I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship.
An under-rated problem of blockchains, imo, is how the system shifts incentives for the stakeholders: if code really is law every system is one mistake away from giving away its entire value, if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Very, very few people have the technical skill to implement a useful system which is fully automated. I'm extremely skeptical that we've been missing something that is going to make that dramatically easier in the future - and without several orders of magnitude decrease in programmer error smart contracts seem like a bad bet.
This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Which proved that as far as the flow of value is concerned, the buck stops not at the tech but at the social consensus. So all this mental effort going into fancy byzantine algorithms is effectively just smoke and mirrors and the rest is a Merkle tree.
Worse than this. Code is law, but some insiders are above the law.
It doesn't make sense to take an example of what happened in the infancy of a technological innovation like Ethereum and think that that's what still defines it.
A rollback like the one the one that happened in 2016 is almost impossible right now as the tech and the community/ecosystem has matured and grown.
It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it.
They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig.
The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.
Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.
I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".
Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?
I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).
I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.
What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?
What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?
Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"
How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?
Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.
> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful
What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?
I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.
Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.
I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?
> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)
Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?
> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original
What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?
> same as a material painting
I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.
What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?
I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.
Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.
This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).
There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).
I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.
Which special qualities are you enamored with? And to what use would you like to put them?
The shared ownership of state -- theoretically "serverless" in that there's not a specific server that rules them all.
> And to what use would you like to put them?
Something wiki-like, as well as service discovery.
Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same.
And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.
This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"
By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.
There's really something worth it, perhaps?
Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time.
Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.
Regarding your use cases.
> uncensorable payments
would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat?
> also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs)
a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though
> moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards)
I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem?
> smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger)
I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.
While it's true that you can't really censor the blockchain transfer, how much that allows someone to 'take' a payment depends a great deal on the legal circumstances where they live. I don't mean that the core transfer mechanism isn't cool - but there's a pretty big gap between a digital currency and acquiring physical goods where authorities can step in.
> super quick payments
Blockchain technology is, on average, pretty much the slowest possible way to make a payment. The slowness of other techniques are not because of any underlying technical reason - they're based on laws and policies. It's true that it can be faster than other methods in certain circumstances - but that has more to do with gaps in regulation than the technology.
I fully agree that distributed ownership is cool, but I wanted to note something about this:
> I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc
You are still bound by them not crashing, losing your data, going bankrupt or changing the rules. Many blockchains have gone down, lost history, shut down entirely, or changed the rules. There are ways that these problems are more easily addressed in a blockchain ecosystem, but it's not straightforwardly "better." If your usecase suffers from a bug, and a majority of the nodes benefit from that bug, you will likely never be able to get that bug fixed on the main chain.
I also think that copyright is the elephant in the room. Imagine two versions of...a world of warcraft sword. One is the texture & model that are included with the game - the other is, additionally, an NFT. The material reality of adding that sword to another game are identical in both cases: you can just put the sword in another game if you have the assets. That has never been a technical challenge. The challenge is legal and NFTs do not help with the legal problems.
If I sign a contract with you saying you can use the sword in another game the contract is the thing that matters. It does not matter if the contract is in an NFT or references an NFT. If anything, creating a system to manage & mint NFTs is an additional technical lift in creating multi-game assets.
I'm hard pressed think of how NFTs would be better than a centralized server that publishes daily signed database dumps of all owned assets. The cryptographic guarantees are the same and in either case the service continuing to sell assets depends on their willingness to assign copyright.
Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.
What's funny about that is China is adopting blockchain technologies specifically to bind together databases for tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
China is banking on blockchain technologies precisely because it's can be such a powerful censorship tool.
https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chin...
> tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
does this sentence mean something to you? what does a blockchain do in this situation?
Only a guess, but I suspect that Covid got as bad as it did partly because Wuhan officials didn't want the central government to know how bad things were (at least at first).
The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.
But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work.
A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government.
Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.
And in a system where it's considered sometimes desirable to erase inconvenient history, an immutable ledger doesn't help with that.
George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.
Sure, you have a limited number of participants and some tweaking to do on the quorum (in some cases you might want all parties to sign).
But hey - the blockchain cool-aid gang tried to sell it as a solution for COVID contact tracing. Which is beyond laughable. The entire industry is a shillfest.
That being said, it is not clear to me how a hash chain guarantees that the data it stores hasn't been modified.
The basic idea is, you have a chain of 'transactions' (like in bitcoin or think git commits) und you store the hash of the content + the hash of the member before as a checksum. This way, if you alter the log file, the hash for the modified entry is suddenly different, and the chain breaks, because the next member used your hash as input to calculate their checksum. So you can not only see that the file was tampered with, you can also say which entry was modified.
