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“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sen

by bertil 3y ago

“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sensitive to a Sybil attack. For every technology, if you ask “What problem does it solve?” and take into account what limits it has, you can backtrack where it’s useful. Something autonomous, expensive, rugged? Talk to the Army. Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system. Crypto makes sense for people who are doing something the government doesn't like, but that isn’t something three-letter agencies are willing to spend billions to fix. So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime. It’s not useless, but it’s not big money, as far as I can tell. I have friends who got in trouble with their government (the spicy kind of ecologists). They have an interesting project around Crypto: communication to evade surveillance. I’m not sure there are many others legitimate uses. But it’s not zero.

saurik 3y ago
> Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system. Craigslist--when you go to like, sell your old TV--actively tells people not to accept online payments from people because they can be reversed. Why? Because the risk to someone who has a single TV to sell is very different from the risk to someone selling hundreds of TVs, and so the person you need to protect is the seller, not the buyer. Also, you can totally build a system on top of crypto platforms that supports reversing transactions: it is, at the end of the day, fully programmable money. It's main claim to fame is that it is decentralized and transparent in implementation, and I'd have thought those would be universally good things, right? But like, frankly, your position here just sounds like some naive form of how we should refuse to give anyone autonomy (which almost all of these systems provide) or privacy (which the better systems provide) because good people have nothing to hide :(. Everyone deserves end-to-end encrypted permissionless communication, and the same everyone deserves zero-knowledge protocol permissionless payments.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
> So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime We have controls on regimes normally because the two are highly correlated.

by bertil 3y ago

saurik 3y ago

> Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system. Craigslist--when you go to like, sell your old TV--actively tells people not to accept online payments from people because they can be reversed. Why? Because the risk to someone who has a single TV to sell is very different from the risk to someone selling hundreds of TVs, and so the person you need to protect is the seller, not the buyer. Also, you can totally build a system on top of crypto platforms that supports reversing transactions: it is, at the end of the day, fully programmable money. It's main claim to fame is that it is decentralized and transparent in implementation, and I'd have thought those would be universally good things, right? But like, frankly, your position here just sounds like some naive form of how we should refuse to give anyone autonomy (which almost all of these systems provide) or privacy (which the better systems provide) because good people have nothing to hide :(. Everyone deserves end-to-end encrypted permissionless communication, and the same everyone deserves zero-knowledge protocol permissionless payments.

philipwhiuk 3y ago

> So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime We have controls on regimes normally because the two are highly correlated.