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Comment by prohobo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized.

I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.

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> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.

For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.

You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.

Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.

> You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?

> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.

Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.

> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.

I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.

> You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.

> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.

I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.

There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.

I don't dispute that this is mostly theoretical. But I wouldn't say it's naive, because we know that when people buy into systems they follow the rules as best they can. The problem occurs when others take advantage of the system to game it with plausible deniability, within the confines of said system. That's the entire point of "the emperor has no clothes" allegory. When people buy in to a broken system, broken things happen.

That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).

> I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.

It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.

In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.

I think of it more in terms of a highly secure and decentralized online videogame. Most people will be happy just to play the game, some people will start guilds and min/max, some people will try to cheat. When someone is found cheating, the system gets patched to prevent others from doing it. The dynamics of a game nudges people into behaving within the incentive structure of the game mechanics - even though technically they could strip naked and /dance for a month straight.

In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.

I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.

On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.

> You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions.

This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.

It's a basic fact. If a problem is caused by something that is not related to lack of technology, you won't solve it with a technical solution. This is obvious in any other field (for example, you won't see a doctor that says that drugs could fix poverty) but a lot of tech people don't seem capable of admitting that some problems cannot be solved by technology.

But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology? Not enough food? Invent agriculture. Or invent the spear and the sandal so you can hunt further afield.

Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.

> But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?

Not at all. I mean, to take your example:

> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.

Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.

The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.

> Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...

But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.

> Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.

I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech

At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.

> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.

Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?

> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

This looks like another useless generalizaton to me.

Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it?

Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.

I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.

No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful.

Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.

These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.

Out of curiosity how do you estimate this comparison:

> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does

I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc.

From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:

> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year

> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year

> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year

> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year

> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year

That is almost 630 watts per person (250 million people, 24*365 hours per year)... That seems like a lot...

As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)

EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..

I would say less technically savvy people probably use more electricity, not less. And you're assuming that you're the average American consumer. There are probably old toasters and electrical heaters that contribute significantly to that figure. In any case, the conservative estimate is still several times that of Bitcoin's usage.

I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!

It's inherently a political, not a technical, question. I think people on the whole recognize it as such, but it's often easier to try to invalidate the stuff on technical grounds, because for crypto to be beneficial it must satisfy BOTH the political and the technical requirements.

Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve.

Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.

Actually I agree with you that a "blockchain of law" would be great..

But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github...

Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..

It seems many of these ideas stem from failures of USA's political system. That is entrenched players fighting against government breaking their hold on their profit models even if that would be net benefit for general population. See taxation and even access to law, which I heard cost something 650$ a month from private provider.

For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/

And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.

Hello fellow scandinavian.

Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit.

Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X.

It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape.

You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once.

Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while.

In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration.

And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...

Maybe you just failed to explain to that person what the roadmap of going from coin to blockchain powered book of law looks like, because it's quite the road.

> cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks.

It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?

We don't really know. A lot of work has gone into trying to minimize incentive for 51% attacks though, and it continues. "Fork off" is a classic argument, that the attacker may take over the chain but then cause a fork where they're left with a worthless system anyway - meaning the 51% attack would only be profitable for a short duration before a fork devalues their winnings and everyone continues on the new system.

Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.

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