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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

"Cryptocurrencies are trustless, distributed, and uncensorable."

"The team behind cryptocurrency X has halted a primary use of the tokens."

Hmm...

I heard on the radio a financial planner talking about the desperate need for regulation in the crypto space because of the terra/luna crash. I laughed, I mean I really laughed. I'm a happy no coiner, and I don't know why people are so excited to experience banking in the 1820's.

"What do you mean the bank is out of money?"

Same thing with DAOs democratizing governance. Have you been to a city council meeting? You want ANYONE to be able to create a proposal that everyone else has to vote on?

Yes I do. We could accomplish so much more with a direct democracy. This Roe v Wade thing? We could have a referendum and be done with it. Instead it will be fought over by ineffectual politicians for the next decade and accomplish little.

Yes I realize that sometimes referendums give sub-optimal results (i.e. brexit), but I'd much rather live in a truly representative democracy that occasionally gets it wrong than a republic that doesn't represent the people's wishes at all.

> Yes I do. We could accomplish so much more with a direct democracy.

Absolutely not, lol.

The world is way, way too complicated for every individual to have a meaningful and informed opinion about every particular topic. That's why we delegate to experts in the field. There's no way I want some corn farmer in Iowa voting on monetary policy. Most people here haven't the faintest idea how monetary policy works. The comments here are horrifying, and this is a pretty elite group to begin with.

Similarly there's no way I want some city-slicker who's never held a hoe to vote on farm policy.

That's before we even start in on civil rights.

It's a flawed, backwards idea best left in the dustbin of history. It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Specialization is good. Delegation is productive.

Most economists have no idea how monetary policy or macroeconomics works.

That's a great opinion, but even if so - you know who has less idea? You and me. And you know who has even less idea? Some random corn farmer.

So why on earth would you advocate for the people who know the least about a topic to make the decisions? It's bananas.

There's no janitorial staff on Apple's board. There's no cooks on the Facebook board. There's no software engineers on the Twitter board. At least in industry we've - more or less - accepted that the folks with the relevant experience should be making the relevant decisions. This should be no less true in governance.

>There's no software engineers on the Twitter board

Yes there is. 3 out of the 11 members the board are clearly software engineers.

Formerly, not actively. Now they do things like sit on boards.

I don’t think that training leaves your system, as much as you sometimes might want it to.

Economists cause more harm than good, id rather they be not in charge of anything important and left to play in an Academic sandbox and publishing papers nobody will read.

California essentially has a referendum system. But it's very confusing. Every ballot has like ~20 of them so as an informed person I have views on many of them. But then there are ones like "Should we fund this stem cell research project for 4B that looks into this" and people have no idea how to vote. Things sound good and then you realize it was funded by very specific group of people and the money would go to their own project. Even though we shit on legislators having super well-informed people with staffs actually does lead them to work out kinks and negotiate good policy that pleases a larger swath of people.

Exactly, I don't want to have to be an expert on every issue that needs to be decided. And I don't want to trust regular people with other jobs and areas of focus to be those experts either. Job specialization was an important invention. Let's give people the job of figuring out policy, and let's hold them accountable by regularly voting on whether they stay in office.

> This Roe v Wade thing? We could have a referendum and be done with it.

I don't think "be done with it" on abortion is remotely possible. The two sides are completely intractable. In my long life I've never heard anyone be persuaded by the other side.

Besides, overturning RvW will not federally prohibit abortion. It will leave it up to the states, which will decide democratically.

This satisfies nobody.

For example, here in Washington State, there is no chance that abortion will be outlawed by the State. But that hasn't stopped major demonstrations protesting the Supreme Court.

> It will leave it up to the states, which will decide democratically. This satisfies nobody.

Not wishing to be unnecessarily provocative, but if each state were to have to set the policy isn't it likely it would be that which is most popular in that state?

Wouldn't more people be satisfied overall? Even if some states end up hating each other a bit more ... than they already do

I was pro-choice until my early-20s and I changed my view. I've met others who were in favor of complete freedom for abortions and now oppose them because they see as veiled eugenics. Not to mention the countless stories of women who attempted or had abortions and regretted it for the rest of their lives and became vocal opponents of it.

