This reasoning also (especially?) applies to voting. Trying to make voting "efficient" is not worth it when we do it rarely and we have not had a problem just getting people to count ballots manually.

This is a really bad comparison. Making it easier to vote has a big affect on how many people vote.

Requiring a hand delivered check vs wire transfer to buy house has a minimal effect on how many people buy a house.

Plus, the US has elections far more frequently than how frequently an average person buys a house.

> Making it easier to vote has a big affect on how many people vote.

I think OP meant "efficient" as in "efficient for the people doing the counting." In this case, efficient is not the same as easy. It's efficient to count a bunch of ballots by having people enter their choices directly into a bunch of counting computers that are networked to a central counting computer.

It's easy to vote by getting a ballot (by mail or in person), marking it, and dropping it into a box. But counting those votes is not efficient, or at least not fast.

I'm with you; I want the latter, not the former.

I find myself commenting on this more and more often, but check out what freeandfair.us is doing in the voting space.

> This reasoning also (especially?) applies to voting. Trying to make voting "efficient" is not worth it when we do it rarely and we have not had a problem just getting people to count ballots manually.

THat's a very rose-colored view on voting, one that conflicts with amount of recounts and outright election fraud that has taken place just in my lifetime. Not to mention the outright denial of some to candidates to attend or speak at conventions and caucuses or having heir delegates ignored entirely.

Ethereum was recently, and succinctly described to be the following by Udi Wertheimer:

“I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don’t know what it’s good for but fine; other people like it. Good for them.”

That pretty much sums up my perception, at first it was supposed to be a global computer, which made no sense to me... then it was THE Blockchain upon which smart contracts could be created, entirely ignoring Bitcoin's could do that multi-sig txs or nLock. But would facilaite things like smart-contracts for hotels and car rentals, then that faded into obscurity when they knew it was not practical at all given its limitations. Then when Crypto Kitties fad came on I stopped attending the local meetups entirely as I couldn't take them serious anymore.

I was always the 'Bitcoin maximalist' at those events, and while I was using their meetups as a way to grasp why Ethereum even mattered as I was at IBM's Blockchain division where they were openly pushing for ETH based solutions and using an equally complicated things as Solidity was when they mandated everything be done in Hyperledger Fabric.

Ultimately, I realized it was complexity for complexity's sake driven by people who really don't understand this technology at all, and did so with no real reason to justify it other than it fit with the 'it isn't Bitcoin, its this other thing' narrative. IBM really dropped the ball on their advantage to capitalize on the use of this tech to many of its multinational customers, many who seemed eager to explore the possibilities, as a result of this.

I still have some screen caps from the internal study material from the exams and other internal material on a phone somewhere that just focused on how Bitcoin was nothing more than digital currency for criminals online. And how Ripple and Ethereum were some how immune to that with no real explanation to anyone who actually understood the technology [1].

To this day I'm still baffled how anything but greed explains how Vitalik, a former member of Unsystem, was the guy behind this and the subsequent clusterfuck that is ETH/Classic/DAO whatever it wants to call itself.

I kind of wished it had all been a big prank to transfer funds from stupid investors and Putin who were mesmerized by empty claims and buzzwords to fund Unsystem's loftier goals for privacy on Bitcoin but after the DAO I was pretty convinced it was never going to happen. Crypto Kitties made me realize that even they had no idea what they were really building.

1: https://thexrpdaily.com/2020/01/20/ibm-said-ripple-is-unique...

Not sure if it’s general but here in the UK our lawyer made us come in to collect the bank account number and were very explicit about never using other details because of this scam.

I saw a variation of it first hand at a company I once worked at. The scammers gained access to the lobby of the building, removed the post and replaced it with invoices with different bank account details on.

Interestingly, property is the slowest and old-schoolest of all the branches of law. Some systems of deeds and recorders have existed for hundreds of years.

As an attorney I used to look at a lot of boilerplate skeptically but is a RE attorney told me I had to sign in the presence of a clergy, my mother and law, and three local stray dogs I'm marching my butt to a pet store and making some calls without a question.

As an attorney, you should know to read your contracts more carefully :) nothing in a pet store should qualify as a "stray dog," so is the whole thing null and void now?

To buy treats, to lure in said strays :-)

> I’m not sure I fully understand, in retrospect, the desire to shave off inconvenient corners for large life events you do so rarely.

Same. I’ve seen people but one car over another just because it was available nearby instead of a half hour bus ride away. How many times in your life do you buy a car that an extra half hour is significant?

For this, I think it also matters how people view the car, the class of car, and the cost of waiting or goi g somewhere else.

If you're buying a cheap car to get you from point a to point b and you don't care about amenities, what does it matter? Will that civic the next town over make you much happier than the corolla in front of you (or vice versa, or whatever)? Some people just don't care about cars, or at least not for the type of car they are buying for that use at that point in their life.

Nobody can care about everything all the time, and sometimes people just decide not to sweat the things other people think are vitally important because they have other stuff they care more about.

I was so picky and spent months looking for my car. To the point the dealers were getting a bit irritated. When I finally picked I was asked what colour. “Don’t care. What do you have on the lot?”

True, if you really don't care at all then just buy the closest one. But in my (limited) experience with buying cars, once you figure out what will meet your needs, there's usually a significant value difference between the available vehicles and it seems silly to give up several thousand dollars worth of vehicle for the sake of one slightly longer journey.

Sometimes. For middle-of-the road needs and reliability, it's hard to go wrong with Honda or Toyota, and at the lowest level of vehicle that only leaves you a couple choices. If I was in that position and didn't know a lot about cars, I might just go to whichever dealership was closest that had one, test drive what they had, and if nothing really negative jumped out, buy it.

The more money you're willing to spend the more good choices there are at that level though, so this becomes harder to do when not operating at the lowest cost tier of cars.

This does change a did if people are willing to consider less traditional choices, like smart cars.

What's so inconvinent about that? I assume you have to go into the lawyer's office anyways. A cheque is just a signed document telling your bank to transfer the money-if you're buying a house then a cheque is the least of the things you're going to have to sign. Was it just a normal cheque? (Not a certified cheque or money order, or anything special) if so many people will already have them on hand.

For $100k it had to be certified. And was a bunch of hoops to jump through to get them. Took like a week.

Mind you this is Canada so things are likely different.

Fellow Canadian here, I did not have this experience.

The certified cheque was done in 20 minutes. All that was required was two pieces of photo id, producing the debit card and entering my pin to access the account.

This wasn't even my "home" branch, zero prior relationship with this branch and I walked into a random one on my way to work.

I'm guessing there are hoops to jump through if you're clearing out your entire bank account because it could be grounds of suspicious activity by the branch manager.

This is an artifact of insecure communications systems and poor operational security. Making people shuffle physical paper around, especially considering things like pandemics and climate change, is a temporary workaround, not a long-term solution.

I think the most important point is that it's slow, it involves many people, and leaves a physical trail. These are all advantages for any kind of ability to prevent or recover from fraud or simple mistakes.

Perhaps you can build a similar electronic system, but if one of the purposes is to make it slow and make it involve lots of manual confirmations, is there really a purpose to it? It's going to be much more complex than the paper system (replacing physical properties like uniqueness with brittle/complex cryptographic versions). Complexity always begets bugs.

Given that it had been working this way for hundreds of years, how is it temporary?

I imagine, barring an extinction event, that humans will be using digital communications systems and cryptography for many tens of thousands of years.