Money Stuff
October 26, 2022 1:01 AM Subscribe
The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - "Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters." (archive; also btw What Is Code?[*] by Paul Ford, earlier)
Yes, but is this 40,000 word article any good? The people writing about the article seem to be Bloomberg itself and a bunch of crypto blogs. Is this ‘line goes up’ for the suit and tie crowd?
posted by The River Ivel at 2:37 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 2:37 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
There's also the issue of Levine's tone coming across as making light of the victims of crypto scams.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:57 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:57 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
It will be a sign of crypto-maturity when mocking the victims of these scams is not the knee-jerk reaction it still is in most cases today, cf. the Onion: Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him or just about every entry on Web 3.0 is Going Great
posted by chavenet at 3:17 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 3:17 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
I have only just gotten started on this colon blockage of an article, but right near the beginning:
What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
Maybe you don't need crypto to do this? Maybe there's a step between the all-COBOL-world the article bemoans and that? Indeed before now I have never heard of modernizing banking as a justification for cryptocurrency. The people who have pushed it the most do it because they hate banks, not because they want them to function better.
posted by JHarris at 3:34 AM on October 26, 2022 [31 favorites]
What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
Maybe you don't need crypto to do this? Maybe there's a step between the all-COBOL-world the article bemoans and that? Indeed before now I have never heard of modernizing banking as a justification for cryptocurrency. The people who have pushed it the most do it because they hate banks, not because they want them to function better.
posted by JHarris at 3:34 AM on October 26, 2022 [31 favorites]
(Yes, I capitalize COBOL, it's an acronym. The article doesn't.)
posted by JHarris at 3:35 AM on October 26, 2022 [18 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:35 AM on October 26, 2022 [18 favorites]
Matt Levine has a specific tone to his articles, but I find that he does an incredible job of breaking down really esoteric finance legalese into English with a genuine delight of "behold what weird stuff has now evolved, here's the history of why you should care and why it failed/is exceeding expectations".
I am his target audience and I enjoyed this article. I already knew a lot of the specifics, but found it a good refresher. He spends some time talking about systems of trust and trust as a societal scaffolding and how that has evolved with crypto currency and block chain, which helps articulate something that's been sitting in the back of my mind but I didn't quite have the terms for.
posted by larthegreat at 3:36 AM on October 26, 2022 [15 favorites]
I am his target audience and I enjoyed this article. I already knew a lot of the specifics, but found it a good refresher. He spends some time talking about systems of trust and trust as a societal scaffolding and how that has evolved with crypto currency and block chain, which helps articulate something that's been sitting in the back of my mind but I didn't quite have the terms for.
posted by larthegreat at 3:36 AM on October 26, 2022 [15 favorites]
I like his writing style and think I'm going to enjoy this, but I just got to his description of hash functions and am frustrated by how close it is to being accurate.
posted by Slothrup at 5:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Slothrup at 5:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
There is not a single good novel use of the block chain. Crypto is just every financial scheme from the last 400 years re-run for a modern group of suckers.
There you can skip the entire article now.
posted by stilgar at 5:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [26 favorites]
There you can skip the entire article now.
posted by stilgar at 5:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [26 favorites]
Kinda glossed over the importance Proof of Work, calling it 'pointless', yet extolled the efficiency of the Proof of Stake system that is designed to enrich and empower the already wealthy.
It would have been nice to see PoW and it's implications/incentives better explained because there has been a lot of disinformation floating about on this subject.
posted by neonamber at 5:07 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
It would have been nice to see PoW and it's implications/incentives better explained because there has been a lot of disinformation floating about on this subject.
posted by neonamber at 5:07 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
@stilgar
Being able to securely send/receive/store money in a manner completely independent of centralized institutions/corporations is THE novel and intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
posted by neonamber at 5:20 AM on October 26, 2022
Being able to securely send/receive/store money in a manner completely independent of centralized institutions/corporations is THE novel and intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
posted by neonamber at 5:20 AM on October 26, 2022
[ explosive guffaw ] Yes, let's add parasitic middlemen who shave significant percentages off every send/receive/store transaction to our "financial" transactions, all which is of course recorded in public by a centralized institution called a blockchain, that is an incorporation of the wills of a few dozen people (whom we are, with no reason whatsoever, supposed to trust with PoS; or who have terawatt sucking supercomputers with PoW).
