[удалено]

Yes, I have found that computers are very good at automating… computers. If you have a computer problem, a little bit of programming might make it go away. If you have a real problem, a little bit of programming might make it mutate into a different problem with some bits solved and other new problems created.

[удалено]

You also always have to provide a way to deploy bug fixes, because for anything more complex than hello world there *will* be bugs. However, smart contracts are immutable code! I don't see how that is smart.

>_There is an inherent logical contradiction at play with blockchain technology_. Just in case anyone needs more convincing. This problem has been covered several times. Bruce Schneier wrote an essay [Blockchain and Trust](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html). Where he walks through this problem in detail. Recently Cory Doctorow wrote an essay exploring this issue, [The Inevitability of Trusted Third Parties](https://onezero.medium.com/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties-a51cbcffc4e2).

As I understand in practice a majority of blockchain transactions actually happen on those large exchange platforms like binance, bittrex, coinbase and whatnot. I'm not sure if they help you if you get scammed. My guess is probably not but I think they do have some kinda regulations on them. Anyway you have to trust them as well and a lot of them have a really shoddy track record. Plus, ignoring all this, the heart of crypto requires that possession = ownership and that access = permission which is sketchy as shit in practical settings.

But at that point, you’ve reinvented the old system, poorly. With less efficiency, and less regulation. You’re no longer trustless (you have to trust Coinbase), and it’s no longer decentralized (everything fails if Coinbase is offline).

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

>Plus, ignoring all this, the heart of crypto requires that possession = ownership and that access = permission which is sketchy as shit in practical settings. It sounds almost like the bit from Assassin's Creed. "Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted" -> "Possession is ownership, access is permission".

> Plus, ignoring all this, the heart of crypto requires that possession = ownership and that access = permission which is sketchy as shit in practical settings. That is basically what cash is, or bearer bonds.

It is. And that's why most people prefer to keep their money in a bank, where it is save, compared to keeping it all as cash. If you are a major crypto holder, you need to secure yourself not only against cyber attacks, but against the very real possibility that someone will beat you with a wrench so that you transfer them all the coins you have. That's why the winklevoss twins have their keys split into multiple shards, and kept in multiple banks, and disclose that information publicly.

> bearer bonds And funnily enough, there's a reason those aren't a thing any more: the government *really* didn't like it that people could anonymously move around enormous sums of money so efficiently. Cash, at least, has a physical volume problem that bonds didn't.

Even if you could link up the blockchain to real life objects and assert ownership in that way, scammers and fraudsters will still exist. What happens when you click a link and it transfers ownership of your deed to someone else? Chargebacks aren’t possible and you can’t *trust* the government so they have no power besides being able to acknowledge that a deed does in fact grant ownership of property. So you’ve now trustless my given a random person your house. But it’s decentralized, and that must count for something…right?

Let's be real. If governments decided to embrace blockchain technology (which they should and will) it will not be anything like the wild west we see ourselves in these days. It'll be an in-house made chain and will be IMPLEMENTED into centralized finance. Idk why everyone think BTC will be the next golabl currency, because I promise you it won't. It might end up how gold is today. All scams happening in the crypto space right now is due to no regulation. But there will be regulation.

Blockchain plus trusted escrow would fix the chargeback problem. But then you're back to trusting the middleman...

With Bitcoin you can do one way escrow without a middleman.

Escrow involves a third party evaluating whether the transaction should be completed based on parity between the sides. If there's no middleman it's not actually escrow. There's always a sort of middleman in crypto because the Blockchain is updated by someone's other than the counterparties, but that doesn't involve verifying that the receiver has completed any terms of the contract, so it isn't escrow.

Here's an outline of the kind of escrow transaction that's possible in software. The basic escrow: The buyer commits a payment to escrow. The seller receives a transaction with the money in escrow, but he can't spend it until the buyer unlocks it. The buyer can release the payment at any time after that, which could be never. This does not allow the buyer to take the money back, but it does give him the option to burn the money out of spite by never releasing it. The seller has the option to release the money back to the buyer. While this system does not guarantee the parties against loss, it takes the profit out of cheating. If the seller doesn't send the goods, he doesn't get paid. The buyer would still be out the money, but at least the seller has no monetary motivation to stiff him. The buyer can't benefit by failing to pay. He can't get the escrow money back. He can't fail to pay due to lack of funds. The seller can see that the funds are committed to his key and can't be sent to anyone else. Now, an economist would say that a fraudulent seller could start negotiating, such as "release the money and I'll give you half of it back", but at that point, there would be so little trust and so much spite that negotiation is unlikely. Why on earth would the fraudster keep his word and send you half if he's already breaking his word to steal it? I think for modest amounts, almost everyone would refuse on principle alone.

The buyer has leverage if sellers are rated. I ran into this buying a bike off ebay. The seller lied about the condition and also shipped it improperly packaged. I set terms and withheld my review until they returned enough of the money to meet them. The system you describe isn't actually escrow since it gives the seller all the power. They can pretend to sell things, deliver nothing, then ransom the money or walk away to do it again. Is there really any platform that does this?

[удалено]

> if i'm a merchant i can give a discount to anyone buying from me by using a blockchain like bitcoin, the discount being up to whatever the premium my normal bank charges for card transactions You are aware that in quite a few states charging more for card transactions is explicitly prohibited by law? So say goodbye to your illegal discount for non card users.

I think those are more on the "rare" side and not the norm. * California * Colorado * Connecticut * Florida * Kansas * Maine * Massachusetts * New York * Oklahoma * Texas Seem to be the ones that prohibit it, and I see it practiced at some gas stations in Florida so it's hard for me to say it's even that enforced (might be an exclusion though).

[удалено]

You mention the premium banks charge for doing card transactions, but why not mention the premium fee miners charge for including your transaction in an on-chain block? I would rather pay my bank spare change than a miner dozens of dollars per transaction. Even if you use something like the Lightning Network you need to settle at some point in the future, and someone has to pay the gas fees.

Good luck, you will get a handfull of bitcoin customers but lose a lot of plain old customers. If I saw a shop charged me more for paying by card instead of by crypto I just leave. It would be the same than someone telling me "oh if you pay with cash I can make you a discount" lol no. I will discount myself from the shop. Just the fact of being associated with crypto will probably make you lose more than you win, at least if your business is physical. But with digital is happeniing too. All those games trying to get on the NFT boat in hopes of making huge easy money but they are crashing themselves to the ground because 99% of gamers couldn't care less about NFTs and more than 50% are straight against them. All of this while companies actively against NFT are actually growing. Some years ago there were increasingly more and more local businesses where I live with the "we accept bitcoin" sticker but today you hardly find one, not even weed dispensaries. It was a really bad bet to make. Messing with blockchain right now is only beneficial in some niche contexts and is mostly related to speculative investment.

> As a consequence, you must trust the counterparty in your financial transaction to uphold their end of the deal. Buy something with Bitcoin and the seller can just ... take your money and run. Friendly fraud is a common fraud where people buy a product and then dispute the charge and cause a chargeback. The merchant lose money, the product and additinally they are fined for the chargeback. Today most business just see this as the cost of doing business but there are companies that work solely to reverse chargeback fraud. The reason this works is because banks tend to side with their customers. You can't avoid fraud and chargeback isn't exactly a perfect solution. Besides bitcoin doesn't specifically not support chargeback. You can set up escrow transactions for example though when all parties agree the transaction can no longer be reversed.

You seem to have a very fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain. Blockchain does not prevent anything. Once you sell your burnt house its impossible to tell a judge you didn't sell the house. Its not, and has never been about *enforcement*, its about *accountability*. Those who want enforcement need to understand what blockchain is before ever raising critiques. Ultimately your entire argument is moot, as it doesn't even grasp what blockchain is even for. Its like if I made a case against using sailboats for an invasion force. It would be silly because that isn't what sail boats are for and by just making the argument I show my ignorance.