But they didn't die from a botched unlicensed one, which is the alternative we have to take into consideration, even if we don't like them. Making abortion illegal == scared young women die.

I responded just to give some data points about people who have changed their minds. I don't think HN is the place to get into a debate about it.

The "two-sides" were created by Roe v Wade. There were always other sides, a 50 year false dilemma where you couldn't even bring it up because "yeah but which side are you on?" Glad that's over! Kind of sad about the inconvenience for people in areas where they expected something different, and I'm moderately annoyed at the next decade where people try to recreate the two sides at the state and congressional level. But it does force room for inspiration!

I think part of the fear is that they will not stop at just overturning RvW. Once it’s overturned, there’s a risk of a federal ban being proposed by congress.

Or, just like everything else, the same forces that brought us to this point would weaponize direct democracy as a denial of service attack against itself and we'd still be able to accomplish nothing.

Direct democracy is great unless you're a minority (or hold an unpopular policy stance) and the majority keeps voting to make your life worse.

There's enough support on either side to have a referendum on the same topic every week. I don't see how that's going to be helpful in any way…

Agree. Especially if you change the wording a bit.

I do think something like Brexit is fine for a referendum. It's a singular issue and clearly very important. In California we have referendums for weird tax issues that become impossible to be informed on and it leads to bad outcomes.

Brexit was decided by like, what, 1 % margin? For that kind of decision? Nevermind the ... "meddling" by foreigners and of course populists...

Brexit was fine for a referendum? Are you kidding me?

This Country hasn't held a fair, informed referendum. Whether that be the AV , Scottish independence or brexit.

The game has changed, you have social media companies, Russia, Palantir and Cambridge Analytica types weaponizing misinformation.

The electorate got pushed to voting against their interests for both Brexit and AV by absolute bullshit lies. (E.g. 350 million to the NHS, AV referendum killing babies...)

At this point in time, we have seen the same thing happen in India, Brazil, the US, UK...

With direct democracy we have people voting on issues they don't understand. With representative democracy we have people voting on politicians, whose positions the voters don't understand, to deal with issues the voters don't understand. Why is the latter better?

Also, I would very much like to see a 5 hour free form interview with major political candidates. I feel like politicians mostly just repeat prepared remarks and don't really have a thorough understanding of issues and/or are not that smart.

Neither are better, but at least corruption and lobbying are somewhat more obvious with politicians. That and at least in theory representative politicians should be more conscious about the consequences of their decisions by hopefully being held accountable to their constituents.

At the moment, the issues surrounding external influences, Cambridge Analytica/PLTR style voter manipulation occur outside the scope of electoral regulators.

In reality, both systems are failing spectacularly given they are being abused by lobbyists, monetary interests, gerrymandering, FPTP, and sheer electoral fraud.

E.g. The Tories openly lying (Brexit empty promises, Scaremongering, AV killing babies). The Tories splitting by campaigning for the left vote to abuse FPTP. The Tories openly ignoring electoral spending restrictions because the fines are ineffective. The electoral college system/voter boundary abuse resulting in people in London/California having far less voting power than those in rural regions.

Neither system will be fair until the above aspects are rectified.

In the future, we are going to need to take unpleasant actions for which the current government models fail absolutely. Take climate change, or even the most recent pandemic. The current government models in the West failed spectacularly compared to places like China or Singapore.

UK citizen here. We implemented direct democracy by having a largely ill informed and sometimes deliberately misled population vote on the highly technical and complicated matter of EU membership. Ask us how it's going.

isn't direct democracy basically a "3 wolves and a lamb voting on lunch" scenario?

Ah yes, the wonderful California ballot proposition system is really something that we should extend to all of government.

There is currently no need to get 50%+1 voters on board with any arbitrary policy that politicians/corporations/others want passed. Hence the current mismatch between the policies that are passing and their current popularity.

