The claim is that some day innovations, and checks, and some other technologies will fix this and do all of this automatically, somehow.
That's why it's still early days.
That's why it's still early days.
This is more of the same. The base rule in crypto has always been “not your keys, not your coins” and to keep your recovery seed offline and only enter it with the utmost of caution.
The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.
Private keys will be something that a certain amount of the population will eventually be required to understand in my estimation, even if simplified as much as can be. The alternative is more middle ground solutions putting ultimate trust in a separate party managing the keys.
There isn’t much use for most first world citizens in maintaining direct control over their digital wealth, so they are best served by staying away or dollar cost averaging a small percentage of their portfolio into an offline wallet. Those who want to experiment with smart contracts can do so with much smaller amounts.
The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).
> The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.
That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
Rollbacks being impossible doesn’t mean the government cannot legislate.
This is a double edged sword - the benefit and the drawback are inextricably linked. Caveat emptor. Do you want absolute control of your funds? If so, you can memorize 12 words and travel the globe. If not, look to custodial partners, ETFs, or multi-signature wallets.
> That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
What? I assume by “this” you mean people who don’t have quality trustworthy financial institutions?
This is Hacker News. We brainstorm technological solutions to real world problems all the time. This particular problem can only be solved be “society” at large, not technology, because you say so?
You want to disparage those trying as “tech-bro peddlers” - do you simply mean any technology inclined entrepreneur who doesn’t present female? This is an absurd emotional invective.
I’d bring up Monero RingCTs and stealth addresses as an intermediate step and the offramp of direct purchases which that community has been building, as well as tools like Bisq, but I doubt the utility of continuing to reply.
People escaping oppressive regimes don't have time for their society to solve it, they need to leave to a different, less messed-up society. And this is one of the few ways that they can bring a decent fraction of their assets with them in a form that's not very easily stolen from them.
This is because blockchains have no way of enforcing laws, including property rights. Therefore it comes down to this. Imagine that whoever got hold of your car keys, automatically became the owner. This is what "not your keys, not your coins" means.
If people want a system where this as well as excessive inflation are close to impossible, they now have an option, with the clear caveat of that ownership.
It’s not like there aren’t other options to choose - custodial services and multi-signature wallets. Banks are custodial services too, and that’s fine.
Fraud. Transaction rollbacks. Consumer protection laws.
A much smaller fraction should be using open source and audited hardware wallets as well as offline paper wallets.
People will have the option to shoot their foot off with real, direct control, yes. That option or ‘genie’ doesn’t go back in the bottle, not permanently.
The "not your keys, not your coins" is more the fact that someone else holding your stuff happen to them and your stuff goes away. Or they never had it to start with. i.e. Counterparty risk.
`Cash` doesn't inherently have any mechanism for enforcing rights either. The difference is that real-world identities are easier to establish in situations where cash transactions go awry.
Common mistake. The original saying was "Possession is nine points of the law". Over time it's been bastardized to "nine-tenths".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Things are the way they are because of interests, some people are making money on it. "Crypto bros" aren't rediscovering anything and you seem clueless as to what they want and are repeating old ass tropes you probably learned from others.
I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S, you probably don't, being of short memory and not learning from others. But, guess what, we are using k8s and crypto and you are stuck and soon will be making apologies for your lack of sense and will be tired of repeating others' lies here.
Sorry but not sorry.
Yes, most don't discover anything, they just run scams. The tiny percentage who doesn't are busy re-discovering and te-inventing all the institutions and processes the world has.
> I remember only a year or 2 ago when HN was very much against K8S
Ah yes. Yet another comparison pulled out of thin air.
In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days.
It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.
It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system.
And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.
Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.
Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.
This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities.
That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.
Try counting the number of times people mention phrases like “combinatorial explosion” or other limitations like the single/multi-layer perceptron argument, which are the kinds of problems we’re talking about where the issue was feasibility on the hardware available, or things like “expert systems” which were dead ends unrelated to neural networks.
Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems. Different technology and implementations having different results isn’t exactly disproving criticism.
> Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems.
Practical ZKP and accessible circuit programming is definitely relevant to blockchains; it is one example of technological advancement in crypto that has led to significant advancements. If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.
Hint: neural network and AI are not synonyms. You were corrected after conflating the two.
> If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.
This post is about Bitcoin so it’s unsurprisingly discussing that, especially since that’s where most of the usage is. Neither of the things you mentioned solve the underlying architectural problems inherent to blockchains, although the ZK stuff does help with privacy somewhat, but again I would remind you that the comparison to the early internet still runs afoul of lack of demand for blockchains. People didn’t need a FOMO sales pitch to see that going online was useful; for a payment system to become popular it needs to offer an advantage on price, performance, or security – the ceiling for how much most people will pay for a cryptocurrency is whatever it costs to use Venmo or Square so the focus needs to be on outcompeting the status quo and setting realistic expectations for how much shaving a point or two off of a transaction price will really change the world.
TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch".
Even given this modest start, fifteen years later, in 2008, nearly 75% of adults used the internet according to a Pew research study (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-in...). In 2008, we already saw the emergence of the e-commerce market, with upstart Amazon already commanding a 1% share of the entire retail market (to put in perspective, that grew to ~6% by 2019, according to Census and Morgan Stanley data: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-r...). Heck, by 2008, you could watch a movie instantaneously on your TV without renting or buying the DVD! (https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netfli...)
So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.