How can crypto help with redistribution you ask? The idea is to represent ownership of anything substantial, houses, cars, companies, parts of companies, etc. on-chain. We already require people to maintain legal documents, deeds and titles and whatnot, for a lot of this and they're generally also recorded in databases so it's not much of a stretch, actually it simplifies things to have a single database to rule them all. Secondly, our monetary system will be on chain also, almost certainly the currency we use should not be the underlying currency which powers the chain, it will be a different token with its own monetary policy, like USD. With these two things in place we can now automatically redistribute, no human intervention required. First, the assets must be priced, there are a couple of ways this could be done. We may allow anyone to bid on an asset, giving the owner the option to sell as long as the bid is in place but not requiring them to do so, the price in this case is the value of the highest bid. The other way is to force the owner of the asset to put a price on that thing and should anyone decide to pay that price they would gain ownership. In this case there is an incentive to overprice everything so you don't lose it, but on the other side there's an incentive to not price too high because there's going to be a wealth tax. We can also do both and use some combination of the two numbers. Back to the wealth tax. I favor a big, whopping progressive wealth tax, one which can in a short time redistribute resources so that the wealth distribution matches whatever curve we collectively feel is best. If you can't pay your wealth tax then one or more of your assets is removed from you and either auctioned off or distributed to someone less wealthy who wants is. Does this have to happen on a Blockchain? No it doesn't, but it's an extremely natural and efficient way to do it because it can all happen automatically and without human intervention, we could intervene to change the rules of redistribution and taxation democratically if they need tweaking, but the actual managerial nuts and bolts stuff is done by a computer program, and one which we can guarantee will run faithfully. If you computerize it but with regular computers and not smart contracts then you have to have some kind of oversight to prevent cheating, and if you do it with paper documents it's going to be an absolute mess. BTW, as I explained above, blockchains work better when everyone participating has about the same amount of wealth. Do I think this will ever happen? No, probably not, I don't really see a way from here to there, but I don't see a way from here to anything good so .... The point is crypto is just a tool and it has no ideology built in. You can have authoritarian communism and Blockchain will help, you can have anarchy and it helps even more, and of course you can also do techno futurist fascist dystopia or libertarianism (is there a difference?) Blockchains do not care. Are a lot of the pioneers of this tech bad people? Yes. Are most of the promoters also bad? Yes. But that's partly because the left have refused to participate because the most obvious use case is libertarian in nature. BTW, vitalik bulerin appears to be, while politically confused, not that bad of a person. He's certainly not a libertarian or fascist, kind of a heterodox lib I guess, and he's a utopian which is kinda cool imo.
It can be an excel spreadsheet, I guess, how about a real database with a server attached to it instead, run from multiple secure locations? But if you do that you need to make sure someone isn't fucking with it, you need to trust the people running it and/or the people with oversite, you want the whole nation to trust these people with you, and you want to maintain that state of things permanently and without fail. It's possible but with all the money and assets of a large country at stake there's a massive incentive for fuckery, it's a very hard problem. This is the problem Blockchain solves, no need to worry about trust, at least when it involves 1s and 0s and simple operations upon them.
Blockchain doesn't solve that problem though. There have been several instances where blockchain instances have split and diverged, and you need to have trust to reassert the correct instance. You've fallen for tech advertising bullshit. Blockchain doesn't run 'permenently and without fail', and suffers from all the same trust issues that an excel spreadsheet can suffer from, but blockchain is vastly more inefficient and expensive to maintain.
Have you just like, not been paying attention to what has been happening with crypto in the past two years? I feel like I'm talking to someone in 2015. We have the use case scenarios now, it's not just cynical speculation, and it doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve.
I have been paying close attention and I totally disagree with you. It's no different than it's ever been. Always there have been hard forks both planned and actual, the first one being early on in the BTC blockchain, importantly the eth/etc split, and recently forks related to the merge. In most cases it was clear which fork to go with or there literally was not a competing fork, the only exception being etc/eth. But suppose there was a contentious fork in an important chain on which government depended, then you literally just pick one and go with it, it's not a problem and you can't make a mistake as long as the new fork fulfils your needs. If not, stay on the old chain or make your own fork. The difference with a spreadsheet is monumental, a spreadsheet can be messed with by anyone with access to it, at any time. Hard forks can only mess with a Blockchain if the community agrees that messing is actually good, assuming at least some of them are paying attention to the new code. They're a non issue, much less scary than things like 51% attacks, which is saying a lot because they're not that scary, and a necessary part of the system to be able to upgrade it
How can crypto help with redistribution you ask? The idea is to represent ownership of anything substantial, houses, cars, companies, parts of companies, etc. on-chain. We already require people to maintain legal documents, deeds and titles and whatnot, for a lot of this and they're generally also recorded in databases so it's not much of a stretch, actually it simplifies things to have a single database to rule them all. Secondly, our monetary system will be on chain also, almost certainly the currency we use should not be the underlying currency which powers the chain, it will be a different token with its own monetary policy, like USD. With these two things in place we can now automatically redistribute, no human intervention required. First, the assets must be priced, there are a couple of ways this could be done. We may allow anyone to bid on an asset, giving the owner the option to sell as long as the bid is in place but not requiring them to do so, the price in this case is the value of the highest bid. The other way is to force the owner of the asset to put a price on that thing and should anyone decide to pay that price they would gain ownership. In this case there is an incentive to overprice everything so you don't lose it, but on the other side there's an incentive to not price too high because there's going to be a wealth tax. We can also do both and use some combination of the two numbers. Back to the wealth tax. I favor a big, whopping progressive wealth tax, one which can in a short time redistribute resources so that the wealth distribution matches whatever curve we collectively feel is best. If you can't pay your wealth tax then one or more of your assets is removed from you and either auctioned off or distributed to someone less wealthy who wants is. Does this have to happen on a Blockchain? No it doesn't, but it's an extremely natural and efficient way to do it because it can all happen automatically and without human intervention, we could intervene to change the rules of redistribution and taxation democratically if they need tweaking, but the actual managerial nuts and bolts stuff is done by a computer program, and one which we can guarantee will run faithfully. If you computerize it but with regular computers and not smart contracts then you have to have some kind of oversight to prevent cheating, and if you do it with paper documents it's going to be an absolute mess. BTW, as I explained above, blockchains work better when everyone participating has about the same amount of wealth. Do I think this will ever happen? No, probably not, I don't really see a way from here to there, but I don't see a way from here to anything good so .... The point is crypto is just a tool and it has no ideology built in. You can have authoritarian communism and Blockchain will help, you can have anarchy and it helps even more, and of course you can also do techno futurist fascist dystopia or libertarianism (is there a difference?) Blockchains do not care. Are a lot of the pioneers of this tech bad people? Yes. Are most of the promoters also bad? Yes. But that's partly because the left have refused to participate because the most obvious use case is libertarian in nature. BTW, vitalik bulerin appears to be, while politically confused, not that bad of a person. He's certainly not a libertarian or fascist, kind of a heterodox lib I guess, and he's a utopian which is kinda cool imo.
But why crypto, and not say, one Excel spreadsheet to rule them all?
It can be an excel spreadsheet, I guess, how about a real database with a server attached to it instead, run from multiple secure locations? But if you do that you need to make sure someone isn't fucking with it, you need to trust the people running it and/or the people with oversite, you want the whole nation to trust these people with you, and you want to maintain that state of things permanently and without fail. It's possible but with all the money and assets of a large country at stake there's a massive incentive for fuckery, it's a very hard problem. This is the problem Blockchain solves, no need to worry about trust, at least when it involves 1s and 0s and simple operations upon them.
Blockchain doesn't solve that problem though. There have been several instances where blockchain instances have split and diverged, and you need to have trust to reassert the correct instance. You've fallen for tech advertising bullshit. Blockchain doesn't run 'permenently and without fail', and suffers from all the same trust issues that an excel spreadsheet can suffer from, but blockchain is vastly more inefficient and expensive to maintain.
Have you just like, not been paying attention to what has been happening with crypto in the past two years? I feel like I'm talking to someone in 2015. We have the use case scenarios now, it's not just cynical speculation, and it doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve.
I have been paying close attention and I totally disagree with you. It's no different than it's ever been. Always there have been hard forks both planned and actual, the first one being early on in the BTC blockchain, importantly the eth/etc split, and recently forks related to the merge. In most cases it was clear which fork to go with or there literally was not a competing fork, the only exception being etc/eth. But suppose there was a contentious fork in an important chain on which government depended, then you literally just pick one and go with it, it's not a problem and you can't make a mistake as long as the new fork fulfils your needs. If not, stay on the old chain or make your own fork. The difference with a spreadsheet is monumental, a spreadsheet can be messed with by anyone with access to it, at any time. Hard forks can only mess with a Blockchain if the community agrees that messing is actually good, assuming at least some of them are paying attention to the new code. They're a non issue, much less scary than things like 51% attacks, which is saying a lot because they're not that scary, and a necessary part of the system to be able to upgrade it