Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility, even amidst the sea of fraud and grift. I still don’t see it.
Some utility? Okay, sure. A ton? Not even close. Consider that the web launched in 1993. By 2007 (14 years later), virtually the entire planet had changed dramatically as a result. That is a technology with a ton of real world utility.
That might explain its almost complete lack of real world use as a currency outside of a few scenarios of economic collapse.
You want people to hold real assets, not imaginary ones like a currency, because you want people to be invested in your economy. The only intrinsic value a currency have is taxation.
We don't want dollars to sit in hoards. We want them to circulate. If I can be without access to dollars for a while I can loan them to you for some enterprise. Then you pay me back more than I loaned you (and more than inflation we hope) because your enterprise created additional value.
If my excess money circulates I benefit from access to the things that money is used to build in addition to the interest I receive. Since I'm not a medieval landed noble my economic value isn't measured by the productivity of the serfs on my land holdings.
To adjust properly there has to be somebody who decides what "in tune" is. We're either back to centralization, or it's some sort of popularity vote which is unlikely to produce the right result.
I think crypto will go down in history as an amazing example of the importance of institutional knowledge and regulation. Like how did nobody see fraud coming in an unregulated financial instrument? Did folks genuinely think that "decentralization" was going to sidestep all of the typical problems that we've been using regulation to solve for the past several hundred years?
Everyone else is better served by instant payments with utility pricing provided by a neutral party, such as a central bank or their delegate responsible for implementation and ongoing operations of the system.
"Accepting money is one thing, but paying out money to the rest of the world — especially long-tail countries with poor banking rails is another thing," he said. "It works better than fiat payments in a lot of cases," he added."
Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails. Crypto is slowly dying while central banks raise rates globally, making the casino attempt at yield unpalatable (most crypto trading was gambling). Africa, for example, is going digital payments faster than some developed countries [2] [3].
Stripe's problem (along with Visa and Mastercard for that matter) is that developing countries are leapfrogging developed world financial infra, and owning it themselves to prevent "light colonization" of this critical financial infra. This compresses the global TAM for the for profit folks who are skimming off rails volume.
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...
> "Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails."
Stripe has also shipped theirs though and it is available and is in use. [0] So have Moneygram [1], Visa [2], Checkout.com [3], PayPal [4] and beyond payments, Walmart Canada is using one right now. [5]
The fact is, they are using blockchains and they are not going away (or dying) anytime soon, like it or not.
[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
[1] https://stellar.org/products-and-tools/moneygram
[2] https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
[3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto
[4] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto...
[5] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...
PIX in Brazil and UPI in India are evidence of what instant payment systems do to incumbent instant (credit card) rails. Central banks are coming for cross border payments next. For profit firms need profit and investors. Central banks (or other nation state monetary policy orgs with similar functions) simply need mandates. Congress told the Fed to build FedNow (to prevent private/for profit instant rails from gating access), and they did, because they were told to.
Visa, Paypal, and others in the space have an existential crisis, no different than Intuit with the IRS preparing to offer filing for free. A Paypal stablecoin? Are you kidding me? Why would you use that versus an FDIC insured deposit account or a money market fund?
https://archive.ph/vh3Dh | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-23/brazilian...
https://www.livemint.com/economy/indians-pick-upi-over-debit...
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2693~8d4e5804...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920633
https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/cryptocurrencies-tnc?loca...
These 'rails' are just meant for the introduction of a CBDC in their respective countries which will just have the same issues that Nigeria's eNaira 'CBDC' had which once that was tried, it was a complete failure. [0] [1] which UPI and PIX will have the same problems and will be no different.
[0] https://business.cornell.edu/hub/2023/04/28/nigerias-enaira-...
[1] https://www.pymnts.com/cbdc/2022/nigeria-cuts-atm-cash-withd...
the problems as I see them are too much private regulation of the market—centralised exchanges that have too much power—and public regulation—KYC—which has largely removed the intended benefits in the first place
Forex (for travelers) perhaps? Technically, fiat itself does not provide exchange. you always need a broker or a counterparty. crypto provides liquidity that can replace a paid service (yes I know crypto also has fees).
