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Utopia Talk / Politics / Cryptocurrency Corner
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:11:03
Cont. from http://uto...hread=88078&time=1620241729329

This reply more or less sums up what appears to be confusing to you:

It's the composable open-source, fully audited, testable components to build ANY FINANCIAL SERVICE that makes it so compelling. THAT DOESN'T EXIST ANYWHERE TODAY.

'Mr. P2P' would love it. That's the whole point. We have all these neat services that serve as financial infrastructure SO THE BIG BANKS DON'T HAVE DO IT. That doesn't render them obsolete, it just changes their role. A DeFi banker will connect the services together for you like I just did for Nim. Or wrap them in their own distinct layer.

I think your issue is you really like traditional finance and big banks, but the reality is they are corrupt as fuck and could use a little transparency.

So we're building it and your system will be made obsolete.
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 14:31:42
My reply to this got eaten so:

1. In terms of composable, testable components - I suspect we will start to see these as AWS lambda functions and similar over time.

2. "I think your issue is you really like traditional finance and big banks, but the reality is they are corrupt as fuck and could use a little transparency."

That does tend to be the typical reaction of crypto supporters: when challenged to actually explain the value add of fully untrusted networks, the fall back is "if you don't agree you must love Goldman Sachs" which is just bizarre projection frankly.

I like the idea of time travel. The fact that you've got a fancy delorian with some LEDs and I want you to explain exactly how that will work as time machine and all you telling me is that it can reach 88 miles an hour, doesn't mean I don't like time travel. It means I think you've confused time and space.

P2P platforms are hardly the big band banks. *However* if we want fractional reserve banking (and economically I think we do) - cryptocoins can't do that (indeed that's the whole point of them).

With that in mind and looking at what applications cryptographic systems support, the value add of untrusted systems seems relatively small; and some of the features required for untrusted fulfillment look incompatible with contract and commercial law.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:40:21
I already told you a million other reasons, so out of exasperation at repeating the same stuff over and over again without being listened to, I've concluded you are simply uncomfortable with change. A bit young to be a stick in the mud, but enjoy.

AWS Lambda hahaha. I use that almost every day. Wrote a Lambda endpoint last week with a Docker image that runs the medical AI I developed and returns quality results from MRI images. I'm intimately familiar, so take that into account (yay fallacies) when I say this:

There's not a snowball's chance in hell that a cohesive set of AWS Lambda endpoints end up being composable parts of a new financial paradigm. -10% chance.

You know almost 0 about professional software development if you think a cohesive standard will be developed that enables interoperability from discrete financial API endpoints. Not to mention you can't do shit offline unlike crypto. There's literally no point to do it in Lambdas. The infrastructure needed is already built. What a waste of time, and it would be a failed effort.

Seen so many software projects run into the ground with people that know enough to be dangerous leading the architecture...stick to your day job. Teach me about physics, I'm happy to listen. Is an atom really 99% empty space?
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 14:40:29
Also I find it odd that you think I've conceded every point.

The key issue is "what specific value does the Blockchain tech bring to the table here", my contention being little. And what we've seem to come up with is that it can do everything a conventional system can do, but slower and decentralised settlement. But no real clear articulation of how decentralisation provides any added value in this instance.

I didn't say blockchain doesn't work. I said it's applications are niche.

And on a macroscale the inability to support fractional reserve banking model (specifically designed not to in order to support trustless network) means it's probably at a disadvantage to banks in a retail situation (as P2P is for most customers: banks take the low risk customers for reasonable returns, creating money at will to do so; whereas borrowers most compete on P2P for fixed pot of liquidity against ventures offering higher returns).

I don't necessarily think that's desirable, optimal, or something I like. But that's just what it is. There are other ways to cut banking down to size of course, rent seeking oligopolies that they are.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:43:58
There's a difference between knowing how to code, and knowing how to engineer systems. The latter is learned in the field. Academic code is some of the most disgusting stuff on the planet. Most of my contracts are porting some deadass researcher's obtuse (probably MATLAB) code into a modern, scalable framework.

Academics know nothing about real systems.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:45:43
> everything a conventional system can do, but slower and decentralised settlement.

I think you misspelled faster.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:47:17
Man, I shudder to think of all the times I've had to take some researcher's crusty bits and make sense of it even though they can't even explain how it works.

The worst ones are the ones that actually think they know what they're doing.

The best ones are honest about their failings and come to the pros with humility. Usually their code is better, too, because they don't punch above their weight.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:48:31
^a clever man could draw parallels to this conversation. :) it's not just story time
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 14:49:48
Nhill:

"I already told you a million other reasons"

You really haven't. You just keep coming back to "but big banks".

So far, not much in the way of concrete use cases.

We shall see re long term evolution - my strong suspicion is we will see continued industrialisation and abstraction and there's no compelling reason why blockchain technology is the superior technology in terms of the kinds of use case it supports. Yes, it's decentralised - but what does that get you in practice?
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:54:46
> Yes, it's decentralised - but what does that get you in practice?

An entire composable financial fabric with limitless possibilities that is censorship resistant, less expensive, quicker, and, with time, easier to use (it's terrible to use right now).

Are you familiar with the Technology Adoption Cycle at all?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/DiffusionOfInnovation.png

We are at the innovator stage. There's a Cambrian Explosion of projects, some of which have a lot of potential and are being tied together in novel ways.

Can you fork Wells Fargo? No, no you can't. If you don't like their service you can't build on top of it or fix it. You gotta go somewhere else. DeFi? It's all open and free to use.

Brother, I've given you way more reasons than decentralization and the reduced dependence on big banks. A more prescient man would be satisfied with those two alone, but please, go back and read what I typed. Not going to copy & paste for you.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed May 05 14:55:02
Seb used to work for the government, with IT platforms and digital stuff. Now he works as a management consultant doing basically the same thing for the same government, but with better pay. So, he is not only invested in the system, he is one of its' henchmen.

;-) <3
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:56:54
Imagine thinking a paradigm that locked up 2.2 TRILLION DOLLARS in value within a decade of being introduced is going to magically plateau and disappear into irrelevance while it's still in the innovator stage.

The jokes write themselves.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 14:57:43
Nim

That explains a lot. You warned me but...I'm wasting my time with him, aren't I?

I do enjoy the dialogue overall, but the thick headedness is frustrating.
Habebe
Member
Wed May 05 15:02:24
So let me ask 1 more thing.