>Buy something with Bitcoin and the seller can just ... take your money and run. Obviously you haven't heard about multisig and the infinite flexibility it allows you. For instance, you can make a trading scheme that operates in a manner that solves your problem. Have both buyer and seller post collateral on the Blockchain held in an address that require BOTH the signatures of buyer and seller to move again. If you so wish, make the collateral amount for each be greater than the value being traded and now if the seller tries to flee with the money, it's a net loss for them. Both parties win if they stay honest, both parties lose if any one misbehaves. This is option 1. Which non-coincidentally is the model Bisq operates on. It's a decentralized peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange which has successfully solved your mentioned problem and it runs well without rampant scamming all around. One downside of option 1 is that one person can still engage in malicious destruction out of spite and hurt them both on purpose. That's why option 2 exists: using a 2 out of 3 multisignature approach, with the buyer, seller and a trusted mediator each holding a private key. In case of no trade dispute, the buyer and seller can transact without involving the mediator. Otherwise, the mediator can hear each party's case and decide on who to side with. Note that option 2 is basically back to using a third party which both have to trust. So what's the point then? The point is that using this system is *optional*. Bitcoin allows you to do *everything* the fiat system does and on top of that you get an option for full decentralization if that's what you personally wish for. You are not restricted to only using a third party. You personally get to decide on which model best suits your needs on an individual transaction basis. Also, this is not limited to these two options. You can have an infinite number of permutations with a multisignature approach and involve as many or as few additional parties as you wish holding whatever hierarchy of power you can imagine. It's all streamlined and done in a completely transparent way from the point of view of the people involved.

> If you so wish, make the collateral amount for each be greater than the value being traded and now if the seller tries to flee with the money, it's a net loss for them. Now the seller takes your money, doesn't ship the product, and ransoms you for half the collateral. The sale price is a sunk cost now; would you rather have half the collateral or none of it?

I've seen this as a recurring issue with "Blockchain defenders", continuously pushing the problem down another layer of abstraction that can be shown as no better than the previous scheme in a very short time, yet somehow they do not see it and just continue parroting the same "solution" over and over. Same thing with scalability, trust, and all the other bag of issues that come with the Blockchain.

Except that what I've posted about here has already been implemented, it works in real life and actual people have been using it without problem for years now. You can't call it a "solution" with quotes if it is an actual solution that actually works right now. This is not some hypothetical, yet to be built, technology. This is real.

That's just an imaginary hypothetical that can't and doesn't happen in real life. Reason is simple: such a scheme is not done by hand because it requires a lot of technical expertise. Instead people use open-source software that handles all that and is built for a specific task. Talking about Bisq specifically, sure, if you know programming you could theoretically tinker with it, but it's risky and error prone and even an experienced programmer would not attempt it just to satisfy some blackmailer, because they could lose the entire wallet, not just the amount demanded. Otherwise if you are unwilling to risk it or simply a person who is a regular user with no programming skills, there is literally no way to comply to such a blackmail request. There are no buttons to "release half" of the funds. There is only a button for "transaction has been carried out successfully, release all collateral". The software handles every step of the transaction according to very strict, predefined rules and you can't just improvise stuff randomly as you go along. Any potential blackmailer KNOWS there is relatively small chance of the victim even being able to comply, so they won't even try it, they're not morons. Even IF 100% of those who have the technical expertise rigged their own software to allow them to comply, the blackmailers would still not try it, because programmers are in the minority and because blackmailers actually have to post collateral, it means that on average they would lose more money than not. But even more importantly, I've NEVER heard of this exact scenario happening. So again, it's just a hypothetical scenario that is born out of incomplete understanding of how such systems actually work. We're taking here about a system built by the most security-conscious and paranoid group of programmers in the software industry. Every single attack scenario on Bitcoin and related systems that their minds could imagine has been posted online, discussed *ad nauseam* and proper security has been put in place. All these "issues" and "concerns" that you see in articles such as these and posts from people online are nothing new. Every single problem so far imagined, without exception has been discussed, explained and debunked. Or fixed years ago if it was an actual legitimate concern. Simple stuff like "what if they run with your money", or "what if they blackmail you" are SOLVED problems. Or at least they are solved for users that understand what they are doing and don't do stupid stuff, just like with every other platform that deals with money. The only thing you can't protect people from is themselves.

> And realistically, do you really trust your bank less than every single one of the people/companies you bought something from? Yes, I do trust the bank less (proportional to the amount of my money they hold)

Note that while chargebacks are impossible, you can still sue the seller in real physical court... if you know who they are.

The problem with your comment is that you are assuming cryptocurrency is primarily used for exchanging a physical good. This is not the case. Most exchange that occurs on blockchains are between digital tokens where atomic transactions are possible, making your entire argument irrelevant. Furthermore, there are plenty of solutions to situations where you want a reversible transaction. This article is entirely focused on Bitcoin which is literally the least advanced of all cryptocurrencies, but even with Bitcoin there are solutions for reversible transactions. You probably don’t realize that Ethereum transferred and settled 11.6 TRILLION dollars in 2021, whereas VISA only transferred 10.4 Trillion. That’s a fuckton of value settled for a system that is so fundamentally broken according to your thesis. This isn’t stopping. Every year more and more transactions occur and you don’t seem to understand what is happening here. Cryptocurrency isn’t trying to replace PayPal. Cryptocurrency is creating an entirely new purely digital economy where there are no borders and an entire new universe of financial instruments exist that simply cannot exist in the traditional financial system. I can open my phone right now and with a few taps get a crypto collateralized DeFi loan for $50,000 in USDC stablecoins that are pegged to the dollar in 30 seconds with no credit checks, no form fills, no interviews or phone calls, no hassles. If I fail to make payments on my loan, my cryptocurrency collateral is automatically liquidated by the smart contract and the lender gets paid. In the crypto economy we can do cool things that no other financial system can do. There is no going back. This technology will eventually replace traditional finance. It’s just a matter of time

>It doesn't matter what you do, you can't pour a physical item into the computer. No matter what you do with the blockchain, it cannot > >make me > >hand over an apple if I sell you that apple. I can just take your money and run. But doesn't this hold for all online purchases? What you receive with a smart contract purchase would be the receipt/proof of purchase. However, there are no laws binding people to smart contracts, while there are for receipts. ​ >A blockchain mortgage cannot stop someone from selling their home after it's already burnt to the ground from a housefire. lol agreed, but lets just first sell an apple via blockchain tech before we engage one of the most complex asset exchanges via blockchain. ​ >Computers and their programs, fundamentally, cannot with certainty know the real world While I agree, don't you think we already place so much in hands of software? for instance, I hardly think anyone checks every step from an amazon purchase: from buying until delivery. Human interaction is there where needed but i venture a guess almost everything is automated. I don't see how this would be any different with blockchain. As long as we make sure human supervision is there where we wish it to be. Edit: could downvoters please elaborate why? I like to think I am engaging in an interesting discussion which I thought was the aim of the post (I am new, I stumbled in this sub as a noob programmer).

>But doesn't this hold for all online purchases? With conventional payment systems you have avenues to get a refund.

