. It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it. Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction. It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life. PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.

Lamad123 5y ago

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bsanr2 5y ago

>the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems). In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.

amelius 5y ago

If what you say is true, we'd all be programming in COBOL still. Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic underlying principle.

pezzana 5y ago

Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may. Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.

grey-area 5y ago
Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations. There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
- pezzana 5y ago
  > Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples: - currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries) - civil asset forfeiture (citizens) These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
  - grey-area 5y ago
    These are not new developments, and diplomacy has always been war by other means, including using currency as a weapon of war against external and internal enemies. Currency has always been a system of control and has frequently been weaponised in the past, it has certainly always been a tool of the ruling class. To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfeiting-conspiracy/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfe... You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.

FooHentai 5y ago

>These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past. An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort. Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.

t2riRXawYxLGGYb 5y ago

It's true that rewriting everything is not always the right answer and that fixing existing systems is underrated. However, there are very few instances in history of systems being indefinitely fixed and upgraded. Most societies were not gradually improved and reformed forever: eventually they fell and were replaced with new societies. The same is true of technology and companies: most technology is eventually completely replaced with newer, better technology that is inspired by earlier technology but that is still new. The cool thing about DeFi is that it has built-in ways of upgrading itself. In traditional systems, upgrades are more centralized and have a single point of failure: once that point of failure (eg the developer/maintainer) stops upgrading, the system dies.