I have never owned crypto but I think it's a great idea as a currency that should have been able to compete with paypal/credit cards, but somehow didn't. I think that's its greatest failure: the fact that 12 years later I can't buy a sandwich with it.
If you are trying to keep your coin over a longer period of time you suffer the high volatility and are at the whims of gamblers. But if it is only used to perform a money transaction which otherwise would not be possible/too expensive/too dangerous, only to be exchanged against a fiat currency immediately after, that could be its role.
Again, we're talking real world. Have you ever travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something? Has anyone you know ever done that?
> travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something
not the scenario I described. Forex is short for foreign exchange. as in, exchanging to local fiat.
Imagine you're in a different thread about social credit scores, or mastercard selling user data, or Canadian protestors having their bank accounts frozen...
And famously, humans did ZERO transacting before the US invented paper currency, right? Or maybe a market exists externally to the financial instruments that can operate in it? Crypto isn't needed for barter. Crypto isn't needed for secret barter. Hell, swap buy sell guides were a thing in my childhood, before anyone paid for anything on the internet.
Because it gets you away from the fiat aspect of it.
I'm not talking about the arguments over monetary economics and whether we should just trust central banks not to print too much money; I'm talking about the other type of fiat. If you contribute money to the wrong protesters, "liberal" "democratic" Western governments can and will freeze your bank account. If you live in the wrong country, Visa and Mastercard will cut off your access to your own money as collective punishment for the actions of a government you didn't even freely elect. If you want to trade in goods the government doesn't like, they have ways of making that difficult for you.
Crypto got sold to finance bros as some sort of respectable financial instrument, which it clearly is not. If you're a respectable normal person in a Western country, crypto probably just isn't for you.
...and without payment processing, fraud detection, customer service, moderation tools, user reviews or a refund policy.
Eg. the rest is optional and doesn't come with the same guarantees as the base network.
I don't hate cryptocurrency personally, but it's not hard to see how 99% of users would prefer "the rest" implemented well over a properly transparent blockchain.
Also, something like OpenSea can block you and you're effectively banned for all practical purposes.
If it's a blockchain, there's no single host who can do that.
For it to truly destroy the monopoly, the items that the NFTs represent would have to stand on their own, outside of any particular platform, implemented entirely in the NFT smart contract itself, but outside of the most trivial use cases (eg displaying an image) that’s not a technology that exists as platforms would have to at a minimum agree on a standard interface and functionality of items. Right now, it’s also held back by storage and transaction costs (although some blockchains are cheaper than others).
But even then, if there was a common item standard and you could use that to somehow implement cross platform (or cross game or whatever) items, any particular platform could still decide not to honour it or to ban you or whatever they want.
NFTs "in games" is just laughable. It's a perfect microcosm of how crypto boosters NEVER know anything about what they are talking about, like even the most basic, first sentence of wikipedia things.
There is no system agnostic way to program videogame object behavior. Your NFT can pretend to have whatever functionality it wants, but it's up to the game dev to honor that. If your NFT is a jpeg that you want as a weapon skin, the game dev has to take that blockchain data and pull or parse the jpeg out of it, and there is NOTHING the blockchain can do to enforce that. There's NO cryptography protecting that jpeg after that moment.
And that's just the physical, technical implementation, completely ignoring that it won't get to that step because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.
Or do you somehow actually think EA and Ubisoft and everyone put pay to win mechanics in their games because players are desperate to give them more cash?
>NFTs "in games" is just laughable
Microtransactions and in game economies already exist. Moving that economy to a blockchain is not laughable. If a developer doesn't want to spend development time working on features for the in game economy they can use the cryptocurrency ecosystem to accelerate their project.
>because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.
If you think microtransactions are not a way for game studios to get quick cash you are misleading yourself.
The state of any particular blockchain doesn't confer any copyrights, license, or real world ownership. It's about as valid as me writing "I own a pair of Air Jordans" on an index card.
Unless a game developer decides to honor any particular blockchain and NFTs on it those NFTs mean nothing. There's no upside to a developer honoring third party NFTs because they make no money off them but do have support and development costs.
For example, if it’s a game item, you still rely on one or more games to honour your NFT that claims you own it, and to implement that item in the first place. If it’s an image, that image is still hosted somewhere (and even if it’s embedded into the NFT directly, those bits are given meaning externally).
