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This is just such an awful betrayal of their mission. The Economist should know better, and everyone I have spoken to which is senior in their readership does k

This is just such an awful betrayal of their mission. The Economist should know better, and everyone I have spoken to which is senior in their readership does know better. This is still a pro-crypto-scam article. They repeat the same scam-artist lies, crypto is somehow an innovation in "trust", somehow more "efficient" than existing infrastructure, somehow "smart contracts" are more reliable than actual contracts. Things "become possible". How can an article like this, at the moment the Emporer's clothes start to fall off, be written? By the economist. It is just as-if homeopathy falls away and The Lancest is still interested in "innovations in water science"! This is, in my view, genuinely unconscionable. The problems blockchains solves are highly academic csci issues around "trust" and "programming" in absurdly distributed systems. They have nothing to do with trust, risk, contracts, ownership or rights in anything like an economic, political or moral sense. Repeating these lies now is such an awful betrayal of their obligations to their readers. They should be the ones informing the public on the actual economic meaning of these terms, and not participating in trying to keep the flame of these pyramid schemes alive. EDIT: since the article is paywalled, consider the following quote: > Amid the wreckage of the past week, it is worth remembering the technology’s underlying potential. Conventional banking requires a vast infrastructure to maintain trust between strangers. This is expensive and is often captured by insiders who take a cut. Public blockchains, by contrast, are built on a network of computers, making their transactions transparent and, in theory, trustworthy. Interoperable, open-source functions can be built on top of them, including self-executing smart contracts that are guaranteed to function as written. A system of tokens, and rules governing them, can collectively offer a clever way to incentivise open-source contributors. And arrangements that would be expensive or impractical to enforce in the real world become possible—allowing artists to retain a stake in the profits from the resale of their digital works, for instance. For this to appear in a serious article on crypto outside of the scamming community is outrageous. The economist here is repeating a fraud.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
The Economist represents a world viewpoint from the days of the United Kingdom: as in a small island nation with a monarchy exerting centralized economic control over a vast worldwide imperial empire. Why would they like cryptocurrency in any way, unless the Bank of England had monopolistic control over it?
- mjburgess 4y ago
  You've misread my comment. I'm angry that they're repeating pro-cypto ideology. If you read the article, they do not want gov control. They want the scams to play out. I expect better from the economist. It shares a readership with the FT, and the FT has not fallen victim to this hysteria.
olalonde 4y ago
I'm sorry but no one in their right mind will come away from this article thinking that this is a "pro-crypto-scam" article. The article is actually very critical. > The problems blockchains solves are highly academic csci issues around "trust" and "programming" in absurdly distributed systems. They have nothing to do with trust, risk, contracts, ownership or rights in anything like an economic, political or moral sense. It's hard to understand what you mean here. The whole innovation behind Bitcoin is to eliminate the need for trust in a centralized entity. This is not controversial at all and claiming otherwise, or even worse, that it's a "lie", deserves some elaboration...
- mjburgess 4y ago
  > The whole innovation behind Bitcoin is to eliminate the need for trust in a centralized entity Err, nope. That's the scam. A blockchain is a kind of database which requires no single machine to be nominated as the single-source-of-truth. that's it. This has nothing to do with centralisation, power, trust, or anything of that kind. The sense of "centralisation" in blockchain means computer network centralisation, as in how one connects databases. And "trust" in the sense that entries in that database are "reliable" in some academic sense. This has absolutely nothing to do with eliminating the need for "trust in centralised entities" -- such a claim is not only absurd, but the premise of a scam. A scam which continues to be perpetrated. And this article participates.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    If "eliminating the need for trust in centralised entities" is an absurd claim and a lie, then it follows that there exists a centralized entity you need to trust to use Bitcoin. What is that centralized entity? PS: When people say that Bitcoin is decentralized, they also mean it in the colloquial sense, not only in the CS academic jargon. Entities like PayPal or the Federal Reserve Bank are centralized and require trust. They have to be run by trusted people. In contrast, Bitcoin isn't run by anyone. It is governed by a protocol which is mostly set in stone. No centralized party can suddenly decide to "print" more Bitcoin or freeze accounts. This is what people mean.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> They repeat the same scam-artist lies, crypto is somehow an innovation in "trust", somehow more "efficient" than existing infrastructure, somehow "smart contracts" are more reliable than actual contracts. Things "become possible". I can't read the article through the paywall to read any clarification on these points, but some of what you mentioned in that list above is arguably true. * Say what you will about crypto, but it is an unbelievable accounting invention and innovation in trust. Crypto the technology is distinct from centralized exchanges. * In terms of electricity usage and transaction speed, most crypto might not be very efficient (yet), but what efficiency are they talking about? If crypto-adoption can replace many bankers and finance employees because the network automatically does a lot of their day-to-day tasks, then there's an argument that crypto is highly efficient in some areas. * Are smart contracts more reliable than traditional contracts? Well, that's highly debatable: you have the existing legal system that can sometimes be used to enforce contracts, but not always. But if the conditions of a smart contract are met, there's probably no conceivable force on Earth short of either a gargantuan cyberattack or the electricity going down network-wide that can stop it from executing. Sure, you might argue that smart contracts have numerous potential flaws (unreliable data, bugs in the contract, no possibility of rollback, etc) but there are good counterpoints, improvements in these areas, and some similar flaws in existing contracts. For instance: people intentionally cheat on traditional contracts all of the time and just dare others to sue: that's much harder with smart contracts that automatically execute once the agreed upon conditions are met.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

