News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Winds of Change: The Case for New Digital Currency. Parent comment

Re:Winds of Change: The Case for New Digital Currency by PeterisP on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:48AM (#18458308)
It seems that you're describing a solution to the problem of delivery failure. However, the larger problem where consumers need the ability to revoke deals is not failure of delivery as such, but failure to deliver the right goods, possibly maliciously. And vice versa, the possibility by consumers to exploit the system to maliciously refuse paying for goods.

Censorship resistance is an edge case that's nice to have for some people, fraud resistance is the mainstream need that's mandatory for most users. Current crypto approaches don't handle fraud resistance as well as the traditional payment systems, so censorship resistance is a moot point until/unless that gets solved.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Winds of Change: The Case for New Digital Currency by DoctorOetker on Thursday November 15, 2018 @06:14AM (#18458405)
I am making no claims about priority of problems, so I certainly welcome identification of other issues and proposals to improve them.

If we mentally subdivide all commercial activity between traditional/centralized/blind trust commercial activities and novel/decentralized/cryptographic trust commercial activities, then (even if it is not occuring yet) it can desirable for the supporters of decentralization to be able to assure themselves that the status quo can not undermine the economic value of the cryptographic trust community.

Even outside of cryptocurrencies we have debates about net neutrality, priority of packets etc... One could similarily wonder if current delivery services are able to say profit by investing in specific companies within a sector of products, and differentially prioritizing the delivery of their goods (or gentleness of delivery for fragile goods, or even non-delivery).

I don't believe in moot points, people can work on different issues, design solutions for them and then they can look at how to intersect/generalize their protocols so that it displays both or more desirable traits...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Winds of Change: The Case for New Digital Currency by PeterisP on Thursday November 15, 2018 @06:28AM (#18458453)
Okay, in that regard the assumption that "the government or its postal system selectively withholds the goods payed for through cryptographic protocols" seems questionable. Is this a real problem that we're seeing in some markets? As far as I'm aware it seems that in general delivery services are decoupled from the payment for goods; the delivery system, no matter if it's government postal system or private parcel delivery, does not know and can not know how (and if) the goods were paid for. They may require some declaration from the sender about the value for insurance and customs purposes, but that's different than the payment data.
[ Parent | on HN ]