An NFT is just a receipt claiming ownership, what that receipt allows you to do still relies on external services honouring that receipt.
NFTs only solve one small part of the puzzle and I’d argue it’s not even the most important one.
A certificate saying that you own the moon can not be a bond. NFTs are much more versatile.
I find it ironic that challenges to the state's monopoly on currency issuance are described as "Monopoly money". Also funny to observe that Binance is reacting to the regulatory moats created to preserve the state's monopoly.
Say what you will about the grift and VC backed pump 'n dump schemes. There's no disputing that. The controversy will be around central banks, the legitimacy thereof and Cantillon effects which result in much of the same via similar means.
that's like saying that submarines were invented when Jules Verne wrote about them (i.e. you're wrong)
blockchain technology requires the internet, hence it cannot be older than the internet
https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/do...
We’re in the MVP stage as an industry with plenty of problems. Unfortunately those problems can impact lives in much more negative ways than a communication tech like the internet could during its “MVP era”.
When will there be this backing for bitcoin?
Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. It's high time to stop pretending it got popular for any other reason.
So, two of the most valuable applications possible?
From what I understand sending money across counties is very expensive. Not to mention "bad countries"
Do people use it for this in real life?
The fees of which are estimated to be over 5% [1]; I mean imagine losing 5% of your paycheck just because of currency problems!
The current Etherum TX fee is 0.0004 which at 1 ETH / 1,573.09 USD comes out to 62 cents.
Would your rather pay 5% of your transfer to send money home to your family or 62 cents?
[1]: https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fe...
Talk is dirt cheap.
It's no web, but its a lot more impactful than say self driving cars (thus far), 3D-printing, or vegan meat.
Edit: This is not to discount those technologies, rather to emphasize that crypto is used by millions worldwide for real transactions.
3D printing has built real things, real products and has immense significance to fast prototyping.
Crypto hasn't built a single tangible item.
In Argentina if someone works for you more than 15/20 hours in a given month you are legally obliged to hire them for, at least, 3 months. The legislation doesn't fit in tons of cases, and led the country to over 35% of working people outside the legal framework.
Crypto gives people living in dysfunctional democracies a chance to participate in the global economy, something that people living in Europe or North America cannot comprehend.
And don't even get me started on why ownership of your money is important but if you are willing to read take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito
You don't get to decide that speed limits are stupid and go 100. You don't get to decide that taxes are stupid and not pay them. You don't get to decide that rules against murder are stupid and ignore them.
> You don't get to decide what to put into your body and smoke weed. You don't get to make a choice about your pregnancy and have an abortion. You don't get to not be a chattel slave in 1840.
Some laws are unjust and it's your duty as a human being with free will to disobey them.
* pay a living wage
* pay your taxes
* comply with health, safety, and employment regulations
* comply with all the other laws (this is a crypto thread, so that includes weapons laws, securities laws, international sanctions, and so many more)
Then you don't have a valid business. You have no inherent right to run whatever business you think you want to.
Also, to your immediate claim, I do not believe you.
I do pay my taxes, also think high worth individuals should be subject of taxation, but your rigid framework leaves out many people that use crypto as their only way to get paid and/or save money because traditional banking system is broken in their countries.
1.
2. https://brazilian.report/liveblog/latam/2023/10/10/dollar-10...
3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-12/argentina...
I'm sad that tariffs mean I can't bring in dirt cheap liquor from the Caribbean to sell for massive profits but that's not an excuse to not pay my taxes.
If I need syringes to work, national syringes costs 3 usd a pack (and they are out of stock) and I can get the same pack for 85 cents in Chile, I'll exchange pesos crocante for dolar blue, cross the border to Chile and get them there.
I wouldn't call it human right, but the idea of amass currency to buy goods seems pretty essential for our modern life.
Although it's sad that tariffs make selling cheap liquor unprofitable in your country, I think we're thinking about different scales of income.
"The killer app for this technology is crime."
Lives lost in Venezuela doing a serious attempt at changing. Do you prefer blood shed on streets?
Tax evasion is possible with or without mechanism. Real world example in Argentina: the way most landlords evade taxes is by charging tenants in cash. They expect you to go to their place with an envelope full of 1000's ARS banknotes.