The Economist represents a world viewpoint from the days of the United Kingdom: as in a small island nation with a monarchy exerting centralized economic control over a vast worldwide imperial empire. Why would they like cryptocurrency in any way, unless the Bank of England had monopolistic control over it?

mjburgess 4y ago
You've misread my comment. I'm angry that they're repeating pro-cypto ideology. If you read the article, they do not want gov control. They want the scams to play out. I expect better from the economist. It shares a readership with the FT, and the FT has not fallen victim to this hysteria.

olalonde 4y ago

I'm sorry but no one in their right mind will come away from this article thinking that this is a "pro-crypto-scam" article. The article is actually very critical. > The problems blockchains solves are highly academic csci issues around "trust" and "programming" in absurdly distributed systems. They have nothing to do with trust, risk, contracts, ownership or rights in anything like an economic, political or moral sense. It's hard to understand what you mean here. The whole innovation behind Bitcoin is to eliminate the need for trust in a centralized entity. This is not controversial at all and claiming otherwise, or even worse, that it's a "lie", deserves some elaboration...

mjburgess 4y ago
> The whole innovation behind Bitcoin is to eliminate the need for trust in a centralized entity Err, nope. That's the scam. A blockchain is a kind of database which requires no single machine to be nominated as the single-source-of-truth. that's it. This has nothing to do with centralisation, power, trust, or anything of that kind. The sense of "centralisation" in blockchain means computer network centralisation, as in how one connects databases. And "trust" in the sense that entries in that database are "reliable" in some academic sense. This has absolutely nothing to do with eliminating the need for "trust in centralised entities" -- such a claim is not only absurd, but the premise of a scam. A scam which continues to be perpetrated. And this article participates.
- olalonde 4y ago
  If "eliminating the need for trust in centralised entities" is an absurd claim and a lie, then it follows that there exists a centralized entity you need to trust to use Bitcoin. What is that centralized entity? PS: When people say that Bitcoin is decentralized, they also mean it in the colloquial sense, not only in the CS academic jargon. Entities like PayPal or the Federal Reserve Bank are centralized and require trust. They have to be run by trusted people. In contrast, Bitcoin isn't run by anyone. It is governed by a protocol which is mostly set in stone. No centralized party can suddenly decide to "print" more Bitcoin or freeze accounts. This is what people mean.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> They repeat the same scam-artist lies, crypto is somehow an innovation in "trust", somehow more "efficient" than existing infrastructure, somehow "smart contracts" are more reliable than actual contracts. Things "become possible". I can't read the article through the paywall to read any clarification on these points, but some of what you mentioned in that list above is arguably true. * Say what you will about crypto, but it is an unbelievable accounting invention and innovation in trust. Crypto the technology is distinct from centralized exchanges. * In terms of electricity usage and transaction speed, most crypto might not be very efficient (yet), but what efficiency are they talking about? If crypto-adoption can replace many bankers and finance employees because the network automatically does a lot of their day-to-day tasks, then there's an argument that crypto is highly efficient in some areas. * Are smart contracts more reliable than traditional contracts? Well, that's highly debatable: you have the existing legal system that can sometimes be used to enforce contracts, but not always. But if the conditions of a smart contract are met, there's probably no conceivable force on Earth short of either a gargantuan cyberattack or the electricity going down network-wide that can stop it from executing. Sure, you might argue that smart contracts have numerous potential flaws (unreliable data, bugs in the contract, no possibility of rollback, etc) but there are good counterpoints, improvements in these areas, and some similar flaws in existing contracts. For instance: people intentionally cheat on traditional contracts all of the time and just dare others to sue: that's much harder with smart contracts that automatically execute once the agreed upon conditions are met.