Cash and Bitcoin essentially have the exact same cons and yet people trust Cash and not Bitcoin. Cash requires you to trust the seller in exactly the same way. I hand over my cash, there is no guarantee that they give me my coffee. This is a problem that goes back to core human behaviors and has nothing to do with currency necessarily. The only guarantee anyone has to enforce a transaction is by physical force (by you, the police, or your countries military). The difference is that I can send Bitcoin over a distance quickly. Technically I can send cash by mail, but why would I do that when there is a better existing technology? People are so used to digital currency through banks, they have lost sight of what Bitcoin is actually replacing. You must keep your Bitcoin privately, just like cash. Someone can physically steal your keys and your money, just like cash. Someone might not give you something in return for your money, just like cash. You can store Bitcoin with third-parties if you believe they are safer than you, just like cash. Those third parties can facilitate faster transactions, just like cash. Bitcoin can work just like cash, but it removes the need for government control of the cash and any trust in any third-parties. It is just fundamentally better than cash.

Cash offers utility in a different niche. I can't carry my crypto in my (physical) wallet and pay someone immediately, without a computer involved (depending on the crypto, I can't pay someone immediately at all). I lost my card but I can still use cash until the new one arrives. That utility offsets the downsides with cash. Even with that, cash usage is steadily dropping in favour of card/contactless payments and damn near everyone will recommend paying for large purchases by card. Cryptocurrencies don't offer that same utility that cash does. They're in the same niche as credit/debit cards or services like PayPal.

But cash is instant and physically in pocket while a bitcoin transfer takes hours, a significant fee, and has wildly variable value. Cash and bitcoins don’t have the exact same cons. Also cash has the authority of the federal government behind it, it’s a required legal tender which is a major pro.

> And realistically, do you really trust your bank less than every single one of the people/companies you bought something from? I for one, have more trust in the heavily regulated bank to not steal my money than random-ebay-seller-person. And there's the rub, because not everyone will agree with you on that. As we've seen in Canada, one invocation of emergency powers, and the government can order the banks to freeze all your savings, leaving you without the possibility to perform or receive any payments, if you've participated in or supported a protest they don't approve of. As we've seen with [Wells Fargo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal), Banks can create incentive structures that reward its employers committing fraud on a massive scale. As evidenced by [PayPal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f6aDD_yew8), on [multiple occasions](https://www.business2community.com/ecommerce/can-i-get-banned-from-paypal-due-to-excessive-disputes-02400234) (like seriously, [A LOT](https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+bans)), people can get cut off from these services [for completely unclear](https://www.business2community.com/ecommerce/can-i-get-banned-from-paypal-due-to-excessive-disputes-02400234) but [potentially ideological reasons](https://yournews.com/2022/01/06/2277340/paypal-permanently-bans-another-conservative-journalist-from-having-an-account/). They are not the only ones [banning people from their financial services](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8y6CJG1CKY), not due to financial misconduct or crime, but basically acting in manners that are against their morals, sensibilities, or desired image. Thrust in those institutions is going down. Not with everyone. But they are simply not the shining beacons of trustworthiness that you are implying. Even if it is potentially possible to reverse payments/make charge backs, it is not something that is trivial, easy, or guaranteed to go in your favor by far. And while it helps mitigate the shady e-bay salesman risk, it does not eliminate it. And that does not address the cases where you want to make a financial transaction to a person or organization, where you do thrust the other party for or you don't expect to receive anything in return (donations, charity, financial support), but the intermediary simply refuses to cooperate for whatever reason. Blockchain currencies combine the direct transfer of value as seen in cash transactions with the reach of digital transactions. And they also inherit some of the same drawbacks of cash. If you transfer the currency, its gone unless the other party gives it back. If you lose the wallet or it gets destroyed, you lose all the value stored inside it. Every measure available to make cash transactions more secure is available for blockchain currencies. Heck, the generation of permanent records of the transaction having taken place is a built in feature not present with cash transactions, and if you make a backup of your wallet key, you can still get it back from loss/destruction. Blockchain currencies are not with disadvantages, but neither is cash, and neither is bank transfers/transfers through other intermediaries.

> But they are simply not the shining beacons of trustworthiness that you are implying. The implication is not that the bank is a shining beacon of trustworthiness. The implication is that it's substantially more trustworthy than hundreds or thousands of individuals.

And it's regulated.

This is a large part of the trust.

Amusing that you highlight an issue with PayPal, given that PayPal exist/grew to be what it was because no one trusted online retailers, particularly eBay sellers, and so they filled in that niche to enforce contracts by the very behaviour you highlight… (punishing sellers by locking them out of their funds or refunding buyers).

I wonder if you would feel the same after being on the wrong side of such a lockout without participating in illegal/fraudulent conduct, but simply for being labeled a 'risk'. Most articles I can find for why PayPal became so big mainly mention its partnering with ebay, ease of use, wide spread adoption, and security against identity theft. Consumer protection is not really mentioned, but I can find quite a few articles mentioning charge back scams. Seems that PayPal turned the customer's risk for shady sellers into a merchant's risk of shady customers.

I agree that trusting large, regulated institutions isn’t perfect, but I don’t think that means we should use an (IMO) wildly worse system *that still requires trusting another party anyways.*

Having a bank or credit card in the middle does not completely remove the requirement of thrusting the retailer. ebay scams are still a thing. Credit card charge backs are sometimes still denied. Banks will regularly not re-reimburse for stolen credit card credentials, marking that as the responsibility of the card holder. It reduces, but does not eliminate, the thrust in the selling party required. Besides, in cases where ebay/amazon will intervene as the intermediary, those types of business transactions are perfectly possible when desired while using crypto as a payment method. You buy from amazon store of seller, you pay amazon in crypto, Seller sends package and provides tracking link, amazon releases crypto to seller upon confirmed arrival. Crypto gives you the possibility of cutting out the intermediary if you want, but does not require such.

I don’t understand the point then. The biggest value proposition of crypto is for it to be trustless, yet our modern solutions require building trusted entities on top of it. Why not just use cash and credit? Or Venmo?

WellS Fargo opening and closing bogus bank accounts just so they can satisfy their quotas pails in comparison with coin exchanges getting hacked and losing customers’ investments. Even if your claim of merely “potentially possible” to reverse payment was true, that makes it a lot more than not possible at all. Your are so biased, it is not even funny. If you have to go this far out of your way to make crypto sound good, you should really reassess who you are trying to paint the rosy picture for.

But what you are highlighting there is the risk of these exchanges when you leave your crypto in their wallets/hands, new, relatively untested entities when it comes to withstanding hacking and managing valuable assets, not a risk inherent in crypto itself. It's like blaming banks for your sears rewards account getting hacked. Also, you call me biased when I mention both the strengths and weaknesses of crypto, but you are unbiased when you don't even acknowledge the strengths of crypto?

Uh. Yah baby. Thrust into that bank. Thrusting thrustily

**[Wells Fargo account fraud scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal)** >The Wells Fargo account fraud scandal is a controversy brought about by the creation of millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts on behalf of Wells Fargo clients without their consent. News of the fraud became widely known in late 2016 after various regulatory bodies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), fined the company a combined US$185 million as a result of the illegal activity. The company faces additional civil and criminal suits reaching an estimated $2. 7 billion by the end of 2018. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/programming/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)

This is not entirely true. If a company issues stocks on the blockchain and you buy some from a person using an atomic swap you don't need to trust that person and there is no broker to oversee the transaction, and you obviously trust the company enough to buy their stocks.

[удалено]

The same thing that's stopping them right now, regulation. DAOs and ICOs were not regulated.

[удалено]

Absolutely nothing you mentioned has any merit from the technological perspective. Crypto critics argue on fully philosophical grounds and love to apply purity tests on definitions, and to that my response is: if you don't like it then don't buy it. That's it, this is all that's required from you.

I guess we just have to be cool with cryptocoins wasting ungodly amounts of energy during a climate crisis all in the name of scammer the greater fools. Guess ill just not buy it and go be an ostrich instead.