Can we just not, please, not, spout obvious bullshit crypto talking points here?
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:28 AM on October 26, 2022 [35 favorites]
Can we just not, please, not, spout obvious bullshit crypto talking points here?
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:28 AM on October 26, 2022 [35 favorites]
People trusted banks to do nice, safe, socially productive things, and it turned out they were doing wild, risky things that caused an economic crisis. After that it became harder for many people to trust banks to hold their savings.
Christ, what an asshole.
You're writing this in Bloomberg. Your audience includes the bankers who did those wild, risky things that caused an economic crisis. You're telling them that the real problem is that there isn't enough trust in the system that they broke by exploiting other people's trust.
And his argument is still the standard "What if there was a way we could have all the benefits of a social construct like money with none of the obligations of needing to be part a society--and what if we do that by constructing a technological godhead that can turn abstract wealth into something concrete through the power of blockchain and belief"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:37 AM on October 26, 2022 [23 favorites]
Christ, what an asshole.
You're writing this in Bloomberg. Your audience includes the bankers who did those wild, risky things that caused an economic crisis. You're telling them that the real problem is that there isn't enough trust in the system that they broke by exploiting other people's trust.
And his argument is still the standard "What if there was a way we could have all the benefits of a social construct like money with none of the obligations of needing to be part a society--and what if we do that by constructing a technological godhead that can turn abstract wealth into something concrete through the power of blockchain and belief"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:37 AM on October 26, 2022 [23 favorites]
What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen so much misguidedness packed into one sentence, but in short there’s nothing about blockchains or cryptocurrencies that has anything to say about modern engineering principles. They aren’t performant, aren’t safe, aren’t accountable, aren’t interoperable, aren’t equitable and aren’t trustworthy. The aren’t even really decentralized, they’re just badly distributed.
The arc of cryptocurrency tech is presently following the arc of any other massive fraud perpetrated against the public and the common good; an overhyped scheme that externalizes its costs onto a misled populace, followed by a hard pivot to a privatizing phase that lets the already-rich consolidate their gains and leave the consequences for the proles to deal with, followed - I hope - by the sort of legislation that keeps this specific class of harms from happening in this specific way again.
There’s nothing new here but the speed of it. The cryptocurrency exercise is a renter capitalism speedrun.
posted by mhoye at 5:45 AM on October 26, 2022 [47 favorites]
It’s been a while since I’ve seen so much misguidedness packed into one sentence, but in short there’s nothing about blockchains or cryptocurrencies that has anything to say about modern engineering principles. They aren’t performant, aren’t safe, aren’t accountable, aren’t interoperable, aren’t equitable and aren’t trustworthy. The aren’t even really decentralized, they’re just badly distributed.
The arc of cryptocurrency tech is presently following the arc of any other massive fraud perpetrated against the public and the common good; an overhyped scheme that externalizes its costs onto a misled populace, followed by a hard pivot to a privatizing phase that lets the already-rich consolidate their gains and leave the consequences for the proles to deal with, followed - I hope - by the sort of legislation that keeps this specific class of harms from happening in this specific way again.
There’s nothing new here but the speed of it. The cryptocurrency exercise is a renter capitalism speedrun.
posted by mhoye at 5:45 AM on October 26, 2022 [47 favorites]
What if there was a way we could have all the benefits of a social construct like money with none of the obligations of needing to be part a society
That was how I read it too. “This is a bad idea - but what if we could change how literally everything in the world works so it was a good idea?”
A Latin term for that grade of argument might be the only interesting or novel thing to be extracted from this pile of whatever this is.
posted by mhoye at 5:50 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
That was how I read it too. “This is a bad idea - but what if we could change how literally everything in the world works so it was a good idea?”
