What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.
First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted.
Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.
As soon as it claimed to be money, then it was all about the money. If you look at early BitcoinTalk, you'll see a pile of scams that are extremely similar to the jargon still used in crypto to this day - the scammers got in very early indeed.
I hear that darknet markets tend to use cryptocoins. Which while probably mostly illegal, isn't a Ponzi scheme and isn't (necessarily, depending on what's being sold) fraud.
Only if you have a wildly incorrect view of what a blockchain is.
Merkle trees are part of a blockchain, but they are not blockchains on their own. What you’re missing here is that blockchains also include something to determine which branch is the correct one, to protect against double spend attacks. This is why “blockchain” gets a different name rather than just being called Merkle trees.
I'm pretty sure that if I posted a fork of Linux somewhere, approximately everyone would know that it's not the correct one.
I thought that Monero at least served some purpose as a currency even if it goes against the wishes of some countries' governments. The fact that there are people that talk down cryptocurrencies that are actually being used as a currency really put things into perspective.
It's just multi level marketing schemes all the way down.
Amusingly enough the darknet use of crypto may only be possible because of the Ponzi-beginnings. Criminals are unlikely to accept Pokémons as currency until after they see others doing it.
The actual interesting and novel thing about crypto-coins was solving the "trust problem" of a distributed ledger. But this solution, to be honest, is quite clumsy: PoW. But nobody ever found a better solution until now. Any other proposal is kind of centralized somewhere.
The question that needs to be asked is now "Do we really want, or even need, a fully decentralized 'value moving system'"?
In a world where you could ultimately trust someone else the answer would be clearly "no".
But when there is on thing to learn about humans than it's "never ever trust someone ultimately as you're going to be scammed by those people eventually". Just look at what government do around the globe…
As long as this fact doesn't change (and it won't change until we create a new species of intelligent beings, better than us) there will be room for something like BitCoin. And as those are distributed systems there even doesn't need to be any agreement on that point.
And then there is what we do know about what happens in practice:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/majority-of-bitcoin-trading-...
https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_find...
"We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote on Thursday. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development."
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/24/andrew-cuomo-covid-ibm-b...
"Blockchains are typically public, their contents transparent to anyone with an internet connection, but the one behind Excelsior Pass will be private, meaning only parties sanctioned by IBM will be able to check the contents."
But the blockchain is the protocol for updating the information where other players aren't trusted. As soon as any "party" can be "sanctioned to be able" there's just no need for blockchain at all. It's just selling of snake oil, and yes, IBM is indeed doing it.
Now who'd expect that? The technology company uses the hyped technologies to sell their services and products, even if the said technologies don't make the products any better?
Of course, blockchain promoters would tell you that "there will be something else, comes Really Soon (tm) which won't use "proof of work"."
One can more efficiently use public key cryptography, hashing and signing without the blockchain for any other problem than "implementing bitcoin."
The problem is that delivering AR with enough fidelity to fool the eye is capital-H Hard. Michael Abrash had a good series of blog posts on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) An old algorithm used for sharding big-data databases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) A simplified version of paxos.
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-ins... The new paper about SCP which allows replication with subjective notions of trust (no central participant-stake list like paxos/raft).
ps: actually i remove "chained" from the idea. If you want to keep the whole authenticated linked-list thing and do it right you'll end up somewhere near https://irmin.org/ (a generalization of git), which is very useful, but doesn't tackle the "strong decentralized commit". You'll probably want to either centrally manage the "lastest-hash(s)" (like git is usually done), or pair it with a state-machine replication protocol. In that last case it may seem useless to use the chained thing if you already have a real replication protocol, but it is much like using public-key crypto for encrypting small ephemeral symmetric keys and encrypting actual data with symmetric crypto: it's an optimization.
Of course, PoS like Ethereum's takes much inspiration from byzantine paxos. But I wouldn't call this a solve problem, and crypto has innovated in this space. We can just debate whether or not the innovation has been worthwhile ;).
So... like git?
And that algorithm is indeed novel! It also has a lot of drawbacks that ultimately makes the whole system not worth the trouble.
This is gold, I'm gonna steal it
Cryptocurrency seems like that for endless numbers of tech nerds. It’s even worse than the impossible shape they were going to use on the Borg since it plugs right into humanity’s biggest cognitive vulnerability: gambling.
Maybe it’s a weapon sent by aliens to make halt our technological progress. 25 years from now cryptocurrency will have soaked up all surplus capital and locked it into a Ponzi and all our best minds will be churning out increasingly Byzantine coin hacks. Then the hypervelocity impactors start arriving…
Curious what you landed on, though.
The NFTs that just point to a painting or a youtube video, I don't think so. They don't do anything and I don't think owning them will be valuable.
