Andreessen on Crypto
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
And generally I doubt the usefulness in classifying things into right and left.
At the polar ends of each are people that have conflicting norms on how the world should work. These usually arise once again through ignorance as a norm carries the expectation to be accepted by everyone.
To someone that has worked in the tech of cryptocurrency, all I'm saying is that I'm not particularily interested in the left/right drama. Let's hope it never catches on.
In my opinion these narratives are just created because somehow they'll serve Thiel and Andreessen to run a more specific story that they can use to increase their wealth.
That said, I think one feature of that campaign is that every party will have to have a position on things affecting the population, crypto eventually being one of those.
Wow, when you put it like that, it's amazing that I can shop, bank, and safely talk with my friends and family online. Pretty much all my messages are encrypted and/or checksummed (as necessary) and I still have to trust all the hardware and software on top to do it's job, just like anything else.
How does "Crypto" change this?
I think this says more about Andreessen than it does about technology. Andreessen is pushing cryptocurrencies and his motivation is clearly political.
Cryptocurrency is just more commonly talked about than cryptography.
Calling cryptocurrencies crypto is like calling an MLM gig a job.
1) a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief.
2) cryptocurrency.
3) cryptography.
obvs the perceived meaning of words depends on context. You can't really just declare 3) is the only true meaning.
1. short for cryptography.
2. (informal) a person having a secret allegiance to a political creed, especially communism.
Or as a prefix / combining form:
1. concealed; secret.
From the Greek kruptos.
I have no idea who manages www.dictionary.com, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they took payments from coinheads to push this shit.
I'm so tired of this stupid mantra that crypto-addicts keep repeating.
1. You can't put real world events into a blockchain in a decentralized manner. In no fckn way. How are you gonna put a result of a sports event into a blockchain? By mining what? It's ridiculous. It always should be an oracle, authority, company, government, etc, i.e. a centralized trusted entity.
2. Loans. Yeah, loans to anonymous entities that can just transfer money to another wallet without any possibility of reversal.
3. Digital ownership. It's nothing without a possibility of a forceful defense of this ownership. You bought a house on a blockchain, but previous owners don't want to leave. What are you gonna do? Call Satoshi?
1. >You can't put real world events on blockchain
Yes you absolutely can, look into decentralized oracle projects like Chainlink or Augur for more info.
2. Loans already exist fully onchain, look into Aave and Compound. Loans are overcollatoralized so 'credit' of address doesn't matter. They haven't figured out undercollatoralized loans yet, but it's just a matter of time before we get propor decentralized identity, which will open opportunities for credit creation on chain.
3. As for titles to realestate, its just a matter of time before goverments recognize deeds held on chain as legitimate, and then that problem is solved.
Do they think that giant companies are run in a decentralized manner in any way? Walmart, Target, Delta, Southwest, Google, Facebook, etc, are all plagued by “central planning”, and resemble the USSR more than they resemble any right-libertarian ideal.
Never mind the fact that the word libertarian referred to left-libertarians until right-libertarians coopted it in the 60s. Left-libertarianism predates right-libertarianism by a century
Also, it’s rich for Thiel to talk about decentralization when he used his money and power to support Trump, the most authoritarian President in a while. Cut a right-libertarian, and a fascist bleeds.
With cryptocurrencies we as society have the option of a new way of organizing labor and capital to achieve a goal. Instead of kings, politicians, corporate owners or middlemen - we have the opportunity to build systems based on the idea of rules without rulers.
Bitcoin eliminates the need for central bankers to control the money supply.
Ethereum replaces armies of lawyers and beaurocrats with smart contract code.
In the future crypto might allow you to build Ubercoin so we can have a distributed ride-sharing platform without a central entity in the middle.
These new distributed consensus mechanisms eliminate the weaknesses of traditional approaches which rely on fallible human leaders who can be corrupted replacing them with code and incentives.
This allows for emergent properties such as censorship resistant money that can be transmitted quickly and irrevocably over the internet.
These are novel and innovative use cases powered by the most important invention of the 21at century.
Say we enter a weather derivative contract that pays off based on total rainfall. If there’s a dispute, instead of a two-bit local judge playing amateur meteorologist, we can simply point our smart contract at AccuWeather’s daily data. AccuWeather is going to be far less likely to destroy their entire franchise by publicly releasing bad data to corrupt a single contract.
