In the end, you either believe in the individual's choice, and individuals will do really stupid and bad stuff, and they will also fall for scams, but do you give the individual freedom of choice to fall for scams and speak freely?
This is a high risk option, perhaps. But it is also likely to be most effective at delivering progress to humanity, considering the difference between innovation over the last 200 years, has it happened in places with more freedom or less?
On the other hand, you have the crowd obsessed with control, obsessed with how the idiot needs to be protected from their own stupidity, and the crowd needs to be protected from the speech of the idiot. But somehow when you control things, in the end they start being used by those in power to cement their power, and suddenly you have less freedom, less creativity, and more suffering. But it's nice for some, because everything is under control.
Make your choice which side you are on.
How so? So far, crypto seems to amplify its worst trait: greed. It takes its destructive properties to new levels.
> you have the crowd obsessed with control
These controls are there for a reason. Controls create trust, and trust removes friction. Creating a stable currency and protecting people's money from scammers has nothing to do with censoring speech. It's a false equivalence.
> you have less freedom, less creativity, and more suffering
You also get this in an environment where the slightest mishap can irreversibly empty your savings account.
> used by those in power to cement their power
That's a problem with capital, not the currency with which it's expressed.
Part of new technology is many scammers entering it and exploiting the situation. Of course in many cases this isn't actually planned scamming, just taking risks in a new market and losing money.
What most here in this thread are basically arguing is blockchain is evil and shouldn't exist. Well, then neither should the internet or steam railways. It's shows a complete lack of understanding of human behaviour and history.
Really sad to see from the HN crowd. They are falling for the narrative built by people threatened by crypto, which is basically the people in power currently. Of course these are also the people against free speech. It's not an accident this is happening.
However these eventually become regulated. Lawlessness was a bug that was progressively fixed. In the case of crypto, it's a feature.
> Of course these are also the people against free speech
Leave those strawmen alone. Be the HN user you want HN to have.
It has happened in places with just enough freedom. The Wild West wasn't exactly known for its great pace of technological innovation. On the other hand, China today is a major innovator (e.g. in solar tech), and it is a much less free country than, say, Indonesia, which is not nearly as innovative.
In particular, legislation and enforcement against fraud are extremely necessary for a functioning system. Fraud directly keeps resources away from innovators (since people who thought they were investing into/buying an innovative solution are giving money to a fraudster instead); and it also indirectly dis-incentivizes belief in innovation, as someone who has been burned by a fraudster will be less inclined to believe the next innovator.
You surely can't expect to author perfect code and set it in stone.
Just pointing out the advantage. Clearly there are also disadvantages, and most people think the latter dwarf the former. I just want an honest and nuanced discussion.
I think most coiners, who skew strongly libertarian, would argue that it's up to you to make sure your smart contracts work.
Ah yes, it's up to the user to review and debug code written in an esoteric programming language to make sure that it works... When even creators of said contracts can't find bugs in their code and fall prey to mistakes (sometimes after multiple audits)
When is the last time you needed to debug the contract when you buy coffee?
The actual example I usually go for is selling/buying an apartment. I'm currently in Sweden, and I've gone through the process twice now. The contracts were several pages if clear text that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of Swedish could understand. Good luck checking that everything is correct with a "smart contract" version.
So where do smart contracts come in? Who would want to use a smart contract to buy an apartment? Unless possible the apartment deed was stored on the blockchain or something, but that is highly unlikely. Real estate is a very poor fit, since it's very heavily regulated in numerous ways. It's not just about ownership, and anonymous ownership of real estate is definitely a non-goal. It's an anti-goal.
Which really doesn't invalidate my original point.
As to use cases, you only proposed two things, coffee and real estate. Those examples are both silly, for different reasons. I think in general it very seldom would make sense to use smart contracts for real assets.
The only real use cases I can think of are financial derivatives with crypto assets as underlying, and various decision making mechanisms that govern processes that are controlled by code. As soon as you need to cross into the physical world, it's hard to see how it would work. Then you need a centralised institution that people trust, which mostly defeats the purpose.
However, even with "purely digital assets" you will end up needing to trust people and exactly for the reason I outlined: unless you're able to read and debug code written in esoteric programming languages, you trust the creator of the contract not to screw you over. And even creators of contracts themselves can't find mistakes in their own code and have all their money drained or locked [1]
[1] Just this week, https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=akudreams-earns-34-million-...
"The contract suffered from several flaws, however. The first allowed an exploiter to stop all refunds and withdrawals from the contract... not so lucky with the second issue. A bug in the code failed to account for users minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction... the team can never withdraw the 11,539 ETH ($34 million) earned from the NFT sales—it is stuck there forever"
But it's not the case that you need to trust the creator, since you can verify it yourself. If you don't understand the code, maybe you can find someone you trust that does. Or just trust that _someone_ hopefully finds any flaws. It's a much better situation than having to blindly trust its correctness.
I wouldn't personally use a smart contract for anything of significant value, but they're not useless just because the transactions are irreversible.
Literally my very first message, and also the one you're replying to: "Ah yes, it's up to the user to review and debug code written in an esoteric programming language to make sure that it works... When even creators of said contracts can't find bugs in their code and fall prey to mistakes "
> Or just trust that _someone_ hopefully finds any flaws. It's a much better situation than having to blindly trust its correctness.
So, at best it's not better than what exists today (trust thrid parties), and at normal (that is not even at worst) is worse than whatever we have today.
I fail to see how this is "not the flaw of technology it's just one way in which it differs from what we are used to"
No, at worst it's like today, at best you can verify it yourself.
But as I've said in almost every message, I'm not a proponent, I haven't seen any convincing use cases so far. And I don't even think it's very relevant to compare it to "what we have today", unless you are discussing replacing everything with smart contracts. Yes, some people do that, but I don't, and it's not an argument against the technology that some overzelous true believers think crypto will replace banks.
It doesn't mean however that we should just throw everything blockchain cryptocurrency related into the same sack and say its nonsense.