4 ms·
> In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in e
by Macha 3y ago
> In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.
Side note: This at least would occasionally happen if you tried to spend Scotland or NI £5 notes in England.
- HWR_14 3y agoThat's closer to my inability to spend US dollars in England. Different countries have different currencies.
- adamckay 3y agoNo it's not, Scottish bank notes aren't of a different currency - they're still pound sterling. The reason they're typically not accepted in English shops (at least, those not on the Scottish border) is most often because they're rather uncommon so it's more difficult for cashiers to detect fakes. My understanding is also that some banks, when depositing, require the English and Scottish notes to be separated and may charge a fee to convert them to English notes, so it's more effort to accept and handle them.
- HWR_14 3y agoCan you (British equivalent of Venmo/Paypal) Scottish pounds to someone who receives them as English pounds? I don't know why Britain doesn't just implement a national printing press.
- adamckay 3y agoThere's no such thing as Scottish pounds or English pounds, the UK uses pound sterling (internationally abbreviated to GBP). There are English banknotes and Scottish banknotes, but they're the same currency.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 3y agoBut banknotes are literally issued by private banks? Why not have a national mint that covers all GBP?
- toyg 3y agoTbh, in practice that really has something to do with counterfeiting worries.
- Macha 3y agoDevil's advocate: Is WEI not tackling counterfeiting of a different kind?
- toyg 3y agoThe difference is the cultural expectation. The web has always been like Venice's Carnival: people wear masks, some very elaborate, some very thin. Now Google wants to go around ripping masks from everyone's faces, because "we are doing some serious business here". It ruins it for everyone.
- Gigachad 3y agoIt's like a double edged issue. On one hand, yes it is actually useful for saving users from logging in to their bank on a malware infested computer. But it also completely kills the last bit of computing freedom and will be used to kill ad blockers and to enforce DRM.
- Gigachad 3y agoIDK why people try so hard to cram metaphors in to things, especially when the metaphore is more confusing that the thing they are trying to explain. It's not at all like currency and fungibility. It's like Android SafetyNet where apps can work out if the device is rooted and running custom software underneath the browser/app.
- kelnos 3y agoThe reason for using metaphors is because most users don't understand the more direct comparables. Pretty much all non-technical users -- and a great many technical users -- have never heard of SafetyNet and don't know what it does. Metaphors are imperfect; that's inherent to their very nature. That doesn't make them useless.
- Gigachad 3y agoYou don't even need to know what safety net is, the description after completely summarizes it and makes way more sense than talking about cash which I can't see any relation to the original topic. I'm not sure how a non technical user is meant to get any kind of understanding of WEI from that metaphor. It can be explained quite simply "Websites can check if your browser has extensions or if your OS has been modified, and refuse access based on this information"
- Brian_K_White 3y agoBut that "explaination" doesn't really mean much to most people. It says words but does not say why they are bad.
- Gigachad 3y agoIt tells you exactly what is going on. It's up to people to decide for themselves if that's bad or not. I can't see any way to understand WEI going by the metaphore of buying newspapers. How does that explain anything?