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Comment by holonomically | Hacker News Reader

Main issue with the crypto community is they throw around words like "trust-less" without truly understanding what they mean so it's very hard to take them seriously. It is impossible to have markets and governments without trust. At some point digital transactions must be reified as real world actions and that means the people carrying out the actions must be trusted to do what is expected of them. There is no system that doesn't assume trust somewhere, the trusted base can be made smaller but it can never be entirely removed.

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This is such a good point. This is my first thought whenever I see a new "blockchain for x", where x involves some real-world product or activity.

Suddenly the promise of "trust-less" makes no sense, and we are just left with poor performance and immutability of human errors.

Trustless in the context of crypto means you don’t have to put your trust (if you don’t want to) a 3rd party because they don’t have the option to not do the right thing. It gives you the ability to know exactly what you will lose and what you will gain when you press confirm on a transaction. It doesn’t matter whether or not you trust the other person because they simply don’t have the ability to do anything other than the code–that you both can verify–says.

(This isn’t to say that there are no bad actors, but that a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be forced to act like the sheep it presented itself as.)

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. The real world requires trust. It doesn't matter what the code says. If I buy something then I have to trust that it will be delivered in some way by passing through trusted 3rd parties like FedEx. There is no way around trust. As soon as the digital makes contact with reality all mathematical guarantees of being "trust-less" are no longer relevant.

Ah, so the real world requires trust but despite what the blockchain says. I get what you mean now but you can still make it a lot easier.

Using your example, you could write a contract such that: you buy an item for X dollar amount, the contract holds it in escrow, waiting for FedEx to confirm receipt of the package and a deposit of Y% of X into a rolling insurance fund from both FedEX and the seller. At this point, if FedEx fails to deliver you’re fully refunded out of the insurance pool and the seller gets their money back. If they deliver, FedEx gets 90% of the insurance payment back, the shipper gets your payment, and they split the seller’s premium as a shipping fee. If the seller never drops off the package you get your money back.

You could even throw in a return period where a third party can confirm whether a bad package is eligible for refund.

There are obviously holes in this haphazard scenario but the big picture is that there’s a lot of stress that can be offloaded to a truly unbiased 3rd party, even if you can’t achieve full trustlessness in real life.

Yes, the point isn't that digitization is bad but that the crypto community is mostly full of people that don't really understand what they stand for and why. So whenever I hear things like "crypto is a trustless and distributed platform for democracy" I immediately assume that these people are not really serious about anything. They're just interested in parroting memes from Twitter and Reddit.

> if FedEx fails to deliver

Who is in charge of confirming to the smart contract that FedEx delivered? Whoever you pick, they have a strong financial incentive to lie. If the recipient confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and get their money refunded. If Fedex confirms, they can lie in order to keep the item and they only lose the shipping costs.

I beat this drum on HN and IRL and get tired of being downvoted for it.

Trust is a lower energy state - it allows specialization, and conservation of energy that might need to be spent defending against threats from different directions.

But people who hold anti-social ideas seem to indulge in thinking that they can create a novel system where they have no obligations, just privileges. Crypto prices going up causes these anti-social delusions to flourish because the increasing prices seem to validate the libertarian futurists fantasy of a world with no trade-offs, where we can avoid having responsibility to other humans.

This is not how a blockchain works though. Transactions are appended to the blockchain by a 3rd party that has discretionary power, not by some computer code.

> 3rd party that has discretionary power, not by some computer code.

I genuinely have no idea what you mean by this. Unless you manage a 51% attack there’s no discretion to be had. You can for sure push nonsense to the chain, but it would either be ignored or punished [1][2] in some cases.

Blockchains are just distributed computing, it’s all computer code. The first two sections here (https://paulx.dev/blog/2021/01/14/programming-on-solana-an-i...) explain it much better than I can.

[1]https://support.polkadot.network/support/solutions/articles/... [2]https://docs.solana.com/proposals/slashing

MEV attacks are a thing. At a minimum, miners have power to frontrun transactions.

For one thing, miners can choose which transactions to include in the transaction block. This means they have the power to censor transactions. The claim that a blockchain is uncensorable is untrue. Under certain assumptions, it's unlikely that transactions will be censored, but there's no guarantee that that will be the case (as would be if this process was handled by a set of predetermined rules, e.g. computer code).

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