A Latin term for that grade of argument might be the only interesting or novel thing to be extracted from this pile of whatever this is.
posted by mhoye at 5:50 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
For a deeper dive into the PoW vs PoS debate this is quite good: The PoW vs. PoS Debate | Lyn Alden & Justin Drake
posted by neonamber at 5:50 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by neonamber at 5:50 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
While I appreciate that they have done some actual research (unlike the usual DYOR crowd), the author is far, far too credulous.
Time and again, when crypto claims to have solved a problem it turns out that either the solution is a scam, or the solution is actually pretty bad because it would have been easier and better if you'd done the same thing but without a blockchain. Sometimes it turns out to be both!
But their conclusion is literally:
And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time. The crypto system has attracted a lot of smart people who want to solve these problems, in part because they’re intellectually interesting problems and in part because solving them will make these people rich.
He claims to not be a crypto true believer, but that's true believer speak if I've ever seen it.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:52 AM on October 26, 2022 [20 favorites]
Time and again, when crypto claims to have solved a problem it turns out that either the solution is a scam, or the solution is actually pretty bad because it would have been easier and better if you'd done the same thing but without a blockchain. Sometimes it turns out to be both!
But their conclusion is literally:
And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time. The crypto system has attracted a lot of smart people who want to solve these problems, in part because they’re intellectually interesting problems and in part because solving them will make these people rich.
He claims to not be a crypto true believer, but that's true believer speak if I've ever seen it.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:52 AM on October 26, 2022 [20 favorites]
Being able to securely send/receive/store money in a manner completely independent of centralized institutions/corporations is THE novel and intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
What's really interesting to me, as a tech guy who sometimes does harbor utopian ideas about how it might improve the world, is that you can simultaneously buy into this and find it technologically really neat and think that this fundamentally doesn't make the world a better place at all.
Because the issue was never the centralized institutions. It wasn't even the corporations, for all that our present world order basically guarantees that any corporation is going to grow like a fucking cancer.
The people driving Bitcoin's success aren't modest hippies living out in the woods, forming communes and trying to respect the earth. They're people looking to create a new kind of centralized power, which is to say they want a new system of wealth so that they can be the wealthy ones. Bitcoin might remove one layer of cruft from that vision of money as raw, naked power, but that vision is itself what's destroying the world. (And, hell, that thin layer of cruft didn't really obscure that any.)
The problem with money isn't "who issues it." It's "how we value it." It is Marx's still-stupidly-simple observation that, in capitalism, money means property means power, and therefore it is possible to "optimize" for money and wind up owning the world and oppressing anyone who isn't as rich and powerful as you. Money can't help but be an abstraction, but that means that it's dangerous to overvalue it, lest you wind up in a world where the pursuit of that abstraction drains the world of all its concrete value, crumbling industries in the pursuit of a number on a screen going higher and higher.
In other words, Bitcoin is a legitimately brilliant solution to a bafflingly incorrect problem. And given that "regulation" and "passing laws" is basically the only thing that can stop unadulterated power in its tracks, Bitcoin is if anything a step in the wrong direction.
I remember interning for a start-up in Manhattan in 2013 for the paltry sum of $500 a month—I wasn't allowed to tell the other interns, because they weren't paid anything—and being told on day 1 that the initial 20 hour/week schedule I'd been promised was now 40 hours, and then being berated by my schmuck of a manager for not coming in earlier than 9 and not staying later than 5, and listening to this doughy little shit talk for hours a day about Bitcoin. Not because it was radical or transformative, but because it was a new kind of stock market, and he'd bought a shitload of it, and if it went big he'd be poised to be a millionaire.
Now that fucking prick probably is a millionaire, despite my having firsthand proof that he's never done a productive goddamn thing in his life. Because money holds no meaning apart from Money. It means nothing when a lot of it shows up in a place, and it means nothing if you're standing there to shove it all into a giant cartoon sack. That's the "radical potential" of Bitcoin: to funnel a little bit more of what used to be reality into a bunch of useless asswipes' bank accounts, which gives those asswipes even more power to re-engineer the economy in ways that let them make more money and get even more power, and all the while anything in the world that used to be genuinely meaningful or useful or benevolent ebbs away just a little bit more, because the only thing these little shits "believe" in is some cyberpunk libertarian drivel written by a 1970s guy who hated shit like "age of consent."