So far I've not seen rents paid in cryptocurrency, but by extension, would you say cash's killer app is tax evasion indeed?
People making the argument that payments are hard to trace with crypto & that's the reason it should be banned or ignored are 1) ignorant because crypto transactions are easier to trace than cash and 2) making a dangerous argument against cash for which authoritarians will be thrilled to have support
As a very last resource, because again, I do not condone crimes, but: When tyrants rule, it's our human right to disobey.
Would you accept to be subservient to a power structure that doesn't work for you? For the "We The People"? Vote them away yes, given voting is not a deceptive theatrical show like it is in Venezuela. So, what are the other alternatives? Ruling out violence of course.
I'm curious if this has ever worked before.
I accept that next time might be different, but previous examples would add to your argument.
Crypto doesn't fix the problem with authoritarian states (or the drug war, or backwards prostitution laws), though, it's just another workaround. There's no shortcut around actual social change.
And the idealistic notion that crypto could allow mass civil disobedience didn't really pan out; these days, "civil disobedience" is usually too marketable and monetizable for it to not get co-opted by scamvangelists and corporations (which reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where they monetize the guy's suicidal protest against everything being monetized).
I'd say the ability to avoid penalties from "victimless" laws is beneficial, irrespective of the governing state.
I'll allow that pragmatism has an important role in tempering the extremes. Claiming that there is "nothing to debate" is a leap into absolutism.
I'd gladly pay $100k for the privilege of renouncing my citizenship and legally becoming stateless. I'd actually have more rights as a noncitizen than I do as a citizen these days inside the US, especially when it comes to KYC and AML rules.
If you consider the government itself as a "directly-involved party" then you would consider no crime to be victimless, since it's always the government who prosecutes a crime.
If you invoke something like "society at large" as the victim, then again you can exclude any action from being a victimless crime if you happen to think society is worse off if that action happens (e.g. certain sexual acts between consenting adults, certain types of drug use, etc.).
Tax evasion, along with similar crimes like smuggling and insider trading, are widely listed as examples of victimless crimes.
Illegality is not directly corelated with harm, sadly.
I mostly agree - but would argue its a lot more gray than black & white.
Have you ever considered what might happen if that distant, authoritarian state suddenly appeared within your country? It has happened many times before, and I don't see why we should think it won't happen again.
Things turn around faster and faster as technology progresses, at least from my perspective
Most of the world is authoritarian and that's if you consider that the Western world is not.
Uber allowed anyone to drive without a taxi medallion.
AirBnB allowed anyone to turn a home into a hotel.
Amazon allowed anyone to buy a book online, without having to go to a book store.
Not everything is about evasion of laws.
Using your own car as a way to give people rides, and get paid for it, fell into a grey zone because nobody had actually thought to do that before.
Let's also not forget that this is a global business with different "laws" all over the place.
AirBnB openly listed properties that it knew (NYC) were illegal and had been told so.
Plus, I think the vast majority of people pay for it without cypto as is, no issue.
Just some sort of disobedience technology without plans for change and active work on that (including majority building and policy proposals) is not going to cut it.
You want functioning societies not some dystopia with a tech underground.
>And there are mechanisms to challenge laws you don’t like that don’t involve simply deciding you’re not going to obey them.
I'm curious about those mechanism to challenge laws.
I mean, let’s buy in on the idea that it is good to enable tax evasion in dysfunctional countries, just for the sake of argument.
Isn’t the bitcoin ledger publicly visible? It seems to me that bitcoin isn’t providing a good way to perform tax evasion. It is creating a totally immutable record of tax evasion, that local authorities just aren’t looking at yet. This is, like, the last place I’d store records of my crimes. If anything it seems more like a (maybe) unintentional honeypot.
Of course, it is possible to obfuscate your identity through various means when using bitcoins, but it doesn’t happen automatically. And the US government basically beat Tornado cash, right? If you want to be anonymous on the ledger you have some pretty scary enemies I think…
If you think that's a crime you are delusional about the uses of money.
Crypto allow me to create a structure where people can work in an animal health control for rural parts of the Patagonia (which is around 2000000 squared kilometers, five times the size of Germany and has 1/80 its population) and provide this kind of services for free in many cases.
