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This compares nicely against Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic, in that it's not nearly as strident and self-satisfied and arrogant. That said, I have an vague h

by phillmv 12y ago

This compares nicely against Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic, in that it's not nearly as strident and self-satisfied and arrogant. That said, I have an vague high level technical understanding of btc, but none of Stellar, and I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve, or why patio11 hates btc. I'm actually inclined to dislike btc, and thus felt that the Defense Against The Dark Arts Professor is not an inapt caricature. But, the TLDR I got was: Stellar is some kind of sweet currency/asset agnostic market exchange. Also, btc boosters mix their metaphors/have incomplete pictures of the economy, warped by libertarianism. So far, so good. But Stellar still seems… awfully opaque.

diego 12y ago
I don't think patio11 hates BTC for any rational reasons. Nobody should hate or love BTC any more than, say, hacksaws. It's a tool, you decide whether you want to use it or not.
- GrahamL 12y ago
  Advocating against certain tools absolutely makes sense. A well marketed but fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous. Whether or not someone uses Bitcoin is not merely a decision that affects the implementer. If Patrick believes that's what Bitcoin is then it makes sense for him to be strongly advocating against it.
  - hempz 12y ago
    While, I agree with your statement; that a "fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous". I was not aware that patio11 nor anyone for that matter, have presented any "fundamental flaw" within the "engineering artifact" known as bitcoin. Which apparently, has also been elected to the position of "foundational infrastructure". Advocation requires an argument, in this case one which I am actually quite interested in reading.
    - dublinben 12y ago
      The deflationary fixed amount of BTC is certainly enough of a "fundamental flaw" for me. I don't think you need to be an economist to recognize the problems inherent in that. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21599053-chronic-deflation-may-keep-bitcoin-displacing-its-fiat-rivals-money http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21599053...
      - joepie91_ 12y ago
        What, exactly, is the fundamental issue with that?
        wmf 12y ago
        Deflationary systems tend to have no credit (because it's more profitable to hold money than to lend it), which slows economic growth.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        "Systems" are irrelevant to the discussion of crypto-currencies. No nation ever will have an economy based on BTC. The halfway argument (if a BTC-based economy would be bad, economies exposed to some BTC would be sort-of bad) doesn't work, either: the global economy has survived many other assets that appreciated in value.
        dublinben 12y ago
        Bitcoin isn't supposed to be an asset though, it's meant to be used as a currency. Unless it's no longer a currency, and the bitcoiners have all changed their tune.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        Stop trollin'. No one is that dumb.
patio11 12y ago
I've got an 8k word essay that I've been working on for a while about the engineering case against Bitcoin. I'd promise it in the near future but it isn't quite ready yet and I try to space publishing things out, partly to avoid wearing out my welcome with my audience and partially to make sure that I don't spend too much time on this sort of stuff relative to all the other stuff I have to do or could be doing. I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve If you trust me to speak on behalf of stellar advocates, then my good faith belief is that they'd describe it as something like "We want stellar to be TCP/IP for money." (People who like Bitcoin qua the protocol or blockchain technology rather than qua an asset also sometimes use that metaphor, for what it's worth.) The implication is that "TCP/IP is a fundamentally important technology which allowed other technologies which changed the face of the world" and "money is a crosscutting concern of many extremely important problem domains which you care about."
- pja 12y ago
  I've got an 8k word essay that I've been working on for a while about the engineering case against Bitcoin. I'll be looking foward to seeing it Patrick. I've got my own rant about why BitCoin is (mostly) a terrible, terrible idea but haven't committed any of it to written form as yet.
  - toasted 12y ago
    Although we are all quivering in anticipation of all these 8 thousand word essays, the fact remains that bitcoin is being used and works well.
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      I think the question is why is it used and what do we mean works well? It does solve the Byzantium generals problem rather neatly, which is good. But I doubt that is why it is used. It is used partly because it suddenly became free money for a lucky subset of people who found you could exchange something you got for free for something valuable (drugs sex etc) - and those were at such high rates that the people receiving the bitcoins were also basically being given free money (when one read the official exchange rates) This managed to fuel an interesting cycle. I would be interested in seeing if bitcoins exchange slips have affected it's purchasing power at exactly the same ratio or if it is being used as a barter not a currency (in these dark corners of the drug dealing world) I would also suggest that (afaik) real drug dealers who do real big deals work on serious guarantees of trust. Things like knowing the person you are dealing with, and where their children go to school. So things like trustless currencies in these environments are not trustless - quite the opposite.
