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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.

As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.

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What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.

Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.

And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a subject before speaking about it.

That’s an incredibly rude way to try to invite someone to a learn about a subject.

Having said that, I think that if these things are so obvious in your opinion, you haven’t considered real world scenarios.

Not GP, but you called it "trivially irrelevant", it didn't seem like you wanted to be invited to learn anything...

I said trivially lying, as in - the ease with which one can simply lie about the nature of a transaction.

People tend to respond that smart contracts are a solution. I personally think they will always contain bugs and are too complicated for the average person to vet.

In any case, I really wasn’t saying I think the whole subject is trivial. Pinky promise.

> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.

If you know of a ledger that's

(1) permissionless and

(2) avoids the double-spending problem and

(3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned

...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.

What I'm saying is that you don't need a decentralized ledger to enable the "financial innovation" we've been seeing, and that it's not permissionless if every meaningful action (buy/sell/trade) happens on good ol' central exchanges.

Truly decentralized exchanges exist and clear tens of billions of dollars in volume every single day.

Within an ecosystem, yes. You can trade Ethereum currency for Ethereum-based tokens.

As for "billions of dollars in volume every single day", I find that hard to believe.

https://info.uniswap.org/

Uniswap alone clears this amount. Part of the power of decentralized exchanges is that every trade is logged and publicly available, which is not something you can claim for their centralized counterparts.

Ethereum's Proof of Stake?

They are not talking about the consensus mechanism but the overall raison d'etre of blockchain.

Which involves decentralization and a ledger.

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