Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>"They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government."

Name one thing that blockchain has made, or is even close to making cheaper or more secure or trustless?

The largest application of the technology has been bitcoin thus far, and bitcoin is more expensive; less secure than the traditional financial system (where if you get hacked you at least have some recourse); and you still have to trust intermediaries like Coinbase to acquire the Bitcoin and Bitpay to actually buy anything with it.

And I know the canned response to that is usually "why can't X new cryptocurrency solve these problems eventually? The internet had its problems at first as well."

But you solve those problems by making bitcoin exactly like our current financial system, with intermediaries and trust and regulation. And minus the hilarious waste of time, money, and energy that is proof-of-work.

Not as big as the bitcoin market but corda's growing[0] use for forwards contracts between parties[1].

Though it seems like this is an instance of blockchain "like our current financial system, with intermediaries and trust and regulation", but with cost/time savings by reducing the amount of humans involved in the transaction reconciliation process.

Many more examples of old finance firms using blockchain [2], though a far cry from the whatever is going on in the cryptos in use with consumer discretionary trading.

[0] https://github.com/corda/corda

[1] https://www.thetradenews.com/commerzbank-replicates-fx-trade...

[2] https://www.globalcustodian.com/news/technology/

I'll give you one.

The year is 2010. And I am a normal citizen and I want to donate money to WikiLeaks without the banks colluding to stop my financial transaction, even though nobody has been convicted of a crime.

How do you do it? The only way I can think of to do this easily (easily being the key word!) is a cryptocurrency transaction.

Banks and credit card companies collude all the time in order to censor financial transactions between people who have committed no crimes.

Do you have a better way of easily sending censorship resistant financial transactions? Because Bitcoin worked just fine back in 2010 for this usecase, even though the banks tried to censor it on their platform.

Most of the people downvoting you probably never had to think about making a censorship free transaction

With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes.

What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or companies) and the ledger would not be used for figuring out and persecuting people supporting certain causes?

Well, for one, the government would actually have to make such a law, and then suffer the political consequences.

I would much prefer that the government is forced to actually follow the legal process, instead of what happened in 2010 with WikiLeaks, where the government made vague illegal threats against the banks, in order to censor transactions between people who broke zero laws.

It forces everything out in the open, instead of giving a couple banks the power to made hidden agreements between each other in order to collude and censor perfectly legal financial transactions.

And so far, the government has NOT made such a law. So guess what, that means it works!

This is not about people breaking the law. This is about people following the law, and yet private parties are STILL able to censor transactions through collusion and because of a few vague, and probably illegal, threats from the government.

The fact that the government has so far NOT been able to pass such laws, is innovation in and of itself. It means that it works right now for the purpose of making censorship resistant transactions, because before people WERE succeeding in censoring them, and yet now they aren't!

Read up on money services business and the various regulations they must follow, including the anti money laundering regulations. You may find yourself surprised at what laws exist.

The government can do whatever it wants, the point is that it’s decentralized design makes it basically impossible to censor.

Given the size of Bitcoin's keyspace, what would you surmise is the cost to a particular cause of "tainting" one of its public keys?

Coinbase seems to already do this to a degree. If you transfer to a flagged address your account is banned with zero explanation or recourse. This will likely be the norm going forward for any reputable exchange.

> I am a normal citizen and I want to donate money to WikiLeaks without the banks colluding to stop my financial transaction, even though nobody has been convicted of a crime.

Time will tell if Wikileaks was really a noble cause, or if the banks were right all along.

It is now 8 years later, and yet the organization has not been convicted of any crimes. Time already did tell who was right and who was wrong.

But even IF they are convicted of a crime sometime in the future, this is 8 years later.

Censoring financial transactions should require a court order. Signed by a judge, and done through the normal criminal justice system. And it should be done publicly, so that judges and politicians are held accountable for their actions.

In America, due process is a constitutional right, and if someone is guilty of a crime, there is a process that we should be going through.

Punishment should not be inflicted upon others outside the court system via secret agreements and collusion between oligopolies.

We have laws and human rights for a reason. Don't be so quick to throw them away.

Let's go to slide #2 then-- Scihub. They take Bitcoin which they ostensibly use to pay for the servers that serve up the science journals.

Do we need time to tell if Scihub is a noble cause?

> I want to donate money to WikiLeaks

Trustworthiness of Wikileaks aside, do you think that's a $500 billion market? Donating to activist organizations?

https://qz.com/775159/theres-a-500-billion-remittance-market...

"Worldwide, 230 million people send $500 billion in remittances each year, primarily using firms like Western Union, Moneygram, and RIA, which together control 1.1 million retail locations and account for more than 25% of the world’s annual remittance volume."

That's not an answer to the question above...

It's funny that the downvoters haven't really come up with a valid argument why Bitcoin is not a valid use case for this.

It's much more difficult to prove that person A transferred money to B via Bitcoin than it is via regular financial transactions due to Bitcoin's pseudonymity. Similar it's equally difficult to prevent this from happening.

Just that the you do not seem value in this (censorship-free transactions), does not make the argument invalid.

PKI is now quite trivial. It's easy for anyone to keep a log mapping a public key to some type of identifier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com