Edit: Merkle trees[0] generalize this concept into trees, which are e.g. used in ZFS (the file system), git and in the blockchain.
(Social factors and forks to change our minds on blockchains notwithstanding)
In addition, I don't see what prevents an "official" from writing a social credit transaction (disclaimer that I have no idea how China's "social credit" system works or even what it is) to the blockchain. Nodes validate to solve disagreements where one node says a transaction happened that did not. This does not appear to be the same type of dishonesty being referred to here.
The world has functioned up until the magical dawning of the blockchain.
A blockchain doesn't prevent individual parties from lying about things only they would know about -- if that's what's on your chain, you still need trust.
How far down the chain could a 51% blockchain rewrite occur before consuming all of the computation power of the universe?
I have seen arguments in which the 51% steals all of the new coins but how long can that be maintained, the other 49% needs to pay their bills and audits would inevitably out the bad players. Eventually, the last bitcoin will be minted, making the whole issue mute.
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/blockchain-portfo...
There are many anti-fraud and enhanced supply chain tracking notions associated with blockchain tech. Of course, those are all enabled with this form of 'surveillance.'
How often is this true in practice? It seems like crypto often has centralized points where people have admin powers.
Blockchain has unique attributes, I don't think it has any unique quality.
Most of its "qualities" are things that you do not want under any circumstance in your systems even independently, so adding them all together turns it into a worthless technology.
Immutability? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Trustless? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Decentralized? A waste in 99% of the use cases. Now put all 3 together, add more "qualities" akin to those, and you've got blockchain.
I suspect this will increase over time.
>if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense.
Exactly, and the "code is law" thing is not going so well, given that many of the programmer error catastrophes thus far have been "solved" by the social consensus of a small clique of developers.
> Sent $80M a Month to Himself
In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.
You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).
With cryptocurrency, code is more like possession. The law is still law.
The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.
It’s a Merkel tree, with a distributed clock. I still don’t know where it would be useful outside of cryotocurrencies. And for currency, it’s still extremely questionable.*
Though I suppose we're not "users" of such a system, but are rather "subjected to it"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta...
EDIT: I guess you could rules-lawyer about the meaning of "majority" but like... you don't even need a majority of users to start a fork! Two people is enough to start a fork. There's nothing preventing me from starting a fork of Bitcoin today and mining/trading it among my friends. It's just that normally people feel compelled to go along with what the majority is doing
If enough people on the blockchain decide to update their code to do something different, you either fork or move with them.
* blockchains are centralized; just in a different way
I wish bitcoin were solving a real problem for the amount of energy it uses.
Absolute integrity is a lot less important in systems which assume that inexpensive manual overrides will be possible - because you save a ton by simply deciding to build a system that 'only' works 99.9% of the time and intervening in 0.1% of cases. Obviously blockchains don't work 100% of the time but that's the premise for their increased costs.
I'm not sure the analogy even works, but in the case of driving, if 99% decided to switch how the roads were to be used, I assure you that literal resistance would not be tolerated. There might be some incidents, but there wouldn't be very many before the 1% were the ones getting pushed around.
Samoa changed road direction a while ago. Not everyone was on board, but it happened anyway.
There’s maybe a utility in crypto, but every one of these dumb scams erodes trust in it and lessens the likelihood of widespread adoption
> It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the recipient now had an expensive-to-maintain animal he could not give away and could not put to much practical use.
Crypto is a blessing because it allows people to move value freely, but a curse in that it forces us to really come to terms with the fact that selective oppression (i.e. you can't use a credit card to pay for a hitman) actually helps us live higher quality lives.
There are still systems like Monero, Firo, and others which are heavily used as payment networks on the DN due to their ability to obfuscate the source/destination/amount of transactions.
Even then, many micro-transactions have little need for anonymity/security and might happily make a tradeoff for lower anonymity and/or higher centralization in exchange for lower fees. There are systems like Nano and GNU Taler which try to address this.
There's a lot of BS surrounding "web3", but the dream is really this: Imagine you could have a spam-prevention system that requires a small fee for users to access a scarce and easily DoS-able service or resource - all without the vendor lock-in, tracking, insecurity, fraud, proprietary software or fees associated with middlemen like PayPal.
I might pay to read a news article for 0.2 cents if I didn't have to give them my credit card. I might pay youtube a cent for every video I watch without ads, in fact I might even pay a cent for a third-party service to strip youtube of ads even if they didn't offer that service. Such a hyper-competitive system would discourage easily-bypassed advertisements and tracking in favor of an online economy that makes it easy to securely spend or donate a minuscule amount of money.
