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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

Man, there's a baby in that bathwater Wiki RFC are throwing out.

There are projects that are fair, were fairly distributed, that work and are secure, that are feeless and instant, all while being truly decentralized. Everything that Bitcoin promised to be and wasn't.

So, when the scams die out the best projects willl still exist. It doesn't matter how much of their own face Wikipedia cuts off, but it's sad to see them do it.

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Nothing in crypto is fairly distributed. Not when the majority of supply is distributed in just a few years, or, much worse yet, all at launch in the hands of the founders plus whoever they decided to handout tokens to by whatever publicly unverifiable way.

> Nothing in crypto is fairly distributed.

Are we speaking relative to fiat here? .... Lol.

Besides, there were many attempts at fair distributions, so you're simply wrong there. My favorite, Nano, distributed small amounts to people who solved captchas between 2015 and 2017.

Yes, relative to fiat, since crypto can at best limit the unfairness to that already present in fiat.

But so far crypto has created wealth inequality which is way worse than that in fiat. Yes, there have been attempts at fair distribution, but to re-iterate my point above, they would need to spread distribution over a long timespan (gold has been distributed over millenia).

Or maybe you don’t want to accept water from providers that are well known to have a very negative impact on environment in the first place. Your baby deserve that you don’t tacitly turn a blind eye to well known side impact, all the more when there no lack of clean water provider.

Yes but Wikipedia only accepted BTC, BCC and ETH anyway. Maybe one day if what you say becomes true they will go back and accept these fancy new currencies.

> There are projects that are fair, were fairly distributed, that work and are secure, that are feeless and instant, all while being truly decentralized

Name two?

Monero and Monero related projects, like Haveno.

Its probably one of the most used cryptocurrencies for normal transactions, as most darkweb marketplaces use it.

The highest transaction fee in the last 100 transactions has been 4c. That's not a lot but very far from "feeless". Monero mines blocks every 2 minutes; hardly "instant". A full confirmation takes ~20 minutes.

Source: https://www.monero.how/how-long-do-monero-transactions-take

As opposed to a normal credit card transaction which takes days.

But not in a practical sense for the user. You don't have to wait 20 minutes for your authorization to clear so you can walk out of Dunkin with your iced coffee

Ironically you're more likely to have such an experience paying with cash these days.

I tried to buy a pizza from Dominos last week. Order online, pick up in person and pay with cash. Should have been simple, but it devolved into 5 minutes of Domino's employees trying to figure out "who's on cash?" (Had the credentials to open the cash drawer.) That person was apparently taking a smoke break, but when they came back it still took them another minute of furious hollywood hacker style keyboard pounding at the POS systems (accidental dual acronym of 'Point of Sale' and 'Piece of Shit'?) to open the cash drawer and give me my $1.20 change. Great job guys.

If you forgive me for being a little conspiratorial, I think point of sale systems must be designed to streamline credit card payments while artificially stalling cash transactions, as part of the financial industry's war against the cash economy.

I think the reason might be much simpler. For businesses, cash involves the risk of robbery, and in any case someone must drop it off at the bank periodically, or a pick-up must be arranged (adding cost). If your customers have a card anyway, why bother?

Fear of robbery might motivate a locked cash drawer, or no cash accepted at all. But only one person in the store being able to operate the cash drawer? The most generous explanation for this I can think of is the business fears their own employees are thieves, and want to reduce risk by only trusting a small number of them to handle cash.

But this doesn't explain why it's so hard for even the employee with the cash drawer credentials to open the drawer in a timely manner. They go full hackerman on the keyboard, scratching their head and cussing at the computer with utterances about the value of technology that would make the unabomber proud. It seems obvious to me the workflow for opening the cash drawer is inexcusably broken.

Sorry, my comment was in reply to the last paragraph of your comment, about POS systems being designed card-first. (Should've quoted it, but my tablet was acting up :) )

"who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions

you're somewhat right about the POS thing. a system like clover, for example, takes credit cards on the main unit, but the cash drawer is an add-on

> "who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions

That much seems certain. Switching to bitcoin to avoid the [artificial] annoyances of cash is like jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire.

You don't have to wait 20 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to clear for the price of an iced coffee, either. For low-value transactions with a low risk of double-spending you can just verify that the transaction made it into the mempool and is likely to be included in the next block or two, a process which takes seconds at most. It could technically still be reversed during that window but you could just as easily get a chargeback from a credit card, or a bad check. And with Bitcoin you'll have confirmation within less than 30 minutes that the transaction is fully irreversible, vs. 30 days or more with most other methods. Only physical cash offers a faster clearing time.

