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This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the di

by evouga 4y ago

This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.) I’m lost on why you need a blockchain.

binkHN 4y ago
> ...trusted central authority... The major point is to not have this. No central authority, or government, will be able to alter the value of the currency.
lordofgibbons 4y ago
>As soon as you have a trusted central authority You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.
- wombat-man 4y ago
  It's all fun and games until someone steals your bored ape.
- ouid 4y ago
  Right, and the parent comment is asserting that that is worse in every way. Which it is.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  That works great except for the fact that 99% of crypto trades occur through exchanges which just put you back to the worst of both worlds.
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    If 99% of users stuck their fork in their eyeball, it wouldn't mean that a Fork is a bad design or a bad implement, it would mean that the users are using it wrong. FWIW, in my own usage of crypto, the lack of central authority is exactly why it is used. I don't really care that other people are just hodl-ing their funny money in someone else's wallet. Crypto, outside of an exchange, means I can send money to anyone I want, and no other entity can prevent that.
    - lottin 4y ago
      > Crypto, outside of an exchange, means I can send money to anyone I want, and no other entity can prevent that. This is basically it. Crypto-currencies are essentially tool to evade financial regulations. The price that you pay for that is a high operational risk and a lack of property rights.
    - haswell 4y ago
      Except you've replaced something people want: easy access to their crypto and a feeling of assurance with something that people clearly don't want: no one wants to stick a fork in their eyeball. The thing is, users define the market. If we were talking about a traditional "product", if 99% of users used a product wrong, that product would be considered an abject failure, at least from a UX / messaging standpoint with a clear mismatch between user wants/needs and product capabilities. The average crypto buyer buys crypto because they want to make money. The average crypto buyer doesn't give a shit about decentralization or removal of bureaucracy. The average crypto buyer is getting exactly what they came for.
      - denkmoon 4y ago
        I would argue that the decentralised nature is a crucial aspect of the value proposition. It's part of the mythos of why crypto is valuable/worth investing in/going to the moon. The way it's actually used completely destroys that part of its value, but don't let reality get in the way of a good investment opportunity. I think if you set up a coin that doesn't use a distributed ledger, and instead uses an SQL database, you wouldn't get buy-in from the ~tulip~crypto fanatics because it doesn't line up with aforementioned mythos.
  - landemva 4y ago
    >> 99% of crypto trades occur through exchanges Do you mean 99% of transactions occur on centralized exchanges without going on-chain? I would like to see the numbers you are using.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      What does it matter that they go on-chain? They are happening between one Coinbase/Binance/etc. wallet and another. If the exchange wants, they can write a reverse transaction on-chain, nothing's stopping them. Even if it was transferred to a wallet of another exchange, they can work with that other exchange to reverse the transaction.
  - randomran01234 4y ago
    Your statement isn’t really accurate. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/defi-dexs-web3/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/defi-dexs-web3/
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      That analysis has a major flaw. One of the main advantages of a centralized exchange is that they don't have to process all transactions on chain. As such, this is measuring very different statistics for centralized and decentralized exchanges.
      - randomran01234 4y ago
        That is true. Probably by pure volume of trades the CEX order books will always be able to facilitate an order of magnitude more than DEX as they can fulfill orders instantly with almost no fees at all, and many beginners and casual traders with crypto will not bother with or even understand what it means to transact on-chain. But there is a very significant amount of crypto trading occurring on-chain, to the tune of multiple billions of dollars per day.
        adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        It's hard to know for sure, but it wouldn't be surprising if the majority of on chain trading is between different accounts of the same person in a (bad) attempt to launder the money.
skybrian 4y ago
Ideally you'd have a SQL database and something like a certificate transparency log as a guard against shenanigans. Also, a bunch of regulatory procedures like DNS registrars have to follow.
- Volker_W 4y ago
  The problem with transparency logs is that you can see that they are doing shenanigans, but not necessarily stop it.
everfree 4y ago
Reliability and composability are two reasons. With a blockchain architecture, the app can't go down unless the entire blockchain goes down. And apps can be built piecemeal by many teams/hackers who add small bits of functionality here and there through standardized interfaces, rather than top-down by trusted agencies - "money legos".
- IanCal 4y ago
  Composability is the main one for me that's interesting. When serving data, I often use HTTP pulling from a Postgres DB. Both of those are massively over engineered for the problems I want to solve but I use them because: * They're already built so it's not my engineering time. * Others can interact with them easily. This is more strongly the case, and becoming more so over time, in crypto work. I can make something with key based auth that I can uniquely identify such that a user can prove they own it to integrate in my "real world" systems, while letting them sell it, trade it, auction it or whatever. To build this I do a starter tutorial, load a common library and publish. After I can just use already existing APIs for integration. That's it and it works because the data and APIs and Auth are all common and standardised now (either inherently for Auth or by convention for the data).
- gray_50 4y ago
  +1 on this answer. Put another way, it's a programmable settlement layer for the internet that anyone can access and is always online. Add in standardized interfaces and all applications built on it become easier to work with and extend.
beambot 4y ago
How do you prove that no one manually added or edited database rows? How do you store the transaction logs & verify their accuracy & authenticity? By the time you build a system with historical "proofs" with enough replication, you'll basically have invented a Blockchain with more complexity.
- Quekid5 4y ago
  Write-once physical storage?
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    I'm sure it's theoretically possible to write a database that only allows reads/inserts and that runs off a CD-R burner, but it's weird that I haven't seen that in the wild. Seems like something that should be doable with SQLite's VFS support (and in fact I'm pretty sure the existing demo VFS for read-only support gets you most of the way there). In any case, "write-once" media can still be rewritten; the same lasers that etch data into a CD-R can do so to destroy the same data. You're going to want redundancy/backups and you're going to want each new row in the table to cryptographically reference the previous (such that any data destruction invalidates all subsequent rows) - by which point you've reinvented most of what constitutes a blockchain anyway.
