Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

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You could make a similarly incredulous argument that messenger apps are totally ridiculous because why would you use a 500 dollar handheld computer to write a message through the "internet" when you could just talk IRL?

I mean, like, within three years you'll probably be having a virtual reality pizza party with your friends on the other side of the world. That's less wasteful of resources than flying, you know! And how will the money work? Maybe with a blockchain.

Let's try to stretch the imagination even more! Imagine you are involved with an open source project. You want to be able to receive some donations, collectively. So you briefly consider setting up a PayPal account, then giggle. "Ha-ha! Why would I use PayPal when these smart contract blockchains technologies have been working well for many years?"

So instead you go to one of the future's several competing smart contract platforms, and you click "Set up budgeted donation contract." It asks you to input the parameters for your donation contract. Maybe you end up configuring something like "Every week, this account's balance will be allocated as follows: 25% to GitHub; 50% split among these N core developers; 25% to the fund; and 25% to the EFF."

Your fans and users can then verify the behavior of this donation contract and easily contribute to your project! Wow! So much cooler than PayPal!

So simply, what's the point?
How is it better than existing methods for doing whatever you envision doing with it?

What if anything, does it enable that would otherwise be impossible?

So you've got nothing?

"Ha-ha! Why would I use PayPal when these smart contract blockchains technologies have been working well for many years?"

So instead you go to one of the future's several competing smart contract platforms

Simply positing a future scenario is not an argument for it's likelihood.

Why do I need a massively parallel system with enough energy to power a city to do this when I could just do it manually, or write a script to do it and run it locally? If one of the donators doesn't trust me or my code, then they can just donate to wherever directly.

I don't even get your scenario, what value is there in me/my contract being an intermediary between my fans and these other organizations? (and isn't GitHub a for profit company? Why would you donate money to them?)

"So you've got nothing?"

Since you immediately reject my examples so completely, I think I won't persuade you. Good for you -- I won't fool you into wasting your time on this obviously pointless blockchain thing.

That's a good lesson for me when wondering whether to include something, to leave it out.

Maybe, you'd like to address the questions I raised and points of logic I made rather than the snark.

Here's basically all I'm saying.

1. Payments and value management on the internet currently suck horribly compared to what you could imagine. (Insert your own imaginations here, since you don't like mine.)

2. Some attempts are being done to make payments and value management on the internet more convenient, but they are controlled by central authorities -- Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, whatever -- so they will exclude, censor, limit, and control. (Just like Twitter controls your API access, Facebook forces you to use your real name, Amazon surveils your preferences, etc etc etc.)

3. Blockchains are the only way I know of to do this kind of thing without that kind of central authority, in a thoroughly open source way.

4. I can quite easily imagine a future when blockchains make it very convenient and nice for individuals and organizations to do payments and value management on the internet, in various creative and interesting ways.

Bonus point:

5. Resource use is indeed something to consider. (That also goes for, like, why are we using so many torrent boxes to seed Game of Thrones? Kinda useless! Stop wasting teh energies!) It is indeed also something that is being very actively considered by leading blockchain developers; for example, it's the major project that Vitalik Buterin is spending his waking hours on, in the form of scaling through proof-of-stake. There are highly functional versions of proof-of-stake already working for years, notably BitShares and Steemit, but they use a form of delegated voting that the Ethereum community mostly doesn't want.

" Blockchains are the only way I know of to do this kind of thing without that kind of central authority, in a thoroughly open source way."

Alternatively, the banks or payment companies are a series of non-profit foundations with protections or basic rights of customers built into their charter using regular, efficient databases with zero or low cost transfer between them. You pay a small, monthly fee to participate with your specific bank which may be waived if you do a lot of business with them. You get regular statements authenticated by the bank's HSM w/ hashes of those posted in one or more trusted, timestamping services for event bank's records are lost. Any major changes to practices might receive a majority vote by customers or people representing them from a diverse background.

So, basically traditional banks with legal incentives to not do bad stuff run by people whose background is pretty trustworthy. Many examples exist of coops, credit unions, and nonprofits that take care of customers due to good incentives. The admin overhead is kept lean per charters. The tech is vastly more efficient than proof-of-work-type schemes since it's just database transactions. Better cost/efficiency than before since new banks aren't stuck on expensive mainframes. ;) What you think?

I'm interested in such schemes, but I suspect that the best way to implement it would resemble a delegated proof of stake blockchain.

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