The point of smart contracts isn’t that everything’s automated. It’s that we can identify the areas that do require human input, and mix and match the best and most trustworthy oracles with high domain expertise.
All I see is that now I have yet another party to trust: whomever wrote the smart contract. Why should I trust him/her? How do I know that there isn’t an intentional logic issue or unintentional bug that will end up with me losing my money? What’s my recourse then?
I agree that you have to trust the software underlying the contract. But it's highly likely that you'll use an open standard that's battle tested across time. Typically it's much easier to develop trust in software than it is institutions. Every day you trust your life, privacy and money to open software standards across a wide variety of contexts.
It may not replace every contract in every case but Ethereum in conjunction with Chainlink does address an increasing number of legacy contract use cases.
This is a nascent technology and per the article, major structural transformations such as this may play out over 30 or more years.
If you are genuinely curious I would suggest reading up on the details of how Chainlink works [1]. As you can see these are not trivial challenges and the solutions often require a bit of effort to understand. (Not claiming to be an expert, just an interested student)
But the majority of potential use cases so far, particularly those relating to applications beyond the strictly financial, seem to rely on flawed premises. The idea of oracles seems to go against the whole point of even using the blockchain.
Perhaps Chainlink or any number of competitors will eventually resolve some of these issues, but I don’t think they’ve presented a convincing case yet. Or I just don’t quite understand it.
To your point though most of Chainlink’s current activity is tied to crypto-asset prices, not the broader use cases mentioned (such as weather oracles). I suspect this is due to the more lucrative short-term returns available from speculation vs other use cases.
I love the potential of crypto but would like to see more real-world use-cases. I suspect they will come in time and that short-term speculation is the use case to drive adoption.
For example, with Bitcoin the rules of the system are transparent to all participants and cannot be changed by any single party. 21 million coins is the limit and the emission rate is fixed. With traditional fiat, no one can promise or predict the supply or debasement rate this year, next year or ten years from now.
Which ones?
> With traditional fiat, no one can promise or predict the supply or debasement rate this year, next year or ten years from now.
Nobody wants to predict the supply. What people want to predict is the inflation rate, and the inflation rate is only predictable when you have a central bank.
I want those things as do others so objectively your claim is false.
Also your claim that inflation rate is only predictable when you have a central bank is just plain silly. It makes no sense.
And the claim that the inflation rate is unpredictable in the absence of an adaptive monetary policy is not controversial among economists, as far as I know. If you think such a claim is "plain silly" and that it "makes no sense" maybe you need to explain why.
Bitcoin solves a whole host of problems:
- hard currency with fixed supply that cannot be inflated by any individual no matter how powerful
- fixed emission (debasement) rate that can be calculated for the next 100 years and beyond
- the ability to self-custody a digital store of value (no KYC required) the owner of the private key is the owner, no questions asked
- censorship-resistant payments that know no borders and are not subject to political whims of a particular country
- runs on proof-of-work rather than proof-of-violence such as the US dollar which requires the backing of the most powerful military-industrial complex known to man to protect it’s value. By contrast Bitcoin currently consumes less than half the electricity of YouTube to secure and protect over half a trillion dollars.
- it works 24/7 and never takes a bank holiday
- it is designed from the ground up to withstand direct attacks from nation-states without a standing army ready to go to war to protect it.
- It allows us to achieve Distribute Consensus without a central party (Rules without Rulers)
I could go on but I trust I’ve made my point.
Bitcoin was used for the examples as it and the Blockchain it is built upon are the original distributed consensus protocol.
I suspect you already knew that but may be having difficulty admitting that I have made my case and that your position might be wrong.
How is
> it works 24/7 and never takes a bank holiday
a problem? That's not a problem. That's a feature of some system.
And what "distributed consensus" has to do with it is even more mysterious.
Also, explain how a bank that is only open during banking hours say 8 hours/5 days per week/250 days per year is better for consumers than a system open 24 hours/7 days per week/365 days per year. How is that a feature for the consumer?