    - Quekid5 4y ago
      I guess I should have specified that I was being a bit tongue in cheek. I do believe Write-Once was actually a thing with the banking mainframe I was acquainted with in my youth. It wasn't a CD-R thing, it was just an IBM thing which enforced write-only at the BIOS/Hardware level. Honestly, I'm not sure, I was young and impressionable :D. IOW, I might have been misled. Anyway... All you need is logically write-once with proper signing, audits, etc. and you'll be just as close to unforgeable, etc. etc. as reality demands. Heck, even journald on Linux provides unforgeable log entries. It is vulnerable to a destruction attack, so whatevs. Everything is. Even a blockchain -- witness the rugpulls. > by which point you've reinvented most of what constitutes a blockchain anyway. I love that. Anyway, I'm here to dissuade you. Do whatever you want. Just be aware of the potential consequences.
deepu256 4y ago
I guess because it's almost impossible to trust an authority which also allows permissionless building on top such data. Most corps now have proven that they act for their own shareholders and can't be trusted to look after all users. Gov agencies while are a potential candidate for establishing trustworthy data owners are too beaurocratic to ever allow for permissionaless building on top. Blockchains sort of allow both trust yourself (by owning private keys) & build permissionlessly on top .
yellowapple 4y ago
It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. By the time you've done that, you've very likely reinvented a blockchain, at many times the cost of just using an already-existing public blockchain. > monitoring and reversing payment transactions I disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; that the same applies to an electronic equivalent ain't the fatal flaw that critics seem to regularly insist without real basis. Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it (and/or giving it to others who will do so, be it voluntarily through some shady dealmaking or involuntarily through card skimmers and database breaches and what have you). > interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction You wouldn't need a central authority for this. Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so).
- westhom 4y ago
  >Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it This isn’t the only form of dishonesty. There’s cases where you initiate an honest transaction, the vendor ships you something you didn’t ask for because they are trying to clear inventory, and then refuses to refund or exchange. Then you file a claim with Amex and get your transaction reversed in about a week.
  - IanCal 4y ago
    You can simply opt in to those kinds of setups. The flipside is there are times I've been unable to pay with cards because the processors deem it to be too large of a risk, despite me being happy risking my own money. Or, see the risks people take running businesses on PayPal - large companies able to reverse transactions / hold your money solves some issues but raises others.
mywaifuismeta 4y ago
That's how you end up with Google, Apple, and Facebook, Twitter, etc. They may start out as providing a service that works, but over time as they get bigger the incentive structure pushes them towards monetizing your data, locking you in, building boundaries around who can access what (e.g.Twitter APIs), and sharing data with parties you don't want to share it with. One way to avoid this lock-in is to change the underlying incentive structure. That's what the blockchain does. The fundamental difference is not about centralized vs. decentralized, it's about the incentives that are a result of centralization vs decentralization.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  The other way of changing the underlying incentive structure is have the centralised service provided publicly by a government rather than privately by a corporation. That's what traditional currencies do, and there's no reason that this model couldn't work for digitalised currencies too.
  - danuker 4y ago
    And which government has not abused its power? Fiat currency is a prime example.
chaosbolt 4y ago
asenna 4y ago
Can you answer why the SQL Database in Bank of America or any other bank in the US is not able to transfer money to Edward Snowden's bank account? Or to the millions of people in Russia/elsewhere who were just a collateral damage to Putin's war? That's just one example - sometimes you need technology which is out of hands of authorities. Cash or Gold bars have similar properties but you literally have to physically take it with you if you want to send it somewhere. Leaving payments aside - ENS domains, exchanges, insurance, lending borrowing and bunch of other products which are equally accessible to a farmer in Nigeria as it is to a Wall Street suit. You don't see a value in that?
cy_overlord 4y ago
"I suspect that legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system." It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority? Blockchain might not the solution but it shows us an alternative to trusting some middlemen that have too much power, instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent. A distributed ledger is more than just a database, it's a technology that can orchestrated trust online without a central authority. That's a huge deal, compared to a sql database that is owned by someone, who is the singularity that administrates the whole thing.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent. Yes. Because that code just appeared out of nowhere, and it's perfect, and devoid of issues.
  - cy_overlord 4y ago
    No, that's why many people is working on it now. If you compare old smart contract with new ones, you will see that things are slowly getting fixed. For e.g., you could literally send NFTs to any address (including a smart contract address) which make things stuck forever. Now there's a safe way to transfer things which check whether or not it is a valid address. And this became the de facto standard for almost any NFT smart contract. All these didn't came out of nowhere.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Exactly. So when you write something like this: "instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent." what you're really saying is: "we trust a bunch of programmers to write perfect code" when even those programmers cannot understand the code they write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704
Volker_W 4y ago
Are you aware of any project using a SQL database that allows someone to purchase legal porn or donate to legal far right organizations? Mastercard, Visa and Paypal lock such accounts. SEPA (luckily) does not. This is the only advantage of bitcoin I see.
- alalv 4y ago
  Do Visa and Mastercard really block porn purchase in the US?
  - Volker_W 4y ago
    I just checked and they do not block all porn, but the porn that does not fulfill their regulations.
Volker_W 4y ago
The difficult part is not setting up a SQL database, the difficult part are complying with all the banking regulations. If you have a distributed ledger, you do not need to comply with these regulations and everything gets easier. This is both a good and a bad thing.