If 50%+1 of voters becomes the metric to hit, it will almost certainly be achieved. Looking at California's ballot referendums, it's clear that it's no impossible task to get voters to approve something against their best interest or ostensibly against their stated political values and beliefs.

See: The ballot initiative exempting commercial property from Prop 13 that failed: (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_15,_Tax_on_Co...), and the initiative to overturn California's law requiring ride share drivers to be classified as employees that passed: (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...).

Roe v. Wade being overturned is making it so states can vote on their own abortion policies. That's closer to a direct democracy and closer to local democracy. You've also referred to Brexit as a suboptimal result, when Brexit was a move about breaking away from a large bureaucratic body of mostly unelected decision makers. The EU is the least democratic body in the West, so I'm having a very hard time understanding exactly what it is you want.

Also, just wanted to point out that you said you'd rather live in a "representative democracy" when talking about direct democracy. Representative democracy is another term for a republic.

>Representative democracy is another term for a republic.

Not really. Since we're talking about Brexit, it's worth noting that the UK is a representative democracy but is definitely not a republic.

You think voting on Roe vs Wade would solve it? Not a snowball chance in hell. Republic is there to make it so that wishes of different parts of the state that do not align at all do not rip the state to pieces and lead to a civil war. Governing by simple majority in long term never worked and never will.

Everyone likes to talk about will of the people. Well here is news. Different people have different desires, in different regions of the country majority wants to do different things. Only way to keep lid on this without the whole thing blowing up is to have representation of the this and slow the process down as much as possible, quick changes are the most disruptive/dangerous.

>Different people have different desires, in different regions of the country majority wants to do different things

Sure. But there is a big problem when the minority of people in an area end up getting what they want because the system that is in place isn't able to properly enfranchise the majority.

funny thing about stable governments, we need irrational actors to slow down popular impulses to make immediate drastic changes.

That’s what the court ruling is. The law makers need to decide the issue. Not the court.

I would like to hold a referendum to decide the organization's official stance on what is more attractive on a man between these two options:

A. Hitler Mustache

B. KKK Hood

Do you think everyone should have to vote on that?

I don't think you understand how referendums work. They require a certain number of signatures to even be considered. There would obviously be a filtering mechanism for trolls.

Until you recruit enough trolls.

The perquisite to successful DAO's is actually a strong centralized universal identity system (which is ironically counter to cryto-bro anarcho-capitalists philosophies).

From there it's pretty easy to associate real political capital with digital decisions.

E.g. Automatic n+1 "ban proposing user" option added to all proposals. If after n votes (where n is large) the sum(ban proposing user) > 0.25*sum(all other options), proposal is removed and user is banned until a proposal to unban is passed.

Too many people are married to the idea of how "democracy" and "decentralization" works in ideal conditions and turn a blind eye to their practical faults.

Makes em easy to dupe...

> Same thing with DAOs democratizing governance.

Is "plutocratizing" a word? Because that's what most of them are actually doing -- granting power to whoever has purchased (or rented!) the largest number of tokens.

* in the form of code.

As if procedural hacks were not enough (leveraged seizure of stake sufficient to exploit anyone...?),

who could possibly both be smart enough to write a contract, yet dumb enough to entrust it with their own money?

Trick question. That's the crypto koan of rue. The answer is no one. The rest is an exercise a lot of students are learning the hard way.

Typical DAOs are neither decentralized nor autonomous, but the idea of voting is not as bad as you suggest. In fact, it's the same decision making procedure that corporations use.

Yes. With some kind of minimum number of initial votes pledged towards it and some other anti-spam measures.

The alternatives are a corporatocracy, a dictatorship, etc. All of those things will be bad for you to live in, except if you are at the top. If you are at the top now, you should not weigh in here. As such, I have to assume you are not at the top - which makes me wonder why you hate yourself so much you believe you should have no voice. Doesn't sound healthy to me.

No I'm not a president or dictator, so no I'm not at the top of anything. I would describe myself as a realist. And in the real world it is extremely ineffective for everyone to have an equal voice in all matters.