Contactless from my phone takes well under a second, perhaps less when I walk through the ticket barrier

Nobody outside of this thread would use “normal transactions” and “darkweb” in the same sentence.

> normal transactions ... darkweb marketplaces

For some abnormal definition of "normal", ok.

Obviously he/she meant normal in terms of exchange for goods and services.

Nano and Hedera.

Block lattice tech is very cool. It's been around for over 6 years now, but even here, people seem not to realize that it exists and is fully functional.

Nano is a very interesting one. The foundation developing it focuses on one thing: developing the best digital currency. They don't implement smart-contracts to make it as efficient as possible for example. The feeless aspect is what makes it great but also maybe vulnerable at the same time: the foundation will have to look for external finance a bit like the Linux foundation of which they are taking inspiration.

and their super-fast blockchain manages 70tps ... compare hundreds of tps on other non-PoW blockchains, e.g. private Ethereum

I believe it has one of the best TPS for a decentralised system, and this can be improved with better hardware when the need for higher TPS comes. Now, as it stands today, you can transact on Nano with a 0.4s confirmation time, so higher TPS is not a necessity.

some interesting data on that point: https://forum.nano.org/t/nano-stress-tests-measuring-bps-cps...

I have no desire to waste time and brain on "look up Block lattice tech" and I know that you tend to "take one for the team" in this kind of matter.

So. Block lattice tech: real or Malarkey?

> I think crypto currencies are for the most part a scam

> Man, there's a baby in that bathwater

It takes a special kind of thinking to insist "yeah, crypto currencies are about 98% scammy, but there must be good in the last 2%!, I've just seen 98 scams in a row, this _increases_ the odds that the next 2 that I see are legit!"

Well,

* no it does not increase the odds, this is desperate wishful thinking clinging to a fixed belief

* what if there is no baby, only bathwater? And where does the burden of proof that there is a baby or not, lie?

There were people who called the internet a fad, while the dot com silliness was at it's peak. Many of them, if you recall.

Look up block lattice tech - it's powerful stuff.

> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

- Carl Sagan

Block lattice tech is not Bozo the clown, but I won't stop you believing whatever you like.

All ponzi schemes start with smart people. The more complicated it is, the more "magical" it becomes for those that have been swayed. It's a religion for some, a cargo cult for others, and a grift machine for the criminals.

But scratch the surface and peer underneath, and you can see what it truly is.

We don't laugh at the people who started the ponzi schemes. We don't laugh at the people that lost their money and learned their lesson.

No, we laugh at the people who despite the clearest of clear headed reasoning still insist on wrapping their logic tighter than a pretzel. We may not all do it publically -- even though there are those that do -- but we do laugh, and are amazed how people got sucked into a tech cult.

What the fuck are you talking about a cult for.. Nano is a real and functioning product, that works. There's no religion or sacrifice or anything like that, you can literally download an app or go to a website and see it work for yourself.

Access to the world's knowledge and people defend their ignorance like this, smh.

Crypto can overall be a scam (or not, pick your poison), but if it's helping wikimedia get funding then that 'baby' is worth saving.

I think we can all agree that wikimedia is a net positive in the world.

Wikimedia Foundation have hundreds of million of dollars. Nothing need saving

See https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

> I think we can all agree that wikimedia is a net positive in the world.

Should Wikimedia take funds from the Kremlin, North Korea and Drug cartels, or should they have limits on ethical sources of funding?

You don't have to answer what you would do, but it is 100% legitimate for them to choose to have clear, written guidelines on what funds they ethically agree to accept.

I don't think that accepting cryptocurrencies is quite equivalent to accepting funds from the Kremlin, North Korea and Drug cartels.

It's more equivalent to accepting donations in roubles, in North Korean won or in the form of legal drug caches.

It's not about the source, but the means of the payment. I can imagine people accepting money from dubious sources, but not via dubious means and vice-versa.

> I don't think that accepting cryptocurrencies is quite equivalent to accepting funds from the Kremlin

I didn't say it was the same, just that they can choose to draw a line somewhere.

> It's more equivalent to accepting donations in roubles

And many are in fact drawing the line at that.

> I can imagine people accepting money from dubious sources, but not via dubious means and vice-versa

Agreed, though I think that once you start looking into ethical funding "why not both" is going to be a common position.

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