gdb 12y ago
I can't speak to why patio11 dislikes BTC, but I can speak to what Stellar's trying to do. If it's helpful, there's some decent documentation on what Stellar's trying to do (at a social level) here: https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/ https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/. At Stripe, we've had to integrate with a number of backend financial providers. Stellar is trying to be a single system anyone can plug into that gives you global coverage. There's a lot of power to that, and a successful Stellar would help us focus on the core of our business (making payments seamless) rather than maintaining a bunch of integrations. I'm happy to answer any questions about what Stellar's doing/how it works: I'm gdb@stripe.com.
- pja 12y ago
  Minor question - Stellar wants access to the user's Facebook account as part of the verification process. Why does the Stellar FB app need to see the users' photos as well as their name and friend's list? Are you accessing these to do some kind of bot prevention, because I can't think of any other reason & spelunking through a users' photos seems like a somewhat invasive thing to do.
  - gdb 12y ago
    > Are you accessing these to do some kind of bot prevention Yep, exactly.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      And thus you will still need to maintain a ton of integrations to cover all the people with no Facebook accounts, or unwilling to provide that information.
- yxhuvud 12y ago
  I suppose the big question will be regulation. How much paper trail will Stellar leave? Can it be enough to make regulators happy?
eridius 12y ago
Bitcoin tries to do too many things. One of the things that it claims to do is be a medium of exchange of value, i.e. a currency. But its really kind of fails as a currency; nearly everyone actually using it to exchange value is really just using it as a just-in-time proxy for some other currency, i.e. businesses accepting BTC nearly always actually accept whatever the BTC equivalent of a USD (or other fiat) price is at the given moment and instantly convert it back into their fiat currency of choice when the transaction is completed. This is in fact the primary service Coinbase offers (at least, for merchants). And of course bitcoin has some flaws that make it hard to use as a currency in this fashion; as mentioned in the fanfic, it takes a decent amount of time before you can be confident that the transaction has actually gone through. Delays like that are acceptable in some transactions, but not in all. Furthermore, this use of bitcoin as an exchange of value is also obscured by the fact that people try and use bitcoin as an investment vehicle, try to use the blockchain for other purposes (e.g. as a digital notary), etc. All these reasons are why I too have been very skeptical of bitcoin. As far as I'm concerned, most of the "value" of bitcoin is driven by people treating it as an investment vehicle, and this leads to a lot of instability in the value. Without a long-term stable value (or predictable trend), it's hard to actually use it as a currency in its own right; anyone not using it as an investment vehicle is encouraged to hold a bitcoin position for as short a time as possible to minimize their risk. --- Stellar is a lot more focused. It's strictly acting as a medium of exchange, and in fact encourages you to not even use STR as a currency but instead to just use currency as a currency. STR will have some intrinsic value, but that value will likely be very stable, based on some particular fiat currency (I'm assuming USD but it doesn't really matter which one). It will largely just be used to facilitate exchanges between other currencies, like USD and EUR. Instead, people will trust various gateways to issue credit in the currency of their choice, and trade that credit. Not only does this insulate all parties from any market instability (as the value of 1 USD is always 1 USD), but the whole mining infrastructure is also gone, replaced by a consensus algorithm, which means transactions happen nearly instantly. On that note, bitcoin fans probably think dropping mining is a huge mistake, but Stellar transactions are already based on trust (you have to trust the issuer of any credit you're accepting), so extending trust to the network itself seems reasonable; you trust that the stellar service provider (stellard) you're connecting to has chosen a set of other peers that will not collude, which prevents you from being defrauded. These changes obviously mean the investment vehicle angle is gone (well, you can invest in STR, but the price is likely to be stable long-term, stellar has inflation too which encourages spending instead of hoarding), as is any of the other messing about with the block chain. All that's left is the currency angle, and Stellar's approach makes a hell of a lot more sense than bitcoin. It remains to be seen whether Stellar will get the widespread adoption necessary to actually succeed. But I hope it does, because it looks like it might actually work. Perhaps someday banks will start acting as stellar gateways, enabling nearly-instant transfer between any two people with accounts at participating banks. Basically, Stellar seems like it could do what Dwolla has been trying to do, except without even the 25 cent fee.

by phillmv 12y ago

diego 12y ago

I don't think patio11 hates BTC for any rational reasons. Nobody should hate or love BTC any more than, say, hacksaws. It's a tool, you decide whether you want to use it or not.