I can now quit/leave/die and anyone can take my place to coordinate it in the same immutable structure.
And the best part? The state can track all the transactions if they really want it. But I'm sure no one is going to work to find out how six veterinarians got 125 USDC in their digital wallets in July 2023.
If it wasn't a crime, why do you have to use cryptocurrency for it?
Or is your definition of "crime" more abstract, not a literal interpretation of the law?
And if you want to know "why you don't simply transfer through a bank?" I encourage you to read the Corralito wiki.
Just before the Corralito ended, there was an asymmetric pesification of bank deposits. This meant that if you had 100k USD in your account on Monday, by Friday it would be converted to 100k ARS at a rate of 4 ARS = 1 USD, effectively leaving you with just 25k USD.
This event left a general feeling of discomfort regarding leaving real money (in terms of store of value) in the bank.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Viedma,+R%C3%ADo+Negro+Provi...
Tax evasion is against the law and therefore is objectively a crime. Whether or not the law is good is a different discussion entirely.
I don't condone tax evasion, but if I can't work because the State wants to go broke before I can even start running my business sorry but no one will do it.
I'm not commenting on whether this particular case of lawbreaking is morally supportable or not. Even if it's 100% morally justified, it's still lawbreaking.
Perhaps it's against the written law, but I think in most countries I am aware of, laws are subject to the judges' interpretation.
"Shitcoin allows easy fraud, destruction of employment, and subversion of laws we dont like at scale, because it's not a fiat currency"
Seriously, if that's your selling point, kill it with fire and bury it in the desert. (shitcoin, not you).
If you associate crypto only with shitcoins maybe your twitter bubble is a bit fucked up.
Corruption (which tax evasion is a facet of) is how you end up with dysfunctional governments. Endemic corruption breeds corruption breeds corruption. Crypto facilitates corruption and crime, which is antagonistic if your goal is a healthy society or good governance.
Paying in ethereum, gift cards, gold, etc doesn’t change if they are employees or reduce how much tax you owe
I'm always fascinated when people come right out and say that the primary use case of crypto is evading laws and taxes.
The strangest part is that using crypto doesn't actually exempt them from the law any more than using a bank account to wire money around. There's just something about crypto that makes some people think it's a safe haven from legal oversight.
That's not a technical feature, that's just tax fraud
The workers are the ones who can't get a job because of the "worker protection laws" you evoke, so you clearly don't understand the problems of Latin America.
This structure only gives them an incentive to travel hundreds of kilometers to a ranch where a bovine died for unknown reasons, for amounts that a western european would spend in a single take-out dinner.
Or maybe it's time to rethink the law...
In technical terms, it costs more for a bank to send an email in between branches than to transfer money in between branches. If, using current tech, some U.S. bank would offer transfers anywhere in the world for $0.20 a transfer, they would still make money, and you would feel much more confident that the money will be available for withdrawal.
Now, I realize that due to various factors, it is not legal to transfer money to all nations, and there are some nations that dont have the infrastructure to reliably get you cash - but those are not advantages of the tech, they are advantages of the lack of laws.
You could build a equivalent, illegal, "bank" with headquarters in, I dunno, Russia? Transfer money worldwide for $5/transfer, and figure out how to avoid the feds. No blockchain, and you have acheived the same.
People usually qualify this with "moral" or "legal" uses -- crypto currencies are absolutely useful for tax evasion and moving money across borders illegally -- it's why many people use them. It's these exact qualities that draw in the 'scammers' and 'get rich guys' as well. So it absolutely has real world uses just ones you don't like. The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? Now you can see how powerful they actually are because they're aren't fragile either and very persistent.
TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action against cryptocurrency blockchains is the "prosecution futures" aspect. The capabilities of the system attract illegal use, and truly staying unidentified requires really tight opsec. This gets even harder if you want to be able to pull some value back into traditional currency anywhere in the process.
It is effectively a distributed honeypot the authorities don't even have to run themselves.
I don't think cryptocurrency has much value, but I think block chain has lots of potential for trading things that have unique ids and are owned by many people. I paid $1500 for research on a title claim and my lawyer came back with "It's looks solid, but I'd get the title insurance just in case". If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.
