Do you think that a bank or a government would've handled fixing such a flaw as well has optimism did?
All tokenization schemes are ponzi scams including USD, it's just that some use violence to stay relevant, and other use bug bounties.
All tokenization schemes are ponzi scams including USD, it's just that some use violence to stay relevant, and other use bug bounties.
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.
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?
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.