I think the largest reason why we don't see bitcoin taking this role as a payment processor goes back to the 2017 XT dispute wherein bitcoin users decided not to increase the block size limit and the users who wanted to decrease payment fees forked off into "bitcoin cash", which happened to coincide with the 2017 bull market. In this sense, bitcoin is a bad example of a cryptocurrency because of its disproportionately high fees and it's use of extra measures like LN. An example of a more "normal" cryptocurrency would be something like litecoin or bitcoin cash.
I'm pretty sure some startups have already attempted a micropayment content gate. You pay them 5 bucks, they portion out the money to the content creators every month based on the articles you choose to read.
Other than an immediate payment (in the case where you're not running it yourself), why does it need cryptocurrency?
Not for or against btw!
It doesn't. It could just be some secure, open cryptographic payment system like Digicash or GNU Taler, but financial institutions refuse to implement those types of systems because they benefit from the vendor-lock-in, surveilance, insecurity, and ambiguity of the existing system.
>Why couldn't I load ten dollars credit into YouTube, in exchange for 1000 credits - one of which I'd use for every video I watch? Google has my card on file already
Because that requires you to set up a pre-existing buisness relationship with every service you interact with. "Works great" for big companies like youtube, netflix, not so much for news websites, blogs, forums, etc. that rely on surveilance and easily blockable ads. The friction associated with that is what makes the current system uncompetitive. You couldn't just do a microtransaction with a random self-hosted website- there's too much risk on both sides: they could steal your identity, you could hit them with chargebacks, etc.
>I'm pretty sure some startups have already attempted a micropayment content gate. You pay them 5 bucks, they portion out the money to the content creators every month based on the articles you choose to read.
I would congratulate them on reinventing paypal. Watch as they re-invent vendor lock-in and hike up the fees once they gain signifigant market share. The purpose of cryptocurrency is to eliminate these middlemen so users can exchange peer to peer using FOSS, and we are not beholden to the whims of a single company like Patreon.
>Other than an immediate payment (in the case where you're not running it yourself), why does it need cryptocurrency?
It doesn't need to be cryptocurrency. It needs to be secure, private, cheap, reliable and competitive. All things which the current payment systems are not, and will never be so long as they are run by rent-seeking intermediaries like SWIFT, PayPal, Apple, Google, etc.
The "revolution" story is what people tell themselves to morally justify getting rich off the money of later buyers.
That is the key.
People will believe anything if it helps them believe they'll get rich quick, whether it's that crypto is revolutionary, or that tulip prices can only go up.
The startup ecosystem is very similar: the large majority of founders and many employees[1] don’t win. A few win very nicely thank you very much.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02632764211049...
But I've spent two years in this space and I've come out thoroughly disillusioned. The vast majority don't even care about privacy or ownership or decentralization - they just want to know "wen pump?"
However I still recommend this article because it’s not necessarily on the topic of self-ownership and privacy (privacy running counter to the concept of cryptocurrency itself anyway)
A notable example here are the "pre-sale investment groups", which essentially consists of morally corrupt criminals buying tokens pre-release e.g. for 2 cents, which will then be listed on major exchanges for 50 cents initial price. You can probably imagine what happens to everyone buying the token for 50 cents on release. This has gone so far that these "investment" groups had to come up with "vesting schedules", which are essentially designed to keep them from dumping on *each other*, in addition to keeping them from selling too much too fast and dumping the price and "painting bad charts".
This is also not a niche venture that only happens with a few select tokens, it's become a completely normal procedure that happens with almost every single new token, and insanely enough even the people further down the food chain have accepted this procedure as a reasonable fact and don't even question it any more. "Of course bro, whales provide liquidity"
I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.
It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)
Well, why wouldn't there be? Cryptocurrency didn't start out the way it's being used now, and evangelists and nerds have been hard at work for over a decade in furthering the technology.
I can understand your perspective too, however, while we obviously appreciate and care for the underlying technology, almost no one else will. Most people have problems operating Metamask already, so there's no possible reality in which I can see cryptocurrency succeeding because of some awesome underlying technology that almost no one really understands. If cryptocurrency ever succeeds, it's because regulation has cracked down extremely hard, a lot of people are in jail, a lot of time has passed, the sentiment has recovered and real utility is commonplace.
The point at which APY rates for farming/staking are equal or almost equal to traditional treasury basis points, and the decision between investing in stocks or crypto is taken on the basis of fundamentals and utility, will be the time cryptocurrency has grown up and put on big boy pants.
I'm not trolling, but I really don't know what this real utility is. I've been extremely active in crypto for two years (as a user, not a trader) and I still don't know if there is any real utility, outside of gated access to communities and/or voting on DAO proposals. Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.
