It's good to see white hat hackers in this space trying to fix what is already broken.
But sorry to be that person, just a timely reminder of the truth: All cryptocurrencies and 'DeFi projects' are ponzi scams including Orchid.
All tokenization schemes are ponzi scams including USD, it's just that some use violence to stay relevant, and other use bug bounties.
It's irrelevant. We don't use 'algorithms as ownership' in the real world. We use social agreements like contract law to undo problems.
"All tokenization schemes are ponzi scams including USD, it's just that some use violence to stay relevant, and other use bug bounties."
We use the law to maintain civil infrastructure. Yes, if someone wants to murder you or someone else, or launder billions, we'll use violence to stop them.
An algorithm that is effectively used as a Pyramid Scheme is not going to save your from anything.
As for your murder comment, I'm not saying that violence is strictly unnecessary, just that the coincidence of "we have the guns" with "we issue the ponzi tokens" is probably not the only way to enforce the law.
Not "the only way", perhaps, but AFAICS the only way that makes sense. Sure, "the law is an ass" and "the querns of law grind exceedingly slow" and all that... But still, it's the worst alternative except for having no law, right?
So if you want the rule of law, the law needs to have the biggest guns. And why would anyone want anyone but the law to issue the tokens of lawful commerce?
I'm not saying it's a better or worse plan than whatever might happen under an alternative system, but just that it's not exactly a clean solution either.
The way that the credit card system works in the US is fundamentally biased towards consumer protection, because that's an explicit policy objective. The same with the Direct Debit guarantee in the UK, or the various laws which limit the maximum exposure due to fraudulent use of payment cards.
And when exchanges break trades, they undo the entire transaction - you don't end up with one party out cash or shares.
Now I get a bank-subsidized thing and you're not missing any money. It creates a drag on the whole economy, because instead of doing productive work to get the thing, it's often easier to play games with the system.
The fact that credit cards use a symmetric key to authorize spend is a glaring flaw. The technology to fix it (asymmetric key cryptography) has been around for decades. But instead of fixing it, the credit card companies just keep writing off the instances of fraud.
That seems, to me, like a sensible risk balancing approach. In the cryptocurrency "all sales are final" world - you're the loser. I don't really see that the economic drag is larger one way or the other.
AFAIK the use of symmetric key cryptography in card capture and payment processing is not in any way a significant factor in payment card fraud - where do you get that information from?
Better would be to have whatever secret authorizes spend (private key) be separate from the account identifier (public key) and to push money, rather than sharing a symmetric secret which authorizes whoever has it to pull money.
But with ETH we have the community patting themselves on the back for it. It’s madness.
You are making a false equivalency when you compare crypto with usd.
However, I can use USD, GBP or any fiat currency in my local grocery store.
Can I use Bitcoin, Shib, Doge, or even Orchid at my grocery store without waiting hours in the queue for the transaction to complete and no huge fees?
But that's orthogonal to how quickly the maintainers of these tokens can make changes in response to threats.
Over a decade later and I still cannot use any of them at the restaurant or without waiting in the queue for the transaction to settle and paying more for the fees than the goods itself.
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[1]: lit. "makers": "Fiat" is Latin for "let there be made", a form of the verb "to make". It's a cognate of modern French "faire", Italian "fare", etc. (Related words are "fact" and "factory".)
Never mind that the entire threat class doesn’t exist in traditional finance?
The strike app (which uses Lightning) is not available worldwide which really doesn't give the image that Bitcoin lightning is decentralised at all.
Seems like just an opinion to me, and a poorly opinionated one at that.
All I see are people holding coins and not using them at all for anything else other than 'I want coin to go up'.
Adding a new technology + blockchain + a coin still makes it ponzi scheme scam, even worse when the price of this coin comes crashing down.
The only reason Helium's LoRaWAN coverage is expanding rapidly is due to the crypto aspects of it.
If I would like to lose my money in style this would be it.
Well get in line, the backlog for receiving hotspots across all distributors is 6-9 months long.
And there is no human coordination mechanism without the freely convertible currency
Blockchains provide the open source rails of all the account management and distribution, easing development costs. The infrastructure is already built compared to alternate ways of attempting to do this
have fun doing that without a blockchain
There is definitely an opportunity to sell overpriced hardware into the community then.
