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I know I will get absolutely thrashed and buried for saying this on this website, but I am going to say it anyway. The starting point for any modern money syste

by ilaksh 2y ago

I know I will get absolutely thrashed and buried for saying this on this website, but I am going to say it anyway. The starting point for any modern money system should be cryptocurrency. It should not be necessary to have a middleman at all. This will eliminate most of the types of 'fraud' where thieves or scammers charge a card in an unauthorized way, because cryptocurrency does not require giving away credentials with that capability. Instead, specific transactions are authorized. There is no such thing as giving out your whole master card number for a transaction. If you want to add middlemen as companies built on the cryptocurrency, you can and for some things they might be useful. But you absolutely should not need them by default in the contemporary era where we have cryptography and the internet.

benced 2y ago
Part of the design of modern credit cards is that even authorized purchases can be reverted if the customer is not delivered the promised goods. My understanding is that crypto people think that is a design flaw, not a feature, but most folks disagree and that's what counts when trying to get most people to adopt your solution.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  That is in there because of the core obsolete design flaw I pointed out -- credit card credentials are master keys authorizing arbitrary transactions. This is because it is an obsolete design that predates modern ubiquitous cryptography.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Dispute resolution, for non-fraud disputes, is completely orthogonal with fraud that happens due to insecure cardholder authentication. What if the seller goes bankrupt after accepting payment, but before shipping an order? What if they're an outright scammer? What if the buyer says they are, but the real scammer is the buyer? Somebody's got to figure all of that stuff out. The established card schemes provide a framework for that. It's flawed, it's taking a ton of automated and manual resources, nobody in their right mind would rebuild the same thing if given the opportunity from scratch, but it's there and it kind of works. That's a lot better than what crypto has to offer.
lolinder 2y ago
> This will eliminate most of the types of 'fraud' where thieves or scammers charge a card in an unauthorized way, because cryptocurrency does not require giving away credentials with that capability. Please get back to us when the cryptocurrency ecosystem has a lower rate of fraud than the mainstream ecosystem. Until then it looks like you've just traded each episode of one kind of fraud for twenty episodes of another kind. > If you want to add middlemen as companies built on the cryptocurrency, you can and for some things they might be useful. Moxie's article on why centralization is inevitable resonated with me [0], and all the evidence I've seen suggests that crypto is just as vulnerable to it as anything else. The middlemen who are initially optional inevitably become a core part of the ecosystem that you can't get away from. See Gmail. The decision you get when building an ecosystem isn't whether there will be middlemen, it's whether to plan around them or not. [0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
lxgr 2y ago
Not having any middleman at all is a non-starter if buyer and seller don't know each other yet. (Note that any form of escrow service, even if "on-chain" or "trustless", is a middleman, whether overt or covert.) Bootstrapping trust is a hard problem and arguably by definition requires some middlemen, some of the time.
gus_massa 2y ago
I'm old enough to remember https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
- ilaksh 2y ago
  This whole thing is similar to neural networks. They were almost universally sneered at for many years. But it turned out that the neural network advocates were 100% correct. The DAO getting hacked many years ago does not refute the idea of using math and the internet to transform money rather than relying on private middlemen companies.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    This is such a popular fallacy: "people sneered at ${thing that became a big deal} and therefore ${thing that I'm a big believer in} isn't doomed to obscurity." For every success story that people were skeptical of there have been a thousand failures that people were just as skeptical of. "People also made fun of ${success}" is meaningless as a defense of any technology. As I noted in my reply: middlemen are inevitable and already dominate the crypto space. If your plan for a crypto future doesn't plan around the inevitable middlemen you're already doomed to failure.

by ilaksh 2y ago

benced 2y ago

Part of the design of modern credit cards is that even authorized purchases can be reverted if the customer is not delivered the promised goods. My understanding is that crypto people think that is a design flaw, not a feature, but most folks disagree and that's what counts when trying to get most people to adopt your solution.

ilaksh 2y ago
That is in there because of the core obsolete design flaw I pointed out -- credit card credentials are master keys authorizing arbitrary transactions. This is because it is an obsolete design that predates modern ubiquitous cryptography.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Dispute resolution, for non-fraud disputes, is completely orthogonal with fraud that happens due to insecure cardholder authentication. What if the seller goes bankrupt after accepting payment, but before shipping an order? What if they're an outright scammer? What if the buyer says they are, but the real scammer is the buyer? Somebody's got to figure all of that stuff out. The established card schemes provide a framework for that. It's flawed, it's taking a ton of automated and manual resources, nobody in their right mind would rebuild the same thing if given the opportunity from scratch, but it's there and it kind of works. That's a lot better than what crypto has to offer.

lolinder 2y ago

> This will eliminate most of the types of 'fraud' where thieves or scammers charge a card in an unauthorized way, because cryptocurrency does not require giving away credentials with that capability. Please get back to us when the cryptocurrency ecosystem has a lower rate of fraud than the mainstream ecosystem. Until then it looks like you've just traded each episode of one kind of fraud for twenty episodes of another kind. > If you want to add middlemen as companies built on the cryptocurrency, you can and for some things they might be useful. Moxie's article on why centralization is inevitable resonated with me [0], and all the evidence I've seen suggests that crypto is just as vulnerable to it as anything else. The middlemen who are initially optional inevitably become a core part of the ecosystem that you can't get away from. See Gmail. The decision you get when building an ecosystem isn't whether there will be middlemen, it's whether to plan around them or not. [0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

lxgr 2y ago

Not having any middleman at all is a non-starter if buyer and seller don't know each other yet. (Note that any form of escrow service, even if "on-chain" or "trustless", is a middleman, whether overt or covert.) Bootstrapping trust is a hard problem and arguably by definition requires some middlemen, some of the time.

gus_massa 2y ago

I'm old enough to remember https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO

ilaksh 2y ago
This whole thing is similar to neural networks. They were almost universally sneered at for many years. But it turned out that the neural network advocates were 100% correct. The DAO getting hacked many years ago does not refute the idea of using math and the internet to transform money rather than relying on private middlemen companies.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This is such a popular fallacy: "people sneered at ${thing that became a big deal} and therefore ${thing that I'm a big believer in} isn't doomed to obscurity." For every success story that people were skeptical of there have been a thousand failures that people were just as skeptical of. "People also made fun of ${success}" is meaningless as a defense of any technology. As I noted in my reply: middlemen are inevitable and already dominate the crypto space. If your plan for a crypto future doesn't plan around the inevitable middlemen you're already doomed to failure.