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People prefer widely accepted tokens of value, which are the few strongest currencies (USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, CHF, not much more). BTC has made enough inroads to b

by nine_k 1y ago

People prefer widely accepted tokens of value, which are the few strongest currencies (USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, CHF, not much more). BTC has made enough inroads to be considered semi-widely accepted, and be useful as is in certain circumstances, but that's about it. Blockchain is a useful technology, but, it appears, mostly not for carrying fancy coins.

XorNot 1y ago
What exactly is blockchain useful for?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Being a single source of truth which changes only according to certain rules, and not at the whims of some administrator. In short: accounting. It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.
  - dehrmann 1y ago
    Isn't an issue with Bitcoin that it's actually controlled by the miners, so they could collude to change some of the issuance rules?
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      I'd rephrase slightly: Bitcoin's problem is that, since it's controlled by the miners, they're unlikely to change the issuance rules. Adequate security can be had at a far lower cost, but that's a change that would damage their investment in mining hardware, so the miners will never do it. I hope one day we start valuing abstractions based on the desirability of their externalities. After such a shift, bitcoin will look pretty silly--who would want use waste-electricity-coin when they could instead use capture-carbon-coin or go-to-mars-coin? But it would seem that we're not there yet.
      - dehrmann 1y ago
        At what point do large AI players have enough GPUs to take over the blockchain?
        __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        That would be 51%. I'm not a big fan of bitcoin, so I haven't tried to forecast it in terms of years. Asic miners outperform GPU's though, so it would have to be an awful large pile of GPU's.
  - wbl 1y ago
    If it solved these headaches why didn't it catch on?
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      I used to work for a company which later got bought by Fiserv (a large payments provider). I had these headaches re: transaction data. Wrote a lot of SQL to reconcile the pairwise sync problem. I tried to convince them that this is a problem for a blockchain, but I grew impatient and left. Just a few weeks ago Fiserv launched a stablecoin on Solana: https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-launches-new-fiusd-stablecoin-for-financial-institutions https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-lau... I doubt they listened to me, probably just came to the conclusion independently. So I'd say that it has caught on, just in a way that doesn't involve the users' preferences as much as I'd like. Because it's not like Fiserv is going to let their end users transact with any of the other assets on Solana. They'll wrap it in an interface that just calls it "$" and the user will be none the wiser.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
The anthropological evidence suggests that people prefer densely connected networks of interpersonal debt to any kind of tokenization. Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance, usually because they won a war and now they want to continue bossing the losers around without having to remain combat-ready all the time. The only people who benefit from using widely accepted tokens of value are those who have a hand in issuing them. To the rest of us they represent a disadvantage. For a long time this was a stable configuration because densely connected networks of interpersonal debt become computationally burdensome to work with at the scale of the empires created by those wars. But if our money can be programmable, then maybe a new way can be found which better respects the needs of all of its users, rather than just the few at the top. I don't know what such a thing would look like, but it would look nothing like a stablecoin.
- Incipient 1y ago
  >Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance, I get the poke at the US there, but I have to refute this bit. The EU is probably the main example of acceptance through ubiquitousness. Rmb through aggressive economic policy, the yen through (traditionally) stability. The usd would arguably be through technological superiority at the advent of global financial markets, and their companies offering global services to facilitate trade (via usd). We'll probably see the rmb replace that gradually/rapidly, again not through violence.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I'm not proposing that fiat currencies overtake each other through violence. If you're accustomed to some bully overriding your notion of "value" to align with their agenda, then you likely don't lose much by swapping them out for a different bully. I mean, some bullies are better or worse stewards of a currency than others, but you're still living under a system designed to protect bullies. I'm proposing that fiat currencies overtake their alternatives by violence, and I'm interested in those alternatives. So it was really a poke at the Roman empire. Or perhaps my history isn't quite right and its some other empire. Surely somewhere, somewhen, there was a people who would be presented with a token for exchange and who would accept or reject it based on the wisdom or skill or empathy shown by whatever group was involved in the creation of that token. Choosing what to accept as money would be an expression of one's personal values: each transaction a sort of vote. Leaders would have an incentive to remain wise or skillful or empathetic, because their power comes from the people's willingness to trade in their tokens. Noticing that somebody else is using the same kind of money as you would be an indicator that you value the same outcomes as they do. If they have a lot of it, it would be evidence that their actions have been furthering your goals. Fiat currency, as practiced today, forces us to act as though we all value the same things (which, in some sense we do: not being harmed by the bully, but that's hardly a useful policy objective). Crypto looked like a way out for a while. A place where we could opt in to good ideas by chosing to use tokens which were involved in carrying them out, a market where the desirability of the externalities determined the value of the abstraction. I really want to see how far technology can amplify a consent-based system as opposed to a bullly-based one, so the collapse of Web3 into a casino feels like a tragedy. What we're doing isn't working, and yet we're apparently too afraid to explore alternatives.

by nine_k 1y ago

XorNot 1y ago

What exactly is blockchain useful for?