The NFTs of, like, NBA clips I can sort of understand as digital trading cards. Being purely digital I think they're inferior to the baseball cards I collected as a kid, but I can kinda see it. But 1) they don't need a blockchain; a public database would probably work better for everyone and 2) I don't think sports trading cards are generally a good investment.
There's something maybe interesting in the "creator economy" angle where like a new podcaster auctions off NFTs of the episodes to early fans, who then become invested in its success. If the show takes off, newly minted NFTs will go for more and more money benefitting the creator and the secondary market will appreciate for early supporters. To be clear, I don't think this is actually a good idea for a lot of reasons... but it's interesting.
All the games and pets and racehorses seem like junk.
Like, sure, NFTs hypothetically make it so that ownership of Top Shots can persist regardless of whether the company that operates it survives. But would the actual Flow blockchain survive the demise of Dapper Labs? I kind of doubt it. And where would the Top Shots I supposedly own continue to be hosted? It's effectively just a centralized marketplace.
I've tried to think about what would truly be unique and interesting about decentralized NFTs, and to me, they make sense if they hold credibility independent of any producer. So, something like a tradable auth role that is respected in many spaces. Kind of like an identity, except that I think the concept of a role makes a bit more sense as something that people can trade. Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.
To me, that's where it starts to enable something that's unlike what's existed before, but it's still hard for me to imagine a real use case. And that's core of the problem of the crypto world: the technology solves problems that don't map on to existing B2B or B2C services. It's literally a solution in search of a problem.
They don't confer copyright or licensing or anything at all other than a URL. This means it would be illegal to build a site that displays such content, and it would get instantly DMCA'd into oblivion.
My issuing an NFT of the Mona Lisa is basically me grabbing a museum map from the Louvre, circling the Mona Lisa on it, signing my name, then selling that map to you for big money. The map doesn't given you a license to display the Mona Lisa. It's just a set of instructions re: how to find it alongside my signature. If they move the painting to a new location, it gets stolen, destroyed, or the Louvre is shut down - well, tough. And anyone can do it, with any map of the Louvre.
> Consider it to be like an event ticket that is respected in an entire ecosystem of different companies.
Event tickets have one issuer and one point of redemption. Generally, Ticketmaster is on both sides (they own the issuance via Ticketmaster and they own the redemption side - the venues - via Live Nation). It's not in their interest as a business to relinquish even the tinies bit of control.
Agreed on the unlikelihood of NFTs supplanting event tickets. I'm just speculating on the type of novel product/ecosystem the technology enables. But building a compelling experience around this concept is a whole other challenge. It remains to be seen whether someone eventually does. Even if that happens, it doesn't mean we're talking about an entire new market of significance.
I guess I'd just say absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, when it comes to the utility, but a level of outside-the-box thinking is required that no one's motivated to do when you can simply mint NFTs of URLs and sell them for absurd sums of money.
Also, consider that in NFTs, the only one selling an NFT to the Mona Lisa is Leonardo.
No. Copyright must be explicitly assigned.
> Also, consider that in NFTs, the only one selling an NFT to the Mona Lisa is Leonardo.
Nah anyone can do it any time.
No one is talking about assigning copyright. The question is about a license to display the content on a website. I am fairly certain you have heard of non-verbal contracts before. For example, here is what the UK government has to say about an implied copyright license:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/license-sell-or-market-your-copy...
> Nah anyone can do it any time.
Anyone can also sell a signature of Clooney. And yet no one does, nor would anyone buy it. This is not something that plays into a serious analysis of the NFT space, and so I am not sure why you would want to find it interesting to talk about.
Agreed that the artificial scarcity is a tell that there's not a particularly impressive amount of innovation.
Sologenic DEX [1] is an modern UI for a DEX to trade. Cutting out the middlemen was once a key point of p2p and decentral systems. It was kinda lost with all the non tech savvy people storming the crypto space.
[1] https://www.sologenic.com/ecosystem/sologenic-decentralized-... (The DEX runs on the XRPL, Manticore Securities AS(the company behind sologenic) has no control over it)
What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.
For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.
That a transaction is final is not a flaw but one of the main features.
I don't use dispute resolution unless someone actually stole my credit card number like when my card info was jacked at a gas pump one time. Credit cards are quite insecure and we still have to type in all our personal info online every single transaction which is dangerous and dumb and makes the whole system vulnerable to credit card fraud in a way that crypto isn't. When you use crypto you simply sign a transaction message, you don't have to give away your private keys to make the transaction occur.
That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made.
Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all.
In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?
Second, adoption is way up and btc is only one cryptocurrency. It gets first-mover advantage in this market (unfairly, probably) and so continues to be a bellwether despite the fact that it is a relative dinosaur, technology wise. I'm fine with that, personally, despite the problems with the technology.