In two years, everything in crypto has largely been the same. Transactions on Metamask run the same way. Mobile experience is uniformly awful. Buying shitcoins is still using the same old crummy Uniswap interface. The only difference is that there are a bunch of new chains VCs can pump and dump on.
Most projects in crypto are deeply involved in navel gazing. All these bridge projects are a good example - they all hail it as "revolutionary" if you can transfer funds from Sol to ETH. Outside of crypto, people ask "but why?"
That sums it up pretty nicely, at least for DeFi.
Layer 1 currencies do have utility as currency, albeit defined by adoption. I sometimes pay for my pizza in Bitcoin. Some banks use XRP as a SWIFT-style cross-border payment network.
Once you go beyond these functional but boring DeFi projects, you run into a ton of scams, wild "experiments for the sake of experiments", and projects that are just trying to extend the ponzis built on top of established protocols.
Take all the forks. One algostable becomes successful and suddenly there are hundreds of forks that collapse within days, sometimes hours (TOMB is an example).
Most of the promises of DeFi are absolutely nothing but pure ponzis that collapse once new money stops coming in. OHM chart is the best example. "Reserve currency" that dropped 99% because new money stopped coming in.
What it essentially boils down to is the simple question: what's the use of these projects besides making money? Don't get me wrong - speculation can be a use case. But I've never heard of speculators take the holier-than-thou, "we'll change the world" tone that crypto proponents seem to take.
I’ve seen a lot of these charts and that is one of the best, but LUNA will forever be the fondest memory..
The boring plain vanilla DeFi stuff seems great, especially for people who live in countries with unstable banking systems (e.g. Lebanon, Russia, &c)
https://a16zcrypto.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/state-of-c...
In my case crypto helps me receive money internationally, in a country where it's a huge pain in the ass otherwise. Just because you don't have a use case does not mean something has no use cases.
He specified he didn't use an exchange by the way, but the reason is the same. It's cheaper.
Some of these things, in some contexts, are both ethical and critically useful. Obviously there are also many (if not most) unethical use-cases.
...but you cannot claim it has no practical value.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/04/05/...
Thank you
And countries at war often use auctions of memorabilia or other objects to raise funds - selling an NFT is just a shift in medium.
A corrupt[0] government collecting money through opaque organizations to use for military purposes and "humanitarian aid" is the best we've got?
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index
You aren't alone, though. There are many in their first-world bubble that don't see the benefits of crypto because their fiat fulfills all their needs. The same way you've never gone hungry, that doesn't mean food scarcity doesn't exist.
I'm somewhat sceptical as I know someone who works for a company in a role organising payment to employees in poorer and third-world countries. They've told me lots of interesting stories about navigating the bureaucracy, nepotism and avoiding extortion/corruption to ensure people were paid but never that bitcoin was involved.
Sorry I can't provide more details, I don't really know if everything happening is totally legal? I assume it is for the US company, but I'm sure you can find more details if you look hard enough.
I’m interested in the many poor people you know who have been lifted into middle class through being paid in BTC by American employers. It’s a fairly bold claim from what I know of the way multinational companies operate globally so I’m genuinely curious about it.
I'm not sure where the bold claim is - there are plenty of articles detailing companies who openly pay contractors in bitcoin, so I must still misunderstand you?
> I know many poor country citizens who have had their families lifted into middle class even by american standards
Sounds like you're describing the same thing as the person you replied to - a small number of people evading or breaking their country's laws so that they can enrich themselves.
Given that you're talking about people earning a middle-class-US money, likely putting them in at least the top percentile or two, I think it's actually exactly the same thing. Even millionaires will tell you they're not rich and point to people who are richer than them to justify why they feel that way, but you shouldn't believe them.
It's also obvious this choice is barely even in the same category as an oligarch that has to choose between being in the top 100 richest people on earth and the top 10,000 richest people on earth.
There's effectively nothing different about a top 10k and top 100 richest persons lifestyle options, they can do practically anything they want so long as it can be bought.
If you're at the top 10,000 level you'll think there's no difference between the top 1 and top 100 but a huge difference between the top 100 and top 10,000. If you're at the top 1,000,000 level you'll think there's no difference between the top 100 and top 10,000 but a huge difference between the top 10,000 and top 1,000,000. And so on at every level.
Why would they want to pay them in USD and not the local currency? What was preventing them from official employment?
I think the point about 1st world bubble is fair, in my opinion
This claim can be dismissed as easily as it was made. Quite literally everyone I know getting paid in crypto (which is only a dozen or so) would rather be paid in fiat but can't because of regulations.
Some see illegal activity - I see consenting individuals being enabled to engage in free trade. Personally I would question anyone that would believe people shouldn't be able to trade their resources freely with consenting individuals. Humans shouldn't be slaves to the authoritarians they may have been born under.
