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Comment by Joe-Z | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I found GP's comment quite insightful until it suddenly called for regulation on the internet.

Why would that change anything when we just established that not the technology but learned behaviours are the problem?

Maybe 2018 was the year that showed us that we finally need to come to terms with the fact that - yes - there are enough resources for everybody and the people who control the bulk of them still want to treat you as a dumb cog in a machine and we need to cut through all the layers of bullshit they are throwing at us.

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To be clear - I'd prefer not to see a new wave of regulation online. I'd much rather see the tech industry clean up its own house and fix its own problems. But since the big companies still seem to be dragging their feet on this after all that's happened I'm pretty sure we're about to get dragged kicking and screaming into the sausage factory that is government regulation.

The market hates regulation but will happily sell you HIV infected blood, then, when they get regulated they cry bloody murder.

And of course regulatory capture is an issue as well.

It is a hard problem because we're dealing with psychopaths.

People aren't going to spontaneously stop profit seeking at the expense of society. If things are going to change, the change needs to be coordinated. That's what government is for.

The change needs to be coordinated, but how do you coordinate action between multiple actors when some of those actors are nefarious and actually acting against the change?

By punishing them with the force of law, just like we do with everyone else who doesn't follow the rules.

You missed the point where I was describing the Byzantine Generals problem, of which Byzantine Fault Tolerance solves, and BFT solutions are at the core of almost all blockchain protocols. Software imitates life.

There is no need for Byzantine tolerance when there is a single authority that is held responsible, like a bank, or a government.

Byzantine problems rarely occur in real life, they were effective invented by cryptocurrencies and "solved" by cryptocurrencies (by turning luck and wasrefulness into a measure of authority)

>There is no need for Byzantine tolerance when there is a single authority that is held responsible, like a bank, or a government.

Where do you live where a single authority that is held responsible? It must be a very idyllic place. In all seriousness a single authority is both very exploitable and failure prone.

If it was exploitable and failure prone, why is it the standard going back centuries?

If somebody gets into my bank account, what happens? The Bank covers my losses as law enforcement looks into the security breach and tracks down the thief. My life is unchanged, I don't lose anything.

If somebody gets into my bitcoin wallet, what happens? I lose everything I put into it, period. Can't get it back, can't prosecute, can't have my losses covered by federal investment insurance, it's just poof, gone, and no government is going to chase it down because the design of the system prevents any authority from intervening.

Which of these is more idyllic to you? I would much rather live in the world of banks and FDIC and police and courts than to live balancing on the razor's edge in crypto-land, a keystroke away from total ruin.

> but learned behaviours are the problem?

Regulation can codify those bad 'learned behaviours' into illegal practices, no?

Good point. But the problem with regulation, especially in as of yet poorly understood domains, is it's hard to craft laws that target the behaviours you want to have punished without inflicting too much collateral damage on behaviours you still want to enable. And of course the ones best able to defend themselves against these regulations are the companies who can afford armies of lawyers and loophole-seekers.

My suggestion is: Punish bad behaviours by social exclusion.

So, next time one of you runs across Mark Zuckerberg at a coffee shop don't greet him, give him the stink-eye, throw a muffin at him or something :D

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