Have you ever seen a road? Do you think everyone got an equal say and vote if and how that road was built? Cities that operate well and are not total disasters to live in, have governments that can improve infrastructure without having to include everyone's opinions equally. Obviously I think that is unfair, especially if I am the person who doesn't want brighter street lights on my street, but I don't want my city to end up like San Francisco where apartments cost 2 Million dollars and are surrounded by tent cities and taxes are super high.

I have a voice, I vote with my feet. I don't get to choose what products Apple makes or what games Nintendo releases, but I do get to choose wether I engage in their ecosystems.

In any system I'm not obligated to participate in, I prefer benevolent dictatorships. If I disagree with the dictator, I can take my business elsewhere.

It's easy for me to see how the 'supervillain origin story' for some bad actors can start with looking at how naive young people are and deciding to exploit it.

We don't want to study history. It's boring. The immersive experience of doing the historical re-enactment is much more intense, and something you can talk about for years to come. Eventually to the next batch of people who want to learn things the hard way, until it's happened so often that you turn into that old person you swore you'd never be when you were that age.

These aren't games though. Learning things the hard way can mean death, chronic illness or crippling debt that affects the entire rest of your life. School needs history lessons, and more of them, but there's also quality vs quantity (how do you make history interesting to kids who think this is just an old story and not a parable?)

Banking from 1820? I’m currently listening to a podcast, streaming back 40 sats per minute, supporting indie content creators using the btc lightning network. Banking from the 1820’s jeez.

Yep. Pretty much nothing created after 2015 is an actual cryptocurrency. It's just the normal finance scammers dressing their scams up with cryptocurrency buzzword camo. It hasn't been possible to organically grow a cryptocurrency from the vulnerable starting state to usefulness in nearly a decade.

I mean, language is descriptive, and while it's useful to be able to maintain a distinction between what the world called "cryptocurrencies" in 2015 and what we call "cryptocurrencies" today, that ship has sailed.

at the same time they are not really currencies, they are "stablecoins" on a many-times replicated digital machine playground where you can pay to add your own machine to interact with the others, and sometimes it turns into Robot Wars and the little coins get mercilessly cut up into bits of worthless parts that are then sold for scrap in the actual currency that runs the playground

Well, sure. But that ship has sailed as well.

    The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

While some people are really good at lying or dodging direct questions, many more are very good at lying to themselves. If you believe your own bullshit it's remarkably easy to look sincere while spewing it.

There are certainly many scammers out there, but also some people who believe their own marketing material. But the thing is that once you start picking apart one infinite growth pyramid, then you start seeing them everywhere, and eventually respectable people start trying to draw lines and claim that the bullshit on this side of the line is obvious and bad, but the bullshit on the other side is okay because reasons (reason #1: we can keep this running for at least another 100-200 years at which point I will be long dead)

> organically grow a cryptocurrency ... to usefulness

You might be right, but the only thing they were ever useful for, was money laundering.

So, I don't think that drawing a greater distinction between the first wave of money-laundering crypto, vs the current wave of Ponzi crypto, is really a defense of either.

Oh? Is that what I've been doing all these years paying my VPS bills and buying computer hardware? I was money laundering? Was it also money laundering when I donated to wikileaks after the US Dept. of Justice forced the credit card companies to blacklist them? All those donations to the internet archive: just money laundering.

And little did I know that others were laundering their money through me when they donated to my websites' bitcoin addresses.

I guess everything that isn't some incorporated third party transfering the money for you must be money laundering. Corporate persons transfer money. Human persons launder. Got it.

Your niche use of cryptocurrency isn't a valid counterpoint to the reality that cryptocurrency, in its general use, is for gambling and money laundering.

I can use a handgun for hunting, but that doesn't mean its primary use-case is hunting.

If you accept that premise then HSBC, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered and Bank of New York Mellon are also for money laundering primarily.

No, because they offer actual legitimate services that are used frequently by legitimate customers. They've also all happened to do large scale money laundering, but that isn't their primary focus and isn't how they're generally viewed.