There are some other antenna-blockchain systems out there that look more like "schemes to sell hardware", such as Match X. There is a big and burgeoning market for these "passive income" things, people install hardware to earn a cryptocurrency.
It is definitely worthwhile to sell the hardware if you can.
And earlier:
>>> GPS
So is this the Charlie Stross blockchain scheme?
Tokens are used to have a stake as an indexer (data provider) and to pay for query fees (data consumption), and if indexers tamper with the data they lose their stake.
It was released last year and has a long way ahead to mature, but it's an amazing product and tokens/blockchain is essential to its decentralized nature. Simply put, there is no way to accomplish this if the network didn't adopt its own cryptocurrency.
Just like all the other coins, the only use case is burning up the planet by using Ethereum, BTC, etc, racking up high fees and being used by speculators while everyone else who invests in the ponzi scheme lose their money when it all crashes.
Nothing has changed.
How so?
I won't bother with the rest of the post as it's your usual crypto bad spiel that has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion we're currently having and has absolutely nothing to back up its claims (as do the rest of your posts, which I'm surprised aren't flagged/dead yet considering their low quality, but I guess HN is ok with them since they're anti crypto), but I'm curious to see how you would build a decentralized system that lets developers build data indexing programs, allows anyone to join the decentralized network as a data provider to run those programs, and lets consumers query that data from the network while also ensuring that the data is valid and hasn't been tampered with by the providers without blockchain/tokens.
Please, do enlighten me, I'm curious.
Like all the others, most people are just speculating on the token price, asking if it is a good investment, etc. You would have to be lying to yourself to believe that people care about the technology.
Could you tell me why does this project needs a token attached? Even if we were to look at the price, the painful truth is that most (if not all) people who invested lost most of their money on this shitcoin, and this is excluding the punishing gas fees so it could be even worse. I hope this doesn't include you as well.
As I said, querying blockchains can be done without the need to attach a token to a project. BitQuery is an example of this without trying to burn up the planet with Proof of Waste.
If you are in support of the Graph you are also in support of the ponzi scheme.
What I would say is that most cryptocurrencies have no fundamental value, and are therefore bubbles. I don't know what the term is for when someone deliberately creates an asset bubble with the intention of profiting from it. It's something like a very long-form, deliberative pump-and-dump.
Other organization bounties should go higher. Especially Web2 ones.
Why do I have to pay more fees to swap tokens on decentralised exchanges making them unusable, and how exactly is DeFi decentralised?
Wait for ETH 2.0. It's a really difficult problem to solve. In the meantime though, use Polygon (or other side chains). Swap tokens for a cent or two.
> how exactly is DeFi decentralised
Take a protocol like app.uniswap.org or pooltogether.com. If you have an internet connection, no one can stop you from using these protocols (and many other protocols). No arbitrary rules imposed by governments or companies. Your funds are your funds, there are no arbiters (just tens of thousands of Ethereum nodes which are responsible for settling transactions).
> What is the process of getting your money back from a hacked DeFi project?
Use protocols that have been around for a long time and have hundreds of millions, billions, or even tens of billions of dollars locked in. That decreases chances of you losing funds. But it is a problem, I agree, hopefully somehow we will make it better.
So I still have to wait at least 2023 (2025 or 2026 for a realistic possibility of merchant adoption) for ETH 2.0 to be used?
I don't think merchants would want to wait for something that is not complete and unregulated.
You do realise that ETH 2.0 has nothing to do with lowering fees? So all the DeFi apps using it will still be unusable anyway.
> If you have an internet connection, no one can stop you from using these protocols (and many other protocols)...(just tens of thousands of Ethereum nodes which are responsible for settling transactions).
Aren't most of these Ethereum nodes and DeFi exchanges on AWS like dydx? It went down a few months ago no? [0]
That doesn't sound decentralised to me.
> Use protocols that have been around for a long time...That decreases chances of you losing funds. But it is a problem
So I can't get my money back then? I see DeFi hacks everyday and not getting my money back doesn't help either.
Makes robbing a bank less attractive for criminals and instead target DeFi projects.
[0] https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381
The decentralized part of DeFi is the smart contracts. If you can interact with the contracts without any centralized help, then how exactly is it centralized in your opinion?