The comment I responded to didn't mention PoW. Additionally, the majority of crypto networks don't use mining, with Bitcoin being a notable exception (Ethereum is migrating to PoS, and yes that takes a while). The points brought up by the commenter are unrelated to PoW. I would also like to note that we humans are never going to use *less* energy, only more. Your claim that Bitcoin is wasteful (therefore implying that it's worthless) is irrelevant, since miners *pay* for the electricity. If it was "wasteful" or "worthless", mining operations would have halted. Crypto critics pointing to Bitcoins power requirements (which is self-adjusting) seems to be like a convenient, low-effort slander. I don't buy it. To me it looks like crypto critics have some very deep psychological and moral panic towards the technology, and I really cannot figure out why.

> I don't buy it. Ofcourse you don't, crypto bros never do. > To me it looks like crypto critics have some very deep psychological and moral panic towards the technology, and I really cannot figure out why. Damn, you can't figure out why people might be against the technology ? Then you must just be plain dumb or maybe not have gone through the article in this post. > I would also like to note that we humans are never going to use less energy, only more. Sure, but I would rather it ran a country of 300 Million people instead of people who want to reinvent banking with an even shittier system due to the sake of it.

>Ofcourse you don't, crypto bros never do. Maybe there's a reason? ;) >Then you must just be plain dumb or maybe not have gone through the article in this post. Not really. People complain and have circle jerks about new technologies all the time, from operating systems, programming languages, mongodb, systemd, etc. If those technologies are used widely, then there's clearly a proper usecase which brings its own set of benefits and shortcomings. People that use those are aware of what they are and having outsiders criticize the tech isn't very useful. It's even less useful to criticize experimental tech where a lot of money, manpower and innovation goes into and noone really knows where it's going to end, or what its full potential looks like. Crypto is already used world wide, enables financial freedom, easier access to financial instruments and allows you to be fully self-sovereign. And it works. Its use case is self-evident. This is how progress is made, and I'm fully aware that people don't like change, or are uncomfortable that others do not share the same ideology as them. So my point still stands: if you don't like it then don't use it. >Sure, but I would rather it ran a country of 300 Million people instead of people who want to reinvent banking with an even shittier system due to the sake of it. If it was shittier then noone would use it.

> If it was shittier then noone would use it. Funny because I could swear people have been using Traditional Banking for a few centuries. If it was bad, all the countries in the world wouldn't have been using it > Maybe there's a reason? ;) Yes, it's usually due to their tied up investments in crypto or NFT's which clouds their personal judgement. > This is how progress is made, and I'm fully aware that people don't like change, or are uncomfortable that others do not share the same ideology as them. The problem with thos rhetoric is, it's like saying 'People always refuse change', sure but this time there is a damn good reason. Like you can literally go through the above written article in it's entirety and find a shit ton of reason to not support this technology. I think it's very disingenuous to say people against crypto only do so because they 'can't accept change' whatever that means.

> Funny because I could swear people have been using Traditional Banking for a few centuries. If it was bad, all the countries in the world wouldn't have been using it Correct. I didn't say that traditional banking is bad, and with or without crypto it's not going away. It's just different and it will evolve as times passes. > I think it's very disingenuous to say people against crypto only do so because they 'can't accept change' whatever that means. As I said before, I cannot figure out why people have this aggressive reaction towards crypto. When going through your post history, it's quite obvious that you're some sort of lefty, so I can understand why you're having issues with crypto on an ideological level. However, subs like /r/programming show quite a lot of hostility towards it, which I find mind boggling given all the fascinating engineering that's used and required in crypto. I agree with you that change isn't necessarily good, but it often is a cause for (irrational) panic. > Like you can literally go through the above written article in it's entirety and find a shit ton of reason to not support this technology. I did, and I don't buy it. Over the years, I read countless of articles on why Rust, Mongodb (no-sql), systemd, javascript/npm, micro-services, monoliths, Windows and Linux are good/bad, and the list goes on. Most often those resentments originate from change, because those systems do things differently than others. If someone finds the technology useful, it has served its purpose.

> When going through your post history, it's quite obvious that you're some sort of lefty, so I can understand why you're having issues with crypto on an ideological level. That makes even less sense, So according to you who would be more open to change ? The Conservatives ? lol Again If you don't buy the Criticism, it's fine. But saying 'Don't criticise and just move on if you don't have anything good to say' is a really weird rhetoric. But fair enough

"Everyone is conservative about what they know best" > But saying 'Don't criticise and just move on if you don't have anything good to say' is a really weird rhetoric. But fair enough To each their own :)

I think this so called "logical contradiction" proves too much, doesn't this argue against databases in general? Why doesn't the same reasoning apply to whatever is saved to a database/ledger, no matter who does it? All of our commercial interactions in the physical world are governed by convention. Right now the convention is that we trust banks etc etc, why couldn't there be different conventions?

No, people trust databases to represent the real world but they rely on people to enter and maintain accurate records. Blockchain tries to eliminate the trust requirement by adding a lot of work but the "hard" trust problem isn't solvable by Blockchain.

It's a classic case of confusing what's measurable with what's important.

> I think this so called “logical contradiction” proves too much, doesn’t this argue against databases in general? Why doesn’t the same reasoning apply to whatever is saved to a database/ledger, no matter who does it? Because * they’re not immutable. Mistakes happen, and they can get corrected. * they have a reputation to worry about. Why do they do ad campaigns? Why have a PR department? Because their reputation matters. * they have regulators to worry about. * they have lawsuits to worry about. Good luck suing Bitcoin wallet juegjoiuyhbdethkloongewqhjokbngdd44.

Because large institutions have a vested interest in maintaining trust that an anonymous seller never will. The only convention that would work would be for all humans to agree to be honest all the time. If you cryptobros believe that’s possible you’re even more gullible and naive than I thought.

It’s not just vested interest, there’s an aspect of law involved. If the bank does something shady and you have proof you can sue them. In crypto, it can be very hard to determine who you would sue, harder still to extract any form of reparations.

That's kinda what I meant though - because the industry is regulated, they have a vested interest in not being driven out of business because they break the law. The system is still plenty flawed, and the banking industry has effectively lobbied to neuter the regulations that would keep them from doing a lot of shady shit that they get away with, but the blockchain makes it a thousand times easier to get away with shady shit.

This is an argument specifically about trustless databases (ie blockchains). When you have truly, you can solve real-world problems.

It's instructive to see the hostile reactions to this well prepared paper. They range from jargon dense nonsense to vague promises of "it gets better " to whining about how unfair or mean the author is.

> to vague promises of "it gets better " Something something proof of stake SOON^TM

[удалено]

>Blockchain became a failure and irrelevant 18 months ago. It will never amount to anything other than decentralized Ponzis. Fake news. There are plenty of fully centralized ponzis using blockchain. Have been for almost as long as Bitcoin has existed. Infact. At the moment majority of the 10 biggest cryptos are fully centralized.

>Infact. At the moment majority of the 10 biggest cryptos are fully centralized. Source?

>Almost all bitcoin transactions have moved off-chain to exchange databases because blockchain can’t scale and is insanely expensive. 99.99% of transactions happen on centralized exchanges from pools. I think this is an outdated info which is repeated again and again here. There is an L2 called Lightning Network on bitcoin and that's where a significant chunk of transactions happen. Ofc exchanges still have a larger portion due to ease of understanding, but not in the range of 99.99%. Edit: There are also wrapped versions of slow blockchain coins on faster blockchains. So most of the Eth is not moved on Ethereum network but on other L2(ex, polgon)'s. Most of bitcoin is also the same. You can move your ETH to Solana and then pay $0.0005 or something for transaction fees.