by evouga 4y ago

binkHN 4y ago

> ...trusted central authority... The major point is to not have this. No central authority, or government, will be able to alter the value of the currency.

lordofgibbons 4y ago

>As soon as you have a trusted central authority You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.

wombat-man 4y ago
It's all fun and games until someone steals your bored ape.
ouid 4y ago
Right, and the parent comment is asserting that that is worse in every way. Which it is.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
That works great except for the fact that 99% of crypto trades occur through exchanges which just put you back to the worst of both worlds.
- denkmoon 4y ago
  If 99% of users stuck their fork in their eyeball, it wouldn't mean that a Fork is a bad design or a bad implement, it would mean that the users are using it wrong. FWIW, in my own usage of crypto, the lack of central authority is exactly why it is used. I don't really care that other people are just hodl-ing their funny money in someone else's wallet. Crypto, outside of an exchange, means I can send money to anyone I want, and no other entity can prevent that.
  - lottin 4y ago
    > Crypto, outside of an exchange, means I can send money to anyone I want, and no other entity can prevent that. This is basically it. Crypto-currencies are essentially tool to evade financial regulations. The price that you pay for that is a high operational risk and a lack of property rights.
  - haswell 4y ago
    Except you've replaced something people want: easy access to their crypto and a feeling of assurance with something that people clearly don't want: no one wants to stick a fork in their eyeball. The thing is, users define the market. If we were talking about a traditional "product", if 99% of users used a product wrong, that product would be considered an abject failure, at least from a UX / messaging standpoint with a clear mismatch between user wants/needs and product capabilities. The average crypto buyer buys crypto because they want to make money. The average crypto buyer doesn't give a shit about decentralization or removal of bureaucracy. The average crypto buyer is getting exactly what they came for.
    - denkmoon 4y ago
      I would argue that the decentralised nature is a crucial aspect of the value proposition. It's part of the mythos of why crypto is valuable/worth investing in/going to the moon. The way it's actually used completely destroys that part of its value, but don't let reality get in the way of a good investment opportunity. I think if you set up a coin that doesn't use a distributed ledger, and instead uses an SQL database, you wouldn't get buy-in from the ~tulip~crypto fanatics because it doesn't line up with aforementioned mythos.
- landemva 4y ago
  >> 99% of crypto trades occur through exchanges Do you mean 99% of transactions occur on centralized exchanges without going on-chain? I would like to see the numbers you are using.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    What does it matter that they go on-chain? They are happening between one Coinbase/Binance/etc. wallet and another. If the exchange wants, they can write a reverse transaction on-chain, nothing's stopping them. Even if it was transferred to a wallet of another exchange, they can work with that other exchange to reverse the transaction.
- randomran01234 4y ago
  Your statement isn’t really accurate. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/defi-dexs-web3/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/defi-dexs-web3/
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    That analysis has a major flaw. One of the main advantages of a centralized exchange is that they don't have to process all transactions on chain. As such, this is measuring very different statistics for centralized and decentralized exchanges.
    - randomran01234 4y ago
      That is true. Probably by pure volume of trades the CEX order books will always be able to facilitate an order of magnitude more than DEX as they can fulfill orders instantly with almost no fees at all, and many beginners and casual traders with crypto will not bother with or even understand what it means to transact on-chain. But there is a very significant amount of crypto trading occurring on-chain, to the tune of multiple billions of dollars per day.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        It's hard to know for sure, but it wouldn't be surprising if the majority of on chain trading is between different accounts of the same person in a (bad) attempt to launder the money.