Maybe it's possible for technology to solve the real problems with money. I like to think so. But those solutions would look radically different than this solution. Completely different ballpark, not only philosophically but existentially. That said, blockchains are really neat from a sheer conceptual perspective. I like them the way I like really beautiful mathematical proofs, only beautiful mathematical proofs rarely give an entire planet cancer.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:52 AM on October 26, 2022 [50 favorites]
What's really interesting to me, as a tech guy who sometimes does harbor utopian ideas about how it might improve the world, is that you can simultaneously buy into this and find it technologically really neat and think that this fundamentally doesn't make the world a better place at all.
Because the issue was never the centralized institutions. It wasn't even the corporations, for all that our present world order basically guarantees that any corporation is going to grow like a fucking cancer.
The people driving Bitcoin's success aren't modest hippies living out in the woods, forming communes and trying to respect the earth. They're people looking to create a new kind of centralized power, which is to say they want a new system of wealth so that they can be the wealthy ones. Bitcoin might remove one layer of cruft from that vision of money as raw, naked power, but that vision is itself what's destroying the world. (And, hell, that thin layer of cruft didn't really obscure that any.)
The problem with money isn't "who issues it." It's "how we value it." It is Marx's still-stupidly-simple observation that, in capitalism, money means property means power, and therefore it is possible to "optimize" for money and wind up owning the world and oppressing anyone who isn't as rich and powerful as you. Money can't help but be an abstraction, but that means that it's dangerous to overvalue it, lest you wind up in a world where the pursuit of that abstraction drains the world of all its concrete value, crumbling industries in the pursuit of a number on a screen going higher and higher.
In other words, Bitcoin is a legitimately brilliant solution to a bafflingly incorrect problem. And given that "regulation" and "passing laws" is basically the only thing that can stop unadulterated power in its tracks, Bitcoin is if anything a step in the wrong direction.
I remember interning for a start-up in Manhattan in 2013 for the paltry sum of $500 a month—I wasn't allowed to tell the other interns, because they weren't paid anything—and being told on day 1 that the initial 20 hour/week schedule I'd been promised was now 40 hours, and then being berated by my schmuck of a manager for not coming in earlier than 9 and not staying later than 5, and listening to this doughy little shit talk for hours a day about Bitcoin. Not because it was radical or transformative, but because it was a new kind of stock market, and he'd bought a shitload of it, and if it went big he'd be poised to be a millionaire.
Now that fucking prick probably is a millionaire, despite my having firsthand proof that he's never done a productive goddamn thing in his life. Because money holds no meaning apart from Money. It means nothing when a lot of it shows up in a place, and it means nothing if you're standing there to shove it all into a giant cartoon sack. That's the "radical potential" of Bitcoin: to funnel a little bit more of what used to be reality into a bunch of useless asswipes' bank accounts, which gives those asswipes even more power to re-engineer the economy in ways that let them make more money and get even more power, and all the while anything in the world that used to be genuinely meaningful or useful or benevolent ebbs away just a little bit more, because the only thing these little shits "believe" in is some cyberpunk libertarian drivel written by a 1970s guy who hated shit like "age of consent."
Maybe it's possible for technology to solve the real problems with money. I like to think so. But those solutions would look radically different than this solution. Completely different ballpark, not only philosophically but existentially. That said, blockchains are really neat from a sheer conceptual perspective. I like them the way I like really beautiful mathematical proofs, only beautiful mathematical proofs rarely give an entire planet cancer.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:52 AM on October 26, 2022 [50 favorites]
(oh, and I only survived that Manhattan stint thanks to a bunch of extremely lovely and far-better-adjusted MeFites who were willing to befriend a 22-year-old fuzzy rodent gremlin and tolerate his extremely malformed personality, so, if any of y'all are reading this, thank you for the drinks and the proof that decent adulthood was a possible outcome 🧡)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
As usual, there's an apposite xkcd. Which, given the number of non-interoperable blockchains that already exist - several of which were implemented with the express design intent of being token-agnostic - suggests that, shockingly, a finance pundit is not only not much of a thinker but has also only made the most cursory possible stab at their homework.
