Re:The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of go...
by shadowgovt on Monday April 18, 2022 @04:05PM
(#31075766)
> replace bitcoin with gold in your question, and ask why that worked for thousands of years
Guns (well, swords and truncheons before that) and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, mostly. And I think I'd argue the dark net markets work the same way: holding reputation as currency, they provide an incentive for the users not to cheat, but if they cheat, there's no recourse except "Well, guess I'd better find another market." And that's if we discount the few but notable instances of them using actual violence to enforce their norms... Ulbricht of Silk Road got arrested for attempting to put an actual bounty on someone's head.
The blockchain system provides a simple way to very publicly and reliably declare the exchange of meaningful numbers between two pseudonymous identities. Everything else about the market that blockchain exists in is the same grabasstical process that humans have used for exchange of resources throughout all of history.
Guns (well, swords and truncheons before that) and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, mostly. And I think I'd argue the dark net markets work the same way: holding reputation as currency, they provide an incentive for the users not to cheat, but if they cheat, there's no recourse except "Well, guess I'd better find another market." And that's if we discount the few but notable instances of them using actual violence to enforce their norms... Ulbricht of Silk Road got arrested for attempting to put an actual bounty on someone's head.
The blockchain system provides a simple way to very publicly and reliably declare the exchange of meaningful numbers between two pseudonymous identities. Everything else about the market that blockchain exists in is the same grabasstical process that humans have used for exchange of resources throughout all of history.