Bitcoin is accepted as payment essentially nowhere, in the grand scheme of things. Yes, you've found some niche places that allow it, but it's rare. When I think ransomware, the first thing that comes to mind is cryptocurrency (specifically Bitcoin and ETH). When I think of money laundering, I think of NFTs, through ETH. If you talk to most normal people and ask them what they think of when you talk about bitcoin, it's probably buying illegal drugs.

>If you talk to most normal people and ask them what they think of when you talk about bitcoin, it's probably buying illegal drugs.

Ah yes. The "experts" that have only heard about Bitcoin from Fox/MSNBC/etc news. I'm sure they know what they're talking about.

Nice No True Scotsman fallacy.

No.

This is a stablecoin which has a centralized management team that can halt and control activity on the blockchain, which is fundamentally different from a bitcoin or monero which is a truly decentralized system with no controlling organization that can change anything without slow bulding, mass consent of all participants in the network, and is anyway naturally very stable because of its simplicity and extremely conservative and risk averse development process.

It's more like an Englishman yelling out that they're a Scotsman as they ransack the public square. It's not a fallacy to point out that they're simply not a Scotsman.

I hate this meme, "No True Scotsman" is not the same thing as language being descriptive and evolving over time. There are two concepts the parent is describing: the set of things described as crypto made before 2015 and the set of things described as crypto made after 2015. The two groups are well defined.

The fact that there isn't a formal name for the era of "pre-finance-bro crypto" or "first wave crypto" doesn't mean it's has anything to do with the scotts. The parent's language might be a little ambiguous but that's to be expected when trying to describe yet unnamed things and their meaning is clear enough.

Willfully misunderstanding someone's words to create a logical flaw that isn't there should be its own fallacy.

superkuh did not specify what exactly changed. Saying nothing created after 2015 is an "actual cryptocurrency" without justifying that somehow makes me think this might be a "no true Scotsman" argument.

What constitutes these eras? And why do you bring that up when it was about a class of products not being "an actual cryptocurrency". I would have thought there are properties to the product that make it belong to the class, not merely when it was created.To me these unnamed things and their meaning you talk about are absolutely not clear enough.

I believe you two have a point. But it doesn't come across...

PS: I would argue in 2015 "crypto" was mostly known as abbreviation for cryptography and had nothing to do with decentralized public ledgers.

I'm in no way trying to argue that the parent's classifications or conclusion make sense, just that it's not NTS because the parent isn't trying to make some universal assertions about crpyto in general and denying the exceptions but comment that the "scene" has changed drastically and the word cryptocurrency along with it.

NTS would be something like

* "All things people are calling cryptocurrencies made after 2015 are just finance-bro scams."

* "But what about TotallyLegitCoin, it's not a scam."

* "But that's not really a cryptocurrency."

Has Binance "gone down for maintenance" yet?

Typically happens when the market's scary.

The market isn't 'scary', this is a small stablecoin, and overall the crypto market is up today[0]. Also exchanges do have issues when the volume is much above the norm but this if anything happens as or more often when there's a lot of buying pressure. It's also much more of an issue with e.g. Coinbase than Binance. Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around.

0. https://www.coingecko.com/

> Binance are more likely to let you trade as you wish but temporarily disable withdraws while they move funds around

I was under the impression that providers being able to "temporarily disable withdrawals" [due to lack of liquidity, political pressure, or indeed any other reason] is one of the key things that crypto didn't suffer from?

On-chain sure. I am not sure why you'd expect guarantees off-chain. If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates. Though I am also not sure why you'd think liquidity doesn't matter, that's neither here nor there.

> If you let me handle an asset for you instead of handling it yourself you are bound by how I operate, not just how the asset itself operates

Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees?

In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital.

* I'm not sure I properly understand this phrase as you've used it

>Is it possible (just for example) to exchange fiat for crypto, or crypto for fiat, or indeed one crypto for another, without having to involve an "off-chain"* counterparty which comes with no guarantees?

Fiat exists inherently off-chain, so you can't not involve an off-chain as you put it, unless you count stablecoins (government or non-government issued) as fiat. Crypto for crypto or crypto for stablecoins you can exchange purely on-chain via DEXs.

