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I think the central idea of a distributed non-permissioned database with a zero trust consensus mechanism, particularly one where transaction cannot be blocked

I think the central idea of a distributed non-permissioned database with a zero trust consensus mechanism, particularly one where transaction cannot be blocked or censored is a pretty useful thing. At it's heart, that's what cryptocurrency is all about. It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts doesn't mean the underlying idea isn't useful.

asimpletune 4y ago
There are so many reasons why even what you're saying is actually just bad! Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail. You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. They basically become landmines waiting to be tripped, and they're all made to look like something legitimate. How did anyone think that was good? When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Sure, you can fix some of these things, but then it just starts to look more and more like the kinds of systems we've been designing for decades. At the end of the day, it was always vapor, designed by people who weren't as smart as they believed.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  >Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail. I could also go write bad things about you and pay someone to launch it into orbit where it will be similarly stable. I could find the sequence in PI that encodes your personal social security number and shout it in a crowded room and you can't ever delete that information either, no matter how small of a jail cell you put me in. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. This also prevents governments from deciding who you are and are not allowed to transact with, whether your money is worth less today than it was yesterday, and whether you can spend your money (power) how you want to. >You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. You're going to need to explain what you think you're saying here, because this is not a property of any well constructed crypto system in existence. >When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Yes, crypto is more difficult to use than the fiat economy alternatives, at least right now. Technology is rarely very useful when it's first developed and especially so in cases where a strong network effect is required for it to be useful in the first place. All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
  - gafferongames 4y ago
    > All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come. This is a dystopia. No thanks!
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      I thought we were having a decent conversation here so I'm disappointed you went with the low effort response. I guess I will only point out that I don't think 'no dystopias' is an option you get. I think you have to pick the one you hate least, if past experience predicts future results.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> I think the central idea ... is a pretty useful thing. What's the best use case that you care to name? > It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts This is the argument that "sure, 98% of it is crap, but there's good too". Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  >What's the best use case that you care to name? Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers are worth it alone, in my eyes. Coming up second is the ability for money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust the execution of that program. Those are both primitives upon which pretty cool stuff can be built. >Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification. I think it's OK to believe in the core value of an area that also has a lot of scams. When they first invented electricity there were an enormous number of conmen who sold miraculous electro-cures for ailments, etc. It's just because people are interested in new technology, so operating scams in new technology is a good way to find people you can scam. In 50 years all the scams will revolve around whatever newfangled technology exists then, it's a pretty basic human pattern. Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    Follow through writh that, what is the actual use case for "Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers" is it legal, and are volatile ctypto tokens good at it? IMHO: No and no. > money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust is is a) money and b) how has that trust (AKA bug bounty) worked out? > Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not. And the fact that it is full of scams does not make it "the society-altering technology of the time" > “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

asimpletune 4y ago

There are so many reasons why even what you're saying is actually just bad! Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail. You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. They basically become landmines waiting to be tripped, and they're all made to look like something legitimate. How did anyone think that was good? When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Sure, you can fix some of these things, but then it just starts to look more and more like the kinds of systems we've been designing for decades. At the end of the day, it was always vapor, designed by people who weren't as smart as they believed.

idiotsecant 4y ago
>Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail. I could also go write bad things about you and pay someone to launch it into orbit where it will be similarly stable. I could find the sequence in PI that encodes your personal social security number and shout it in a crowded room and you can't ever delete that information either, no matter how small of a jail cell you put me in. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. This also prevents governments from deciding who you are and are not allowed to transact with, whether your money is worth less today than it was yesterday, and whether you can spend your money (power) how you want to. >You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. You're going to need to explain what you think you're saying here, because this is not a property of any well constructed crypto system in existence. >When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Yes, crypto is more difficult to use than the fiat economy alternatives, at least right now. Technology is rarely very useful when it's first developed and especially so in cases where a strong network effect is required for it to be useful in the first place. All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
- gafferongames 4y ago
  > All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come. This is a dystopia. No thanks!
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    I thought we were having a decent conversation here so I'm disappointed you went with the low effort response. I guess I will only point out that I don't think 'no dystopias' is an option you get. I think you have to pick the one you hate least, if past experience predicts future results.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

> I think the central idea ... is a pretty useful thing. What's the best use case that you care to name? > It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts This is the argument that "sure, 98% of it is crap, but there's good too". Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.

idiotsecant 4y ago
>What's the best use case that you care to name? Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers are worth it alone, in my eyes. Coming up second is the ability for money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust the execution of that program. Those are both primitives upon which pretty cool stuff can be built. >Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification. I think it's OK to believe in the core value of an area that also has a lot of scams. When they first invented electricity there were an enormous number of conmen who sold miraculous electro-cures for ailments, etc. It's just because people are interested in new technology, so operating scams in new technology is a good way to find people you can scam. In 50 years all the scams will revolve around whatever newfangled technology exists then, it's a pretty basic human pattern. Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  Follow through writh that, what is the actual use case for "Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers" is it legal, and are volatile ctypto tokens good at it? IMHO: No and no. > money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust is is a) money and b) how has that trust (AKA bug bounty) worked out? > Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not. And the fact that it is full of scams does not make it "the society-altering technology of the time" > “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.