What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much
wired.com
wired.com
Stereotypical sales guy telling these farmers how blockchain is going to make sure coffee is traceable from seed to cup and revolutionize the industry. Everything is immutable, no one in the world is using blockchain for coffee, we are the first and announcing it here today! (just don't google it)
I'm out of the loop on how blockchain would actually help or be truly immutable in a case like coffee. I doubt independent associations are running nodes to prevent data tampering for this private company, and the process from seed to cup has long periods of time between each step. At what point do you enter all the immutable data? If you enter it little by little how do you 100% guarantee the association is correct and you're not mixing up plants, bags of beans, who shipped it, or the 30 other blocks of data we quickly scrolled through?
(1) Something to do with the growing number of people not participating in the current traditional financial system (the unbanked etc) together with some sort of negative event in current traditional system (recession/depression etc).
(2) Something to do with future A.I. systems and processes requiring a historical snapshot of everything that happened within the system or process and blockchain somehow ending up being more reliable, secure, and accurate than a traditional database in recording the history of an A.I. system or process.
(3) Something to do with the ability to monetize certain things at scale that either could not be monetizable at scale before or could have been but no tech existed that could have made the project/business profitable.
This is what we're doing here -> https://www.grassland.network
Think of things like Uber or Airbnb. I could theoretically imagine a system with the proper incentives between users, providers and a incentivised system of decentralized arbiters or oracles that could be self-sustainable. You would lack a central authority but they would all work within a framework. But the fact that you lack this authority could potentially make it un-bannable. It would effectively be a system of peer to peer transactions that could offer come form of settlement in case of conflicts.
Hard to pin down, but not impossible, I think.
The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long-term viable situation.
There are a multitude of problems with global consensus systems as monetary systems. But, something to consider is this:
Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system. Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed. Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money -- then I might start to consider how to help keep "bad people" off of cryptocurrencies.
However, I think that the Gold Standard in international malfeasance will continue to be "suitcases full of USD or EUR $100 bills". As it is today. But, you don't see governments or central banks falling over themselves to fix that problem. Yet, they are actively preventing the unbanked from having access to viable money substitutes.
The systems before them, where each local region, each business, each actor, could coin money via IOUs or other forms and trade was much more costly and corrupt than the current system. Local failures, actors running off with capital, low liquidity were rampant.
There are decent empirical reasons the entire world moved off systems tied to how fast they could dig up metal - such systems have an impedance mismatch with productivity, for example, hindering growth when useful and flooding the markets with new gold finds when the markets don't have matching growth. These led to boom and bust cycles.
With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so smoothed.
After the Great Depression and the resulting solid evidence that non-fiat exacerbated the problem across dozens of countries, every economy in the world move off them. The evidence was that solid.
>Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed.
Yet it's backed up by factual behavior.
>Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system.
Citation? I can find nothing near this claim to be supported by any evidence I can find. From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases. If pretty much every person on the planet uses some form of govt issues money, how is that not being served? They're pretty much all capable of local barter, yet choose this other system. Maybe it's better for them? At least they're choosing it.
It is true that a decent chunk of the world has no access to a cell phone or internet. How will cryptocurrencies serve such people?
>Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money
Which cryptocurrencies are anywhere near as stable as a modern first world currency? By stable, I mean the usual financial measure of price volatility against a reasonable basket of goods. Last I checked, BTC, for example, was about the least stable investment one could make. Volatility has serious costs throughout the economy - predictability is vastly better for making contracts like employment or rent or mortgage.
Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.
> From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases.
All of which are at the mercy of whoever is in power at the time. In the past few years: - 80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
You think this is good?
Do you care to contrast your implications to periods without the Fed? How many depressions? How many wars?
The Great Depression showed pretty conclusively the folly of a non-fiat currency, since the Fed was still tied by the gold standard, as were many other countries. The distinction between length of depression with and without fiat money was the nail in the coffin for things like gold standards. The results of modern monetary policy during the Great Depression is what led to every single country in the world dropping the gold standard.
Evidence beats speculation in the long run every time.
It's still the narrative. 2008 was the biggest since the GD in 1929. Here's a list [1] of all US recessions. There's no question volatility has been reduced since the introduction of the Fed. And the same has been demonstrated in dozens countries.
>80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
And billions of people have not lost their savings, and billions have been removed from poverty. Cherry picking outliers does not make your case very persuasive.
There's 7+B people on the planet. Demonstrate that your tiny number is worse than before central banking then you will have some room to complain.
The vast literature on this shows the evidence to be otherwise.
>Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
Yeah, this is nonsense, propagated by places like ShadowStats. There are ample other groups measuring inflation, such as the Billion Prices Project [2], and they obtain the same numbers. If inflation were lied about, there would be ample ways to game various commodities and make a pretty hefty profit. Yet no one I've known in trading has ever heard of such a thing, despite many people trying to do so.
And the most compelling way is you can check it yourself. Take BLS reported inflation for the past few decades. Pick a basket of goods similar to theirs. Measure local prices in a spreadsheet. Now go to your local library or the web and find old ads from decades ago, which is easy to do now. Compute the basket value then.
Even a percent off over a few decades would vastly skew prices. I've done this legwork out of debunking ShadowStats to someone I know that believes their nonsense. You can do it, and disabuse yourself of such unsubstantiated conspiracy nonsense.
>Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. ... You think this is good?
Yes, it's better than a deflationary spiral. Single digit inflation, if somewhat stable, is vastly better than previous boom bust cycles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Time will tell who is correct.
Most computer scientists who study elections are personally opposed to even electronic voting and prefer paper ballots, which I do too. That's because they can be physically counted and intuitively understood in a way that software cannot be by most of the population. That simplicity is a strength in building trust.
But a simple search on the internet shows that there are a lot of folks who don't want something like this.
Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can see you all wisely agree with me.
The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.
The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.
The voter can remember the position of their own key if they choose to for later validation against the open ledger and can use the others for deniability (if needed).
1) Each voter enters the booth and a computer immediately generates a random number, let's call it a transient voter ID. The computer then prints out their number shuffled in with 10-20 other (real) transient voter IDs. User takes the printout and notes the position of their number.
2) Voter makes their selections, and their vote is recorded by the software.
3) At the end of the election, the ledger of all transient voter IDs and the accompanying vote is published.
Voters can confirm that their ID is present in the list, along with the correct candidate choice, and that the final totals were summed correctly. The general public can also spot-check that the appropriate number of votes per precinct are present. Yet since the printout includes 20+ other IDs, no one can prove conclusively who they voted for. The computer could ensure that at least one vote for each candidate is included on the printout.
There's really no need to trust the software since the vote ledger is fully published (also no need for blockchain).
Edit: If you do show all 20 votes, you'd have to have votes for all candidates on them.
Also if someone is trying to manipulate a bunch of votes, they'd run into dupes and know one is lying.
Neither of those however should be difficult with electronic voting systems.
There are verifiable voting protocols that allow for accurate counting. That is, verification by the voter that the ballot is accurately recorded without allowing the voter to prove which way they voted to a third party. They require complex infrastructure and they don't hold up against total corruption of the process any better than paper anyway.
I think simple paper ballots are superior.