I don't understand what you're suggesting would be different if it were regulated.
794 karma · joined March 10, 2017
The gas terminology is confusing, so many people get it wrong. Someone on HN mentioned 'gas' should have been called 'cycles' to make its meaning clearer.
Gas is how much Ethereum network resources (EVM operations, reads/writes to state, etc) a transaction uses. The amount of gas each EVM instruction uses is hardcoded in the protocol. The gas price is how much ETH each unit of gas costs. This is negotiated between miners and users in the market. The higher price you offer, the more likely your transaction will be picked up by a miner.
Ethereum has the critical mass of supporting infrastructure (all the wallets and services that are compatible with ERC20 tokens) and liquidity to be the best choice for token sales.
I didn't say that. I said there was no code added with the intention of making payment channels possible. The claim that there was is based on nothing more than conjecture on what the intended purpose of the script was, and the dating of an undated email from Satoshi that was first made public in late 2013.
>There's was no "original plan" as much as there were discussions.
There were multiple statements by Nakamoto explaining how Bitcoin could and would scale. This was widely understood to be the scaling plan, as evidenced by what the Bitcoin Wiki said about scaling all the way up to late 2014. [1]
It's odd for you to describe your conjecture about the intended use for op codes and data fields as facts, while dismissing clear statements of intent by Nakamoto regarding how Bitcoin would be able to scale.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=53...
And large blocks were very much part of Bitcoin's original plan. They were described even before the initial release of the software:
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099...
>The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality.
That wasn't my characterisation. I disputed your characterization of the Core contributors being the most knowledgeable on these game theory aspects of security based on their contribution to the source code.
Maybe. But maybe in the long run, the regulated industry, as encumbered by regulatory friction as it is (e.g. $10 per trade), is a dinosaur, and will be thoroughly eclipsed by this new unregistered blockchain token market with its nearly frictionless transactions.
These guys don't have the deepest understanding of any of those things. The minutia of the protocol, and the source code that implements it, is extremely important, but knowledge of it does not impart one with any insights into game theory, the political implications of different decentralisation tradeoffs, and adversarial blockchain design as it pertains to political/economic attacks.
Maybe people can fund themselves with token sales on the blockchain. If the government got out of the way with all of its attempts to centrally plan complex industries, I'm confident that capital and talent would do a much more effective job of finding each other, as a result of the incentives and feedback loops built into the market mechanism.
Regulatory friction is the great barrier to economic participation by the poor. It imposes primarily fixed costs, which fall most heavily on the lower/middle class.
I like Weinstein's comments on the growth hypotheses being proven wrong. I suspect it's not correct, especially not in our era where I believe we're on the precipe of an era of much higher economic growth rates, but it's thought-provoking nonetheless.
On the other hand, "hypersocialism" sounds like a meaningless buzzword. It would be nice if he defined it.
While I am least opposed to generic disclosure requirements (as opposed to a requirement of getting the approval of and registering with some specific regulatory authority, as is the case with getting an exemption to the prohibition on offering securities to the public) like you describe, it is still a prohibition on what Mayweather can say.
The law essentially says, "you cannot say X, unless you say Y and Z". It is a prohibition on what he can say under particular conditions. That being said, I haven't fully considered the implications of disclosure requirements, and would hold it as a possibility that it can be justified, on the grounds that "saying X, without saying Y and Z" is indisputably fraud, under all circumstances (those this is a very high bar to clear, and I'm not sure that the prohibition clears it).
The investigative report they released [1] is quite informative, and suggests to me that the vast majority of tokens being traded and sold do not meet the SEC's definition of a security. Mind you, I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
That's not how it works.
By preventing Floyd from saying what he wants to say.
The parent comment gave a prediction of Monero being banned by exchanges. That is the electronic equivalent of banning cash deposits.
>E.g. you can legally sell stuff for a briefcase of cash, but you're required to declare the transaction, including the identity of that person (e.g., in USA, IRS form 8300 for cash amounts exceeding $10000; you can legally sell stuff online for Monero or whatever other consideration, but if it's a significant amount, then you are required to identify the person even if the payment instrument is anonymous.
While unrelated to the topic I was referring to, this is indeed a slippery slope. The minimum amount for reporting to FinCEN started at $10,000 decades ago, and hasn't changed despite inflation reducing the real value of that sum by several fold.
In some countries the minimum amount has even been reduced in nominal terms, despite it already gradually declining in real terms due to inflation. Amidst this gradual criminalisation of ever less substantial anonymous cash transactions, there are a growing number of calls for banning cash altogether. That is a textbook example of a slippery slope.
>ICOs, like any other securities offering, come with risks.
