4 ms·

That wouldn’t stop someone from entering something into the ledger wrong or fraudulently. Crypto just isn’t a silver bullet, for anything.

trompetenaccoun 4y ago
It's not about preventing lies or making fraud impossible. It's about leaving a clear record of it for use cases where accountability is paramount. The current trust-based system in finance does not work and only aids scammers. Because of all the scams we have auditing and then it's found the auditing firms are fraudulent/corrupt as well. It's fraud all the way down, there is no way to change this because who audits the auditors?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  I think OP is right. Cryptocurrencies / distributed ledgers / merkle trees literally solve 0 problems of confirming things said in meat space were actually said or done. Additionally, a ledger of facts doesn’t give you the bigger picture of what’s happening. Eg if I’m saying as a CEO that our retention policy is now 3 months, how are you going to use facts to prove that I’m doing this for FOIA? Additionally, even if you think there’s some kind of path where recordings go into the ledge, with deep fakes, that’s a losing proposition. How do you solve this problem? Checks and balances and strong institutions that actively work to remove moral hazards from society AND themselves. Sure, if you weaken institutions and then claim they’re ineffective, you’re just creating self-fulfilling prophecies. In a well-designed system, you don’t need to audit the auditors. Make sure that the auditors are secret and that randomly chosen (ie there’s no incentive to collude with the entity being audited). Provide strong incentives (training, compensatory, social, rewards) and protection (ie people with power going after them / their reputation) for both rooting out corruption/scams and that when they say a business isn’t a scam then it’s most likely not (eg clawbacks on money, prestige, recognition, etc). Additionally, the FBI, IRS and other state and federal law enforcement agencies should be proactively auditing the largest businesses OR outsourcing to very trusted auditors (ie ones for whom the cancellation of the contract would be a death sentence which is easy to enforce by requiring that 100% of revenue for the outsourced agency comes from the federal government and there’s N such agencies that all split the pie so that if one fails and gets corrupt the others take over (the FBI is authorized to have wiretaps and secretly monitor the auditors to ensure there’s no kind of collusion communication happening between auditing agencies (ie we allow leadership in these trusted position to require that you give up more of your rights to be in it and we publish job-relevant details from ~5 years ago without any FOIA battles allowed - only personal details can be omitted and only on-the job details are revealed so no marital secrets). Additionally, anyone caught leaking or losing these records before they are released to the public is punished by getting fired and criminal charges being mandatory. If an audit of the FBI reveals the director is asleep / didn’t properly establish best practices to keep the data in control, the president fires them. Anyway these are all obvious wildly radical ideas and not necessarily possible to implement due to various laws / there may be flaws in the specific details. My overall point still stands. It’s fraud because we let it exist, not because it’s impossible due to human nature / the way society works.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    I get your point, we're talking about different things though. I'm strictly talking about money movements on chain, in areas where there is sufficient public interest to mandate it. That isn't a radical idea for government finance and central banking as an example, why should this be hidden from the public? The current system is opaque and encourages corruption/fraud. It was in reply to the above comment saying our entire society is run on scams, which is true. We can start cleaning it up from the top, which is the smart way to go about it instead of tilting at legal windmills. In the current system, you're more likely to get caught and punished as a petty criminal than someone who siphons off millions. Yes, some fraud will always be possible in free societies but it doesn't have to be the way it currently works. More transparency and better record keeping are a positive thing. Even if we take your example of someone inputting wrong data, they're more likely to be found than if there is no data at all and thus nothing to scrutinize. People who falsify data make mistakes just like anyone does.

trompetenaccoun 4y ago

It's not about preventing lies or making fraud impossible. It's about leaving a clear record of it for use cases where accountability is paramount. The current trust-based system in finance does not work and only aids scammers. Because of all the scams we have auditing and then it's found the auditing firms are fraudulent/corrupt as well. It's fraud all the way down, there is no way to change this because who audits the auditors?

vlovich123 4y ago
I think OP is right. Cryptocurrencies / distributed ledgers / merkle trees literally solve 0 problems of confirming things said in meat space were actually said or done. Additionally, a ledger of facts doesn’t give you the bigger picture of what’s happening. Eg if I’m saying as a CEO that our retention policy is now 3 months, how are you going to use facts to prove that I’m doing this for FOIA? Additionally, even if you think there’s some kind of path where recordings go into the ledge, with deep fakes, that’s a losing proposition. How do you solve this problem? Checks and balances and strong institutions that actively work to remove moral hazards from society AND themselves. Sure, if you weaken institutions and then claim they’re ineffective, you’re just creating self-fulfilling prophecies. In a well-designed system, you don’t need to audit the auditors. Make sure that the auditors are secret and that randomly chosen (ie there’s no incentive to collude with the entity being audited). Provide strong incentives (training, compensatory, social, rewards) and protection (ie people with power going after them / their reputation) for both rooting out corruption/scams and that when they say a business isn’t a scam then it’s most likely not (eg clawbacks on money, prestige, recognition, etc). Additionally, the FBI, IRS and other state and federal law enforcement agencies should be proactively auditing the largest businesses OR outsourcing to very trusted auditors (ie ones for whom the cancellation of the contract would be a death sentence which is easy to enforce by requiring that 100% of revenue for the outsourced agency comes from the federal government and there’s N such agencies that all split the pie so that if one fails and gets corrupt the others take over (the FBI is authorized to have wiretaps and secretly monitor the auditors to ensure there’s no kind of collusion communication happening between auditing agencies (ie we allow leadership in these trusted position to require that you give up more of your rights to be in it and we publish job-relevant details from ~5 years ago without any FOIA battles allowed - only personal details can be omitted and only on-the job details are revealed so no marital secrets). Additionally, anyone caught leaking or losing these records before they are released to the public is punished by getting fired and criminal charges being mandatory. If an audit of the FBI reveals the director is asleep / didn’t properly establish best practices to keep the data in control, the president fires them. Anyway these are all obvious wildly radical ideas and not necessarily possible to implement due to various laws / there may be flaws in the specific details. My overall point still stands. It’s fraud because we let it exist, not because it’s impossible due to human nature / the way society works.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  I get your point, we're talking about different things though. I'm strictly talking about money movements on chain, in areas where there is sufficient public interest to mandate it. That isn't a radical idea for government finance and central banking as an example, why should this be hidden from the public? The current system is opaque and encourages corruption/fraud. It was in reply to the above comment saying our entire society is run on scams, which is true. We can start cleaning it up from the top, which is the smart way to go about it instead of tilting at legal windmills. In the current system, you're more likely to get caught and punished as a petty criminal than someone who siphons off millions. Yes, some fraud will always be possible in free societies but it doesn't have to be the way it currently works. More transparency and better record keeping are a positive thing. Even if we take your example of someone inputting wrong data, they're more likely to be found than if there is no data at all and thus nothing to scrutinize. People who falsify data make mistakes just like anyone does.