If I wanted to get into investing small time into ETH, what would you recommend?

I see dozens of places offering to sell me it. Should I get a wallet?

I have some loot just sitting around shrinking in value. I have some pegged to buy drugs with. The rest Id like to invest, if I lose it thats fine, I still have an income.

Could you point in a direction as I read white pages and learn?
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 15:02:52
My first job as a programmer (before I became engineer a few years later) was programming financial software for banks. This was a decade ago.

Now I code AI and cryptocurrency.

I've been on both sides as a professional, and let me tell you what. It'd be easy as hell for me to hack your bank account. I wouldn't ever do it, no reason, but the financial infrastructure is a fuckton of duck taped COBOL that no one can touch out of fear of breaking things.

I've seen things you wouldn't believe in traditional finance. Can't say here because it was against the law (nothing I was involved in personally), but none of it would be possible in DeFi.

You clearly don't understand the fragility of our traditional financial infrastructure. It's so bad that cryptocurrency was a higher quality solution within months of being release.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed May 05 15:08:27
I am in stitches :) Because here comes this poster who has been away for some time. Within 3-4 days he is in a discussion with seb, verbatim saying phrases I have said: "go back and read what I typed. Not going to copy & paste for you" and showing the same frustration I have felt (and several other posters) talking with seb. See, your crypto missionary has failed to solve all the problems of the world and explain everything. It is like the gun thread, guns don't solve all the worlds problems, so ergo they solve no problems :)

THUS all you have achieved is validating seb's impression of himself as a genius. You are just another "libertarian tech bro" having naive dreams of utopia.

This is good, this is really good. We needed a jolt of energy, this place is a ghost of halcyon days.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed May 05 15:11:05
Nhill
I hope you stick around. I am going to read into DeFi and Liquity. I appreciate the information you have supplied.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 15:13:00
> If I wanted to get into investing small time into ETH, what would you recommend?

If you just want to invest and not use the financial infrastructure you can use that steaming pile of dogshit called Robinhood. It's the only platform of which I know where they don't charge visible fees. Of course, they sell the orderflow to market makers so they aren't saints or anything. I'd also never use Robinhood as they have questionable practices.

So what I would recommend is using an exchange. Different exchanges are available in different places. In my state, pretty much the only choice is Coinbase.

> I see dozens of places offering to sell me it. Should I get a wallet?

I always transfer directly to my wallet. But that also entails expensive fees. You can make more money (by avoiding fees) if you keep it on the exchange.

The downside is you now have to trust the exchange to hold your assets.

If you transfer to your wallet nobody can touch it unless you expose your private keys. Does that make sense?

> I have some loot just sitting around shrinking in value. I have some pegged to buy drugs with. The rest Id like to invest, if I lose it thats fine, I still have an income.

If you want to do DeFi itself I'd recommend at least $10,000 to start because gas fees are high right now (gas is what you pay the miners, basically the equivalent of a credit card transaction fee).

Otherwise you can start with as little as you want to invest.

Note that Ethereum just hit its all time high yesterday. So it might pull back in value for a bit. Crypto has sharp pullbacks, so be prepared to see your ETH drop 10-15% every once in a while before going back up to a new all time high.

As long as you hold it and don't sell, you'll be fine.

> Could you point in a direction as I read white pages and learn?

What do you want to learn? If you want to invest in ETH just make an account at an exchange such as Coinbase, Robinhood (fuck RH), Kraken, or Binance. They are the big ones. After you make and fund your account it's just a matter of pressing a few buttons to invest.

I can point you to resources about how to send the Ethereum to your wallet, if you'd like, but the instructions will differ based on which exchange you pick.

I know I go fast and cover a lot, so let me know where I need to fill in the gaps.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 15:17:26
> I am in stitches :) Because here comes this poster who has been away for some time.

I think I last visited UP like 5 years ago, maybe more. :) Quite the welcome.

> I appreciate the information you have supplied.

I appreciate the open mind and giving me a chance to explain shit. I'm passionate about all technology, and don't really care if anyone here buys or gets into crypto. Despite what WoO, Hood, and crew may think, I ain't selling shit. Make up your own minds. Makes 0 difference to me. I'm here to share knowledge.
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 15:48:19
nhill:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/DiffusionOfInnovation.png

Oh gosh, you are going to get the Gartner Hype Cycle out next - as though there was no technology that ever imploded and all inevitably proceed to full adoption.

"Imagine thinking a paradigm that locked up 2.2 TRILLION DOLLARS in value"
On a mark to market basis - that's not a hugely meaningful number - the whole issue here is establishing an underlying intrinsic value.

Indeed, a technology that *doesn't* have a strong intrinsic value is most likely to be at it's valued peak in it's innovator phase. That's just a truism! The whole point here is understanding the intrinsic value.

Put it this way, south sea company in todays dollars, was valued about $4.3T. Tulip mania drove the VoT valuation to $7.9m. Both bubbles popped. The SouthSea company in it's innovator phase. I don't particularly like comparing cryptocoins to tulip mania - that's what NFTs are for - but if you are going to give specious arguments like "look at my market cap" I'm afraid that is where we do end up going.

Yes, bubble do exist, and even bigger ones have existed and gone pop! Market cap is no insurance against this.

"There's a difference between knowing how to code, and knowing how to engineer systems."

And there is a difference between engineering technical systems and understanding law, governance, the financial system and monetary system. As I said way back - it is possible to focus too much on understanding the elegant mechanisms and maths that give cryptocoins their properties, than understanding what those properties actually allow in terms of business models.

So for example, when BIS was looking at digital land registry, it quickly became apparent that non-repudiation was an absolute non-starter in terms of the impact it would have on the property market. Namely there are various ways to illegally acquire land through a valid process, and certain circumstances (legal cases resulting in specific performance, say - and handling land whose owners had expired, and witness protection) where ability to repudiate transactions are actually essential. This key idea of perfect independence from intervention does not always work.

Nim gives a partial account of what I've been up to in govt. Its a mix of things, but a fair bit of it is looking at what we can do with tech, including secure multi-party computation and AI - and particularly what can be a lever to foster broader innovation in the economy. Nim has some very weird ideas about govt.


BTW, re diffusion curves, you might find Simon Wardley's musings interesting if you've not come across him.

http://blo...n-diffusion-and-evolution.html

Nim:
"So, he is not only invested in the system, he is one of its' henchmen."
Gosh, what a warped view of the world you have. Yeah, we are all servants of THE MAN. Every day we chomp cigars and work on ways to keep you DOWN. To work in the public sector means a rigid adherence to the status quo.

