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>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and

by lvass 4y ago

>This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology I generally agree but there definitely are exceptions. For example they can provide viable financial models for tech organizations like Brave and Protocol Labs (I'm not endorsing them) to actually care about privacy, which is an enormous social issue right now.

engineer_22 4y ago
Agreed - privacy of transaction is the #1 issue blockchain potentially solves.
- ninkendo 4y ago
  I don't get it... aren't all transactions completely public on the blockchain? Isn't that the fundamental way it works? (Mixing services notwithstanding.) Sure, your wallet isn't necessarily traceable to your identity, but the whole transaction history of your wallet is there, and if you ever convert those bitcoins to real cash, you're going to need to divulge that identity to someone.
  - iskander 4y ago
    "Shielded" transactions on networks such as Zerocash are private. There's an increasing trend in this direction as "zero knowledge" layer 2 networks come online, since they have the same underlying mechanisms which makes private transfers easy to implement (or to even have as the default).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  And Monero is the only widely used coin that actually does this, the rest make things even less private because all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain.
amluto 4y ago
Are you referring to things like the Basic Attention Token? As I see it, there are two separate things going on here. 1. A micropayment system. Nothing here requires a blockchain. Maybe doing it in a privacy-preserving way is easier with a decentralized solution, but I’m not convinced this is necessarily true. 2. Bypassing problematic regulation. The US and US-led financial system make legally moving small amounts of money around on behalf of clients prohibitively expensive and require an unfortunate degree of discrimination. By magic, blockchains bypass this. The latter is, in my mind, a huge problem in both directions. A non-blockchain company should be able to offer micropayments without getting tangled in a KYC-AML morass. To the contrary, I would argue that financial services on a common carrier basis would be superior to the current system. On the flip side, I don’t understand why regulators tolerate cryptocurrency exchanges or why they should tolerate them. From outside, Bitcoin (and, even more so, Monero) are systems by which unknown people can instruct exchanges to move fiat currency without knowing on whose behalf they are moving it. This flies entirely in the face of AML-KYC. The exchanges do not know the customer. Money is laundered.
simonw 4y ago
The big open question here is whether they can provide viable financial models once the speculative mania around this stuff wears off.

by lvass 4y ago

engineer_22 4y ago

Agreed - privacy of transaction is the #1 issue blockchain potentially solves.

ninkendo 4y ago
I don't get it... aren't all transactions completely public on the blockchain? Isn't that the fundamental way it works? (Mixing services notwithstanding.) Sure, your wallet isn't necessarily traceable to your identity, but the whole transaction history of your wallet is there, and if you ever convert those bitcoins to real cash, you're going to need to divulge that identity to someone.
- iskander 4y ago
  "Shielded" transactions on networks such as Zerocash are private. There's an increasing trend in this direction as "zero knowledge" layer 2 networks come online, since they have the same underlying mechanisms which makes private transfers easy to implement (or to even have as the default).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
HideousKojima 4y ago
And Monero is the only widely used coin that actually does this, the rest make things even less private because all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain.

amluto 4y ago

Are you referring to things like the Basic Attention Token? As I see it, there are two separate things going on here. 1. A micropayment system. Nothing here requires a blockchain. Maybe doing it in a privacy-preserving way is easier with a decentralized solution, but I’m not convinced this is necessarily true. 2. Bypassing problematic regulation. The US and US-led financial system make legally moving small amounts of money around on behalf of clients prohibitively expensive and require an unfortunate degree of discrimination. By magic, blockchains bypass this. The latter is, in my mind, a huge problem in both directions. A non-blockchain company should be able to offer micropayments without getting tangled in a KYC-AML morass. To the contrary, I would argue that financial services on a common carrier basis would be superior to the current system. On the flip side, I don’t understand why regulators tolerate cryptocurrency exchanges or why they should tolerate them. From outside, Bitcoin (and, even more so, Monero) are systems by which unknown people can instruct exchanges to move fiat currency without knowing on whose behalf they are moving it. This flies entirely in the face of AML-KYC. The exchanges do not know the customer. Money is laundered.

simonw 4y ago

The big open question here is whether they can provide viable financial models once the speculative mania around this stuff wears off.