For the naysayers, ask yourself:
- do you trust your government more or less than your parents
- do you trust the mainstream media more or less than your parents
- do you trust big companies to do the right thing more or less than your parents
As we culturally become less trusting, we need different tools to organize and determine value. Protocols that enable decentralized, distributed consensus helps build those tools. Adoption of these protocols, independent of cryptocurrency mania, is bound to happen.
To that extent there’s going to be a major push, where practically feasible, to replace existing institutions with open software and protocols. Trust is more efficient, and trusted entities will long-term outcompete untrusted.
The technology doesn’t yet exist, but if you could replace JP Morgan with a DAO, how does JP Morgan not watch its business crumble. Why would any stakeholder choose to trust an opaque bank over an open protocol?
I enjoy philosophical discussions as much as the next person, but this kind of sweeping postmodern categorical generalisations just smell like a new Sokal affair.
Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133...
I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate uses for crypto.
It took the world by storm once people could connect to it, and viable and useful ideas and applications (browsers, search engines, eCommerce, filesharing, etc) proliferated at breakneck speed.
Internet had no competition from any other industry. It was nothing like anything that ever existed. In terms of Internet's development itself, we went from dial up to optical fibers. People in 21st century who use internet have no idea about pains of dial up connection.
Crypto is replacing something that has existed for centuries - the financial system. The financial system being challenged has itself kept up with changing tech, albeit slower than expected. This system is corrupted, exploitative and doesn't provide equal opportunities to all who use it. Crypto has to better the existing system by making things better. But the main point is, crypto itself is the next evolution of financial industry. Internet was a new industry of its own.
If Crypto is so revolutionary, it should have resulted in radical changes within the entrenched financial industry. All we've seen is regression (Stripe supported bitcoins from 2014[0]-2018[1] for eg).
That's what happens when you only look at Stripe. smh.
Pretty sure every major financial institution is buying crypto because it's obviously superior to the dying and corrupt printer and fax system.
Right now cryptocurrencies have taken off to an extent. Everyone knows about them but the eco system is a giant mess.
Amazon was launched in 94. My dad was buying books from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and having them sent internationally around 96. By the end of the 90s the internet had 250M users carrying out all kinds of activities, including commercial.
The comparison with crypto just does not stand its ground. It's been 13 years and counting and there is barely anything to show for it except a lucky few people riding Lambos.
[1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-u...
The dot com bust, which was around 99/00, was a build-up of huge economic expectations around the internet indeed. Granted that this bubble was mostly caused supply-side (many companies barely had users), but the internet as a whole had millions and millions of users, ~250M circa 99 [1], carrying out all sorts of activities.
Whether most end-users were aware of its true potential is irrelevant - the comparison to crypto, both in terms of timelines (13 years and counting with few applications to show for it) and usefulness, is preposterous.
[1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm
We're at 12 years of Crypto and "a tech of the future" is now an increasingly difficult proposition to make as we're nowhere near real usecases.
[0]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hi...
Edit: Also, no response to the SSO use case I shared??
It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.
Considering the best faith argument here, I’m guessing he’s seeing the “right wing” being pro business as opposed to a pro government “left”, and in that view, business is considered “bottom up”. As you alluded to, though, this ignores a lot of actual historical and political context and seems more driven by punditry shorthand.
IMHO the political spectrum has a circular topology where extreme left and extreme right merge into one point. As an illustration, consider Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union:
* Extremely brutal top-down dictatorship.
* Suppression of all dissent by means of secrete police (Gestapo vs NKVD).
* Single party rule (nazi party vs communist party)
* No meaningful elections.
Of course, there were many differences and nuances but the power structure was surprisingly similar.
EDIT: bullet formatting
The left-wing has always been anti-authoritarian.
A better comparison would be like Hitler versus Emma Goldman.
That said, early enthusiasts notwithstanding, the majority of businesses are likely far more interested in the profit potential than political or ideological aspects of technology.
It's not some liberal plot that cryptocurrencies are mostly usable as a way to separate the gullible from their money.
so you can't send crypto to another person?
i'm confused.
to downvoters:
When you say the mass use case, you mean everyone is using crypto to scam each other?
So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely?
I don’t think we should ban everything that has no valid use case. Maybe someone will come up with one eventually. For now, it’s all get rich quick all the time.
Also consider the transaction fees it charges for every btc trade. They're going to be around for awhile.