That you haven't adopted the tech doesn't mean that adoption is failing, you know. There are more users every year (this is difficult to pin down for obvious & good reasons, but the indicators are solid) and no technology with millions of users globally, including institutional adopters, can be said to be failing.
Further, to call any payments technology 'mildly popular' which safeguards USD 1.5-2.5 trillion (total cryptocurrency market cap, BTC accounting for over 760 billion alone, despite the recent corrections) in deflationary wealth undermines your argument to the point of bad faith. Is the cryptocurrency market overheated and full of nonsense? Of course. But let's do the analyses with level heads at least.
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
This article includes some interesting tidbits: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-...
Paper currency is a couple millenia older than the printing press, using woodlblock printing.
If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.
Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.
It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.
I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Jack-Weatherford/dp/060...
In Europe credit cards are not very common, and debit card transactions are often not reversible.
A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".
Anyone who has worked with payment processing can tell you how rare debit card chargebacks are, this is because they’re usually vastly more difficult.
And no, your comment on Ethereum is about 4 years outdated.
The fundamental issue is that creating scalable, cheap credit infrastructure for mass economic activity is fundamentally in opposition with creating an investment that will continually gain in value. You see this really clearly in Ethereum, where’s gas fees can be exceptionally high compared to traditional financial institutions.
Or https://compound.finance/ also a great project.
Ethereum's gas fees have nothing to do with the price of the base asset: it has to do with limited block size availability. When the network is congested, block size is limited and this causes transactions to be bid up in an auction format to get in first.
This is one of the costs of decentralization. However, recent advances in Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography has paved a path for Ethereum to take to get to VISA scale and beyond and be able to process 200K transactions per second (at pennies or less per tx): see https://zksync.io/ and https://starkware.co/.
There are already a large number of crypto projects partnering with existing businesses to address real problems. I don't see a minority ideology standing in the way of this.
Here's various businesses running oracles for smart contracts including Deutsch Telecom: https://chain.link/ecosystem/data-providers
Here's Ernst & Young's take on the technology: https://www.ey.com/en_us/blockchain
They are not. They're offering a pre-paid card that users can top up with their crypto.com wallets. [1]
The Crypto.com Visa Card is a prepaid card. Broadly speaking, prepaid cards are the same as debit cards. The difference is that debit cards are linked to your bank account, but prepaid cards need to be topped up. In our case, you can top up using bank account transfers, other credit/debit cards, or cryptocurrency.
And Deutsch Telecom isn't using a blockchain either. They're selling data to a company that then puts the data on a blockchain. That's not using a blockchain.
And Visa clearly said: that Anchorage will be its “digital asset settlement agent” and that it will “integrate [its] treasury systems with Anchorage.”
“After further testing and additional conversations with clients, partners and members of the regulatory community, we hope to launch this capability for other partners in the year ahead,” Visa said in a blog post about the news.
Read it from their official press release, a couple times: https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
Multisig escrow is also better in every way if people want to involve a third party in case of a dispute
SWIFT international wires do cost the DI more, but not several orders of magnitude more. I don't happen to know that number off hand.
Some retail banks charge a lot for wires because they can - people don't use them frequently (as to your point its not what people want most of the time) and usually only for bigger purchases so the fee matters less.
However, if this is something you do more often, banks offer steep, steep discounts over sticker.
And BTW no we dont need bitcoin for this at all its depreciated tech. But other DLT can be very usefully. There is a reason CBDCs are a huge topic in global finance.
With technology getting faster, I regret not mining a few coins.
I even bought the sound cards?
A life if regrets because I didn't follow my gut feelings, or let people sway my decisions?
(Would I invest in Bitcoin now. Hell no, but years ago yes. It will deflate, along with NTF's, and the stock market soon.)
Not be able to reverse transaction is not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw. There is absolutely no advantage to the consumer or the producer to have all transactions immediately permanent.
The rest of your comment reveals your bias: You don't really care about it working technologically, you just wish you had made money on it.
The slow transition away from “mass adoption soon!” is extremely entertaining to me.
Why, pray tell, for a currency would developers matter more than end users?
Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.
Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.
It'd be like if the number of Facebook accounts kept rising, but hardly anyone posts content anymore. If I were a Facebook investor, that would worry me.
First I've heard of this. Do you have more information?
And the idea that miners have a god-given right to make $100 per transaction, $40m per day, and therefore if the mining reward halves, the price of BTC must inevitably double, is obviously preposterous.
Note, not speculation in Bitcoin, usage of it as an actual currency.
I agree with you. Both versions of this argument have to stop in favor of actual discussion (which, it seems, there is a good amount of in this thread)
Most technology companies should hold it on their balance sheets and employ a contributor.
“Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”