GrahamL 12y ago
Advocating against certain tools absolutely makes sense. A well marketed but fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous. Whether or not someone uses Bitcoin is not merely a decision that affects the implementer. If Patrick believes that's what Bitcoin is then it makes sense for him to be strongly advocating against it.
- hempz 12y ago
  While, I agree with your statement; that a "fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous". I was not aware that patio11 nor anyone for that matter, have presented any "fundamental flaw" within the "engineering artifact" known as bitcoin. Which apparently, has also been elected to the position of "foundational infrastructure". Advocation requires an argument, in this case one which I am actually quite interested in reading.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    The deflationary fixed amount of BTC is certainly enough of a "fundamental flaw" for me. I don't think you need to be an economist to recognize the problems inherent in that. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21599053-chronic-deflation-may-keep-bitcoin-displacing-its-fiat-rivals-money http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21599053...
    - joepie91_ 12y ago
      What, exactly, is the fundamental issue with that?
      - wmf 12y ago
        Deflationary systems tend to have no credit (because it's more profitable to hold money than to lend it), which slows economic growth.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        "Systems" are irrelevant to the discussion of crypto-currencies. No nation ever will have an economy based on BTC. The halfway argument (if a BTC-based economy would be bad, economies exposed to some BTC would be sort-of bad) doesn't work, either: the global economy has survived many other assets that appreciated in value.
        dublinben 12y ago
        Bitcoin isn't supposed to be an asset though, it's meant to be used as a currency. Unless it's no longer a currency, and the bitcoiners have all changed their tune.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        Stop trollin'. No one is that dumb.

patio11 12y ago

I've got an 8k word essay that I've been working on for a while about the engineering case against Bitcoin. I'd promise it in the near future but it isn't quite ready yet and I try to space publishing things out, partly to avoid wearing out my welcome with my audience and partially to make sure that I don't spend too much time on this sort of stuff relative to all the other stuff I have to do or could be doing. I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve If you trust me to speak on behalf of stellar advocates, then my good faith belief is that they'd describe it as something like "We want stellar to be TCP/IP for money." (People who like Bitcoin qua the protocol or blockchain technology rather than qua an asset also sometimes use that metaphor, for what it's worth.) The implication is that "TCP/IP is a fundamentally important technology which allowed other technologies which changed the face of the world" and "money is a crosscutting concern of many extremely important problem domains which you care about."

pja 12y ago
I've got an 8k word essay that I've been working on for a while about the engineering case against Bitcoin. I'll be looking foward to seeing it Patrick. I've got my own rant about why BitCoin is (mostly) a terrible, terrible idea but haven't committed any of it to written form as yet.
- toasted 12y ago
  Although we are all quivering in anticipation of all these 8 thousand word essays, the fact remains that bitcoin is being used and works well.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    I think the question is why is it used and what do we mean works well? It does solve the Byzantium generals problem rather neatly, which is good. But I doubt that is why it is used. It is used partly because it suddenly became free money for a lucky subset of people who found you could exchange something you got for free for something valuable (drugs sex etc) - and those were at such high rates that the people receiving the bitcoins were also basically being given free money (when one read the official exchange rates) This managed to fuel an interesting cycle. I would be interested in seeing if bitcoins exchange slips have affected it's purchasing power at exactly the same ratio or if it is being used as a barter not a currency (in these dark corners of the drug dealing world) I would also suggest that (afaik) real drug dealers who do real big deals work on serious guarantees of trust. Things like knowing the person you are dealing with, and where their children go to school. So things like trustless currencies in these environments are not trustless - quite the opposite.

gdb 12y ago

I can't speak to why patio11 dislikes BTC, but I can speak to what Stellar's trying to do. If it's helpful, there's some decent documentation on what Stellar's trying to do (at a social level) here: https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/ https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/. At Stripe, we've had to integrate with a number of backend financial providers. Stellar is trying to be a single system anyone can plug into that gives you global coverage. There's a lot of power to that, and a successful Stellar would help us focus on the core of our business (making payments seamless) rather than maintaining a bunch of integrations. I'm happy to answer any questions about what Stellar's doing/how it works: I'm gdb@stripe.com.

pja 12y ago
Minor question - Stellar wants access to the user's Facebook account as part of the verification process. Why does the Stellar FB app need to see the users' photos as well as their name and friend's list? Are you accessing these to do some kind of bot prevention, because I can't think of any other reason & spelunking through a users' photos seems like a somewhat invasive thing to do.
- gdb 12y ago
  > Are you accessing these to do some kind of bot prevention Yep, exactly.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    And thus you will still need to maintain a ton of integrations to cover all the people with no Facebook accounts, or unwilling to provide that information.
yxhuvud 12y ago
I suppose the big question will be regulation. How much paper trail will Stellar leave? Can it be enough to make regulators happy?

eridius 12y ago

Bitcoin tries to do too many things. One of the things that it claims to do is be a medium of exchange of value, i.e. a currency. But its really kind of fails as a currency; nearly everyone actually using it to exchange value is really just using it as a just-in-time proxy for some other currency, i.e. businesses accepting BTC nearly always actually accept whatever the BTC equivalent of a USD (or other fiat) price is at the given moment and instantly convert it back into their fiat currency of choice when the transaction is completed. This is in fact the primary service Coinbase offers (at least, for merchants). And of course bitcoin has some flaws that make it hard to use as a currency in this fashion; as mentioned in the fanfic, it takes a decent amount of time before you can be confident that the transaction has actually gone through. Delays like that are acceptable in some transactions, but not in all. Furthermore, this use of bitcoin as an exchange of value is also obscured by the fact that people try and use bitcoin as an investment vehicle, try to use the blockchain for other purposes (e.g. as a digital notary), etc. All these reasons are why I too have been very skeptical of bitcoin. As far as I'm concerned, most of the "value" of bitcoin is driven by people treating it as an investment vehicle, and this leads to a lot of instability in the value. Without a long-term stable value (or predictable trend), it's hard to actually use it as a currency in its own right; anyone not using it as an investment vehicle is encouraged to hold a bitcoin position for as short a time as possible to minimize their risk. --- Stellar is a lot more focused. It's strictly acting as a medium of exchange, and in fact encourages you to not even use STR as a currency but instead to just use currency as a currency. STR will have some intrinsic value, but that value will likely be very stable, based on some particular fiat currency (I'm assuming USD but it doesn't really matter which one). It will largely just be used to facilitate exchanges between other currencies, like USD and EUR. Instead, people will trust various gateways to issue credit in the currency of their choice, and trade that credit. Not only does this insulate all parties from any market instability (as the value of 1 USD is always 1 USD), but the whole mining infrastructure is also gone, replaced by a consensus algorithm, which means transactions happen nearly instantly. On that note, bitcoin fans probably think dropping mining is a huge mistake, but Stellar transactions are already based on trust (you have to trust the issuer of any credit you're accepting), so extending trust to the network itself seems reasonable; you trust that the stellar service provider (stellard) you're connecting to has chosen a set of other peers that will not collude, which prevents you from being defrauded. These changes obviously mean the investment vehicle angle is gone (well, you can invest in STR, but the price is likely to be stable long-term, stellar has inflation too which encourages spending instead of hoarding), as is any of the other messing about with the block chain. All that's left is the currency angle, and Stellar's approach makes a hell of a lot more sense than bitcoin. It remains to be seen whether Stellar will get the widespread adoption necessary to actually succeed. But I hope it does, because it looks like it might actually work. Perhaps someday banks will start acting as stellar gateways, enabling nearly-instant transfer between any two people with accounts at participating banks. Basically, Stellar seems like it could do what Dwolla has been trying to do, except without even the 25 cent fee.