3 ms·

And more to the point, there’s no suggestion of this process ever stopping. There will always be bugs—new ones discovered and old ones reintroduced.

woodruffw 4y ago
On it's own, that would be fine! Nobody expects criminals to stop innovating on crime; it's fundamentally an arms race. The problem is not the unending process itself, but the flawed (and conceited) belief that cryptocurrencies don't have to solve the same problems.
- CPLX 4y ago
  Yes but we do expect to be unaffected by financial crime. I have never been the victim of a financial crime, like an institution trusted to hold my assets just not doing it. Most people I know haven’t either. Granted it’s not like it never happens. But it’s exceedingly rare and people’s standards are incredibly high. We demand and expect that if you put money in a bank you can always get it back and we mostly stick to that plan.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Well said. In a perverse way, financial schemes built on top of cryptocurrencies represent the crowning achievement of traditional finance: we've successfully made it so safe, so incredibly boring for ordinary citizens that technologists believe they can derive the same system from first principles.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  When I’m dealing with a bank, I don’t have to care about the arms race. If the bank gets hacked, I haven’t lost my savings.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I don't quite buy this. "There will always be bugs" is a truism, along the lines of "all code bases will have to be maintained forever." But that's just not true, code can be done. I think it's really a problem of tooling. We have formal verification, you can come up with an idea, write a specification for it, and write code that does exactly what is intended. It does require more rigor than we currently have, someone attempting to build something must thoroughly understand what they're trying to accomplish and understand how to properly use the tooling, but it can be done.

woodruffw 4y ago

On it's own, that would be fine! Nobody expects criminals to stop innovating on crime; it's fundamentally an arms race. The problem is not the unending process itself, but the flawed (and conceited) belief that cryptocurrencies don't have to solve the same problems.

CPLX 4y ago
Yes but we do expect to be unaffected by financial crime. I have never been the victim of a financial crime, like an institution trusted to hold my assets just not doing it. Most people I know haven’t either. Granted it’s not like it never happens. But it’s exceedingly rare and people’s standards are incredibly high. We demand and expect that if you put money in a bank you can always get it back and we mostly stick to that plan.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Well said. In a perverse way, financial schemes built on top of cryptocurrencies represent the crowning achievement of traditional finance: we've successfully made it so safe, so incredibly boring for ordinary citizens that technologists believe they can derive the same system from first principles.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
When I’m dealing with a bank, I don’t have to care about the arms race. If the bank gets hacked, I haven’t lost my savings.

betwixthewires 4y ago

I don't quite buy this. "There will always be bugs" is a truism, along the lines of "all code bases will have to be maintained forever." But that's just not true, code can be done. I think it's really a problem of tooling. We have formal verification, you can come up with an idea, write a specification for it, and write code that does exactly what is intended. It does require more rigor than we currently have, someone attempting to build something must thoroughly understand what they're trying to accomplish and understand how to properly use the tooling, but it can be done.