4 ms·

Why does it have to be a binary property? Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative E

Why does it have to be a binary property? Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative ENS names (yes, ENS domains are NFTs) as some kind of hedge against the occasional top-level domain crisis, or in the odd chance that my domain registrar fucks up/gets hacked or even as some kind of back-up plan for the case where registrars decide to collude and increase prices. Same thing for banking/finance. Yes, SEPA works well in Europe and in 99% of the cases I am okay using my credit card. It doesn't negate the case where I'd like to pay someone where the only alternative is Paypal and with it its crazy fees, odd cancellations, poor customer support, etc. For merchants, the same. Not long ago OnlyFans almost destroyed its own business because it wanted to kill its adult content side. The reason? Mastercard. Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust", or should we be able to say "crypto payments can be an alternative and do not depend on the interests of some powerful group with the right connections"?

shatteredgate 5y ago
>Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem, they may even make it worse. They're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something when the original problem seems to so often get lost in translation.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      > no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor. This is the realm of the social layer, not the technology. You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. > It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). > and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina. She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP. Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
      - shatteredgate 5y ago
        >You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional. >Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway. >Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%. I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing. This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.
jspaetzel 5y ago
ENS is great until you lose control of it due to a hack or a death. Compare the reprocussions of that with the traditional system.
- rglullis 5y ago
  OpsSec is and should always be part of the vocabulary for anyone dealing with crypto seriously and they should know that they need to have a plan for the inevitable. Also, more and more smart wallets are implementing solutions that allow for social recovery of keys. > Compare the reprocussions of that with the traditional system. It's a hedge. It works both ways.
  - shagie 5y ago
    > OpsSec is and should always be part of the vocabulary for anyone dealing with crypto seriously and they should know that they need to have a plan for the inevitable. So, this is just for someone who is already part of the technological and economic elite? Things like "how do your heirs recover the appropriate access to your wallet upon your death" is something that someone should think about before they buy their first bitcoin? The thing that keeps turning me off of cryptocurrency is the appearance that a small and vocal group of people are trying to set up an alternate libertarian fantasy economy that only benefits the upper echelon of society that are educated enough in the nuances of the technology so that they don't encounter any number of foot guns and irrevocable and anonymous scams that is founded the fancy technology equivalent of a "name that star" catalog (with all of the associated competing ones that can name the same star too). So, how is the average person supposed to take advantage of the cryptocurrency economy if they're the type that forgets their passcode on their phone where their wallet is stored and have found it easier to buy a new one? Or for the grandmother who kindly helps out the county password verification agency who calls up to check on if her bank account is secure enough? How is cryptocurrency better for these people than the already existing banking systems and title transfer system where the system itself has human checks in it and can reverse things when a scam or fraud is discovered?
    - rglullis 5y ago

shatteredgate 5y ago

>Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem, they may even make it worse. They're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something when the original problem seems to so often get lost in translation.

rglullis 5y ago
> controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor. This is the realm of the social layer, not the technology. You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. > It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). > and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina. She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP. Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
    - shatteredgate 5y ago
      >You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional. >Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway. >Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%. I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing. This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.

jspaetzel 5y ago

ENS is great until you lose control of it due to a hack or a death. Compare the reprocussions of that with the traditional system.

rglullis 5y ago
OpsSec is and should always be part of the vocabulary for anyone dealing with crypto seriously and they should know that they need to have a plan for the inevitable. Also, more and more smart wallets are implementing solutions that allow for social recovery of keys. > Compare the reprocussions of that with the traditional system. It's a hedge. It works both ways.
- shagie 5y ago
  > OpsSec is and should always be part of the vocabulary for anyone dealing with crypto seriously and they should know that they need to have a plan for the inevitable. So, this is just for someone who is already part of the technological and economic elite? Things like "how do your heirs recover the appropriate access to your wallet upon your death" is something that someone should think about before they buy their first bitcoin? The thing that keeps turning me off of cryptocurrency is the appearance that a small and vocal group of people are trying to set up an alternate libertarian fantasy economy that only benefits the upper echelon of society that are educated enough in the nuances of the technology so that they don't encounter any number of foot guns and irrevocable and anonymous scams that is founded the fancy technology equivalent of a "name that star" catalog (with all of the associated competing ones that can name the same star too). So, how is the average person supposed to take advantage of the cryptocurrency economy if they're the type that forgets their passcode on their phone where their wallet is stored and have found it easier to buy a new one? Or for the grandmother who kindly helps out the county password verification agency who calls up to check on if her bank account is secure enough? How is cryptocurrency better for these people than the already existing banking systems and title transfer system where the system itself has human checks in it and can reverse things when a scam or fraud is discovered?
  - rglullis 5y ago