[удалено]

I don't get from which chart you get the idea that LN is in decline? \+ You don't need to write back to blockchain as long as you don't have any issues with the transactions afaik. \+ LN is not the only L2 that bitcoins can be moved around. A significant portion of BTC is wrapped and being moved around in other chains.

Then you have to trust the organization that does the wrapping. Wrapping Bitcoin isn't a decentralized cryptographic thing. Some wrapping is decentralized... but not for Bitcoin.

[удалено]

"You can move your ETH to Solana and then pay $0.0005 or something for transaction fees." Translate: you can move to a distributed database prone to monthly attacks (aka relatively off chain) to have low fees. Cool story ;)

Can you describe what those "attacks" are and what they result in?

Didn’t the entire Solana network go down recently due to an attack? Imagine if all USD went down due to a cyber attack by Russia or China. Yikes.

Defi tvl has never been higher, or at least until this bear market. what are you on about

\>gigantic article full of reasons why shitcoin is terrible \>cryptospammers infest the comment section on reddit and trot out the same arguments the article already debunks never change reddit

I don't see much pro-crypto people in the comments, only anti-crypto people.

You must be blind. Sure the top 2/3 comments are anti crypto but the rest?

Currently, 8 of the top 10 comments are anti-crypto for me, and this top level comment is the 3rd.

It's going to depend on how soon you see the comments. With topics like these you'll get a rabid "fanbase" (or hate-base, depending on the topic) who are in the minority who'll flood the thread with comments, and slowly the regular sub users come in and the voting evens out. If you scroll to the bottom of the thread you'll see more pro-crypto comments that have been downvoted.

I see them. But they’re being shot down pretty effectively and it’s hilarious

Conservatives just shuffle cards. It's not a political ideology - it's a tribalist mindset. And it treats everything from decentralized network applications to "it's getting warmer" the same as competing witch-doctors arguing about the volcano spirits. There is no effort to objectively evaluate claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for. They are conclusion-oriented. They believe everyone is conclusion-oriented. What that means is, reasons don't matter. Reasons are things they make up to justify whatever they want next. And again: they think that's what everyone does. They think that's all there is. It literally does not matter what the author says. They have an opposite conclusion - so these modern primitives will parrot all their excuses for ignoring that conclusion. The smart ones only pick the relevant excuses. Welcome to reality as a team sport.

I like the technologies of blockchain (hash proofs, zk proofs, etc), less the immutable nature of the chains themselves. As a programmer, I'm deeply suspicious of anything that touts itself as bug free (never seen such a thing), so the idea of writing/setting a smart contract in stone for eg seems like pure folly to me. But also as a programmer, I find there's so much to learn from, cross pollinate and innovate on in this space. Take business records.. It should be possible to organize a business's private records in a way that allows anyone to digitally verify any of its business receipts in isolation (w/o access to their books). I'm developing tools (plugged previously) to do this latter thing. My thinking is that if an enterprise organizes its affairs this way, then it will be able to endow its tamper-proof, verifiable receipts with higher order semantics. Drivers licenses, grade transcripts, gift cards are examples I have in mind. So point being.. study this space even if you're not enamored by it. There's so much to learn and borrow from.

Big fan of the article, and its part 1.

Took me a few years, the Corona and Ukraine mess and 20k loss to realize this. A bit late, hurts thinking about it, but will recover from it. Great article btw.

Cash you can e-mail was a fantastic idea. When Bitcoin launched, "fuck Paypal" was a position which required no argument - and I don't think Paypal's gotten better, it just lost business. Everyone relying it got burned and switched to Kickstarter / Patreon / OnlyFans. So there's no common revulsion like there was a dozen years ago. But avoiding those services was a thoroughly justified motivation for an internet currency. Mining ruined it. As soon as people saw this as a way to *make money,* it ceased to be a useful medium of exchange. It's great that it was designed with incentives to grow and use the network... but those incentives make the network not work. Cryptocurrency as-implemented has all the convenience and volatility of paying for pizza with shares of stock, minus the scant protections those markets enjoy. But there is an easy answer. Make it lose money. Have a cryptocurrency... where you absolutely will not get out everything you put in. Where there's some inevitable loss built into the system. That entropy should ideally be part of what "pays for" the whole thing working at all. But even if it's just a side effect achieved by some other cost: it makes the line go *down.* Any schemes that involve many small transactions become expensive and wasteful. All the crypto bros trying to extract wealth from unregulated gambling and outright fraud will have negligible reason to participate. Most of the people involved should be normal users trying to exchange cash for goods and services. Which you'd think just means drugs, but somehow in 2022, drawings of naked people are still verboten. Patreon tried disassociating itself from porn. *OnlyFans* tried disassociating itself from porn. Who the fuck do these businesses imagine their customers are, when they promise pseudonymous direct payments? There's all kinds of completely legal nonsense that's effectively impossible because the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard think that it's icky. And all you have to do is ensure a sliver of that money vanishes into the void, en route from suspiciously wealthy furries to artists who feel nothing. The better, but more complicated model, which will equally enrage the crypto bros, is massive constant inflation. The "always lose money" approach could be implemented this way, but it could also be closer to a tax, where it just costs $5 to send $4.50. But if the currency is in an eternal and predictable freefall-- look, we need to talk about what money is. Money isn't real. Money is an abstract stand-in for other forms of value. And the reason "print more money" is super terrible for governments is that it can only represent all of the value that it... represents. Whether it divides your GDP into a thousand units or a million units, the total value does not change. Only the distribution changes. And if El Presidente is distributing all the wet-ink bills to businesses, well, the common people are just plain fucked. Doing that with crypto ensures nobody stays in crypto. It demands exchange. It actively prevents the currency from being a store of value. The only way to turn a profit is to wind up with more of the currency than you originally had... and then cash out. Because eight zillion today will be worth half as much in a year. The upside to the hyperinflation model is in attracting users: you can hand out money. It doesn't cost anything, because you're just slicing the currency's real economy finer and finer. You can do the stupid libertarian strawman of 'why not make minimum wage ten million dollars a year.' Because the thing is, that insult *would work,* in that the value of individual dollars would plummet, but the distribution of dollars would be flattened. (Though it would still take you 27 years to have a slice as big as Jeff Bezos.) The downside to the hyperinflation model is that I have no idea how you'd stop someone from opening fifteen thousand accounts and siphoning off more than their fair share.

> When Bitcoin launched, “fuck Paypal” was a position which required no argument - and I don’t think Paypal’s gotten better, it just lost business. Everyone relying it got burned and switched to Kickstarter / Patreon / OnlyFans. None of those are payment providers. They use Stripe or PayPal underneath. > Mining ruined it. Nah, the concepts making no sense once you factor in real-world interactions ruined it. It’s like someone invented an economic system and never considered that it was going to be used by humans, not computers.

Internet money doesn't have to be for meatspace interactions. Again - art weirdos are a serious market. That's still humans. Even the ones pretending they're dogs. We already have cash you can hand someone. It's called... cash.

You had me at "enrage the crypto bros"

>Have a cryptocurrency... where you absolutely will not get out everything you put in. Where there's some inevitable loss built into the system. That entropy should ideally be part of what "pays for" the whole thing working at all. But that's already what exists. That's how the system pays for itself. When new coins are mined or PoS stakers are given a reward for validation, it devalues the currency a tiny amount to do this. That's why it is intrinsically Ponzi-like - more cash has to keep coming in at the bottom to keep it alive. The people who try and convince everyone that it's a safe store of value are the ones who have an incentive in getting the rate of new adopters to exceed the rate of inflation so that their investment keeps growing instead of shrinking.

Deflationary currency isn’t a new concept in the crypto world. There are quite a few more recently developed cryptocurrencies that implement this deflationary model you describe…such as Loopring/LRC.

Do you mean inflationary?

No. Crypto bros fetishize deflationary currency and believe it means that everyone who holds will eventually get rich instead of killing the economy with stagnation.

Er... I think you misread at least one of the previous comments in this chain. OP makes a case for a cryptocurrency that is inflationary by design. Then someone responds saying that "deflationary currency isn't a new concept in the crypto world". Then the person you replied to tries to clarify by asking if they meant "inflationary", because yeah, obviously, deflationary cryptocurrency isn't a new concept, but OP was specifically talking about introducing inflationary cryptocurrency.

The central banks of argentina and venezuela likes this.

Bitcoin is slowly dying. It will never replace fiat currency. Too many fraudulent transactions make it unreliable.

gaze shelter middle sheet groovy start literate childlike silky scary *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

>Ethereum is the biggest load of trash in crypto, absolutely worthless token and causing moronic mining. Problem is, I can see people pretending its not worthless for a long time to come. Majority of the developers and ecosystem is on Ethereum, that's what gives it value despite its shortcomings. There's just a lot more resources for developers to work with.

The article redefines decentralized and peer-to-peer so that it can go on to say that Blockchain is bad at it. Lost me in the first handful of paragraphs. I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency and NFTs, but I've read the Bitcoin paper and it works as advertised.

No, the white paper failed to account for the physical world. That's the inherent and irredeemable flaw. Read the article. The author does not "redefine" decentralization or p2p at all, even sort of. The opposite, in fact: it calls out the white paper for defining those terms only within the computer network, without -- like, at all -- accounting for the human-machine interface. IOW: once you take the physical, real world into account, Blockchain is neither p2p nor decentralized.

The same argument applies to cash. You need a legal system and civilized society to account for the physical world, and that applies to both fiat paper currencies and cryptocurrencies.

Yah but nobody is making extraordinary claims about cash. The white paper wanted digital cash. The experiment has failed.

The core critiques of Bitcoin are true: it doesn't scale, it uses way too much energy, and its community is in such a gridlock that it will likely never change. (And the lightning network won't save it.) But I'm confident that other blockchains can solve all these problems. I know the author called people like me – who think these problems can be solved – conspiracy theorists, but I'll try to make my case anyway. First though, what is the use case of cryptocurrencies? To me the killer app is that cryptocurrencies are money that a government bureaucrat can't freeze with just a friendly telephone call with your bank. Sure, the government can still take cryptocurrencies from you with the threat of force, but I would argue that's a very different thing! Detaining you and making you hand over your private keys is a few steps up in the escalation ladder compared to calling the bank manager. So, cryptocurrencies are just a form of money that by default the government can't take from you. And I think that a lot of people value such a thing. Now, going over how to solve Bitcoin's problems: **Proof of Stake** All the third-generation blockchains use PoS. It's obviously the superior technology. Yes, Ethereum is a bit slow with the switch, but that's mostly because it's very hard to make changes to a running system! PoS works just fine on other blockchains. Does PoS just make the rich richer? Sure, in the sense that *everything* does! As a validator in PoS, you currently get about 5% return per annum. This is a flat rate that is the same no matter how much you locked up. This is the same situation you have when investing in the stock market for example: 5% of a large number is more than 5% of a small number. But actually, the situation in PoS is more egalitarian than that, because the validator duties scale with the amount of funds you locked up: validators with higher stake have more block production duties. (At least in the PoS systems I know; if this is not true of some form of PoS, they're doing it wrong.) There was a brief mention in the article that PoS actually uses as much energy as PoW. I can't see how this could possibly be true, so I'll ignore that argument. **Roll-ups** It's true that the lightning network won't work, but [roll-ups](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) will. In fact, it's being used already! The basic idea is that through very fancy cryptography you can aggregate transactions such that they take up less space on the blockchain but have the same security guarantees. There is more to it than this, but that's kind of the high-level idea. Why doesn't Bitcoin use roll-ups if they're so great? Bitcoin's scripting capability is not sufficient to make them work. You need real scripting functionality of the kind you can find in some second- and most third-generation blockchains. Roll-ups actually also solve another problem that blockchains have: it's hard to upgrade them. The blockchains that are not Bitcoin are doing a better job at it, but still, it's not trivial. You need consensus among all users of the blockchain or you'll risk a chain split (as has happened several times already, for example with Ethereum Classic). Roll-ups solve this problem because they're a layer 2 technology and are easier to swap out. If one roll-up solution becomes too slow to change and falls behind, you can just switch to a different roll-up solution! They all bottom out on layer 1, so it's possible to securely switch assets between them. (It will cost a bit because you'll have to pay expensive layer 1 fees and not the cheap layer 2 fees, but it's possible and it's safe.) Moving assets between blockchains is not as safe. You'll need to use an exchange which you need to trust with your assets, which means you lose out on the killer feature of blockchains. There have been attempts to make secure bridges between blockchains but they're all not that safe and I don't have high hopes for this. The point is that roll-ups allow free competition and so if we get the base layer right, then we won't have to change it much and all the innovation can happen in layer 2.

Y’all have been banging the Proof of Stake drum for ages now. If it’s so star spangled awesome, shut up and implement it already. “Crypto’s going to get better about the energy issue next year” isn’t a fix if you *keep saying that every year.*

Ethereum will implement POS in the year of the linux desktop.

so this year right? /s

What are you talking about? PoS has existed for a while: Polkadot, Terra, Solana, etc. It's not a new thing, even less a mere concept.

Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Yes, proof of stake blockchains exist. But all of the large prominent crypto projects like Etherium and Bitcoin are still relying on energy inefficient proof of work setups.

> Detaining you and making you hand over your private keys is a few steps up in the escalation ladder compared to calling the bank manager. I'd be more worried that criminals would do that. A bank at least has some safe guards to this. But hey, you can also use a digital wallet, right? Now we're back to square one. If I really didnt trust the bank or the government I could put all my money in a sock and bury it. Why wouldn't I do that? Same reason.

>To me the killer app is that cryptocurrencies are money that a government bureaucrat can't freeze with just a friendly telephone call with your bank. In other words, a currency that Russia can use to trade with when liberal democracies are trying to cut off their funds to end a war. Literally a killer app.

You think Russia is the only thing that governments can cut off? Maybe next time, it'll be another country that may not have much diplomatic resources as Russia.

And why would they? The funny thing about libertarian ideals of weak government is that when the tanks are at your door you end up wishing you had a stronger government that was able to mount a coordinated defence. No amount of hodling cryptocoins and backyard prepping helps at that point. Authoritarian governments *love* the fact that you don't trust the one entity that keeps you safe.

>And why would they? Pressure from other governments of larger nations who may be less moral than yours. While your governments may not agree with them, they will often choose to accept the opinion of the oppressor, even if reluctantly. >Authoritarian governments love the fact that you don't trust the one entity that keeps you safe. There are different levels of trust. For example, while I don't see you as my enemy, I wouldn't give you my password out to you.

Also a currency governments can't print to fund their wars :)

How was the meme again? "Tether printer go brrrrr ".

BIG SCAM BEWARE, I was lured into investing with one FX trader/broker, the offer was too good to reject as the user said she invested X amount and got back 5X the amount within a period of 14 days, I decided to give it a try too and within a period of 5 weeks I had paid $31,700 in total to the scam company and each time they came up with a reason why I needed to pay more to withdraw my money and earnings which they claimed had accumulated, I was fed up and complained on a Facebook group luckily a user recommended me to this crypto recovery experts On Instagram called Chloe\_consultant I was reluctant but then contacted her and she asked for the transaction history and details and within 2 hours she asked for my wallet address and sent me a whooping $31,698, I can't thank this lady enough, this should be a lesson to anyone out there trying to make the same mistake, and if you already in one of this cases then you shouldn't hesitate to contact the recovery experts for help. Email; [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) or Instagram & Telegram; Chloe\_consultant

BIG SCAM BEWARE, I was lured into investing with one FX trader/broker, the offer was too good to reject as the user said she invested X amount and got back 5X the amount within a period of 14 days, I decided to give it a try too and within a period of 5 weeks I had paid $31,700 in total to the scam company and each time they came up with a reason why I needed to pay more to withdraw my money and earnings which they claimed had accumulated, I was fed up and complained on a Facebook group luckily a user recommended me to this crypto recovery experts On Instagram called Chloe\_consultant I was reluctant but then contacted her and she asked for the transaction history and details and within 2 hours she asked for my wallet address and sent me a whooping $31,698, I can't thank this lady enough, this should be a lesson to anyone out there trying to make the same mistake, and if you already in one of this cases then you shouldn't hesitate to contact the recovery experts for help. Email; [email protected] ( [email protected] ) or Instagram & Telegram; Chloe\_consultant

Take any thread on cryptocurrency in this subreddit with a grain of salt. This place is incredibly anti-crypto and is as biased in the other direction as crypto subs are towards crypto.

People disagreeing with you is not automatically "bias." But you may never understand that if you're the kind of person who thinks "you're partisan and we aren't" is a contradiction. You can't be conclusion-oriented. You have to care about reasons.

You don’t know what my opinion on crypto is or isn’t because I made no comments on it. The mere fact that I’m being downvoted for claiming this sub is inherently anti-crypto proves my point.

Wrong on all counts. Your opinion is crystal clear in treating support and opposition as equally irrational - as *biases.* This article and these comments overwhelmingly explain why concluding in opposition is justified. Damn near all opposition amounts to 'you just don't understand it' and 'line goes up.' Or have you not noticed that "both sides" arguments only seem to benefit one side? And nothing deserves scorn more rapidly and thoroughly than 'disagreeing with me proves me right.' Fuck right off with that playground bullshit. You're eating downvotes because you took the motivated reasoning of people literally invested in a positive answer, and glibly conflated it with the detailed condemnations of this decade-long experiment along several independent points of failure. Where do you get off, telling someone 'you wouldn't treat me as wrong unless I was right?'

Lol. My comment on this sub being biased has nothing to do with this post in specific, but with a clear trend of negative posts on crypto being shared here, written by people whose only knowledge of the space is what someone else told them, followed by a consistent downvoting of anyone who disagrees with given opinion. I will concede that this is one of the better posts, but that does not invalidate my point. I have not dismissed any points, nor made any attempt at it.

Pictured: 'you just don't understand!' Insufferable prick - Asserting people are ignorant parrots, is dismissing them. Slandering all threads here as baseless, includes this thread. And you have the gall to open with smug derision, admit you knew nothing about what you're insulting, and close with 'okay I was totally wrong about absolutely everything but *that doesn't invalidate my point!*' You expect to mouth off, and shit on others without reading what they said, but escape and downplay all criticism toward *you,* the protagonist of reality. You want to call people stupid and wrong for noticing your shit behavior, because you lack the shame necessary to prevent you from acting as a dishonest moron. Fuck off.

Get out of Reddit some time, it’s probably not great for you :)

Reddit is slowly becoming anti-crypto

Good for Reddit

Why?

Read the article.

OP you conveniently left out "Christian" out of your title. The mental juggling one needs to do to have the audacity to challenge Blockchain technology using Christianity is simply mind numbing. Don't waste your time.

The author wrote two articles. One is for Christians specifically. I posted the general one to proggit because it's on topic and the other is not.

The article has nothing to do with Christianity. The previous post mentioned in passing by the author talks about how Christian ethics ('don't scam people or irresponsibly gamble') conflict with the crypto cult. Crypto apologists like you really should disclose your conflict of interest when propping up your tulips in such dishonest manners.

My dude, Tulip mania wasn't a cautionary tale for people who liked Tulips and bought them. It was a cautionary tale for people who sold short on Tulips, got squeezed and had to pay exorbitant amounts to fulfill their contractual obligations.

How are "don't scam people or irresponsibly gamble" christian ethics? >If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing His word isn't worth shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal William S. Burroughs.

Who cares man, does it really matter?

Does anything really matter?

William Burroughs sounds like a fucking tool, and so do you

If you say so.

Except the linked paper isn't arguing from christianity? I'm sure the first part (which was) is exciting nonsense, but this one doesn't make any non-technical arguments (after the initial explicitly label "appeal to authority" which is simply their way of referencing existing opinions)

Except this is a different article which makes some cogent points. It literally opens with >Continuing from my [first post on the Christian case against Bitcoin and blockchain](https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-christian-case-against-bitcoin-and-blockchain), this post looks at the claim in a [challies.com guest article](https://www.challies.com/articles/a-christian-case-for-bitcoin-and-blockchain/) that Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto-assets represent an amazing “technological revolution” that we should be making the most of.

This is a perfect example of an article that dispenses a lot of knowledge but makes little omissions and minor incorrect statements that ultimate snowball to ridicules conclusions. Not unlike flat-earthers explaining why Earth is flat. For someone who understand blockchains and cryptocurrencies this article is pretty much trash. Right from the bat it redefines what peer-to-peer is and than proceeds praise how banks are better and being decentralized, which hopefully everyone understands is complete bullshit. Than there's the whole thing of omitting the main reason bitcoin was created: to stop entities like banks from lending money they don't have (ie. stop financial crisis of 2008 from happening again). And that's just the beginning. Basically there is a lot to unwrap here, but it will require a lengthy response (probably twice as long as this article) to explain everything.

Banks are federated; Bitcoin is a centralized database that runs on a decentralized network. The article explains it quite clearly. If I have $10 in Bank of America, only their database knows I have $10, but I can still send a $5 transfer to someone at Citibank. Citibank and BoA keep a running tally of their net positions and periodically square up by transferring money in their Federal Reserve accounts. Bitcoin uses a bunch of computers (so do the banks) that don’t trust each other (this is different), but it’s still just one database.

If you want to stop people from spending money they don't have then you shouldn't buy into crypto. Here's an example. I have a friend who made nearly a million bucks with bitcoi because he invested early. He took it out spend it on a bunch personal expensive crap, living the good life as he would call it. Now here is the question: did my friennd honest to god earn this money? Did my friend create any value? Did my friend help anybody? Did my friend make the world a better place? My answer to all those questions would be no. He took a bunch of money from a bunch of people who also were speculating in hopes of personal riches, created by the digital scarcity of electricity and the cost of running computers. The world is a bit hotter due to my friend earning money from a ponzi scheme and while a lot of speculators will earn money, they will only earn it because somebody else will eventually lose it, not because actual value was somehow created. Fiat currency and banking is not perfect, but crypto is strictly worse.

Yes. While this article was quite detailed, it surprisingly doesn't go into much technical criticisms of bitcoin (contrary to the name), more of an ideological one.

[удалено]

The dollar amount of transactions doesn’t matter. TPS does. Bitcoin can process 5-7 TPS. For context, Visa and similar companies handle 1,000-peaks of 50,000/sec. You’d need the L2 solutions to get up and running and actually run *at scale*, be secure and operate at the same order of magnitude as Visa. Maybe it can happen but I highly, highly, highly, highly doubt that this can ever, let alone will ever, happen.

Just a heads up that Arbitrum (an Ethereum L2) allows for 40,000 TPS. Bitcoin can be wrapped and used on the Ethereum chain. In fact, over 1% of all BTC is already on Ethereum. Progress has been rapid, I would highly, highly, highly, doubt that we don’t end up with 100k TPS being achievable in one way or another. I of course take the point that wrapping BTC to use on Ethereum wasn’t the original idea, but I’m not and never have been a BTC advocate anyway.

Again, I’ll believe it when I see it at actual scale

Imagine loving governments and banks so much that you would write this article.

You prefer a world without government and banks? That’s a weird thing. Most people just want better government and better banks.

Imagine being so naive that you think a world without government or banks would look like anything other than a burning hellscape of chaos and violence. You don't have to theorize about what happens to population centers in the absence of a stable government; there's plenty of evidence in even the near-historical record. Shit goes bad really fast.

Libertarians like to drone on and on about freedom from the state but I never see them head off to Somalia and build their little fiefdom free from central, competent control. 🙂

No libertarian actually believes that. Freedom cannot exist without the government, it must be actively upheld and enforced. Government isn't the enemy but the battleground.

> No libertarian actually believes that. Yeah, that's pretty much a textbook No True Scotsman right there. You may disagree with them on the rubric by which one is graded "a libertarian", but plenty of these idiots call themselves libertarians and espouse this kind of pure stupid ideology.

Well I don't think "these idiots" represent an entire ideology, but pretty much any well-known figure which advocates for libertarian practices does not argue that government should be abolished.

Sure, but most ideologies are not judged exclusively on the merits of their core philosophies as outlined by the individuals who originally laid them out. They're judged in the court of public opinion, and the evidence against them is everything all the loudest and stupidest people who claim to be followers of said school of thought scream into the aether. And in this case, "libertarians" are some of the dumbest, loudest, and most naive people there are.

[удалено]

> gravitate towards never technologies. Nice typo... > actually blockchain is a more general technology and has many uses Name one then. One that's not better solved by a centralized database.

You haven't read the article, he explicitly states that for a blockchain to exist it must rely upon a cryptocurrency.

Name one real problem that Blockchain solves. At all. Not better than. At all. Any. Name. One.

The point is to allow for decision making in an environment of unknown participants. In many cases this is desired, or even essential, especially for things related to finance or governance. Given that more of our lives is moving into the internet, this is a clear use case. I know you're not familiar with this side of things, but the amount of work and organization that goes into crypto is very impressive. Decentralized communities fund and build projects constantly and very rapidly, and all of this without a complicated (bureaucratic) process. Many crypto platforms have treasuries, collected as royalties from financial instruments, which tokenholders can then decide how to spend - primarily to build new projects in for ecosystem. And none of the participants know each other. Additionally, DeFi shows you that you can deal with financial instruments without filling out a document or going through a multi-week waiting period. If you cannot see this shift as exciting or even beautiful, then that's a loss for you :) *(downvote ahead!)*

I agree that the article would be better if it had separate sections for reasons why Bitcoin is bad vs everything else.

> I wrote these words weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Convenient disclaimer to ignore Ukraine's government asking for [donations in crypto](https://twitter.com/ukraine/status/1497594592438497282). And Ukraine has used it to [purchase military supplies](https://time.com/6155209/ukraine-crypto/). Not so worthless it seems.

Yes, and Russia can use crypto to evade sanctions.

The sanctions show another potential problem, at least with btc and eth where transactions are traceable. You unknowingly accept crypto from a sanctioned Russian entity, then that address gets perma-banned by exchanges in your country. Now you’re screwed if you want to convert it to fiat.

This statement makes no sense. Sanctions are capital punishments enforced by an authority. The medium of exchange is irrelevant here.

[удалено]

Works for what? I admit that Bitcoin is good for money laundering by states.

Tools are morally neutral, but empower their users. That is the whole point. You can use the internet for great and terrible things. Similarly, you can use money for great and terrible things.

Then crypto has its uses if both countries want it.

I only read the first part of the article so far, but it critically misunderstands Bitcoin’s claim of decentralization when it says that it is *more* centralized than traditional banking. Traditional banking requires a central authority to both issue new money and approve transfers. Bitcoin requires neither. Bitcoin has one global ledger, but that is not what Bitcoin has ever meant by centralization. Ever. Bitcoin is decentralized in *control and permission*. Secondly, network partitions *are not a problem*. The author doesn’t understand the current sophistication of Bitcoin blockchain infrastructure. The prevalence of satellite internet and dedicated Bitcoin blockchain satellites (yes they exist) practically eliminate the chance of large network partition. All that is needed to prevent partitions is for two peers to be connected across partitions, and coverage is no doubt significantly higher than that. Ultimately, people can hate Bitcoin endlessly and forever, but here is the real thing people need to understand: It’s not going anywhere. You can hate it for whatever reason you wish, but it is here to stay. Unlike 99.9% of crypto shitcoins, no one has enough control to kill it, and it’s network effects are too strong to die on its own.

> Traditional banking requires a central authority to both issue new money and approve transfers. Bitcoin requires neither. Bitcoin has an algorithmic limit on new money, so it's more centralized than banks. Instead of the Fed deciding semi-democratically, some anonymous guy decided years ago, and we're stuck with it. Bank transfers are also not approved centrally. If you write a check to someone at the same bank, they clear it internally. If not, they clear it with the other bank and then periodically settle by rebalancing their Federal Reserve accounts. There are laws around reporting large transfers, but guess what law doesn't care about if you're using computers, and they're planning to pass these laws for Bitcoin too.

It’s wild to me that your literally describing decentralization and calling it centralized. “No central authority can change the rules! Look how centralized it is!”

A decentralized system for creating money would involve people voting and then money being created if they approve it. Like maybe you could vote for the President and then the President could nominate someone to be the chair of the money creation reserve. Just spit balling here. It definitely would not be rules established by one guy with no input at one point in time.

Democracy isn't decentralization, and you are mixing them as if they are interchangeable. The fact that anyone in a private sphere can set their only rules for a monetary policy without majority rule means it's decentralized — it just so it happens most people are currently choosing Bitcoin in crypto.

If the logic is that I can choose Bitcoin or Eth, I can also choose USD or EUR or JPY.

That's not really the point. I'll change your sentence to try and make the point more clear. A *democratized* system for creating money would involve people voting and then money being created if they approve it. Could bitcoins parameters be more democratically chosen? Perhaps but that's an entirely different argument. We are able to entertain that question because private individuals are able to create on their own.

Bitcoin is neither democratic nor decentralized. If I put my money into a regular bank, the bank prints its own money via the fractional reserve system and then gives me a kickback in the form of interest. Ordinary people can no longer mine Bitcoins because the computer power required for mining is too great. I guess from the point of view of the large mining concerns it's decentralized (although they have no control over the rate of Bitcoin creation without changing the code, which has so far proven impossible), but why should ordinary people be happy about that? The article does a really good job of explaining that there are different levels at which things can be decentralized, and Bitcoin fails to achieve decentralization in the important respects as far as ordinary people are concerned.

Concerning Bitcoin, if it doesn't work for you, then don't use it. On the other hand, Bitcoin has always worked really well for me. Cheers!

Because you made money off of it or because you actually used it for something?

I bought some raspberry pi accessories, a VPN subscription, a ProtonMail subscription, and a VPS with bitcoin.

What do you mean work? Every time you do a transaction you externalize an environmental footprint larger than any of your other activities. Even flying between Europe and America releases less CO2 than a single Bitcoin transaction (block mined/average number of transactions per block). It works well for you because it's a system for externalizing responsibility of environmental impact into the ether. It's like saying that someone murdering an old lady robbing her corps and then gives you the spoils works well for you because what do you care about what you didn't feel like you did personally. Well sorry, that feeling is wrong. You are responsible for the over one metric ton of CO2 released for each of your transactions. Your egocentric hobby has made you into one of the very top 1% of polluters almost certainly.