posted by flabdablet at 6:18 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
As usual, there's an apposite xkcd. Which, given the number of non-interoperable blockchains that already exist - several of which were implemented with the express design intent of being token-agnostic - suggests that, shockingly, a finance pundit is not only not much of a thinker but has also only made the most cursory possible stab at their homework.
posted by flabdablet at 6:18 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
It will be a sign of crypto-maturity when mocking the victims of these scams is not the knee-jerk reaction it still is in most cases today, cf. the Onion: Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him or just about every entry on Web 3.0 is Going Great
Except that both of those are literally the opposite of a knee-jerk reaction. The Onion piece is about a guy who went out of his way to ignore all of the people in his life--not just internet randos, but people with credentials and/or who knew him in meatspace--and then chose to play the victim and then went out to do it again on the advice of internet randos; W3IGG very carefully documents the outright scams and--and this is relevant to the topic at hand--the very vigorous efforts of many of the people involved to pretend that everything is going great, few understand, number goes up, blah blah blah. In neither case are the people involved going after your Great-Aunt Gertrude who got taken by the flim-flam man with his nice suit and smooth patter; they're going after people who ignore sign after sign on the road that the bridge is out, start a GoFundMe from their hospital bed, and then buy a faster car with the proceeds, thinking that next time they'll just jump the gap like the Blues Brothers.
Greed is bad. It's a human failing; I've gotten suckered into losing a small sum at the blackjack table by being up at first and then trying to win it all back when it started going down. But that was my last time at the blackjack table.
And, relevant to the FPP, yes, Levine does mention some of the scams and intrinsic problems of crypto, but ends with "the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time." For what? Is the house going to change the system where the house doesn't win? Who's the sucker at the table? The best time to walk away is two hours ago; the next best time is now.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [22 favorites]
Except that both of those are literally the opposite of a knee-jerk reaction. The Onion piece is about a guy who went out of his way to ignore all of the people in his life--not just internet randos, but people with credentials and/or who knew him in meatspace--and then chose to play the victim and then went out to do it again on the advice of internet randos; W3IGG very carefully documents the outright scams and--and this is relevant to the topic at hand--the very vigorous efforts of many of the people involved to pretend that everything is going great, few understand, number goes up, blah blah blah. In neither case are the people involved going after your Great-Aunt Gertrude who got taken by the flim-flam man with his nice suit and smooth patter; they're going after people who ignore sign after sign on the road that the bridge is out, start a GoFundMe from their hospital bed, and then buy a faster car with the proceeds, thinking that next time they'll just jump the gap like the Blues Brothers.
Greed is bad. It's a human failing; I've gotten suckered into losing a small sum at the blackjack table by being up at first and then trying to win it all back when it started going down. But that was my last time at the blackjack table.
And, relevant to the FPP, yes, Levine does mention some of the scams and intrinsic problems of crypto, but ends with "the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time." For what? Is the house going to change the system where the house doesn't win? Who's the sucker at the table? The best time to walk away is two hours ago; the next best time is now.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [22 favorites]
I have no doubt that blockchain has useful applications, but the whole idea of a stateless currency is just a libertarian wet dream.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:23 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Artful Codger at 7:23 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
This conversation has been very informative.
Thanks everybody!
posted by MrJM at 7:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thanks everybody!
posted by MrJM at 7:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have no doubt that blockchain has useful applications,
No, it really doesn't. At its heart, a blockchain is a ledger that's had a number of functions removed that make ledgers useful, like the ability to reverse transactions. Anything you can use blockchain for, you already have more performant solutions to pick from. And this is not surprising because the use case that blockchain was built around was "how do you run a ledger without trust?"
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:13 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
No, it really doesn't. At its heart, a blockchain is a ledger that's had a number of functions removed that make ledgers useful, like the ability to reverse transactions. Anything you can use blockchain for, you already have more performant solutions to pick from. And this is not surprising because the use case that blockchain was built around was "how do you run a ledger without trust?"
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:13 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
suggests that, shockingly, a finance pundit is not only not much of a thinker but has also only made the most cursory possible stab at their homework
...a suggestion made, as it turns out, by the unfortunate piece of my brain that still can't be persuaded not to post hot takes before reading TFA.