skybrian 4y ago

Ideally you'd have a SQL database and something like a certificate transparency log as a guard against shenanigans. Also, a bunch of regulatory procedures like DNS registrars have to follow.

Volker_W 4y ago
The problem with transparency logs is that you can see that they are doing shenanigans, but not necessarily stop it.

everfree 4y ago

Reliability and composability are two reasons. With a blockchain architecture, the app can't go down unless the entire blockchain goes down. And apps can be built piecemeal by many teams/hackers who add small bits of functionality here and there through standardized interfaces, rather than top-down by trusted agencies - "money legos".

IanCal 4y ago
Composability is the main one for me that's interesting. When serving data, I often use HTTP pulling from a Postgres DB. Both of those are massively over engineered for the problems I want to solve but I use them because: * They're already built so it's not my engineering time. * Others can interact with them easily. This is more strongly the case, and becoming more so over time, in crypto work. I can make something with key based auth that I can uniquely identify such that a user can prove they own it to integrate in my "real world" systems, while letting them sell it, trade it, auction it or whatever. To build this I do a starter tutorial, load a common library and publish. After I can just use already existing APIs for integration. That's it and it works because the data and APIs and Auth are all common and standardised now (either inherently for Auth or by convention for the data).
gray_50 4y ago
+1 on this answer. Put another way, it's a programmable settlement layer for the internet that anyone can access and is always online. Add in standardized interfaces and all applications built on it become easier to work with and extend.

beambot 4y ago

How do you prove that no one manually added or edited database rows? How do you store the transaction logs & verify their accuracy & authenticity? By the time you build a system with historical "proofs" with enough replication, you'll basically have invented a Blockchain with more complexity.

Quekid5 4y ago
Write-once physical storage?
- yellowapple 4y ago
  I'm sure it's theoretically possible to write a database that only allows reads/inserts and that runs off a CD-R burner, but it's weird that I haven't seen that in the wild. Seems like something that should be doable with SQLite's VFS support (and in fact I'm pretty sure the existing demo VFS for read-only support gets you most of the way there). In any case, "write-once" media can still be rewritten; the same lasers that etch data into a CD-R can do so to destroy the same data. You're going to want redundancy/backups and you're going to want each new row in the table to cryptographically reference the previous (such that any data destruction invalidates all subsequent rows) - by which point you've reinvented most of what constitutes a blockchain anyway.
  - Quekid5 4y ago
    I guess I should have specified that I was being a bit tongue in cheek. I do believe Write-Once was actually a thing with the banking mainframe I was acquainted with in my youth. It wasn't a CD-R thing, it was just an IBM thing which enforced write-only at the BIOS/Hardware level. Honestly, I'm not sure, I was young and impressionable :D. IOW, I might have been misled. Anyway... All you need is logically write-once with proper signing, audits, etc. and you'll be just as close to unforgeable, etc. etc. as reality demands. Heck, even journald on Linux provides unforgeable log entries. It is vulnerable to a destruction attack, so whatevs. Everything is. Even a blockchain -- witness the rugpulls. > by which point you've reinvented most of what constitutes a blockchain anyway. I love that. Anyway, I'm here to dissuade you. Do whatever you want. Just be aware of the potential consequences.