The solution to stopping unethical activity should be to stop that unethical activity. It shouldn't be to limit and regulate all activity to simply make it less convenient to participate in unethical activity.
You’re claiming that these countries prevent people from being paid money for work?
Crypto is a luxury even for people in such countries, it’s not a feasible alternative to local fiat.
> The solution to stopping unethical activity should be to stop that unethical activity
Thanks for clearing that up! I wasn’t aware that the solution was so simple.
Yes, it's quite common even in the US you can't work without a visa. Other countries have much stricter rule depending on things like sanctions etc.
> Crypto is a luxury even for people in such countries, it’s not a feasible alternative to local fiat.
Except when it isn't - which is exactly the case I'm describing.
> Thanks for clearing that up! I wasn’t aware that the solution was so simple.
Really no need for snark. No one said it was simple. You know it would be much easier to presume guilt until proven innocence too, but that doesn't make it a better approach to creating a healthy society.
> Why would they want to pay them in USD and not the local currency?
To be blunt, because the local currency is useless. You're presumably from somewhere in the Western world, so smack dab in the very first-world bubble being discussed here where "fiat" means stability and not simply a measure of an economy in free fall. Outside of the world's strongest economies there is very real incentive for individuals and businesses alike to hold currencies that don't lose significant amounts of their value from month to month. I started at my current role in April 2021 at which point the parallel market exchange rate was ₦480 to $1; earlier this month I exchanged currencies at ₦600 to $1. Less than a decade ago in 2014/15 the pm exchange rate was ₦200 to $1. Why on earth, if I had a choice, would I take a salary pegged to the naira in such conditions?
People in the first world also vastly overestimate how useful holding [local] fiat is in the global market. Sure when your currency underpins the global economy you never have to think about foreign exchange, but for most developing countries pretty much no international marketplaces will take your local money. They may show localised prices but the actual transactions are settled in USD (or similar), which is often harshly controlled. For example naira-denominated Mastercards and Visa cards here have international spending limits - currently those limits are as low as $20 a month (not an exaggeration or typo) from major banks in the country. Middle-class people resort to using virtual dollar card services (which charge exorbitant rates, and which are often detected/blocked by platforms) to be able to pay for basic subscriptions. And for bigger expenses, getting large amounts of foreign currency ($1000+) from local currency involves either filing a Form A with the central bank (you get dollars at the official exchange rate, but the process takes a month or more, must be for an approved purpose, and again has spending limits - if you want to travel for tourism/business you can request a maximum of $4000, if you're attending a foreign university you can request a maximum of $15000 for tuition and $5000 for living expenses per semester, etc) or doing quasi-legal transactions at bureau de changes that are charged at the parallel market rate.
Whether or not you consider those limits too frugal, I personally am not interested in the government restricting me from spending literally my own money. So I simply receive and hold my salary in foreign currency and exchange a fraction of it to the naira for day-to-day living expenses. All my international transactions - new electronics, flight tickets, etc - I pay for directly. If I want to send money to friends or family outside the country I can do that without fuss. I'm able to receive USD directly because I have a foreign currency account and restrictions on the foreign exchange of the naira don't apply to it obviously. Not everyone can get one (e.g. most banks require you to present two references who themselves have FCAs to qualify), so they turn to alternatives like Payoneer and Wise. But those charge significant fees to make profit and will ban/block accounts especially of people from the developing world on a hair trigger (and also recent government controls mean that you can no longer withdraw from those accounts to a local naira account, so getting cash for local expenses is an issue), so recently people are increasingly turning to cryptocurrencies as well.
You need to understand that in a failing economy, crypto is just another foreign currency - one that is in some ways easier to obtain and hold safely (under a government that can and will freeze your bank account for dissident activity) than traditional foreign currencies. It's volatile, but averaged over time it's certainly held its value significantly better than the naira ever has. It's a gamble, but people don't have the luxury of caring as strongly about the risk as those who can comfortably rely on their own fiat. I consider myself lucky that I've been able to avoid using it; I don't judge those that have.
> What was preventing them from official employment?
You cannot officially employ people in a jurisdiction you do not operate in.
For all HN talks about remote work and hiring all over the world, how exactly do you imagine that works out legally? My employer certainly considers me a full-time employee in spirit (and so do I), but the paperwork is quite clear that I'm an independent contractor - same for all my non-American colleagues.
How did you open an USD account? Did you have to travel to the US?
If you had to do it today, would you use services like Wise. Being paid in crypto currencies seems unrealistic if you’re working for companies like Intel, not sure they would pay you in BTC.