Car deeds, property deeds, stocks, concert tickets, air line tickets, hotel reservations, all these would benefit from being frictionlessly traded on a block chain. That said, to be useful the entities have to be tangible and the owners don't really benefit (though hotels would benefit from the speculation since it'd even out their cash flow) or the owner is the government.
If you need to trust a central authority to hold up their end of the bargain, for example trusting a Hotel to actually provide the room, then a decentralised system adds absolutely no benefit over the hotel simply digitally signing a ticket themselves.
The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?
Society should probably be a high trust environment and if it isn’t we should work to fix that.
Because the hotel then has to swap the reservation whenever it's traded. Let's say I want to book a hotel in the future for downtown Chicago Cubs making it to the World Series. As the season progresses it's a future whose value goes up and down depending on how they are playing. If the hotel is in the loop they could play shenanigans and charge you a fee every time you reschedule. The idea of the blockchain is that it's out of their hands.
The owner of the room at the time of the booking shows up with the private key, and swaps it for the room key.
If you involve the hotel enshittification will ensue to make sure they grind out every last cent.
Also, being on a blockchain allows for trades such as swapping rooms across chains, trading rooms for cars, etc. The blockchain unifies ownership and rights as tradeable like money did for barter. There is a common unifying method of exchange.
It does. Unused bookings are pure profit for them. It also means that they get the cash now. It means they don't have the uncertainties of unusually low or high demand so it smoothes out their finances.
* To be clear, for this to make any sense, the booking has to be prepaid, or at least a significant portion of it. Maybe just minus a room cleaning fee etc that is due on check-in.
They want to be fully booked, because not only does it avoid the appearance and vibe of being a "ghost town", they also make a lot of money on things like the hotel bar, minibars, laundry services, etc.
If a room stays un-used, the marginal cost to the hotel does not actually decrease much, especially not in the short term.
They still pay the same to their laundry contract, they still pay the same rent, they still pay for the front of house staff and the chefs to be there, and they still pay to heat / AC most of the hotel.
They might save very marginally on some room AC not being on as much, and eventually if the reduced bookings was noticeable might negotiate a smaller laundry contract, reduce head count, but at that point you just look like a failing hotel.
I'm confident if you looked at the accounts, it's more profitable for a guest to turn up than not, even if the guest still paid for the booking.
a) Everything you mentioned here can already be done with just a database. Trading a hotel room, rescheduling, swapping across chains, etc.
b) The hotel has no incentive to allow any of this
Exactly! At some point a real person has to choose to honor your hotel room NFT or not, just as easily as they could choose to honor your driver's license or not. There's no advantage to mucking up the entire system with crypto and blockchain.
True, but then a ton of other things would be much, much more difficult.
Like, what happens if Joe has the deed to a home, but then Joe dies, and nobody has the key to his wallet?
If you have some kind of way, on the blockchain, to solve this problem, and reassign the property without Joe’s private key, then what you have is a situation where human decisions take priority over cryptographic guarantees. You can’t have it both ways—either the human decisions are trusted over the cryptographic guarantees, or vice versa.
This is essentially just a reinvention of centralized real property registration systems, where the current owner of a particular piece of property must be registered either at some government office (in a registration system) or on the blockchain (hypothetically). One of the reasons you want title insurance is because some deed (a piece of paper) may be defective for various reasons, and having a centralized registry (either at a government office, or on a blockchain) makes this problem much less likely. I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.
I have thought about this and it's solveable. Physical goods have to have some sort of "sanctioned violence" to enforce, so there is always a government. They have a public key that is known and publish updates. So if something gets legally confiscated, there is a message published by the government that amends the chain. "The owner of X is now Y".
> I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.
Because it unifies ownership under a central mechanism and you don't need to wait in line at a government office. You have an API and a log. It doesn't really need to be distributed just public I guess, but having the ability to have a private copy for reference would be a benefit.
For example consider title on property. Just putting it on the blockchain would run into trouble when you try to implement squatters rights https://propertyclub.nyc/article/squatters-rights-in-califor..., or the government takes the title back with eminent domain https://ij.org/issues/private-property/eminent-domain/califo..., or you fail to pay taxes https://www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_public_auction.html, or the bank forecloses https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-foreclosu....