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Being a single source of truth which changes only according to certain rules, and not at the whims of some administrator. In short: accounting. It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  Isn't an issue with Bitcoin that it's actually controlled by the miners, so they could collude to change some of the issuance rules?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I'd rephrase slightly: Bitcoin's problem is that, since it's controlled by the miners, they're unlikely to change the issuance rules. Adequate security can be had at a far lower cost, but that's a change that would damage their investment in mining hardware, so the miners will never do it. I hope one day we start valuing abstractions based on the desirability of their externalities. After such a shift, bitcoin will look pretty silly--who would want use waste-electricity-coin when they could instead use capture-carbon-coin or go-to-mars-coin? But it would seem that we're not there yet.
    - dehrmann 1y ago
      At what point do large AI players have enough GPUs to take over the blockchain?
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        That would be 51%. I'm not a big fan of bitcoin, so I haven't tried to forecast it in terms of years. Asic miners outperform GPU's though, so it would have to be an awful large pile of GPU's.
- wbl 1y ago
  If it solved these headaches why didn't it catch on?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I used to work for a company which later got bought by Fiserv (a large payments provider). I had these headaches re: transaction data. Wrote a lot of SQL to reconcile the pairwise sync problem. I tried to convince them that this is a problem for a blockchain, but I grew impatient and left. Just a few weeks ago Fiserv launched a stablecoin on Solana: https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-launches-new-fiusd-stablecoin-for-financial-institutions https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-lau... I doubt they listened to me, probably just came to the conclusion independently. So I'd say that it has caught on, just in a way that doesn't involve the users' preferences as much as I'd like. Because it's not like Fiserv is going to let their end users transact with any of the other assets on Solana. They'll wrap it in an interface that just calls it "$" and the user will be none the wiser.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

The anthropological evidence suggests that people prefer densely connected networks of interpersonal debt to any kind of tokenization. Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance, usually because they won a war and now they want to continue bossing the losers around without having to remain combat-ready all the time. The only people who benefit from using widely accepted tokens of value are those who have a hand in issuing them. To the rest of us they represent a disadvantage. For a long time this was a stable configuration because densely connected networks of interpersonal debt become computationally burdensome to work with at the scale of the empires created by those wars. But if our money can be programmable, then maybe a new way can be found which better respects the needs of all of its users, rather than just the few at the top. I don't know what such a thing would look like, but it would look nothing like a stablecoin.

Incipient 1y ago
>Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance, I get the poke at the US there, but I have to refute this bit. The EU is probably the main example of acceptance through ubiquitousness. Rmb through aggressive economic policy, the yen through (traditionally) stability. The usd would arguably be through technological superiority at the advent of global financial markets, and their companies offering global services to facilitate trade (via usd). We'll probably see the rmb replace that gradually/rapidly, again not through violence.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I'm not proposing that fiat currencies overtake each other through violence. If you're accustomed to some bully overriding your notion of "value" to align with their agenda, then you likely don't lose much by swapping them out for a different bully. I mean, some bullies are better or worse stewards of a currency than others, but you're still living under a system designed to protect bullies. I'm proposing that fiat currencies overtake their alternatives by violence, and I'm interested in those alternatives. So it was really a poke at the Roman empire. Or perhaps my history isn't quite right and its some other empire. Surely somewhere, somewhen, there was a people who would be presented with a token for exchange and who would accept or reject it based on the wisdom or skill or empathy shown by whatever group was involved in the creation of that token. Choosing what to accept as money would be an expression of one's personal values: each transaction a sort of vote. Leaders would have an incentive to remain wise or skillful or empathetic, because their power comes from the people's willingness to trade in their tokens. Noticing that somebody else is using the same kind of money as you would be an indicator that you value the same outcomes as they do. If they have a lot of it, it would be evidence that their actions have been furthering your goals. Fiat currency, as practiced today, forces us to act as though we all value the same things (which, in some sense we do: not being harmed by the bully, but that's hardly a useful policy objective). Crypto looked like a way out for a while. A place where we could opt in to good ideas by chosing to use tokens which were involved in carrying them out, a market where the desirability of the externalities determined the value of the abstraction. I really want to see how far technology can amplify a consent-based system as opposed to a bullly-based one, so the collapse of Web3 into a casino feels like a tragedy. What we're doing isn't working, and yet we're apparently too afraid to explore alternatives.