It's a bad suggestion. This article is well researched, entertaining, informative and thorough, covering enough territory to give me plenty to agree with and disagree with. It's long but no longer than it needs to be, and unusually for a work of tech-adjacent journalism there are no horribly unsound IT misunderstandings behind any of the opinions I do disagree with. I've come away with a great deal of respect both for the quality of Levine's reasoning and for his command of his craft.
Thanks, kliuless. I don't know how you manage to knock these things out of the park so consistently but I'm hugely grateful that you keep on doing it.
Now let's have a crack at Ford.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
...a suggestion made, as it turns out, by the unfortunate piece of my brain that still can't be persuaded not to post hot takes before reading TFA.
It's a bad suggestion. This article is well researched, entertaining, informative and thorough, covering enough territory to give me plenty to agree with and disagree with. It's long but no longer than it needs to be, and unusually for a work of tech-adjacent journalism there are no horribly unsound IT misunderstandings behind any of the opinions I do disagree with. I've come away with a great deal of respect both for the quality of Levine's reasoning and for his command of his craft.
Thanks, kliuless. I don't know how you manage to knock these things out of the park so consistently but I'm hugely grateful that you keep on doing it.
Now let's have a crack at Ford.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
I'm as much a crypto-skeptic as anyone else here but I think this monster of an article is worth reading. You can probably skip the first two parts if you don't need a refresher on the technology and environment. The author (IMO) skilfully breaks down and explains just what the hell people see in this ecosystem and why they're excited about it.
The overall tone is one of hopeful optimism—this is freaking Bloomberg, after all—but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see it's all bullshit. Many interesting points are brought forward only to be immediately cut down. One example of many:
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 8:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
The overall tone is one of hopeful optimism—this is freaking Bloomberg, after all—but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see it's all bullshit. Many interesting points are brought forward only to be immediately cut down. One example of many:
Crypto, meanwhile, has built a financial system from first principles, pure and pleasing on its own, unsullied by contact with the real world. [...] You’ve built a derivatives exchange, cool, cool. But can a real company use it to hedge a real risk facing its real factory? You’ve built a decentralized lending platform, awesome. But can a young family use it to buy a house?If this is crypto's best argument, I remain comfortable in my stance that society is better off without it.
And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 8:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
I have had reason to deal with cryptocurrency recently and holy shit it is just a total fucking pile of bad decision upon bad decision. It was full of dumbness back when it was just Bitcoin and it's only gotten worse. Accidentally sent some Garblecoin to an address on the Flargle blockchain that nobody's using instead of the exact same address on the Garble chain? lol sucks to be you, blockchain is forever, sorry! Suggest that maybe the address syntax could be extended to encode the chain in it, similarly to how credit card numbers encode if they're Visa/MC/etc? Have a lengthy lecture from a true believer about how this is absolutely impossible to fix!
The further I look the more the whole thing seems like it was dreamed up and implemented by teenage programmers who had no idea of any real-world problems, and no concept of things like "gracefully handling errors".
posted by egypturnash at 8:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
The further I look the more the whole thing seems like it was dreamed up and implemented by teenage programmers who had no idea of any real-world problems, and no concept of things like "gracefully handling errors".
posted by egypturnash at 8:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time.
Crucially, it's completely clear to me from the context of everything else in the article that this is Levine reporting crypto's best argument, not endorsing it.
My reading of his own position on it is that whether or not this particular expression of late stage capitalist insanity has practical real-world uses it's interesting, which seems to me to be manifestly true.
posted by flabdablet at 8:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
Crucially, it's completely clear to me from the context of everything else in the article that this is Levine reporting crypto's best argument, not endorsing it.
My reading of his own position on it is that whether or not this particular expression of late stage capitalist insanity has practical real-world uses it's interesting, which seems to me to be manifestly true.
posted by flabdablet at 8:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
40,000 words?? That's about the length of Fahrenheit 451. If I wanted to read a dystopian book about burning things of value as a metaphor for a distracted society sleepwalking into fascism, I'd... just read Fahrenheit 451.
posted by gwint at 9:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [24 favorites]
posted by gwint at 9:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [24 favorites]
The further I look the more the whole thing seems like it was dreamed up and implemented by teenage programmers who had no idea of any real-world problems, and no concept of things like "gracefully handling errors".
