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Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

I looked through a few of those, and I struggle to see how those are superior to traditional solutions to the same problems. Care to enlighten me?

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They're permissionless, open source, censorship-resistant, borderless, near instant compared to legacy finance, auditable, composeable (can build protocols on top of other protocols to extend various financial services), and they enable new capabilities that current system can't do.

These technologies try to solve for a lack of trust and avoiding regulation. This use case combination is exceptionally rare (as Animats enumerates, drugs, ransoms, and money laundering). As long as you have a functioning legal framework, financial distributed ledgers and smart contracts have very little value (what happens when a judge overrides your smart contract’s evaluation and result? A fork each time? The law supersedes the chain).

Instant payments don’t need a blockchain [1]. Avoiding financial regulation sends you to jail [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18302053/bitcoin-dealer-pr...

There is a functional arbitration platform called Kleros. It could be tied in with any contract to have some human “legal” input. In fact, any contract can be admin‘d by one person or a group. See DAO’s - curve.fi and aave are 2 examples, they are both community run where ppl vote on proposals with their shares.

As I think you were getting at, there’s enormous systemic risk with hacks and bugs. Now the contract ecosystem is so intertwined that a bug in one can cause a cascading effect. E.g a price feed which powers a DeFi platform could be hacked/attacked. Even a bug in a simple erc20 could have massive consequences since a lot of the contracts are intertwined

How is a judge going to override a blockchain state update? He may as well rule the planet to stop spinning.

People are ultimately responsible, and people are ultimately held accountable. Disrupting nodes or node network traffic, 51% attacks, and proverbial rubber hoses are all options.

If Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea can barely avoid sanctions what makes you think a blockchain network can avoid something similar?

How would the authorities know who to look for?

Ethereum is becoming increasingly anonymous. While not as good as Monero, it's still trivial to go in and out anonymously.

By paying technologists to implement the necessary tooling.

https://decrypt.co/40284/us-homeland-security-can-now-track-... ("US Homeland Security Can Now Track Privacy Crypto Monero")

You create a wallet, even offline if you want, and you have instant access to a worldwide, no KYC, pseudo anonymous, financial ecosystem. You can lend and trade all sorts of assets and derivatives. You don’t even need to log in or sign up in the traditional sense. It’s really incredible

There is a single private key log in to ALL of them and they interoperate without requiring partnerships by way of sharing protocols and token specifications. It's quite unlike traditional banking verticals where each is siloed and never let the user share data or make it portable. (think 2-3 day processing times, shitty PDF exports and incompatible data exports).

open source, permissionless, programmable, trustless, unstoppable.

open source: not exclusive to blockchain

permissionless: seems to be code for "lets you do things that are illegal"

programmable: not exclusive to blockchain

trustless: also attracts those that are untrustworthy (scammers, etc)

unstoppable: seems to also be code for "lets you do things that are illegal", and im sure the various people who are in prison and/or under investigation for their various blockchain related crimes would disagree with how "unstoppable" it really is

So just to be clear illegal does not mean immoral. Lets assume that tomorrow a percentage of nations decided to revoke wealth and confiscate wealth. They could pass laws and make what they are doing legal and evasion of it illegal. While it would be legal for them to do so, it would be immoral as it is basically theft, and one would not be immoral to try to protect the wealth that they have worked for and amassed by illegal activities such as trying to get that wealth out of the country via digital currency before fleeing.

Let's take the Nazi's for example, because they are always the generic personification of an evil government. Had digital currencies existed in that time, it would not have been immoral for the Jews to transitional all of their wealth into digital currencies ahead of trying to flee Germany, though it would have certainly been illegal by German laws against the jews.

Nothing is trustless. It just distributes trust which makes it harder but by no means impossible for your trust to become misplaced.

theyve changed the blockchain a couple of times so no.

blockchains are immutable for all practical purposes using social consensus/governance rules.

sure. it's immutable. they'll just fork the data and force you to choose.

a lot of people enjoy not playing by the rules.

https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

agreed. Here "they'll" is not Vitalik/co, it's in control of the node validators, ofcourse you are affected by this if are in disagreement of the majority. The reason why it will be difficult to pull off a hard fork today[1].

See UASF for the success in community governance. This is good proof that the users are always in control, not miners or Vitalik.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/binance-may-consider-bitcoin-rollba...

The house has 435 members. the senate has 100. nobody thinks the 535 members are effective.

enjoy your user uncontrolled anarchy

do you have any response to > 50% attacks?

51% is possible, but it only leads to chain reorgs, not the actual consensus rules.

In practice the actual cost and the uncertainty of an attack ensures that it is almost never attempted in practice for secure* blockchains:

1. You would need much greater hash rate share than 50% for good chances(forgoing the block rewards $$ incase of failure!), the social coordination is the bigger challenge, see mining pool distribution[1].

[1] https://btc.com/stats/pool

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