I've used Wise in the past (their borderless account) but had my account deactivated for no discernible reason, which was frustrating. I'd use their direct-to-account transfer service, but because of central bank regulations passed in 2020 they are no longer permitted to send/deposit naira in Nigerian bank accounts. This actually cut off quite a few people I know from receiving international payments - some scrambled to open foreign currency accounts, some got pushed to receiving crypto whether directly or through now-existing platforms like Sendcash. So now I just get my salary through regular old SWIFT transfers - my employer takes on the transfer fees, but I still get debited $20 for receiving them.
You're right that being paid in crypto is unrealistic for a company like Intel, because giant multinationals like that either have a local presence (Microsoft has an engineering office in my city) or have huge relocation budgets (Amazon, Google, etc usually move hires from here to offices in Europe). Some smaller companies and startups will offer to assist with relocation, but understandably will take local talent over someone that needs to sort out a visa and work permit the vast majority of the time.
as for altcoins I really don't know what your point is
I see, nothing right?
So Stripe [0], Stellar, and MoneyGram [1] are polluting the world? Where is Stripe, and MoneyGram scamming then?
Of course, we like to complain about the scammers in crypto (and there are outright scams on there but not all of them are scams) just as we keep complaining about the non-free software and spyware that is plagued by the same companies from Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Some are still waiting for all non-free software to be wiped off the face of the software industry and after 37 years, that hasn't happened and it has gotten to the point that we have the same Big tech companies keeping privacy activist companies like Mozilla on life support.
The outcome is the same and it is co-existence. Many of these coins and tokens will collapse, but the useful and compliant ones with ISO 20020 will still be around as soon as regulations come in, which will disappoint both crypto-maximalists and the skeptics.
[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-29/moneygram...
One of the interesting things about crypto to me, is that the projects that don't involve pollution, speculation, theft and crime don't get noticed because of the lack of controversy or speculation.
People are like "but what if there wasn't artificial scarcity", well those projects exist, they just fail to coordinate humans to care. What you see is survivorship bias. There are many onchain-only versions of other onchain projects without any token at all! Annnnd thats exactly why nobody knows about them. (some are pretty active though, they just don't bubble up and out to a broader community)
Theft and crime? I mean if that's the headlines you see, (or even if its your actual experience), thats still not nearly everything.
Pollution? Proof of work still taking up all the headlines when only like 2 out of like a thousand blockchains are heavy on that, with one of those 2 trying as hard as it can to go off of that.
(I'm not opining about the "revolutionize" part, that one is so subjective that its not worth bothering.)
Another one that comes to mind is pNetwork. That is a big bridge, was the subject of a large and amateurish hack. There are now many bridge technologies. I had found it interesting that it was so popular but had no token, seemed like it was popular in Asia which contributed to me missing it before the headlines. Nowadays most bridges don't have a token associated with them though.
Sometimes what I do to find projects that don't surface from seeing a big token price movement or don't surface from hearing people talk about it, is to search for certain code signatures for a constructor or a popular function that programmers might re-implement.
Seriously, both the finance industry and politics needs to return to a time when it was boring a.f., just ordinary people getting on with their day-to-day jobs. The artists are the ones that should be entertaining us, not the NASDAQ, and not the latest political (bowel) movement.
I hear all these anecdotes about people sending money back to countries in South America, but these clearly are happening at a small scale and with whatever crypto currency being seen as a slightly more complicated version of other money sending apps.
If crypto had a value prop to justify the absurd prices it would be that it would one day replace, or at least compete with, USD as a global currency. The fact that we aren't seeing articles about Russian oligarchs making massive financial transactions using crypto tells me that this will never happen. If ruthless billionaires don't see crypto as a viable means of evading sanctions right now, I can't imagine what conditions would actually make cryptocurrencies succeed.
Of course this brings up the obvious problem with crypto: do you really want to live in that world? For all the positive messaging around decentralized exchange, and anti-government rhetoric involving crypto, the reality isn't that it will be used by radical lovers of freedom to evade oppressive governments, but rather that things like sanctions will be impossible.
Either way, if crypto was going to become a serious player in facilitating financial transactions we would absolutely be seeing it right now. Since we're not, I'm not sure what arguments are left as far as the "you just wait and see!" crypto camp.
Cryptocurrencies are the only viable mechanism for online financial privacy that comes even remotely close to widespread adoption and use.
Hint. It’s not just for images.
They had boosters just like crypto and the same problems happened that led to the regulations.
It's just tech pressing a reset button on things and pretending like it won't end up in the same place - like it did with taxis and hotels.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't believe they ever claimed to solve these things. All the same problems exist with other forms of money. As far as I can tell, crypto is just money with more steps.
What does "self-regulate" mean in this context?
Here's the most obvious example right now: what is the argument for centrally regulating BTC at this point given its design? People will HODL no matter what happens. The set of all attributes of personal sovereignty includes self-regulation.