Additionally what happens when the keys and person separate? Some scammer gets your key off of your computer and sells the title to themselves? Or someone loses the computer on which they had their title, and now can't sell because they can prove that they are them?
The real world is messy. And for most of the messy cases that the world has to deal with, the blockchain makes things worse. Not better.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what property deeds record or how they are recorded. Property deeds record the real property owned, using geographical features and descriptors. It's irrelevant whether deeds are stored on paper or in a blockchain, because the method of storage doesn't do anything about the features/descriptors changing.
For example, if a river widens, or a tree is cut down, or plots shift because of an earthquake or ground settling, or if someone oversteps the boundaries of a plot...these are all situations covered by property insurance. The point is to make the homeowner whole for those situations where the deed as recorded (however it is recorded) no longer matches reality due to changes in the world.
But, I think those big swings make it a poor instrument for most people to view it as a real way to store value.
You are missing the extremely important point that crypto is saturated by these types exactly and explicitly because of design decisions that are inherent in crypto!
The lack of transaction reversal is an explicit choice and explicitly empowers fraudulent activity over legitimate. What business or individual wants to lock up any value/cash/work they have in a system with zero recourse for fucking up?
Even if it wasn't for elaborate rug-pulls, you could still lose everything to an evil-maid with a $5 key logger. That is just untenable.
like tor escrow markets? monero is a great way for us to obtain things that haven't been legalized yet. cryptocurrency has already found quite the niche for transactions that don't want or need government meddling
-vicuna
to be clear I still think crypto is completely take over by grifters & charlatans & the environmental footprint of proof-of-work is abysmal but still its good to have a decentralized alternative to central bank fractional reserve paper money. its as close to gold as we are ever gonna get now. if it were not so they (not just US but all around world) would not be trying to kill it that hard.
PS: dont own crypto
You can exchange cryptocurrency for goods and services, even the ones governments and banks don't want you to buy.
That's not a helpful comment, and you aren't even correct. the web was around in the 80s, 70s ... no wait the 1960s.
The number of years its been around is irrelevant to its current or future usefulness.
Saying arpanet is the web is like saying Minitel clients are personal computers. Yes, the underlying tech is basically the same, but the design and philosophy is different.
Technology is usually around for a very long time before adoption.
ONLY ONE.
"Do people believe it will retain or increase in value?"
That's IT. This goes for the things you think are scammy, and it also goes for the things that you perhaps expect to retire on.
There is nothing there besides "what people choose to believe."
So there it is, even for crypto. If enough people believe in crypto/the stock market/social security, then it will work and do the thing. If they don't, it won't.
Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, and not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.
Cryptocurrency not only doesn't help much, but even goes backwards there. You think the government is bad? Imagine life in NFT land. Your gym ticket is a NFT. Your movie ticket is a NFT. Your house deed is a NFT.
So everyone you interact with knows where you work, how much you earn, what you own, where's your house, what you buy, what groups you belong to... and they can keep tracking you forever if you tell them who you are just once.
They can treat you preferentially or charge you more or ban you depending on your past history.
Sure, there's Monero, but nobody seems to really care about that one.
> It's a shame that the "get rich quick" grifters and speculators took ahold of it and have killed any chance of normal people adopting it as a regular form of payment.
It's built into the system. The early makers like Satoshi wanted a deflationary system. A deflationary system is inherently undesirable for usage as a currency, and makes it just the thing for HODLing and speculation.
You could have inflation, but who controls it? There are no good answers.
Granted public blockchain is a lot more discoverable, but a lot of this already is public. Property ownership is public (at least in the US), credit cards sell your data, facebook knows which groups you belong to, etc.
Granted you can have an LLC own property, but that's a different obfuscation mechanism.
New doesn't always mean better, and it's often objectively and demonstrably worse than what preceded it.
I have a public map overlay on my phone that gives me deed information for (AFAIK) every parcel I can see in the USA.
Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company, and fully accessible to non-technical users? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.
(I've heard all of the arguments about backup phrases and social recovery wallets and suchlike, and I have yet to see evidence that these will work for anyone other than the most technically sophisticated of users.)