Jeezus. Take the tin foil hat off!
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 15:55:59
Basically, in govt, we spent a long time looking at blockchains various potential uses for all sorts of things.

Contrary from Nims perspective the great idea was not "argh, kill it, threat!", it was "yipee, what can we outsource to a decentralised autonomous market place so we can slash our opex and sack a bunch of people to cut the deficit, and possibly make a revenue source?"

The answer is in almost all cases the technology was too constraining in its fundamental properties in ways that would damage the economy surrounding whatever it was we wanted to shift to a blockchain based approach.

In the end, a trusted centralized model using public verification gave most of the advantages; bar the key one for us: getting rid of the trusted authority and accessing those sweet sweet savings.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 16:07:07
> And there is a difference between engineering technical systems and understanding law, governance, the financial system and monetary system. As I said way back - it is possible to focus too much on understanding the elegant mechanisms and maths that give cryptocoins their properties, than understanding what those properties actually allow in terms of business models.

I appreciate you sharing your experience and I'll give it some thought. As I said before I'm also adept at finance and economics partly from getting an MBA (covered business law heavily there too) but mostly from beating the market for years with a 4 quadrant approach of investing in industries that benefit from growth/inflation and their inverse. E.g growth/deflation, growth/inflation, stagnation/inflation, stagnation/deflation. BTW get ready for stagflation in Q3.

That said, there's always room to grow so I'll give it more thought.

In the end, none of my arguments have been refuted other than the govt controlled cryptocurrency argument. Every other one you concede by ignoring and brushing it off with hand wavy explanations where convenient. I'm perfectly fine with you going back and repudiating them further-- the correction on the centralized cryto was much appreciated. Keep 'em coming.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 16:27:15
BTW can you answer my question:

Is an atom really 99% empty space?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed May 05 16:31:08
Let just summarize what seb just spend several paragraphs of fluff on. The government he worked for tried to use block chain for everything other than what Satoshi wrote it for and it failed.

The place where I work, they are doing it to, all those research grants have to be used for something! I mean, even I in my stupidity have thought about a "genius" idea to use block chain for some other thing (regulatory surveillance), than what it was written for.

I am sure there are many successful (some yet to be found) applications for block chain other than BTC, Chainlink, DeFi etc, but more will fail than succeed. And this, as I said, in the first thread to Daemon, like trying to solve all kinds of medical conditions with antibiotics or cancer meds. It is retarded, but that doesn't mean antibiotics and cancer meds are not very useful.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 16:35:27
Yup. Blockchain has just become a buzzword in corporate that upper management throws around to sound cool. Willing to bet whomever initiated the effort for Seb's tea is an overly ambitious middle-upper management guy that makes up for his lack of intelligence by trying to sound smart and brown nosing everyone. Either that or he's just a dumbass trying to shoehorn whatever sticks. HaVe wE tRiEd tEh bLoCkChAiN?!
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed May 05 16:46:25
I would also appreciate if seb could clarify, what he he meant with "space *and* time" earlier. I thought they were part of the same "spacetime" and that time was another dimension inseparable from "space".
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 17:13:42
Nhill:

Depends what you mean by "99%", "Empty", "Space" and "Atom" ;-).

The idea it is mostly empty space implies that the electron has no volume and is point like rather than being a distributed probability cloud or excited quantum field; which isn't strictly accurate, but then assigns volume to the nucleus even though it too is made up of similar objects.

It's 99% empty is the simplest way to explain to school kids or non majors that matter isn't really a solid, homogenous block of uniform density. The stuff that pushes back at you is actually a combination of electrostatic force from the outer shell electrons combined with the Pauli exclusion principle that forces electron density into certain radii around the nucleus defined by the shrodinger equation and prohibits fermions from occupying states with identical quantum numbers in the same system; but the inertia is all concentrated in a much smaller space at the centre of the atom.

All of that also applies to the nucleus, nucleons and constituent quarks too, but as the forces there are even greater for most purposes things that can go sailing through the electron cloud around a nucleus will scatter off the nucleus. So in a particular energy regime, yeah it's empty except for a solid bit in the middle.

Only thats not really solid either. Not really.

Basically depending on the level of abstraction you want to go to you have a hard time explaining what would constitutes space that isn't empty. And even then, empty space isn't really empty anyway thanks to virtual particles.

And then you get into the whole "what is space anyway?" question on quantum scales, because we know GR doesn't work on that scale. And then we get into loop quantum gravity or other theories for quantising space.
nhill
Member
Wed May 05 17:17:32
So it's turtles all the way down then, huh.
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 17:35:34
Nim:

"The government he worked for tried to use block chain for everything other than what Satoshi wrote it for and it failed."

*Sigh* yes. I've been telling you, the types of business model a blockchain tech can support are actually relatively limited. A payment system is one of the few that do really really work.

As for why apply blockchain - it's a publically verifiable ledger.

What do you think a driving license is..or the land registry... 90% of public service is effectively a ledger. Ditto for tax and benefits accounts.

80% of public service admin costs are staff, many of which work on maintaining ledgers.

So yes on one level there are people going "ooh blockchain" (and also lots and lots of IT geeks desperate to find a reason to develop blockchain portfolio so they can get the hell out of Swansea and get into fintech).

But the idea isn't totally without merit either, or we could have "Yes, Ministered" it.

We did sort of work out a business model for a distributed land register. It's just that it would have done bad things economically to how the housing market worked, created a few insoluble problems etc.

Still there is plenty of room for improvement by straight up digitisation. The creaking COBOL monstrosities are not unique to finance by any means. One of the reasons COBOL remains pervasive is, perversely, it handles financial transactions better than some modern languages through use of fixed rather than floating point numbers. It can be a fucking nightmare to get calculations accurate at certain scales in some languages, and creates performance issues. Obviously all of this can be solved, but you end up with a potent mix of critical national infrastructure, stupid budgetary processes that make paying down technical debt hard to win budget for, and nightmare toxic legacy dumps that bloody understands and everyone is affraid to touch.

So you end up with the DVLA (two databases and a website, if built from scratch) being a 4000 man organisation, the largest employer in Swansea, the biggest print shop in North Europe and responsible for two thirds of all mail delivery in Wales, running of a mainframe that was once transported by helicopter several hundred miles, and which the British Museum of Computing has an option on, should they ever get rid of it completely.

The idea that you might be able to do vehicle registration (a ledger if vehicles and keepers) through some kind of distributed system that you can leave entirely to those putting the vehicle on the market without need for a central authority is quite attractive and worth exploring.
Seb
Member
Wed May 05 17:45:48
Nhill:

Yeah. But in the end the important point is that "stuff" isn't smooth homogenous matter. It's all force fields.

And the main thing that stops everything collapsing is first and foremost this idea of the Pauli exclusion principle. Two fermions can't occupy the same quantum state.

That's why atoms aren't more squashy - sure the electrons in the atoms of your hand repel the ones in the wood of the table, but why don't they just both squash up closer to the nucleus?

It's the Pauli exclusion principle.

And the really interesting thing with neutron stars is that it is not so much that gravity overcomes the electrostatic force pushing electrons and nuclei, it is that the gravitational potential energy pushes elections into higher and higher energy states until they inverse beta decay with a proton and turn into a neutron. And then the same can happen again to get the neutrons to a high enough density that a black hole forms.
Habebe
Member
Wed May 05 17:58:51
Nhill, First, If I type chill that's autocorrect.

And I completely am grateful for you answering all my noob questions.

I did get a coinbase account. And I may activate my robinhood account that I never finished.

I think for now I'll wait on investing till I get a better grasp. But I like the coinbase account condensing the ups and downs.When it has a big drop maybe I'll stick my toe in.

So far here is the gist that I get.

Bit coin works as an online ledger with an attached currency. Instead of a bank verifying how much wqs sent or received , people do it (miners) by solving small puzzles,

I think* this is similar to when like gmail asks me to pick out road signs in pictures to verify I'm a real person. And for that verification these miners are paid small amounts of bitcoin.

Doge is a similar copycat, however it had easier use to send value from person A to person B.

Etherium took the idea of blockchain (decentralised verification ledger) and instead of just a currency it lets you send value to all sorts of stuff.

Now admittedly I get a little lost with what all Etherium can be used for.

I want to look into these gas fees before I invest and want to get a better grasp for it. Part of me though sees ETH as having an insane amount of uses and potential.


and figure the money is only losing value now, it cant hurt to let it sit there for a few years anyway. But Id likely only add like $200 a month after my initial purchase which might not be worth these gas fees just yet and best to find other places to put it to shield it from inflation.

Now for regular banking options it sounds cool too.The cash app was a nice way to send money to my friends before, does this offer much benefit to that for value transfers?


Habebe
Member
Wed May 05 18:10:28
I seen some groups will actually pay you small amounts to take small courses on learning how crypto works.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu May 06 04:29:37
Seb
When you start sighing, it is a clear sign of oxygene deprivation, stop twatsplaining what I just explained. No one cares about what block chain fails to do, we care about what it *is* doing. So, you end up giving a bunch of credentials, that only confirms, you don’t get it. You don’t get it and you are actually part of the problem. Sorry.
Seb
Member
Thu May 06 05:02:16
Nim:

"You don’t get it and you are actually part of the problem. Sorry."

LOL - from the man that just tried to explain that "each coin has a unique hash".
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu May 06 05:22:40
Grats seb, I forgott to write coin ”transaction”. I guess now all the BS you have said about illicit activity is true. If this a victory for you, I can’t imagine what a defeat looks like. Pathetic.
nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:12:35
Seb

Thanks for the explanation, most of it makes sense but some concepts I'll need to explore.

Do you think this supports a thesis that Reality is essentially holographic? By that, I mean it's turtles (space) all the way down and matter is perception more than Reality?

I don't mean philosophically, nor do I know/care much about the holographic thesis. Just curious from a Physics standpoint.

Habebe

> Doge is a similar copycat, however it had easier use to send value from person A to person B.

DOGE is nothing more than a joke the creator made to illustrate the ridiculous explosion of different cryptos being used at a the time. It has no fundamentals and was worthless until Elon Musk got involved.

In fact, the creator himself sold all of his coins years ago as the joke ran its course.

Don't buy $DOGE unless you are a social sentiment investor. You'll lose money long-term, I guarantee. Look at it's value a year ago compared to know. It'll get back.

But if you want to have some fun and try to scalp some money on a day trade, have at it.

> Etherium took the idea of blockchain (decentralised verification ledger) and instead of just a currency it lets you send value to all sorts of stuff.

Ethereum added the concept of smart contracts and those contracts themselves are considered cryptocurrencies in their own right. But they need Ethereum to run, so Ethereum is going to overtake Bitcoin (which only has use a store of value, has no intrinsic value itself anymore) over time.

> and figure the money is only losing value now, it cant hurt to let it sit there for a few years anyway. But Id likely only add like $200 a month after my initial purchase which might not be worth these gas fees just yet and best to find other places to put it to shield it from inflation.

Yes. It's intrinsically inflation resistant. This point is disputed, so do your own research. But there's a strong inverse correlation. Some people argue that the inverse correlation isn't due to inflation, and rather more the hype. We'll see over time.

> Now for regular banking options it sounds cool too.The cash app was a nice way to send money to my friends before, does this offer much benefit to that for value transfers?

My friend sent me a few hundred dollars of Ethereum and the transaction fee was around $6. That seems competitive with other forms of currency. Especially considering that if he sent me $100,000,000 it's still be a $6-10 fee. Much more competitive rates.
nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:12:54
The delay in response is because I just slept for about 18 hours.
nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:19:42
> But Id likely only add like $200 a month after my initial purchase which might not be worth these gas fees just yet and best to find other places to put it to shield it from inflation.

At $200 a month, that's about a 4.5% service charge. Comparable to a credit card processing fee, which is usually 1-4% depending on the card and transaction level.

But remember, you can also keep it on the exchange for 5 months and then transfer to your wallet.

If you did that you'd have <1% transaction fees which is much better than a credit card.
nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:25:56
> Still there is plenty of room for improvement by straight up digitisation. The creaking COBOL monstrosities are not unique to finance by any means. One of the reasons COBOL remains pervasive is, perversely, it handles financial transactions better than some modern languages through use of fixed rather than floating point numbers. It can be a fucking nightmare to get calculations accurate at certain scales in some languages, and creates performance issues. Obviously all of this can be solved, but you end up with a potent mix of critical national infrastructure, stupid budgetary processes that make paying down technical debt hard to win budget for, and nightmare toxic legacy dumps that bloody understands and everyone is affraid to touch.

That's not the case anymore, but it used to be true. COBOL has no advantage over other languages for accuracy. Almost all modern languages support fixed point arithmetic.

I've been on the battle lines. The reason COBOL isn't touched is because it's virtually impossible to modify without breaking things because of all the nasty hacks, coupled code, and lack of cohesive architecture in the 60s/70s. Software engineering was an afterthought. Mainly because COBOL doesn't really have the capabilities. Can't even do recursion, for example.

If you think COBOL is still around because it's 'battle tested and has some advantages' you're dead wrong. It's a steaming pile of insecure garbage. Internal banking transaction security is the easiest thing in the world to hack.

Ask me how I know.
nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:28:19
We had 3 full-time developers whose job was to UNDERSTAND what the core banking code did.

You read that right. They didn't even write the code, they just translated it (often wrongly) for people like me that had to interact with the system.

I wrote a WPF wrapper around our Core Banking COBOL code by using microservices that communicated with COBOL proxies.

Guess what? It won a shitload of national awards and was demoed at banking conferences all over the country.

Simply because it wasn't a steaming pile of shit (little did they know the steaming pile of shit was actually just abstracted away by my code).
jergul
large member
Thu May 06 18:41:51
The ledger function is to me the most interesting and I imagine a future where proof of work is actually value added.

Follow a cod from trawl to fish finger on the table.

Each step demands work, proof of work and quality of work data.

nhill
Member
Thu May 06 18:52:46
Have you looked into Proof of Space?

It's the best of both world IMO. Requires proof-of-work initially to create the 'plots' (A LOT OF WORK), but then the plots are stored on a hard drive and no longer require much energy. From there it's basically playing Bingo. If your plot contains the hash, you get to mine it. Instead of everyone trying to mine at the same time with GPU (much more wattage) power.

It has the same advantages as PoW but takes virtually no power (relatively speaking).
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 01:56:50
nhill
I meant that each step of processing mines a distinct hash carrying processing information. A chain is created and is ultimately purchased by a consumer.

This cod coin can give producers feedback on the final value of the product their hash was a part of.

Insentivising and rewarding better treatment and payment for cod. Including all the enviromental and regulatory quality control you could throw at it.

There are problems with this. But Codcoins in similar is were I feel the value of cryptocurrency intrisicly lies.

Full disclosure. I did my mining really early. Cheap electricity in Northern Norway and I had a old house to heat. It made no difference to me if I heated the house with a couple gpus or an electric stove.

I cashed out too early to be a multi millionaire alas :D.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 02:13:26
Oh, yeah, that is different. I think that's an inevitability.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 02:23:28
nhill
Is it really that different?

Seb
This is incidentally were I think the UK went astray. Blockchain gives better, more assessible information, not cheaper information. People still need to do stuff to create ledgers. They can just make better ledgers with the same work.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 03:30:22
jergul

I mean it was different than my understanding. I thought you were talking from a cryptographic perspective. And I do think the concept is inevitable. It's a good use case.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 05:31:39
Nhill:

The holographic principle - that the information contained in the system can be encoded in its surface - isn't necessarily meaning we are literally some kind of hologram with the information encoded in the outside.

It can get a bit metaphysical. Like wave particle duality, the important point is that our macroscopic conceptions of matter etc are approximations and the way things behave vary at different energy scales. It's not so much that matter is an illusion, so much as matter is much stranger than it appears on everyday basis.


"If you think COBOL is still around because it's 'battle tested and has some advantages"

If I meant to say that, I'd have said it.

Yes, modern languages support fixed point arithmetic, but I remember at least one of the attempts to shift off a particular system failed because of scalability. Though that would have been about 2014ish.
Getting rid of legacy tech tends to fail because pretty much everything is stacked up against doing basic house work in the public sector - most specifically budgeting and governance process. Of course part of that scaling problem was that this particular agency hadn't embraced the idea they could use public cloud.

The big problem is a confluence of all these issues that runs head first into public sector budgetary and program governance deficiencies.

The shift to outsourcing and reducing headcount, and finance ministries generally viewing tech as a fixed output of a program rather then a thing that then only gets modified by specific change projects creates a situation where almost everything other than routine bau operations require specific funding.

"So this is going to cost us a lot of money, expose us to a lot of risk, and may actually increase our opex* in the short to medium term, but the payoff is an opportunity cost in reducing costs of future change and literally not being able to recover from a catastrophic issue due to our last architect being 75 years old? I uh, support exploring this further... why don't you bring back an iterated business case to investment committee to look at again next quarter?"

I remember being in a meeting where a chap with the job title "Government COO" starting demanding to know if we could "just TUPE a COBOL expert in from Germany", like TUPE was the kings shilling or something.

Fixing the plumbing is easier than getting a budget to fix the plumbing.

And then they wonder why "we can't do more with data", then Palantir shows up promising fancy analytics based on the idea that can just suck loads of information out of these systems in under a week.



Jergul:


The key point is decentralisation. If you can work out a business/regulatory model that can be fully decentralised, you can step back and the state doesn't need to fund the activity.

If on the other hand you need someone to have privileged editing access (for example a court order to transfer a property title because it's been accidentally sent to the wrong address, has in some other way fraudulently transferred) then you can't have decentralisation, then a full blockchain implementation doesn't work.

But you can have the publicly verifiable system by using a Merkle Tree instead. Similar to a blockchain in that you can publicaly verify the integrity of the register. That sort of thing has been adopted.

The challenge with using blockchain to verify the integrity of a physical supply chain is that the dominant form of supply chain fraud is substituting deficient goods or fraudulently certifying deficient goods rather than issuing of fraudulent certificates (checking of which can be done with digital signatures), or a fraudulent entry into the register itself. So improving the auditablity of register doesn't really help.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 05:34:27
Nhill
Yah, I am sometimes too smert for my own good. As noted, it cost me a pretty penny.

Crypto to me means uncorruptable data, not secret data. Meaningless proof of work like running gpu's through the night offended my sensibilities, so linking blockchain tech to actual tangibles with monetary value enhanced by every hashcode in the sequence seemed very sexy and way better than coins priced only be sentiment.

I would have been a grand hoarder of cod coins if such had existed :D.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 05:52:50
Seb
The point is more to reward faithful market actors than to eliminate unfaithful ones.

I feel rather strongly that trying to lessen control is counter productive. Blockchain is a way of rewarding good behavior, not punishing bad.

The weight and scale inspectors will always be needed in other words.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 06:09:28
jergul:

"The weight and scale inspectors will always be needed in other words."

Yup, but then I think an untrusted network becomes the least efficient solution.

You can just have digital signatures into a centrally managed database.

The point of most of the technology is specifically to do away with trusted individuals with higher privileges.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 06:16:40
Seb
That is a very limited way of looking at the point of block chain technology.

I elaborated above on where I think the value lays.
OsamaIsDaWorstPresid
Member
Fri May 07 07:57:54
shuld i sel mi houze and use da monie 2 buy dogecoin
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 09:03:30
So, then maybe this is about incorruptible data, in trustless, decentralized and transparent network.

Jergul
Your cod coin thing, is something that would fit neatly in the "Smart contract" concept. Basically a contract that releases funds or collateral when certain coded conditions are met or not met. And easy one would be, when x amount of cod is off loaded in the harbor, the fisherman gets paid X amount of coins. Without the need for a third party. Smart contracts is a really really interesting concept, I only learned about yesterday, finally finishing the Lex Fridman podcast.

I am sort of getting what Nhill is talking about. Everything can be done without the middlemen, profiting ordinary people instead. Having a lot of money going in, will always give you an edge, but you beyond that it is the same game.

I think crytpto is going to get established first in countries with really shitty financial systems and large amount of corruption and inflation. In fact, it already is. They have the biggest incentives to adopt early. I really recommend this 3 hour episode with the founder of chainlink:

http://youtu.be/TPXTmVdlyoc

And I am thinking...If there ever was an equalizing force, to achieve, everything that the left has wanted to achieve for over a 100 years, crypto is the best candidate to date. Not just for developing countries, but developing individuals as well.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 09:38:10
Jergul:

Give a worked example - pretty much every one we looked at (and sustainable fishing and EHCs was an example!) - always suffered from the fact that it didn't actually address any fraud vectors over a system using digital certificates with a central register run by an authority, and in many cases weaker unless you trusted certain agents to verify the data on chain reflects the reality of the goods.

Nim:

"And easy one would be, when x amount of cod is off loaded in the harbor, the fisherman gets paid X amount of coins. Without the need for a third party."

Someone needs to verify that the fish actually was unloaded - blockchain can't do that. And both the fisherman and the person disbursing funds need to trust that person.

Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 09:46:27
Jergul
"The weight and scale inspectors will always be needed in other words."

Why?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 09:47:03
Seb
A sensor and bar code reader could relay that information to the network.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 09:48:23
It is not even like sensors and bar code readers are not already relaying this kind of information, it just that the information being relayed doesn't directly settle a transaction in waiting.
Dukhat
Member
Fri May 07 10:10:47
*yawn* More gaslighting. "Normal institutions are corrupt as fuck. Trust this completely untested, unverified system!"

Fucking crypto evangelists are always fucking morons.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 10:27:45
Nim:

"A sensor and bar code reader could relay that information to the network."

So, lets say I am an evil fisherman, and I put some other fish onto the scale. Worse, it's not fresh, it's actually by catch I caught earlier this week.

Sure, the same sensors are being used now, but what gives those integrity is that there is a person receiving the fish.

Automation isn't the issue - we could equally hook that barcode up to a bit of software that triggers an automatic payment. The reason it is *not* automated is because there needs to be some verification of the physical goods (even if only performed in principle on a risk based basis).

This is why the weight and scale inspectors will still be needed.

Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 10:41:49
Seb
Just add a vision system that can tell good fish from bad fish. No people needed. The answer is more sensors :)

You can bribe people and people are fallible is some additional and rather predictable ways. We sort of run into this problem, every time the idea of out sourcing surveillance to a domestic body in the country of manufacturing. Can we trust a chinese inspector? It can be done, based on the same kind of fallible agreements and processes to establish trust, we already have. But primarily you want to send your own people, because you know them, trust them and control them.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 10:47:50
”we could equally hook that barcode”

You are right, we could and the automation part isn’t the issue, it is the infrastrcture around that allows this take place without the middle men and third parties and without the need to trust any single actor. That is essentially the value if a third party, you can trust in the results because the third party is independent and impartial.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 11:12:51
> Fucking crypto evangelists are always fucking morons.

Duckhat continues to impress me with his ability to completely avoid a logical argument and rely on fallacies.

It's fascinating, really.

*motions to the kid table*

Now please take a seat, kid.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 11:17:35
Seb

Thank you for the productive discussion. I will have further questions once I do some further research. Do you have any sources you could recommend that are along these lines? (I have PhD level skill in mathematics, but it doesn't necessarily need to be that technical)?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 11:58:45
Dukhat had a meltdown when Rugian announced the passing of his father, little less than a year ago. He got very emotional and honest about his (and I quote) "raw naked hatred for conservatives" and as it turned out, their dead parents. He hasn't really been the same since Trump got elected.

What you are seeing is actually an exceptionally well mannered Dukhat.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 12:00:09
A fish becomes several things that are treated in distinct ways. It is really hard to barcode from deck to dinner.

The main point of blockchain based traceability is trust and quality through accountability and reward.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 12:16:20
Dukhat

I'm sorry for the loss of your father. Despite the hostile welcome, it's good to see you still around after all these years.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 12:18:18
jergul

Agreed.

This has a lot of implications, such as completely preventing counterfeit items by manufacturers storing the private keys, and the public keys on barcodes.

That's a million dollar idea which is probably already being worked on somewhere.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 12:19:26
The items (cod, in this case) could also have an NFT smart contract attached to it, and you could buy/sell the rights to the fish based on supply/demand curves for a specific boat.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 12:29:05
Well, let's figure it out from sea to port, like on a pilot project level difficulty before we solve the entire supply chain into your mouth :)

Also I don't think the main point of block chain, can be anything without de-centralization. We can already provide trust and quality and accountability, but they are all contingent on some third party assuring everything and taking a cut. Those surveillance schemes, especially once you get into complex or important stuff like medtech, safety or complex systems, get really expensive. Of course, some of that is by design, to keep out the phony actors, but a lot of it is constrained by physical reality.

As you can imagine Covid has had some terrible consequences for all these surveillance and inspection schemes. They are being conducted remotely and I can't tell if the frowns on the faces are because this is new and uncomfortable or because the quality of surveillance is actually worse. Probably a mix, but ultimately easy to fix.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 12:32:01
nhill
oh no, Rugian's father died and Dukhat couldn't conceal his happiness over the fact, to put it mildly. Dukhat is completely beyond help and salvation. Everyone else on UP are assholes in their own (including me) ways, but we are assholes within the accepted norms of assholery.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 14:18:14
> oh no, Rugian's father died and Dukhat couldn't conceal his happiness over the fact, to put it mildly. Dukhat is completely beyond help and salvation. Everyone else on UP are assholes in their own (including me) ways, but we are assholes within the accepted norms of assholery.

Ah, well my condolences to Rugian then.

Duckhat's tone does come across as a bitter has-been. Hope he recovers.

> Everyone else on UP are assholes in their own (including me) ways, but we are assholes within the accepted norms of assholery.

This is part of the appeal of UP. I've never seen such a menagerie of assholes.

We should charge admission to this damn zoo.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 14:18:57
Is Real Fred still around?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 14:26:40
He hasn't been around for some years. Hot Rod, if you remember him passed away a few years ago.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 14:55:22
Dukhat

Have you kept in touch with Fred? He still alive?

Nim

I saw his memorial in UGT. RIP. He was both one of my favorite and least favorite personalities at the same time.

Paradox.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 15:02:07
Nimi
The decentralized aspect is unimportant, as are individual control points that literally add value.

Bacalao sorters are worth their weight in diamonds

I like the feedback loop potential. Treat the fish right and you will be rewarded.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 15:04:10
Its one of the things we seem to struggle with. Monetizing information.

Blockchain literally does this.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 15:05:18
"He was both one of my favorite and least favorite personalities at the same time.

Paradox."

People feel that way about Paradox Games.

Paradox squared!
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 15:21:03
> People feel that way about Paradox Games.

Some people maybe...there's no paradox for me though. I straight up dislike their games (Prison Architect was good but not developed by them is my understanding).
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 15:43:13
haha!

There are a number of their games that I love. Crusader Kings III is my current infatuation when we discount FPS stuff.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 15:57:57
Stellaris was the last one I played by them.

It suffered from a terrible endgame like all the other Paradox games do.

But I'm glad you're having fun with them. :)
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 16:17:56
Nim:
"Just add a vision system that can tell good fish from bad fish. No people needed. The answer is more sensors :)"

Right, in principle you can do that, but in the end the you are still then trusting that system - so you could let it make payments direct through an automated bank transfer. The untrusted nature of the blockchain system is redundant: it doesn't let you do anything new here.

"You can bribe people and people are fallible is some additional and rather predictable ways."

Yup, you can, and this is the next major problem with blockchain systems: non-repudiation. If you have a corrupt port health authority issuing certificates, conventionally those certificates can be revoked. It's much harder to do that with a ledger entry on a block chain, and this is the main failure mechanism for blockchain based business models applied to physical goods.

The question to ask yourself is "how does blockchain remove the need for trust/verification in relation to the properties of physical goods?" It guarantees the integrity of the data, but it does not guarantee the accuracy of the correspondence of the data to the physical goods.

Generally it is not integrity is the data that is the problem conventionally, it is the latter.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 16:45:39
Nhill:

Most of what we are talking about here is undergrad level - my PhD was in nuclear fusion which is decidedly practical and that was some years ago now.

I'd probably hit MITs online courses and work up to quantum field theory, but it depends what you want to do. Some of this boils down to long standing open questions of how you want to interpret the physical theories so if you are looking for ultimate explanations - much remains an open question. And possibly an unresolvable one.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 16:46:35
It's just intellectual curiosity. Thanks. I've read the Feynman Lectures and they were a great introduction.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 16:47:47
> If you have a corrupt port health authority issuing certificates, conventionally those certificates can be revoked. It's much harder to do that with a ledger entry on a block chain, and this is the main failure mechanism for blockchain based business models applied to physical goods.

This isn't true. Revoking blockchain transactions is built into smart contracts. You can issue a cancelling contract.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 16:50:32
> The question to ask yourself is "how does blockchain remove the need for trust/verification in relation to the properties of physical goods?" It guarantees the integrity of the data, but it does not guarantee the accuracy of the correspondence of the data to the physical goods.

It's a publicly auditable, unhackable ledger. That doesn't exist in any form. Have you seen how many databases get hacked? There's no need to hack a blockchain ledger to view it-- it's already public. And because it's public, it's unhackable without consensus. You can't change the blockchain without 1000s of computers noticing. And the company can have 100% consensus to prevent that vector if they don't want to issue separate coins.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 16:51:54
Nhill/jergul:


"This has a lot of implications, such as completely preventing counterfeit items by manufacturers storing the private keys, and the public keys on barcodes."

That's just a digital signature and is done already in many applications.

What matters isn't the integrity of the data, what matters is the integrity of the barcode being applied to a piece of cod rather than say, a haddock.

As long as you need a trusted third party to do that, the fact you can create an untrusted mechanism for proving the integrity of the data is irrelevant as the data is only accurate if you can find some source to vouch for the third party - and the blockchain becomes redundant.




Seb
Member
Fri May 07 16:55:43
Basically, this works much better when there's no need to prove correspondence between data and product because the data on the chain is the product.

Hence: currency and pure information services (again, services not products necessarily, c.f. NFTs where you can't actually control distribution of say an image once rendered).

There's probably a near DRM system in there somewhere though.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 16:55:48
> Right, in principle you can do that, but in the end the you are still then trusting that system - so you could let it make payments direct through an automated bank transfer. The untrusted nature of the blockchain system is redundant: it doesn't let you do anything new here.

You can run validator nodes with AI pretty easily with the right amount of censors and a large enough test data set. Validator node support is built into smart contracts.

With that, you may assign a trustworthiness value to the smart contract (it'd be a smart contract in itself). Perhaps a threshold where manual intervention is needed for investigation.

Can't believe you don't understand the capabilities this can enable. Sure, other technologies can do this. But this is already built. It's like having unlimited cloud computer power for free.

Although I assume the company itself would run validator nodes, and, of course, they'd have to pay for those.

But the network itself is free for them.

Do you not see how democratizing this technology will be yet?
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 17:01:19
> That's just a digital signature and is done already in many applications.
> What matters isn't the integrity of the data, what matters is the integrity of the barcode being applied to a piece of cod rather than say, a haddock.
> As long as you need a trusted third party to do that, the fact you can create an untrusted mechanism for proving the integrity of the data is irrelevant as the data is only accurate if you can find some source to vouch for the third party - and the blockchain becomes redundant.

What a ridiculously long-winded and completely wrong argument.

Logically, you are simply arguing that counterfeit items are never sold. That's super easy to disprove.

Smart Contracts can prevent all counterfeit items from being marketed without distinction from the original.

Many forms of counterfeit protection exist, sure. And a large portion are in the form of predictable algorithms due to the implementation details of random number generators.

This would not be possible with a smart contract solution.

It's enabling people to create things without having to worry about the price of computing power and security. With transparency. You'd have to have your head in the sand to not see that. IT DOESN'T EXIST IN ANY OTHER FORM. Duh.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 17:27:46
Seb
In many ways, provenance is the product.

But, for cod, like with a painting, it is good to also get the tangible along with the provenance.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri May 07 18:06:13
jergul
"The decentralized aspect is unimportant, as are individual control points that literally add value."

How do you mean? I have a failure of imagination about applications without the ledger being decentralized.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 18:12:13
Nhill:

Wow. No. You've massively misunderstood.

I'm saying the main way of counterfeiting is not attacking the certificates, it's simple substitution of fake goods for real goods.

Certificates of authenticity aren't new and rely on a trusted authority at some point (E.g. manufacturer) who might as well hold the register. If the goods are worth enough to do this, then bad faith actors in the supply chain simply substitute fake product for real, sell on with the certificate, and sell the real at discount to someone that can verify it's authenticity and is happy not to retain the certificate.

For consumables like Cod, this is trivial.

I land a cod, get a crypto token created showing its a cod, substitute for lower grade fish and sell to you by transferring the token that says it's a cod, land the cod again to claim a new token. I've sold you a haddock for a cod and made a profit.


The attack isn't on the integrity of the certificates, it's ok the correspondence between certificates and actual goods.

And this is the dominant source of supply chain fraud. We have public/private key digitally signed certificates already. The hard part is "how do you indelibly attach an identifier to a fish". Until we get something like a startrek tricorder that can uniquely DNA fingerprint a fish in milliseconds, blockchain doesn't add anything here to supply chain fraud.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 18:22:53
Jergul:

Depends - but even where the certificate of authenticity is less fungible than the product itself and thus holds the value, you can also just have public/private key digital certificates underpinned by a ccentral register operated by the original issuer (e.g. the manufacturer) who necessarily is ultimately trusted.

A truly decentralised blockchain involves allowing third parties to capture value in some form of transaction fees - so there's little incentive to do that. Rolex can charge a fee if it holds the definitive register. Someone else can of course start a blockchain based mechanism but then you'd have two different registers of ownership, underlying the futility here.

Nobody steals a Rolex by trying to hack Rolex's records and alter the certs database or change a register of owners.

Substitution is the main issue in this kind of fraud. "How do you reliably barcode a fish?" it's the problem, not "how can I ensure the integrity in changed ownership/processing between different owners/processors", until I can be sure continued correspondence between data and fish, the integrity of the data between changes is kinda irrelevant.
Seb
Member
Fri May 07 18:24:43
Basically, of at any point you rely on trust, you probably end up better with a centralised database.
jergul
large member
Fri May 07 19:04:41
Seb
haha! Haddock was always higher priced than cod when I was a deckhand.

Ultimately, its about selling the provenance, not the product. This requires faithful actors along with regulators and controllers. As it is today.

Dna testing is down to 3 dollars a shot for cattle now. We are fast approaching feasible use of dna to underpin the connection between product and blockchain. You don't need very many markers to check.

Not that I think it is required. Any problem you raise is a problem that already exists, yet we happily certify fish products anyway.

I think physical tagging is the way to go. Just because temperature data is so vitally important to fish quality and you need the temperature tag to follow the product consistently to provide data of the products "real" age.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 23:07:04
> I'm saying the main way of counterfeiting is not attacking the certificates, it's simple substitution of fake goods for real goods.

This makes a lot of assumptions about the product in question. Certainly, it's an obstacle with Cod, but, let's face it, that was a strange use case to begin with.

Are you familiar with how SSL works? It's a chain of trust. It contains a degree of centralization, about as much as a notary. You can't just replace the 'certificate' unless you have access to the private keys.

Or are you thinking an actual certificate like a diploma is being passed around? Lmao

It'll be digital and could be tied to the item any number of ways, one example would be an RFID with a TPM chip. Both are very inexpensive these days, but obviously this works best with luxury items (which are the subjects of counterfeiting anyways).

You are thinking small if you think a database would be ideal here, even though there is centralization. Cryptocurrency & blockchain are agnostic to centralization. It doesn't prevent it. It just happens to be support decentralization so well that it's almost always used that way in finance. But this isn't finance.

And it's a semi-strange use case all together, but just one of numerable applications that would either not been possible, or not been secure.

The key is that the ledger is public and distributed. No point of failure. Manufacturers can't modify/hide it, and neither can a bad actor.

Just like SSL, if you have a CA that's no longer trusted, the certificate is revoked. If someone along the supply chain is caught counterfeiting, stealing, sabotaging, or whatever, consumers can trace back to that person by isolating the common ancestor node.

None of this really matters that much. The point is it enables new capabilities and puts power in the hands of the users/consumers. You have yet to dispute that simple fact, which has been repeated by multiple people in many different ways.
nhill
Member
Fri May 07 23:11:15
> Until we get something like a startrek tricorder that can uniquely DNA fingerprint a fish in milliseconds, blockchain doesn't add anything here to supply chain fraud.

This is a tacit admission that blockchain is useful. As you said, you only have to overcome one obstacle (which isn't even an obstacle for most things). Hell, even with cod I'm sure you could semi-securely attach an RFID that is tamper-resistant. That's not even new tech, my friend.

You're playing dumb, aren't you?
habebe
Member
Sat May 08 01:05:07
So I've seen a few USD tethered currencies.At first I wondered why would someone want that?

But then I realized it could.be great to shield your crypto earnings from taxes and garnishment. It's much less volatile than most crypto so its like holding cash in a savings account but as an asset that is only taxed or garnished etc. when you monetize it.
habebe
Member
Sat May 08 01:07:39
Or Tether also.has one pegged to Gold, which would probably nice right now if you've been eyeing the inflation numbers.
nhill
Member
Sat May 08 01:34:15
Correct.
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