>In the fiat world it would appear one can do an exchange "old school" by going to a physical bank branch and exchanging [physical] fiat for fiat (USD to EUR or whatever) and not have to worry that the transaction is going to be halted half way through due to "temporary restrictions" leaving you unable to access your capital.

When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat.

> When you involve a bank or brokerage or paypal you do face those same risks (but possibly to a lesser extent) with fiat.

Aren't money exchange services fairly heavily regulated, for precisely this reason?

I'm asking specifically about unregulated counterparty risk. Which there seems to be quite a lot of in the grey area between crypto and, well, everything else that isn't pure crypto.

There actually is a p2p marketplace for buying and selling of crypto called Bisq. You don't need a third party wallet. All trades are from/to BTC. It's a native Java app and it relies on the Tor Network.

Yes, you can trade crypto assets on-chain with decentralized exchanges like uniswap, sushiswap etc. Of course you can not fiat-crypto trading on chain , but you can do USDT-crypto trading.

Folks, nothing has been said by the commenter that is non-factual. Please contribute to making HN a space of curiosity.

The commenter didn't even take a stand on crypto vs fiat. The market isn't scary. The stock market also halts trades when things get rough.

I think the point of criticism is (as alluded by the previous poster) that crypto (I can't believe that this term now means cryptocurrency, not cryptography) proponents like to say that they are different from traditional markets which are "corrupted" by those with power.

That said, I agree that this should be a point to debate not downvote.

Sorry, I meant "when the markets for coins Binance is heavily invested in/front running is scary".

This one is too small to have a larger effect on the market. Only 2% the size of Terra UST

Sorry, I saw on Coinmarketcap a market cap of around $4bn for DEI, which is about 25% of UST, or 2.5% of the entire USD stable coin "market" (while UST was about 10%). Is that what you meant?

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dei/

That market cap is inaccurate because it doesn't represent the true supply.

Note the red explanation marks that indicate how the data is inaccurate.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dei-token has a better estimate.

At peak, DEI was only around $100 million or so. Compared to roughly $20 billion for UST.

You could also look at the volume. UST frequently had $500 million of volume each day. DEI only had a couple million at best. (Volume is of course also a flawed metric and can be faked, but the lack of effort in faking volume is a signal in and of itself.)

Interesting. Coingecko is basically reporting #(float) * price for a coin, while Coinmarketcap is reporting #(minted) * price. Neither of which feel perfectly accurate for token pricing, but do seem like reasonable high and low endpoints, with the gecko version closer to an estimate of 'other peoples money' involved in the coin.

Coinmarketcap isn't reporting the minted numbers. Coinmarketcap is just reporting the theoretical maximum in the protocol. It's a really bad estimate.

Oh, wow, really? That's even worse.

I just checked coingecko and the highest market cap Dei ever had was barely over $100 million

This is when which blockchain it's on really matters. DEI is on Fantom. Unclear who controls that. It's a "consensus blockchain", which means some group of operators has control.

With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely.

>With UST, the issuer controlled the blockchain and shut it down completely.

The issuer didn't control Terra. The Terra blockchain is unable to come to connesus about creating a new block if 33% of the staked Luna goes offline. You just have to get the largest validators to agree to go offline and it will stop.

Hm. Is that a potential failure mode for other proof of stake blockchains?

This is speciﬁc to tendermint consensus. Casper consensus doesn't seem to do it.

Yeah, those attributes describe just one point in the design space of tokens running on distributed ledgers. It's perfectly possible to create tokens that require trust, that have centralised elements or that can have their transactions easily censored.

The smart contracts are still ironbound to whatever they end up compiling to. It's the pesky humans who are ruining things. It can be easily argued that any cryptocurrency involving human intervention is vulnerable to ... human intervention.

Oh, don't worry about it, with the amount of (increasing) energy demand and the resulting pressure on climate change, Crypto is working hard at removing that bad influence.

Yes, many crypto projects are permissioned scams. The few that aren't just may change the world yet. There are plenty of people who continue to work on these projects as markets fluctuate and crypto trends come and go.

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