deepu256 4y ago

I guess because it's almost impossible to trust an authority which also allows permissionless building on top such data. Most corps now have proven that they act for their own shareholders and can't be trusted to look after all users. Gov agencies while are a potential candidate for establishing trustworthy data owners are too beaurocratic to ever allow for permissionaless building on top. Blockchains sort of allow both trust yourself (by owning private keys) & build permissionlessly on top .

yellowapple 4y ago

It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. By the time you've done that, you've very likely reinvented a blockchain, at many times the cost of just using an already-existing public blockchain. > monitoring and reversing payment transactions I disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; that the same applies to an electronic equivalent ain't the fatal flaw that critics seem to regularly insist without real basis. Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it (and/or giving it to others who will do so, be it voluntarily through some shady dealmaking or involuntarily through card skimmers and database breaches and what have you). > interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction You wouldn't need a central authority for this. Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so).

westhom 4y ago
>Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it This isn’t the only form of dishonesty. There’s cases where you initiate an honest transaction, the vendor ships you something you didn’t ask for because they are trying to clear inventory, and then refuses to refund or exchange. Then you file a claim with Amex and get your transaction reversed in about a week.
- IanCal 4y ago
  You can simply opt in to those kinds of setups. The flipside is there are times I've been unable to pay with cards because the processors deem it to be too large of a risk, despite me being happy risking my own money. Or, see the risks people take running businesses on PayPal - large companies able to reverse transactions / hold your money solves some issues but raises others.

mywaifuismeta 4y ago

That's how you end up with Google, Apple, and Facebook, Twitter, etc. They may start out as providing a service that works, but over time as they get bigger the incentive structure pushes them towards monetizing your data, locking you in, building boundaries around who can access what (e.g.Twitter APIs), and sharing data with parties you don't want to share it with. One way to avoid this lock-in is to change the underlying incentive structure. That's what the blockchain does. The fundamental difference is not about centralized vs. decentralized, it's about the incentives that are a result of centralization vs decentralization.

nicoburns 4y ago
The other way of changing the underlying incentive structure is have the centralised service provided publicly by a government rather than privately by a corporation. That's what traditional currencies do, and there's no reason that this model couldn't work for digitalised currencies too.
- danuker 4y ago
  And which government has not abused its power? Fiat currency is a prime example.

chaosbolt 4y ago

asenna 4y ago

Can you answer why the SQL Database in Bank of America or any other bank in the US is not able to transfer money to Edward Snowden's bank account? Or to the millions of people in Russia/elsewhere who were just a collateral damage to Putin's war? That's just one example - sometimes you need technology which is out of hands of authorities. Cash or Gold bars have similar properties but you literally have to physically take it with you if you want to send it somewhere. Leaving payments aside - ENS domains, exchanges, insurance, lending borrowing and bunch of other products which are equally accessible to a farmer in Nigeria as it is to a Wall Street suit. You don't see a value in that?

cy_overlord 4y ago

"I suspect that legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system." It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority? Blockchain might not the solution but it shows us an alternative to trusting some middlemen that have too much power, instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent. A distributed ledger is more than just a database, it's a technology that can orchestrated trust online without a central authority. That's a huge deal, compared to a sql database that is owned by someone, who is the singularity that administrates the whole thing.

dmitriid 4y ago
> instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent. Yes. Because that code just appeared out of nowhere, and it's perfect, and devoid of issues.
- cy_overlord 4y ago
  No, that's why many people is working on it now. If you compare old smart contract with new ones, you will see that things are slowly getting fixed. For e.g., you could literally send NFTs to any address (including a smart contract address) which make things stuck forever. Now there's a safe way to transfer things which check whether or not it is a valid address. And this became the de facto standard for almost any NFT smart contract. All these didn't came out of nowhere.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Exactly. So when you write something like this: "instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent." what you're really saying is: "we trust a bunch of programmers to write perfect code" when even those programmers cannot understand the code they write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704

Volker_W 4y ago

Are you aware of any project using a SQL database that allows someone to purchase legal porn or donate to legal far right organizations? Mastercard, Visa and Paypal lock such accounts. SEPA (luckily) does not. This is the only advantage of bitcoin I see.

alalv 4y ago
Do Visa and Mastercard really block porn purchase in the US?
- Volker_W 4y ago
  I just checked and they do not block all porn, but the porn that does not fulfill their regulations.

Volker_W 4y ago

The difficult part is not setting up a SQL database, the difficult part are complying with all the banking regulations. If you have a distributed ledger, you do not need to comply with these regulations and everything gets easier. This is both a good and a bad thing.