The other claim is even more bizarre. Let's say that your car is "backed" by a smart contract. How does a smart contract stop a thief from stealing your car? Does it involve magic?
1) I can send large payments effortlessly. I tried to move large sums using eTransfers last year and the friction is just unreal. I don't give a shit about my bank's arbitrary monthly limits
2) Fuck inflation. The fact that I can't park my money without it losing its value over time is asinine. I shouldn't have to be forced to play the market or spend if I don't want to. Just let people save their damn money.
You are always playing the market, and certainly are doing so when you park your wealth in whatever your cryptocurrency of choice is.
Having currency being optimized for use a liquid medium of exchange while other assets are better as a long term store of wealth is much better than having a currency that tries to compromise between competing purposes and ends up doing neither well.
Forcing people to invest or spend their money is the entire point of inflation. For good reason too, decreasing velocity of money is a major cause of recessions, and tightening of liquidity in the money market always leads to high unemployment.
Point (2) is very axiomatic in its claims:
> The fact that I can't park my money without it losing its value over time is asinine.
Money will always have some relative value to what you can exchange it for. The reason bitcoin's value has kept up with inflation, is because today its price is determined mainly by speculative demand. Not because there's some cosmological guarantee that bitcoin is immune to inflation.
A few examples: one 1btc buys a small car today. Twenty years from now, when the novelty of crypto has worn off, what is providing the guarantee you'll be able to buy another car with 1btc? Or with 10btc you can buy a house today. Will 10btc buy you a house 20 years from now? If not, does it mean btc lost its value, or does it mean land got more valuable?
There's really no known way to park money and expect it to keep value, just because of its inherent properties. We've been trying for 5000 years.
> I shouldn't have to be forced to play the market or spend if I don't want to
Actually, yes, you do have to, at least if you like to preserve wealth, you preserve it by growing it. That's what investing (and it's degenerate cousin, "playing the market") really is.
Point (1) does hint at some intrinsic value of blockchain-technology. I think we'll know in 5-10 years or so, when we've gone through this correction, maybe some more war or something, whether the technologic properties of blockchain are enough to prop up current crypto prices. Consider as a counterpoint: noble metals are amazing technologies, which have provided value for millennia; from mediums of exchange, to stores of wealth, to their use in medical technologies, for mundane applications like for dishware, or spiritual applications in churches or art, for jewelry ... Really, it's absolutely completely mind boggling how long, how broadly, and how consistently gold and silver have provided value to humans. Yet, they've been poor hedges for inflation over the long term, both gold and silver being very speculative assets, worse than stocks or bonds. How is crypto-technology going to be even more fundamentally better? What is so amazing about blockchain that it's going to defy all other asset classes?
I'm not a crypto fan, but am mostly understanding it as a financial churn mechanism. Wealth and power tend to pool and become self-stabilizing -- power is inherently conservative imho. Assets moving between hands is part of renewal cycles -- generally a chance for change or something different. It allows new possibilities to be stumbled into. Even just assuming we're doing a random walk of the possibility space, churn is better than stasis, no?
If there's any value in crypto, it's imho mostly about moving money between hands. Crypto has funded a ton of garbage and fads, but also a ton of research and advocacy. So yea, new garbage, but also new and different research and advocacy, different than we'd have had otherwise. I could certainly judge and express opinions on which hands it's moving between (and that's a site of action for justice work) but it can still be a net positive even when that's flawed.
re: moving X between hands. The value here is comparable to how some believe the main value of democracy is that it's a stable system for moving power between hands, and nothing more.[1] We wrap it in a nice story, but some smart people genuinely believe it's nothing more, and that most things we tell us about how and why democracy works, it's pretty suspect. (I've worked in democratic reform movements for almost a decade, so that's not an unconsidered perspective.)
Again, speaking of "churn" and keeping power circulating. The value of churn is kinda like the value of tidal action or diurnal rhythms generally -- it doesn't have a goal on which to judge whether it's "succeeding", but from the churn and flow of resources, it supports ecologies that find new niches. So maybe crypto has no purpose. But even if pointless, it can still have a role in the environment we live in.
Tides, democracy, american dreams, crypto or any goldrush past -- it's maybe stuff with mystique because each is a churn that creates some sort of renewal, like turning the earth with a shovel and mixing it up. I'm glad for most any churn, especially in a society lacking it in certain spaces, even if it leaves things to be desired. imho the alternative is to allow power to entrench more and more, which isn't the team i want to be on while wishing crypto away * shrug *
[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsiv...
It can be hard to tell the difference once you've had all that kool-aid.
Really?
