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It makes me sad, because I expected a comment like this to be the highest on HN. In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a tu

It makes me sad, because I expected a comment like this to be the highest on HN. In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy. Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life. As an example, already, anyone in the world can buy property in the US: https://realt.co/ https://realt.co/ What the web did for infomation, Ethereum will do for value.

louwrentius 6y ago
> In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. Does this sentence actually mean anything? > In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. What does this mean in concrete terms? > Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy. Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life. Who wants this?
- seibelj 6y ago
  You just keep acting like the “caveman lawyer” from Saturday Night Live and refusing to learn or acknowledge anything. You are being obnoxious and just continuing the HN trope of “blockchain is totally worthless despite it being worth hundreds of billions - the whole world is wrong not me!”
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    An ad-hominem, thank you. Do you know anything about human psychology, by the way?
  - UShouldBWorking 6y ago
    Very well put. It's hard to not feel conspiratorial seeing this level of ignorance here. Blockchain solves the problem of transferring value without an intemediary, what's so hard to understand for these people?
- pavlov 6y ago
  > ”Does this sentence actually mean anything?” In more traditional software engineering language, it means “you can run stored procedures on an incredibly slow and limited distributed database.” Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese, and you have to use a scammy cryptocurrency to pay for the privilege of running these unsafe programs. The adherents call this “web 3.0” in some kind of ironic joke because it’s nothing like the web.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Hmm, this reads like something I do understand, thank you.
    - deeeeplearning 6y ago
      You clearly aren't interested in learning anything, just on "dunking" on cryptocurrencies.
      - louwrentius 6y ago
        Hmm, where would you get that idea from? https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
        deeeeplearning 6y ago
        So your response is to post your blogpost dunking on Crypto and reinforcing my point?
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    > Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese... You're probably referencing this fuck up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) The huge advantage of smart contracts is that they are supposed to be trustless - you don't need to necessarily trust your business partners because contract is set in stone ... code and will be executed exactly as agreed beforehand. In reality, you move your trust in your understanding of the code. But then when 18 000+ (probably highly technical) people investing $50 million don't spot the bug in the code, then it calls the whole "trustless" concept into question.
- parksy 6y ago
  Turing completeness in layman's terms means you can write programs on it. Traditionally a computer that most people are familiar with is a single machine, like PC or the device we can hold in our hands. Etherium is a swarm of millions of computers that anyone can add to the swarm. When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. But which node's output is the truth? Without some mechanism in place, a bad actor could claim to have computed an output that serves them greedily. Ethereum has baked in protocols so that the distributed result of millions of nodes running a program reaches a stasticial consensus. Being turing complete means that any computable program can run on Ethereum. So you can imagine writing a program that, say, runs an auction, or performs escrow for contractors, or whatever. You could run doom on it, albeit at an extremely low framerate because you need the swarm to validate each frame. I hope this explanation helps. Edit: I swear autocomplete is becoming more forceful over time.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. (...) Ethereum has baked in protocols so that the distributed result of millions of nodes running a program reaches a stasticial consensus. Usually the reason to run something on more than one computing unit is to achieve additive gains - like getting results faster, or processing more data in the same amount of time. This however sounds like a million computers computing the exact same thing. Why would one want to do that? It's a serious question - I'm having trouble imagining a generic use case.
    - dev_throw 6y ago
      This is to achieve consensus - the N nodes running the smart contract will ideally replace the central authorities that we implicitly trust. This enables trustless transactions, which gets rid of a lot of business red tape and unlocks productivity.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
ForHackernews 6y ago
Why does any of this require ethereum? We have all kinds of markets already, ones that are much faster, more liquid and more efficient than any blockchain-backed exchanges. There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges, or you from making a new exchange. Literally the only things Ethereum adds are decentralization and no way to dispute or reverse transactions, but for 99% of users those are ANTI-features.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  To trust a currency, you must trust the institutions that manage that currency. You have no control over it. To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable. It still takes me several business days to complete an ACH transaction in the US, and requires I trust the banking system. Transferring cryptocurrencies happen much faster and don't require the same kind of trust or centralized management. What you see as anti-features are good reasons why they won't replace the dollar yet, but they still have a place in the market.
  - kingaillas 6y ago
    >To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable. What happens when Ethereum 2 inevitably hits a security bug, much like the ones Ethereum 1 hit that led to the DAO hack/theft (some might say... worked exactly as coded)?
    - parksy 6y ago
      Compare it to traditional security. If you want to steal a few dollars you just need a sharp bit of metal and an easily frightened shopkeeper. Of course when you leave, the shopkeeper (assuming you didn't murder them) can use a phone to inform the authorities. Then a manhunt begins involving resources like police and their cars, radios, guns, protocols, legal justice system, forensic investigators etc. Is the sharp piece of metal a bug? Is the patch just more force, monitoring and authority? Edit: And is the cost and risk of trusting an algorithm comparable to the human cost and risk in maintaining current securities "authenticity", which is basically a might is right system?
an_opabinia 6y ago
If the affiliated get rich quick scheme didn’t pay out as well as it does, people would give as few fucks about ethereum as they do 100,000 other actively maintained but intellectually masturbatory projects on GitHub. The popular impression of the crypto bro is real - that is, the kind of idiot who is only engaged ritualistically with the technology but is actually interested in making a quick buck. This coexists with interesting applications for block chains. The commenter is just making light of how deeply coopted programmers are by crypto bros.
jpxw 6y ago
What’s the difference between realt.co and REITs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust
- std_badalloc 6y ago
  The difference is presumably the digital contract, that is written in a programming language that only a handful of people on earth can understand, where a programming error can make your money disappear, such that you have no recourse in the court system. Another difference is the pyramid scheme incentives in the cryptocurrency tech, causing everyone who's bought into it to be incentivised to talk about how great it is.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Please don't comment on subjects you know nothing about and are clearly ignorant and show no desire to actually learn.
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
For a bunch of educated people HNers can be some of the dumbest people in the world sometimes.
dewarrn1 6y ago
Imagined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
deathcakes 6y ago
"In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy." I'm sorry but I really totally fail to see what is appealing about this future hellscape where literally every aspect of our lives is transacted, monetised and profitable. What is good about this? Why is this something to aim for?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Star Trek was a prophetic vision of the future. Except we aren't meant to be running a federation of planets. We are the Ferengi.
- markkat 6y ago
  I see the opposite happening, as rent-seeking models like that of the recording industry are replaced. Also, this regards the music an artist makes and sells, not every aspect of their life.
  - phatfish 6y ago
    I don't see how Ethereum or any "digital currency" solve the real world problems that will still exist. Sure, the big players in the recording industry can treat artists badly. But a service is provided, which is doing all business and marking side of things that most artists don't want to bother about. The idea of recording companies will still exist. Maybe somehow the big incumbents get caught out by the change to a "digital economy", but all that will happen is new ones will appear, and will end up doing exactly the same as the old ones. Digital distribution was supposed to free artists from record companies. Now it is consolidated to a few large companies like Spotify and Apple because musicians don't want to run and market their own digital store front.
- carleverett 6y ago
  I highly recommend "A Blank Slate of State" by Chris Burniske: https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of-state/ https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of... He makes the same argument that I think you're making, that these new types of "more accessible" financial markets in crypto can corrupt people if they only use it to seek out money for money's sake. TLDR: it's a tool, that can be used for good or for bad, but like any tool it's better to have it than not.
KSteffensen 6y ago
> In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use This sentence is completely opaque to me. I have no idea what you are trying to say. > In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of asset So I will be able to go to Starbucks, buy a cup of coffee, pay for it with Ethereum and not involve my bank? > Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life. I can currently buy shares in companies I work for. Why is Ethereum different (other than I don't understand it)?
- gnarcoregrizz 6y ago
  No KYC Offline account creation Instantly liquid programmable assets Programmable banking Financial censorship resistant Micro finance Anyone can use it, it’s surprisingly simple You could create your own company+shares if you want and they can be instantly available on any market. Ever tried trading a penny stock, or an international stock? It takes forever to open an account at a brokerage where they may or may not allow you to trade certain types of assets, or at certain times. Trades can be reversed and assets confiscated. It’s a million times easier with crypto. Yes it’s a “dark forest” for now (buyer beware) but there are some legitimate platforms like aave and uniswap. Install metamask and check it out! Feels incredibly futuristic to me
  - KSteffensen 6y ago
    > No KYC I don't know what KYC is but I'm not US based. Sounds like some fee that's peculiar to US banking environment (which I have heard is extraordinarily bureaucratic). >Instantly liquid programmable assets Another example of opaque blockchain jargon. Maybe it makes sense, but not as a way to convert the sceptical. >Programmable banking I can currently program transfers to happen regularly every month on a certain date, or every tuesday or on soem other timebased trigger. This pretty much covers my personal needs. Everything else I want to double check before approving. I program for a living. Looking around at my family, I don't see anyone capable of writing a simple Python program in order to e.g. pay a bill and my wife has a PhD. > Financial censorship resistant Is this a feature? Don't we as a society want a way to control e.g. drug lords and tax evaders moving their money around? I have never tried buying penny stocks or any type of stock, but is it really such a big deal that you have to wait a day or week before you can place your bets? And that your bets are limited to the roulette and not the blackjack?
nwah1 6y ago
You can already buy shares of things, crowdfund, buy real estate, invest in REITs, and a million other financial instruments. Since real estate is a physical thing, it needs to interface with the legal system, the recorder of deeds, etc. The goal of all this is to circumvent the legal system, but it will never happen for anything physical. Won't even happen for ownership of music groups if anyone ever hopes to use a court.
wpietri 6y ago
For me at least, "Imagine the possibilities!" is not an answer to the question, "What's it good for?" Indeed, my experience is that it's almost an anti-answer. For example, in the mid-aughts I was talking with the CEO of a well-funded "semantic web" company about joining. I liked the people and the tech was cool, but I just couldn't figure out how it would turn a profit. His answer was similar to yours, a "what couldn't they do?" answer. Turns out they never found an answer, and got acquired for their technology without ever turning into a real business. As somebody who used to write software for financial traders, it's not clear to me that removing clearing houses is a step forward. They provide important services. And I'm even more skeptical that allowing randos to trade in opaque, unregulated assets is a good idea. Music industry actors, for example, have decades of experience in creative accounting and screwing people over. Real estate has a strong caveat emptor tradition, and property management companies are not exactly a watchword for fair dealing. So from you description, I'm mainly imagining people all over the world getting fleeced with no practical legal recourse. As best I can tell, the cryptocurrency space seems hell-bent on rediscovering why strong markets and government oversight exist in the first place. The only demonstrated market advantage Bitcoin has in a decade of operation is in light financial crime like money laundering, capital control evasion, ponzi schemes, ransom payments, and outright theft. I do hope these technologies turn out to be useful for something. But the "imagine the possibilities" routine worked much better when there was less of a track record. Now I'd rather examine the actualities.
- api 6y ago
  You touched on the core problem with cryptocurrency, and it is not a technology problem. The problem is that cryptocurrency and the community around it is absolutely crawling with scams to the point that it's hard to find things that are not scams. Bad drives out good. Even if the tech works perfectly and can be made to scale, if the ecosystem is full of scams it will never be used for anything but scams and black/grey market applications. Anyone not looking to scam will run away. Contrast with the stock market. There are scams, sure, but the majority of stocks are not scams. If you bought stocks at random you have at least >50% odds of buying stock in a real and honest business of some kind. If you participate in cryptocurrency stuff at random I'd say you have a >90% chance of being scammed... probably closer to 99%. All the ad-hoc regulations and institutions around conventional finance are the outcome of a multiple century long Red Queen's race between productive economic activity and noise. Noise includes scams, frauds, bubbles, and other forms of undesirable action or emergent behaviors in markets that get in the way of productive economic activity. That hodge-podge of adaptations is almost certainly sub-optimal, but you're not going to do better by just ignoring the problem domain and offloading everything onto individual market participants. That means every market participant has to operate their own SEC and investigative journalist outfit to have any chance of not being scammed. Not going to happen. A recurrent fallacy of techno-libertarians and techno-utopians is to vastly underestimate human avarice and opportunism. The people designing these systems are usually fairly honest, so they have a hard time imagining what sociopaths and con artists will do with the things they create. If you create anything that offers even the tiniest chance at making money or obtaining some form of status or power, it will be DDOSed with fraud and con artistry of every kind. Edit: I am not totally bearish on this stuff and I see valid uses for it, but I don't think it's as broadly world changing as its evangelists do.
thekyle 6y ago
I don't really see how something like Realt is any different from owning a REIT. You still have to trust that the property actually exists. AFAIK there is no way for a blockchain to "own" property in the U.S. so there must be some shenanigans going on with a corporation owning it and agreeing to pay out the returns to token holders. At this point it seems like you've just recreated being a shareholder in a REIT except without all the legal protections.

louwrentius 6y ago

> In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. Does this sentence actually mean anything? > In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. What does this mean in concrete terms? > Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy. Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life. Who wants this?

seibelj 6y ago
You just keep acting like the “caveman lawyer” from Saturday Night Live and refusing to learn or acknowledge anything. You are being obnoxious and just continuing the HN trope of “blockchain is totally worthless despite it being worth hundreds of billions - the whole world is wrong not me!”
- louwrentius 6y ago
  An ad-hominem, thank you. Do you know anything about human psychology, by the way?
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Very well put. It's hard to not feel conspiratorial seeing this level of ignorance here. Blockchain solves the problem of transferring value without an intemediary, what's so hard to understand for these people?
pavlov 6y ago
> ”Does this sentence actually mean anything?” In more traditional software engineering language, it means “you can run stored procedures on an incredibly slow and limited distributed database.” Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese, and you have to use a scammy cryptocurrency to pay for the privilege of running these unsafe programs. The adherents call this “web 3.0” in some kind of ironic joke because it’s nothing like the web.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Hmm, this reads like something I do understand, thank you.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    You clearly aren't interested in learning anything, just on "dunking" on cryptocurrencies.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      Hmm, where would you get that idea from? https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
      - deeeeplearning 6y ago
        So your response is to post your blogpost dunking on Crypto and reinforcing my point?
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese... You're probably referencing this fuck up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) The huge advantage of smart contracts is that they are supposed to be trustless - you don't need to necessarily trust your business partners because contract is set in stone ... code and will be executed exactly as agreed beforehand. In reality, you move your trust in your understanding of the code. But then when 18 000+ (probably highly technical) people investing $50 million don't spot the bug in the code, then it calls the whole "trustless" concept into question.
parksy 6y ago
Turing completeness in layman's terms means you can write programs on it. Traditionally a computer that most people are familiar with is a single machine, like PC or the device we can hold in our hands. Etherium is a swarm of millions of computers that anyone can add to the swarm. When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. But which node's output is the truth? Without some mechanism in place, a bad actor could claim to have computed an output that serves them greedily. Ethereum has baked in protocols so that the distributed result of millions of nodes running a program reaches a stasticial consensus. Being turing complete means that any computable program can run on Ethereum. So you can imagine writing a program that, say, runs an auction, or performs escrow for contractors, or whatever. You could run doom on it, albeit at an extremely low framerate because you need the swarm to validate each frame. I hope this explanation helps. Edit: I swear autocomplete is becoming more forceful over time.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. (...) Ethereum has baked in protocols so that the distributed result of millions of nodes running a program reaches a stasticial consensus. Usually the reason to run something on more than one computing unit is to achieve additive gains - like getting results faster, or processing more data in the same amount of time. This however sounds like a million computers computing the exact same thing. Why would one want to do that? It's a serious question - I'm having trouble imagining a generic use case.
  - dev_throw 6y ago
    This is to achieve consensus - the N nodes running the smart contract will ideally replace the central authorities that we implicitly trust. This enables trustless transactions, which gets rid of a lot of business red tape and unlocks productivity.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago

ForHackernews 6y ago

Why does any of this require ethereum? We have all kinds of markets already, ones that are much faster, more liquid and more efficient than any blockchain-backed exchanges. There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges, or you from making a new exchange. Literally the only things Ethereum adds are decentralization and no way to dispute or reverse transactions, but for 99% of users those are ANTI-features.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
To trust a currency, you must trust the institutions that manage that currency. You have no control over it. To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable. It still takes me several business days to complete an ACH transaction in the US, and requires I trust the banking system. Transferring cryptocurrencies happen much faster and don't require the same kind of trust or centralized management. What you see as anti-features are good reasons why they won't replace the dollar yet, but they still have a place in the market.
- kingaillas 6y ago
  >To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable. What happens when Ethereum 2 inevitably hits a security bug, much like the ones Ethereum 1 hit that led to the DAO hack/theft (some might say... worked exactly as coded)?
  - parksy 6y ago
    Compare it to traditional security. If you want to steal a few dollars you just need a sharp bit of metal and an easily frightened shopkeeper. Of course when you leave, the shopkeeper (assuming you didn't murder them) can use a phone to inform the authorities. Then a manhunt begins involving resources like police and their cars, radios, guns, protocols, legal justice system, forensic investigators etc. Is the sharp piece of metal a bug? Is the patch just more force, monitoring and authority? Edit: And is the cost and risk of trusting an algorithm comparable to the human cost and risk in maintaining current securities "authenticity", which is basically a might is right system?

an_opabinia 6y ago

If the affiliated get rich quick scheme didn’t pay out as well as it does, people would give as few fucks about ethereum as they do 100,000 other actively maintained but intellectually masturbatory projects on GitHub. The popular impression of the crypto bro is real - that is, the kind of idiot who is only engaged ritualistically with the technology but is actually interested in making a quick buck. This coexists with interesting applications for block chains. The commenter is just making light of how deeply coopted programmers are by crypto bros.

jpxw 6y ago

What’s the difference between realt.co and REITs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust

std_badalloc 6y ago
The difference is presumably the digital contract, that is written in a programming language that only a handful of people on earth can understand, where a programming error can make your money disappear, such that you have no recourse in the court system. Another difference is the pyramid scheme incentives in the cryptocurrency tech, causing everyone who's bought into it to be incentivised to talk about how great it is.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Please don't comment on subjects you know nothing about and are clearly ignorant and show no desire to actually learn.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago

For a bunch of educated people HNers can be some of the dumbest people in the world sometimes.

dewarrn1 6y ago

Imagined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man

deathcakes 6y ago

"In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy." I'm sorry but I really totally fail to see what is appealing about this future hellscape where literally every aspect of our lives is transacted, monetised and profitable. What is good about this? Why is this something to aim for?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Star Trek was a prophetic vision of the future. Except we aren't meant to be running a federation of planets. We are the Ferengi.
markkat 6y ago
I see the opposite happening, as rent-seeking models like that of the recording industry are replaced. Also, this regards the music an artist makes and sells, not every aspect of their life.
- phatfish 6y ago
  I don't see how Ethereum or any "digital currency" solve the real world problems that will still exist. Sure, the big players in the recording industry can treat artists badly. But a service is provided, which is doing all business and marking side of things that most artists don't want to bother about. The idea of recording companies will still exist. Maybe somehow the big incumbents get caught out by the change to a "digital economy", but all that will happen is new ones will appear, and will end up doing exactly the same as the old ones. Digital distribution was supposed to free artists from record companies. Now it is consolidated to a few large companies like Spotify and Apple because musicians don't want to run and market their own digital store front.
carleverett 6y ago
I highly recommend "A Blank Slate of State" by Chris Burniske: https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of-state/ https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of... He makes the same argument that I think you're making, that these new types of "more accessible" financial markets in crypto can corrupt people if they only use it to seek out money for money's sake. TLDR: it's a tool, that can be used for good or for bad, but like any tool it's better to have it than not.

KSteffensen 6y ago

> In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use This sentence is completely opaque to me. I have no idea what you are trying to say. > In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of asset So I will be able to go to Starbucks, buy a cup of coffee, pay for it with Ethereum and not involve my bank? > Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life. I can currently buy shares in companies I work for. Why is Ethereum different (other than I don't understand it)?

gnarcoregrizz 6y ago
No KYC Offline account creation Instantly liquid programmable assets Programmable banking Financial censorship resistant Micro finance Anyone can use it, it’s surprisingly simple You could create your own company+shares if you want and they can be instantly available on any market. Ever tried trading a penny stock, or an international stock? It takes forever to open an account at a brokerage where they may or may not allow you to trade certain types of assets, or at certain times. Trades can be reversed and assets confiscated. It’s a million times easier with crypto. Yes it’s a “dark forest” for now (buyer beware) but there are some legitimate platforms like aave and uniswap. Install metamask and check it out! Feels incredibly futuristic to me
- KSteffensen 6y ago
  > No KYC I don't know what KYC is but I'm not US based. Sounds like some fee that's peculiar to US banking environment (which I have heard is extraordinarily bureaucratic). >Instantly liquid programmable assets Another example of opaque blockchain jargon. Maybe it makes sense, but not as a way to convert the sceptical. >Programmable banking I can currently program transfers to happen regularly every month on a certain date, or every tuesday or on soem other timebased trigger. This pretty much covers my personal needs. Everything else I want to double check before approving. I program for a living. Looking around at my family, I don't see anyone capable of writing a simple Python program in order to e.g. pay a bill and my wife has a PhD. > Financial censorship resistant Is this a feature? Don't we as a society want a way to control e.g. drug lords and tax evaders moving their money around? I have never tried buying penny stocks or any type of stock, but is it really such a big deal that you have to wait a day or week before you can place your bets? And that your bets are limited to the roulette and not the blackjack?

nwah1 6y ago

You can already buy shares of things, crowdfund, buy real estate, invest in REITs, and a million other financial instruments. Since real estate is a physical thing, it needs to interface with the legal system, the recorder of deeds, etc. The goal of all this is to circumvent the legal system, but it will never happen for anything physical. Won't even happen for ownership of music groups if anyone ever hopes to use a court.

wpietri 6y ago

For me at least, "Imagine the possibilities!" is not an answer to the question, "What's it good for?" Indeed, my experience is that it's almost an anti-answer. For example, in the mid-aughts I was talking with the CEO of a well-funded "semantic web" company about joining. I liked the people and the tech was cool, but I just couldn't figure out how it would turn a profit. His answer was similar to yours, a "what couldn't they do?" answer. Turns out they never found an answer, and got acquired for their technology without ever turning into a real business. As somebody who used to write software for financial traders, it's not clear to me that removing clearing houses is a step forward. They provide important services. And I'm even more skeptical that allowing randos to trade in opaque, unregulated assets is a good idea. Music industry actors, for example, have decades of experience in creative accounting and screwing people over. Real estate has a strong caveat emptor tradition, and property management companies are not exactly a watchword for fair dealing. So from you description, I'm mainly imagining people all over the world getting fleeced with no practical legal recourse. As best I can tell, the cryptocurrency space seems hell-bent on rediscovering why strong markets and government oversight exist in the first place. The only demonstrated market advantage Bitcoin has in a decade of operation is in light financial crime like money laundering, capital control evasion, ponzi schemes, ransom payments, and outright theft. I do hope these technologies turn out to be useful for something. But the "imagine the possibilities" routine worked much better when there was less of a track record. Now I'd rather examine the actualities.

api 6y ago
You touched on the core problem with cryptocurrency, and it is not a technology problem. The problem is that cryptocurrency and the community around it is absolutely crawling with scams to the point that it's hard to find things that are not scams. Bad drives out good. Even if the tech works perfectly and can be made to scale, if the ecosystem is full of scams it will never be used for anything but scams and black/grey market applications. Anyone not looking to scam will run away. Contrast with the stock market. There are scams, sure, but the majority of stocks are not scams. If you bought stocks at random you have at least >50% odds of buying stock in a real and honest business of some kind. If you participate in cryptocurrency stuff at random I'd say you have a >90% chance of being scammed... probably closer to 99%. All the ad-hoc regulations and institutions around conventional finance are the outcome of a multiple century long Red Queen's race between productive economic activity and noise. Noise includes scams, frauds, bubbles, and other forms of undesirable action or emergent behaviors in markets that get in the way of productive economic activity. That hodge-podge of adaptations is almost certainly sub-optimal, but you're not going to do better by just ignoring the problem domain and offloading everything onto individual market participants. That means every market participant has to operate their own SEC and investigative journalist outfit to have any chance of not being scammed. Not going to happen. A recurrent fallacy of techno-libertarians and techno-utopians is to vastly underestimate human avarice and opportunism. The people designing these systems are usually fairly honest, so they have a hard time imagining what sociopaths and con artists will do with the things they create. If you create anything that offers even the tiniest chance at making money or obtaining some form of status or power, it will be DDOSed with fraud and con artistry of every kind. Edit: I am not totally bearish on this stuff and I see valid uses for it, but I don't think it's as broadly world changing as its evangelists do.

thekyle 6y ago

I don't really see how something like Realt is any different from owning a REIT. You still have to trust that the property actually exists. AFAIK there is no way for a blockchain to "own" property in the U.S. so there must be some shenanigans going on with a corporation owning it and agreeing to pay out the returns to token holders. At this point it seems like you've just recreated being a shareholder in a REIT except without all the legal protections.