Bitcoin was always something of a piece of software sculpture and had I been its sculptor I, too, would have chosen to remain permanently pseudonymous.
In the very early days it looked quite stylish, standing out there with the occasional bit of sun glinting off the newly cast bronze. But it quickly became a popular pigeon roost and has now accumulated such an astonishing weight of guano as to be impossible to live downwind of and a danger to shipping.
posted by flabdablet at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
Bitcoin was always something of a piece of software sculpture and had I been its sculptor I, too, would have chosen to remain permanently pseudonymous.
In the very early days it looked quite stylish, standing out there with the occasional bit of sun glinting off the newly cast bronze. But it quickly became a popular pigeon roost and has now accumulated such an astonishing weight of guano as to be impossible to live downwind of and a danger to shipping.
posted by flabdablet at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
My reading of his own position on it is that whether or not this particular expression of late stage capitalist insanity has practical real-world uses it's interesting, which seems to me to be manifestly true.
It's interesting in the same way that a train wreck is, which is the whole issue.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's interesting in the same way that a train wreck is, which is the whole issue.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Maybe something good can come from this train wreck. If only we'd just accept the potential that train wrecks have to offer and allow them to happen, who knows what they might produce?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:34 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:34 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was published in October 2008, the protocol released in January 2009, so about 13 years ago.
ARPANET was established in 1969. By 1982, it was clear there was something to this interconnected networks thing, even if at first it was for military and academic use.
The World Wide Web was established in 1990-1991. By 2003-2004, it was clear there was something to this WWW thing, even if at first it seemed like the niche province of tech geeks.
13 years on and it is still not clear what actual use, if any, there is for crypto beyond speculation and scams. It's had plenty of time.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:39 AM on October 26, 2022 [17 favorites]
The Bitcoin whitepaper was published in October 2008, the protocol released in January 2009, so about 13 years ago.
ARPANET was established in 1969. By 1982, it was clear there was something to this interconnected networks thing, even if at first it was for military and academic use.
The World Wide Web was established in 1990-1991. By 2003-2004, it was clear there was something to this WWW thing, even if at first it seemed like the niche province of tech geeks.
13 years on and it is still not clear what actual use, if any, there is for crypto beyond speculation and scams. It's had plenty of time.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:39 AM on October 26, 2022 [17 favorites]
Being able to securely send/receive/store money in a manner completely independent of centralized institutions/corporations is THE novel and intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
I've definitely not reached "crypto-maturity" because I'm really having trouble seeing how anyone could actually make that case in 2022. This is satire, right? Right?!
posted by aspersioncast at 9:40 AM on October 26, 2022
I've definitely not reached "crypto-maturity" because I'm really having trouble seeing how anyone could actually make that case in 2022. This is satire, right? Right?!
posted by aspersioncast at 9:40 AM on October 26, 2022
It's interesting in the same way that a train wreck is, which is the whole issue.
If you're a humanities type (like Levine, who taught Latin for a couple of years) and you somehow find yourself in finance, or finance-adjacent litigation, sometimes all you can do to soothe your itchy brain is admire the ingenuity of it all. This is especially true if you don't have any ideological commitments to smashing the system, but even I have caught myself suggesting to meetings that it would be aesthetically pleasing if someone sued someone else on a certain theory.
(Reminds me of a passage in The Ambassadors:
posted by praemunire at 9:45 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
If you're a humanities type (like Levine, who taught Latin for a couple of years) and you somehow find yourself in finance, or finance-adjacent litigation, sometimes all you can do to soothe your itchy brain is admire the ingenuity of it all. This is especially true if you don't have any ideological commitments to smashing the system, but even I have caught myself suggesting to meetings that it would be aesthetically pleasing if someone sued someone else on a certain theory.