In the blockchain world, there's two options. The first is the "code is law" option. Since you sent him the house, it's his and there's nothing you can do about it. The court might arrest him, but there's no way of ever recovering your house. If he's particularly spiteful, the villain might kill himself. With proper security, his private key is lost forever and that property becomes inaccessibly for eternity.
The other option is the "reasonable" option. Here, you go to court and have his token for your house officially invalidated. Additionally, a new token is minted for the property is minted and sent to your account, making you whole again. However, this only works with a modified blockchain that allows a centralised authority to invalidate and mint new tokens. Since we're already trusting this centralised authority, then we're back to the old laser printer and stamp, just with extra steps.
It's at a point where you could easily read the original comment as blockchain should technology should be pushed by governments to help fight crime.
For the average person crypto-currency have all of the disadvantages of credit/debit- cards, cash and Zimbabwe dollars combined while providing none of the benefits.
There has been hundreds of stories about how blockchain technology has been a boon to investigators trying to track drug, terrorism and illegal porn money flows.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-blockchain-hacking-arre...
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactions.htm...
To be honest, it's not just the grifters that put me off using cryptocurrency as a regular form of payment. It's other considerations such as volatility, the inability to undo payments, etc.
Although it's true that the the fact the cryptocurrency tends to be used, or at least advocated, mostly by certain subcultures (not just criminals) is very off-putting to me as well.
Plus, at least for the sorts of commerce I engage in, cryptocurrency is very inconvenient and doesn't give me any benefits that justify the inconvenience.
It really makes me happy that cryptocurrecy is here to stay despite the constant groaning and moaning. One day, even folks like hn will face the same issues that forced people to rely on it and they will be glad that it exists too :)
Edit: less downvoting, more useful discussion.
Every crypto "currency" was dead the moment they dropped stability for personal/miners gains.
Edit: Imagine a system where nodes would gain progressively less by dicovering new blocks but would prevent a timed decay of their wallets by doing so. A naive inverted incentive structure. Would this be a more long term relyable currency?
There has been hundreds of stories about how blockchain technology has been a boon to investigators trying to track drug, terrorism and illegal porn money flows.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-blockchain-hacking-arre...
Pseudonymous is not anonymous. Pseudonymity is not privacy.
Cryptography is cool for certain kinds of privacy. Cryptocurrency has almost nothing to do with cryptography and does not provide privacy in the ways that counter a surveillance super-state. Pseudonymity makes transactions more traceable because unique identifiers are tied to each wallet and every single transaction with all metadata is recorded in plain view by design of the protocol. Mixers are an attempt to patch the failure of the protocol's design to actually implement any form of privacy, and even then, there are statistical tools that can plausibly tease out who's paying whom. At least enough to justify to the state, in its bureaucratic processes, more conventional forms of investigation. It's not perfect because the failures are systemic, i.e., inherent to the protocols.
I feel like a crazy person. Sometimes I feel like I'm hallucinating the life I'm living, and I'm really locked in a padded room repeating these things to myself day and night but no one will listen.
All of these le sigh type retrospectives seem to completely skip over stuff like this.
I'm pretty sure cryptocurrency isn't the solution.
At least with the government, you (theoretically) have due process. True, the Constitution (or equivalent documents in other countries) is worthless if not enforced and observed, but the private sector has no such guarantees.
Every single "feature" touted as a good thing by crypto boosters is exactly WHY grifters and conmen got into it.
The system doesn't even have a concept of a "fraudulent transaction" FFS. For a system built by people who claim to know so much about cryptography and computer security, they sure seem stumped by the very simple concept of "someone tricked me and I clicked on a link" which is still the number one problem in computer security.
The lack of transaction reversal is a god-send for crooks. The lack of a justice system is a boon for them. There's a reason they don't even have to be creative with their scams, and are just dusting off old play books from the 1920s.
Crypto isn't shitty because of bad luck, crypto is shitty because the people who built it are completely ignorant of the value of regulation because they are caught in their ideology that all regulation is bad.
I thought China loved crypto because you get absolute spy power over how every penny of your citizenry is spent, and can then control someone's access to their coins if they speak out against you. Seems like the opposite of what you're describing, no?
Oh, right, HN no longer does anything about generic soapbox comments that have nothing to do with the article.