> As of Sunday, the national police force said in a statement, 219 “financial products” had been frozen, 253 Bitcoin addresses related to protesters and organizers had been given to virtual currency exchange operators, and a bank had frozen 3.8 million Canadian dollars held by a payment processor. [1]
> Corrupt governments like Canada
I'm also curious as to the definition of "corruption" you're choosing to use here, as it seems to be totally foreign to the one I understand the one I'm able to find definitions for online.
You're free to go to the ballot box to vote in a different set of politicians or petition for reforms to be passed. The emergency act powers are certainly controversial & we can have a debate about whether those powers are overbroad but I don't see how that's corruption (in which case the PATRIOT Act and the TSA are corruption but then that word loses all meaning). We can have debates about the ability for law enforcement to ruin your life without the legal system even getting involved. That's still not corruption by any definition I can find. To my knowledge, the balances of these accounts weren't transferred anywhere. The government did this to disperse the protests that were phenomenally more disruptive to the Canadian economy than the BLM protests were to the US economy in a drastically less violent response than what the BLM protestors saw from Washington DC (& all around the country).
Generally the definition of corruption I'm familiar with is members of the government making decisions that aren't in the best interest of the people they are governing but instead enrich themselves or their allies or otherwise wielding their power for self-interest goals, particularly through subterfuge and dishonesty. The goal of the government to be good stewards of the public good and for the public to have faith that they're doing that. Democracy depends on full information about the goings on of those in the government being available to voters. That's why subterfuge is generally a key component of corruption.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to 1971 with some brief interruptions. Before that, other commodities were used as the underpinnings of the monetary system for as long as humanity has utilized currency. These are all deflationary currencies. In fact, inflationary currencies are a relatively recent invention. The one notable feature it has is that depressions don't seem to exist (instead being converted to bad recessions). That being said, it has only 50 years of history behind it so who knows how stable it is in the longer term.
I'm a huge crypto skeptic because the cost/benefit isn't there for the amount of pollution it creates and the amount of crime it enables, not because it's a deflationary currency.
In what world is gold deflationary? The supply of available gold generally increases. The difference is that the expansion of the supply of gold is less flexible and harder to control.
Gold is also vunerable to supply shocks. For those weak on history, I suggest learning about the effects on global currencies due to the european pillaging of the Americas for precious metals.
Also, nothing prevents cryptocurrencies from having a mint rate that makes them inflationary. You don't really see that much because all "currency-like" projects with cryptocurrencies are still fundementally about inflating a speculative bubble to get early adopters rich.
Complete nonsense. A currency is an asset, and an asset is neither deflationary nor inflationary, since these terms refer to its price, which is determined by the market and is therefore not an intrinsic characteristic of the asset.
I get that you, personally, aren't concerned about money laundering... But can you at least understand, in principle, why governments are concerned about money laundering?
(The factuality of these claims is not being offered or challenged; only the observation that the justification seems to have completely flipped.)
Money laundering is a place where scale matters. Having the anonymity of cash creates privacy at the individual level but it's scaling issues are actually a feature that limit abuse.
That doesn't reflect reality.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spo...
"In 2018, $24.26 Billion was lost due to payment card fraud worldwide"
"Since the start of 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams – that’s about one out of every four dollars reported lost, more than any other payment method."
Not to mention "Because of federal law & issuer card network terms and policies, consumers are shielded from the cost of unauthorized purchases made with their cards."
That's not the case with crypto currencies
https://about.dish.com/2021-10-26-DISH-Partners-with-Helium-...
https://blog.helium.com/san-jos%C3%A9-first-city-to-launch-i...
https://senetco.com/about/news/senet-and-helium-announce-lor...
https://blog.helium.com/helium-chapter-2-a-network-of-networ...
You can believe it or not. But businesses like Helium are positioned for success and sustainability and are here to stay.
Edit: Hacker News is telling me I'm posting too fast. Here are some more resources:
https://www.helium.com/enterprise
https://www.helium.com/chapter2
https://multicoin.capital/2021/03/17/the-helium-flywheel/
Here are some excellent resources if you want to learn more about the network, its future goals, and its economic model. The white paper is also a good read.
Ultimately, will Helium succeed? I don't know. But what I do know is that it is positioned for longevity. And like any ultra fast-growing startup, it is working through the kinks of scaling right now. In my opinion, Helium is as sure of a bet within the blockchain/crypto/decentralized wireless space as there is and will benefit all stakeholders, users, and enterprises alike. I don't work for Helium. However, I have been involved with the project for almost three years. It's been gratifying to me monetarily (on paper) and through a lens of my providing service and value to others, while building out the largest contiguous wireless network on Earth.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/netscape-creator-says-web3-re...
Does that sound at all equitable to you? Or does it sound like a greater fool's scam?