Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

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> To me decentralization is a value. It's a goal, and yes, a goal that almost every web3 project falls short of in some way.

But the whole point of building these systems is to get away from the entrenched interests of centralized authority, and if these systems can't actually deliver on that, then what's the point of adopting them? At least my bank accounts are insured if the bank fails and transactions have to clear ACH. If my credit card gets stolen, I call Visa and they make it go away in a matter of minutes. If someone gets access to my private key, that's it, there's nothing I can do to get my crypto back. I don't want "kinda decentralized", I want "definitely decentralized". This attitude represents a major goalpost shift for this kind of movement.

> But I think values are important. Values play a huge part in guiding human behavior.

This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.

There is still a lot of value in "kinda decentralized". For example, you can download smart-contract bytecode and verify it. Go ahead and call up visa and ask for their source code.

Another example is the immutability of smart contracts. If someone updates a contract and you don't like it then you can keep using the old one. Go ask robinhood if you can use an old version of their app.

As far as private keys, I really don't know what to tell you. People lose their passwords all the time. Also smart wallets will help you recover you crypto wallet. UX is moving in the right direction here.

> This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.

So should we stop using email because of phishing? Or stop using phones because of spam calls?

We educate people on phishing. We educate people on scam calls. We educate people on the dangers of investing in penny stocks. We educate people on the dangers of options trading.

Why can't we educate people on shitcoins and decentralization? That's my point, crypto is a wild place but we can absolutely create a culture that moves things in the right direction.

> Go ahead and call up visa and ask for their source code.

Visa's source code is incidental to the value it provides me.

> Go ask robinhood if you can use an old version of their app.

The version of the Robinhood app I'm using is incidental to the value it provides me. Their value is actually pretty strongly correlated with their ability to evolve their codebase in response to market demands without being burdened with backwards compatibility.

> People lose their passwords all the time.

Yep, and then they recover them, which isn't possible with a lost private key.

> crypto is a wild place but we can absolutely create a culture that moves things in the right direction

That crypto and decentralization is "the right direction" is absolutely not self-evident. Can you substantiate that position?

In that case I'm happy Robinhood hasn't screwed you over. Unfortunately that isn't the case for everyone.

In the past Robinhood has done questionable things like halting trading on a specific stock (GME) that other platforms didn't halt. I've also heard horror stories about people getting margin called due to bugs. I'm not saying smart-contracts are immune to these issues but the transparency of the bytecode being public is huge IMO.

This is just a single example of course. Imagine for a moment that we have a decentralized facebook-like app. Wouldn't it be great if we could fork it if they did something we didn't like? You might think that's a pipe dream but my argument is that this becomes less of a pipedream the more we educate people.

> That crypto and decentralization is "the right direction" is absolutely not self-evident. Can you substantiate that position?

My position is that crypto and decentralization give people options and put pressure on existing institutions that IMO have become too powerful. My goal isn't necessarily to destroy Bank of America, Visa, or Robinhood but to inject some real competition into the system. That includes institutions like the federal reserve.

I want there to be a spectrum of centralization <-> decentralization and let people choose what they're comfortable with. I want people to be able to say "Fuck bank of america, I'm going bankless". Or people can stick with what they know. Either way I think competition is good.

> I want people to be able to say "Fuck bank of america, I'm going bankless"

The problem is that there is a bunch of people out there that don't want others to be able to do this and will constantly shout about perils of permissionless DLT systems without acknowledging such (or without mentioning the many ways which permissioned non DLT systems have and continue to fail for increasingly more people [or without having any ideas on how to approach solving such problems in general that individuals can adopt for themseleves], which is really fine to me, because those people can't really stop what has been underway for the past 13 years [and often want somebody else to stop it for them, without even understanding how the systems they want to stop work, or putting any work in themselves to stop it beyond open throat/think piece operations])

It's so disingenuous to equate the problems related to, like, the Fed, to the problems inherent to crypto. Somebody exfiltrated an API key from some bad Javascript and stole $130,000,000 with no consequences. That's what crypto is. Unavoidably so. It's just mind boggling that folks try to sweep that aside as if it's nothing, or solvable!

There is a technology called an optimistic rollup. The basic idea is that you submit transactions to the rollup and these transactions are assumed to be valid. These transactions stay on the rollup for a period of time, 7 days, 1 month, whatever. During that time anyone can submit a "fraud proof" and that transaction can be reversed. After the time interval the valid transactions are committed to the main blockchain.

There is no reason that bank of america or visa couldn't run their own rollup and implement their own fraud system. In fact, visa is likely working on tools like this.

Just $130M? Knight Capital lost $440M because of a software bug in automated trading on a centralized exchange.

It's computers. Shit happens.

> I'm not saying smart-contracts are immune to these issues but the transparency of the bytecode being public is huge IMO.

I think this is a tad overrated, honestly. The DAO was open-source and that didn’t prevent it from being hacked and ETH hard-forked. I’m not against this kind of transparency, but DAO proved that it’s no silver bullet because the rate at which they shipped code made the whole transparency point moot.

Yes, you can easily find examples of bad stuff done by companies. But they're ultimately beholden to laws and regulations which, in the long arc of history, do actually serve the interests of society. That authority is important. And it's totally absent from decentralized systems. If a con man tricks me with a smart contract that drains all of my wealth, I have no recourse. That's a catastrophic outcome, and a fundamental problem with the whole enterprise.

>Yep, and then they recover them, which isn't possible with a lost private key.

He told you that there are smart wallets now (like with Argent) that allow you to retrieve access to your account just like you would with anything else. And it's possible to lose your password and not recover them unless you've set up the right recovery measures.

> And it's possible to lose your password and not recover them unless you've set up the right recovery measures.

But you can always ring them because financial institutions etc all have customer service teams dedicated to solving problems like these.

Is there going to be an equivalent for Web3 ?

Yes there's nothing stopping someone from giving their keys to bank of america. With smart wallets, the bank can even reset your password.

It is a statement of fact that a lost private key is unrecoverable. But there is nothing I can do, neither by malice nor accident, which will irrevocably prevent me from accessing my Bank of America balance. You are equivocating two inarguably and fundamentally different things.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...

The NPR Planet Money episode "Escheat Show" follows the story of a man who bought some Amazon stock long ago, and purposely never logged in to his online account, letting the stock multiply into a presumed small fortune. Years later he found that due to his inactivity the account had been deemed by his state (Connecticut?) as lost property years prior, liquidated, and entered into the state's escheat program, where one can claim lost property. The stock had been liquidated at a much lower price than its present worth. He wanted to sue since his intention was to leave the stock untouched for years but found there were some complications. He's currently waiting for the stock to hit a valuation where a great lawyer will be tempted to take it on contingency while still leaving himself a fortune.

I specifically mentioned "Smart wallets".

These wallets are actually smart contracts. One major feature of these contracts are that you can swap out the security keys if certain conditions are met. For example, you can generate 7 recovery tokens such that you only need 5 of the tokens to replace your security keys.

There is nothing stopping bank of america from creating a smart wallet and keeping the recovery tokens. This would allow them to reset your keys if you lose them.

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