There has been no statement from the SEC that all token sales qualify as securities offerings.
It is imprecise because the Parity multisig bug is an outlier. There are numerous contracts both by 'crack' teams like Parity, and by teams with a less established reputation, that have not been found to have a critical bug in production.
Therefore, the evidence that most contracts have serious bugs is simply absent, and one can't accurately state that the odds of a contract being launched without a serious bug is "remote".
>Moreover, I was cautioning OP to be careful. One valid response to that is what he's already going to do (get an audit). This makes a bug less likely. The next phase would be a Bankor-style pilot+bounty. After that... well we just don't know.
Yes and I agree with your advice.
>Sorry, but unexploited is not unexploitable.
And the possibility that it is exploitable does not mean it is exploitable. I'm not saying that it's out of the question that there are numerous contracts out there with exploits. I'm saying that we can't assign a probability to that being the situation.
I fear regulations for that reason. If political marketers convince voters to elect some puppet for special interests, who imposes regulations mandating I use some inferior product, by prohibiting all other options, I have no way to opt out.
I trust the ability of people to see through marketing lies when it's in the context of an organic market with multiple options, mediated my consumer interest, more than when it's relating to politics and proposed regulations to mandate one solution for the entirety of society.
There is a lot of propaganda out there to make people fear the market, and to believe that its advocates are the bad guys (unsuspecting dupes for corporate interests), and I believe that this is by design, and the originators of these memes are in fact projecting. They represent a powerful elite who stand to extract economic rent when the state eliminates choice from market in the name of consumer protection, and they have created an elaborate ideology to convince the population to support their policies. Don't fall for it.
>Monopoly, information asymmetry (You don't have the same resource as GS to understand the market condition ).
The government can address monopolies without prohibiting consumer choice. It can simply fund a public option. For example, it can provide publicly owned roads, so that people aren't stuck with a private road network. It doesn't need to prohibit private roads.
As for information asymmetry, this is effectively dealt with in the market. See my microprocessor example I brought up earlier.
>Most people would reject slavery, experimentation on human, kidnapping, extortion ... as normal behavior.
These are all qualitatively different than buying food with hormone disrupting chemicals. In fact, the law you're advocating is more like these things, as it reduces personal autonomy by restricting the right to engage in voluntary interactions. It is clear when a legal remedy is appropriate, and when it is not. This can be deciphered by considering the nature of the law:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
>We have already plenty of certification companies that take your money in exchange for a nice logo/label on the packaging. You still need an expert to tells if they do it right.
I think you're underestimating how reputation and communication lead to consumers gaining reliable information in the marketplace. Apple didn't develop a reputation for quality and customer service for nothing. It earned that reputation, and the marker rewarded it for it. Consumer knowledge is often times far more sophisticated than voter knowledge. If consumers are too ignorant to solve this problem, then I have no faith voters will solve it. This comes down to a problem of ignorance, and once that problem is solved, then marketplace solutions can be introduced, whether through cookie-cutter mandates imposed by government that reduce our freedom, or through a diverse array of products/services provided by entrepreneurs that expand our options.
This idea that since you need an expert, it must be done through regulations imposed on everyone, is nonsensical. Experts can work for nongovernmental organizations too, and can have a contractual obligation to serve the public interest, just as government officials do. Moreover, the government can appoint experts to the task, and provide its own certification of what products meet its standards, without making said standards mandatory.
Frankly I find this insistence that only a government appointed body, that imposes standards that no one in society is allowed to opt out of (even if they like BPA in their food), would work, because of an almost religious like faith that market mechanisms, meaning people interacting through voluntary exchanges and contracts, can't work, to be immature.
Assuming no pollution-related concerns affecting non-participants, there is absolutely no moral justification for prohibiting people from buying/selling food containing some hormone disrupting chemical. What society needs is the information with which to make informed decisions. But that decision should be each individual's to make.
>And isn't this an admission that Monero is of no real legal use?
What kind of absurd conclusion is that? There are infinite number of possible non-criminal reasons why one would want to convert one currency to another. In fact, the currency having the property of not leaking private information has no bearing on that.
>Otherwise, why would you care about cashing it out at an exchange? You could spend it on goods and services instead.
This is absolute nonsense. Why do we have USD-YEN exchanges?
This would be a very dangerous precedent for the cause of privacy. It's the financial equivalent of banning encrypted communication.
Regulation is about controlling what other people buy, which I find to be absolutely unjustifiable. If you don't want unsafe food, you should deliberately avoid it. The problem is no government or private company provides any kind of certification on this.
This is a good analysis of how US securities laws relate to tokens: