Once again I am asking those who say crypto is good "in theory" or that it "makes sense" to please fucking elaborate exactly WHAT their use case is for crypto actually doing something of NOVEL UTILITY. I've never seen a serious reply to exactly what crypto is supposed to be able to accomplish that either isn't a misunderstanding of what crypto does, or is more easily accomplished with non-crypto means.
Feel free to make up your own society in order to answer this, as I'm pretty convinced that even if you were able to construct an entire world to make your crypto dreams make sense, that it'll still be stupid.
Feel free to make up your own society in order to answer this, as I’m pretty convinced that even if you were able to construct an entire world to make your crypto dreams make sense, that it’ll still be stupid.
To make the world fit around your ideals and to not make your ideals fit the world is another form of liberal idealism.
Let's say your home country government falls for whatever reason. You can escape to wherever in the world and have your assets follow you rather than abandoning them where you just fled from.
When my country fell, my grandfather lost his egg monopoly. He tried to sneak a laying hen with him on the US helicopter but couldn’t due to it interfering with the seatbelt.
please burn two hundred billion tonnes of coal so that my grandfather and people like him can take their money digitally and engage in capital flight.
I think one issue is conflating blockchain with crypto, at least to me. Im not computers, but from what I’ve read blockchain is very promising for data distribution and privacy…? So medical records, etc but also potentially streamlining supply line and other economic functions. Without making a total idiot out of myself I guess it could help realize the promise of Allende’s CyberSyn.
Of course crypto is just a money application of blockchain so I really have very little hope for that aside from maybe some way to develop non-state MMT…? idk
Blockchain, as in a decentralized ledger that is extremely difficult to tamper with, is not in theory tied to cryptocurrency, but the only currently known way to do it is with cryptocurrency. It might be possible to do it another way but it would require a theoretical breakthrough.
Now just to break down what this is in its purest form, is the basic idea that you have a long list of entries that include a hash of all the previous entries (and I'd assume all the previous entries and itself as well) using a deliberately inefficient and slow hashing algorithm for the explicit purpose of making it cost prohibitive to create an altered version, but then there'd have to be some more efficient way to quickly verify that as well so is it some particularly weird and clever method that makes it hard to generate but easy to verify? And then that just gets mirrored across a bunch of hosts via some networking scheme that works on consensus, to further confound attempts to introduce falsified records?
The big question then is why? It's trustless record keeping, but you still have to trust whatever is creating the entries and you have to trust whatever will honor the entries, which are all much bigger problems than preserving an untampered-with database. Like what is an actual use case that would benefit specifically from creating a database that can't be altered enough to offset the cost of making it expensive to alter or even write to in the first place?
imagine getting a socialist paradise, where you no longer have to pay $250 to your medical insurance to see your doctor, but instead you have to pay $250 in energy costs to validate your medical records hash
The database doesn't have to be expensive to alter, that's a consequence of one particular type of scheme, proof of work, and there are already good alternatives or there will be shortly, with more coming. For use cases of a trustless distributed computer/database, see my other comment.
I know you're just kinda spitballing here, but in order for this to be a compelling argument, you'd have to show how those systems are failing, and how the blockchain would fix those issues without creating worse ones.
Yeah for sure, I’m not one of these crypto or blockchain salvation people. I’m more just thinking about how it might be broadly useful and to not dismiss it out of hand. But I have zero interest in implementing or putting effort in defending it lol.
It’s actually useful to see people dunk on me because I’m mostly parroting what I’ve seen others say.
One more thing I’ll add is LivAgar had an interesting medium post on crypto from awhile ago. I don’t remember all the details (it wasn’t positive but said we need to anticipate and critique future capitalism not just fight current forms) but I’ll just leave it here if people want to look at it.
Of course you can theoretically do anything you can do with cryptocurrency without it, as long as you have full trust in some central authority who is willing to implement the thing you want. Two big problems with this, first not everyone trusts the same authority or even any authority, so we all have to use different systems that are difficult and expensive or impossible to connect. Second, the institutions which currently process financial transactions are very much not willing to implement whatever code you want on their servers. I can't deploy an automated market maker or prediction market to chase bank, I can't ask them to use zero knowledge proofs to reveal something about my assets to a third party while keeping something like my account balance a secret. I for sure can't ask them to do more communisty things like create a form of money or asset that automatically redistributes itself. There are a whole bunch of applications that are currently happening on blockchain that absolutely could not exist otherwise, not because the technology is tied to blockchain, but because governments and corporations aren't interested in them.
I can’t deploy an automated market maker or prediction market to chase bank
at last crypto will free us from the oppression of Chase Bank not letting everyone set up anonymized stock trading robots on their servers. surely the future is bright now that crypto has solved this problem
I'm giving examples of things that are currently happening on blockchain which you can't practically do any other way, what the parent comment asked for, not saying these are good things we definitely should do.
thank you for earnestly and knowledgeably replying to the question i posed. what i assumed implicit in the question and your answer is that any reply given would be for things that are good and should be advocated for. apologies for the snark and misunderstanding
Unfortunately most of the really good stuff isn't happening, I admit that the majority of people interested in participating in crypto are... not friendly to socialism, but as OP shows it's not 100%, and I can tell you from interacting with the community there is a lot of ideological diversity on the margins and even among the top influencers. The good stuff as I see it would be having a borderless communist economy in which all powerful institutions are under public or worker control, with automatic and continuous redistribution of wealth, and which cannot be easily couped from within or destroyed from without. I don't see an obvious way to get there at a scale that matters, you need a lot of people to participate, but I also don't see any reasons why growing such a thing would be impossible, and putting it on the blockchain has the advantage of giving it protection from hostile actors while it's still in early stages and unable to defend itself with military force.
Once again I am asking those who say crypto is good "in theory" or that it "makes sense" to please fucking elaborate exactly WHAT their use case is for crypto actually doing something of NOVEL UTILITY. I've never seen a serious reply to exactly what crypto is supposed to be able to accomplish that either isn't a misunderstanding of what crypto does, or is more easily accomplished with non-crypto means.
Feel free to make up your own society in order to answer this, as I'm pretty convinced that even if you were able to construct an entire world to make your crypto dreams make sense, that it'll still be stupid.
uhm were gonna do UBI via gaming and crypto
:graeber:
Edit: I love this site. We have the best emotes, no contest
To make the world fit around your ideals and to not make your ideals fit the world is another form of liberal idealism.
Let's say your home country government falls for whatever reason. You can escape to wherever in the world and have your assets follow you rather than abandoning them where you just fled from.
:data-laughing: lol no. Imagine having all your assets in fucking bored apes for the sake of economic stability
deleted by creator
this is gold but worse
When my country fell, my grandfather lost his egg monopoly. He tried to sneak a laying hen with him on the US helicopter but couldn’t due to it interfering with the seatbelt.
please burn two hundred billion tonnes of coal so that my grandfather and people like him can take their money digitally and engage in capital flight.
im sorry for ur lots
If only there was some way to have seen it coming, be strong
yeah, like, to communism. So rich people can be above the people even as more and more countries switch to socialism.
deleted by creator
I think one issue is conflating blockchain with crypto, at least to me. Im not computers, but from what I’ve read blockchain is very promising for data distribution and privacy…? So medical records, etc but also potentially streamlining supply line and other economic functions. Without making a total idiot out of myself I guess it could help realize the promise of Allende’s CyberSyn.
Of course crypto is just a money application of blockchain so I really have very little hope for that aside from maybe some way to develop non-state MMT…? idk
Blockchain, as in a decentralized ledger that is extremely difficult to tamper with, is not in theory tied to cryptocurrency, but the only currently known way to do it is with cryptocurrency. It might be possible to do it another way but it would require a theoretical breakthrough.
Now just to break down what this is in its purest form, is the basic idea that you have a long list of entries that include a hash of all the previous entries (and I'd assume all the previous entries and itself as well) using a deliberately inefficient and slow hashing algorithm for the explicit purpose of making it cost prohibitive to create an altered version, but then there'd have to be some more efficient way to quickly verify that as well so is it some particularly weird and clever method that makes it hard to generate but easy to verify? And then that just gets mirrored across a bunch of hosts via some networking scheme that works on consensus, to further confound attempts to introduce falsified records?
The big question then is why? It's trustless record keeping, but you still have to trust whatever is creating the entries and you have to trust whatever will honor the entries, which are all much bigger problems than preserving an untampered-with database. Like what is an actual use case that would benefit specifically from creating a database that can't be altered enough to offset the cost of making it expensive to alter or even write to in the first place?
imagine getting a socialist paradise, where you no longer have to pay $250 to your medical insurance to see your doctor, but instead you have to pay $250 in energy costs to validate your medical records hash
Thanks for this it’s genuinely helpful.
The database doesn't have to be expensive to alter, that's a consequence of one particular type of scheme, proof of work, and there are already good alternatives or there will be shortly, with more coming. For use cases of a trustless distributed computer/database, see my other comment.
I know you're just kinda spitballing here, but in order for this to be a compelling argument, you'd have to show how those systems are failing, and how the blockchain would fix those issues without creating worse ones.
Yeah for sure, I’m not one of these crypto or blockchain salvation people. I’m more just thinking about how it might be broadly useful and to not dismiss it out of hand. But I have zero interest in implementing or putting effort in defending it lol.
It’s actually useful to see people dunk on me because I’m mostly parroting what I’ve seen others say.
One more thing I’ll add is LivAgar had an interesting medium post on crypto from awhile ago. I don’t remember all the details (it wasn’t positive but said we need to anticipate and critique future capitalism not just fight current forms) but I’ll just leave it here if people want to look at it.
https://livagar.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-the-end-of-capitalism-1-2-f11db6a4815b
Of course you can theoretically do anything you can do with cryptocurrency without it, as long as you have full trust in some central authority who is willing to implement the thing you want. Two big problems with this, first not everyone trusts the same authority or even any authority, so we all have to use different systems that are difficult and expensive or impossible to connect. Second, the institutions which currently process financial transactions are very much not willing to implement whatever code you want on their servers. I can't deploy an automated market maker or prediction market to chase bank, I can't ask them to use zero knowledge proofs to reveal something about my assets to a third party while keeping something like my account balance a secret. I for sure can't ask them to do more communisty things like create a form of money or asset that automatically redistributes itself. There are a whole bunch of applications that are currently happening on blockchain that absolutely could not exist otherwise, not because the technology is tied to blockchain, but because governments and corporations aren't interested in them.
at last crypto will free us from the oppression of Chase Bank not letting everyone set up anonymized stock trading robots on their servers. surely the future is bright now that crypto has solved this problem
I'm giving examples of things that are currently happening on blockchain which you can't practically do any other way, what the parent comment asked for, not saying these are good things we definitely should do.
thank you for earnestly and knowledgeably replying to the question i posed. what i assumed implicit in the question and your answer is that any reply given would be for things that are good and should be advocated for. apologies for the snark and misunderstanding
Unfortunately most of the really good stuff isn't happening, I admit that the majority of people interested in participating in crypto are... not friendly to socialism, but as OP shows it's not 100%, and I can tell you from interacting with the community there is a lot of ideological diversity on the margins and even among the top influencers. The good stuff as I see it would be having a borderless communist economy in which all powerful institutions are under public or worker control, with automatic and continuous redistribution of wealth, and which cannot be easily couped from within or destroyed from without. I don't see an obvious way to get there at a scale that matters, you need a lot of people to participate, but I also don't see any reasons why growing such a thing would be impossible, and putting it on the blockchain has the advantage of giving it protection from hostile actors while it's still in early stages and unable to defend itself with military force.
I think capitalism had a rather distasteful, yet supremely effective way of dealing with this problem at the beginning.