(Reminds me of a passage in The Ambassadors:
Waymarsh presently said: “Look here, Strether. Quit this.”I haven't read the article yet, but if it's like his other writing, in many cases he is articulating a position held by some rather than endorsing it himself. So I would be cautious about pulling a random quote and assuming he believes it.
Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”
“No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let them stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit for. People don’t take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”
“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never called myself!”
“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but you’ve kept your teeth.”)
posted by praemunire at 9:45 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
> At its heart, a blockchain is a ledger that's had a number of functions removed that make ledgers useful, like the ability to reverse transactions. Anything you can use blockchain for, you already have more performant solutions to pick from. And this is not surprising because the use case that blockchain was built around was "how do you run a ledger without trust?"
I agree that cryptocurrencies have certainly not become the speedy lower-friction medium of exchange that was initially fantasized about, but there are still trust "gaps", vulnerabilities and delays in many transactions (financial and otherwise), and blockchain is one possible technology for speeding these up and making them more reliable. Yes, I'm just reading off the cover of the brochure here, but it's not hard to dig further into this.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:52 AM on October 26, 2022
I agree that cryptocurrencies have certainly not become the speedy lower-friction medium of exchange that was initially fantasized about, but there are still trust "gaps", vulnerabilities and delays in many transactions (financial and otherwise), and blockchain is one possible technology for speeding these up and making them more reliable. Yes, I'm just reading off the cover of the brochure here, but it's not hard to dig further into this.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:52 AM on October 26, 2022
So I would be cautious about pulling a random quote and assuming he believes it.
If he doesn't want me to think he believes it, he could try using some of the 40,000 words of this article to be more clear about that. Personally, I'd rather take him at what he wrote, versus guess at what he meant because of a pre-existing notion of how I think he writes.
The article as written paints him as someone who is too enamored with the possibilities of what might be (because he's so personally invested in finance) that despite understanding a fair bit of what's wrong with crypto, he still thinks "it's early, few understand" is a reasonable stance.
It is really, demonstrably not.
posted by a faithful sock at 9:57 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
If he doesn't want me to think he believes it, he could try using some of the 40,000 words of this article to be more clear about that. Personally, I'd rather take him at what he wrote, versus guess at what he meant because of a pre-existing notion of how I think he writes.
The article as written paints him as someone who is too enamored with the possibilities of what might be (because he's so personally invested in finance) that despite understanding a fair bit of what's wrong with crypto, he still thinks "it's early, few understand" is a reasonable stance.
It is really, demonstrably not.
posted by a faithful sock at 9:57 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
but there are still trust "gaps", vulnerabilities and delays in many transactions (financial and otherwise), and blockchain is one possible technology for speeding these up and making them more reliable.
Blockchain systems are notorious for their lack of throughput, among all their other failings - we're talking magnitudes of order here. Again, all a blockchain is ultimately is a ledger that's had key functionality removed to "solve" the trust issue, which is why it turns out that there are better, more performant solutions the moment that you no longer have that issue.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:02 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Blockchain systems are notorious for their lack of throughput, among all their other failings - we're talking magnitudes of order here. Again, all a blockchain is ultimately is a ledger that's had key functionality removed to "solve" the trust issue, which is why it turns out that there are better, more performant solutions the moment that you no longer have that issue.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:02 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
I mean, just scanning it, the whole article goes through arguments and counterarguments? Personally, I think the problem with Levine's approach is not that he's credulous, but that his position of intellectual detachment is not actually the correct approach to machinery that can chew up whole economies. Yet it lets him feel like his hands are clean as a mere observer, when in fact he bolsters the system by treating it as, hypothetically, legitimate.
(I also think familiarity with a writer's style and approach--and I've been reading him since he was a Dealbreaker columnist--provides useful context for understanding their meaning. I don't think that's a generally controversial position.)
posted by praemunire at 10:07 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
(I also think familiarity with a writer's style and approach--and I've been reading him since he was a Dealbreaker columnist--provides useful context for understanding their meaning. I don't think that's a generally controversial position.)
posted by praemunire at 10:07 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
he could try using some of the 40,000 words of this article to be more clear about that
About 1000 words are devoted to exactly that, and they struck me as completely clear. Not directly linkable but you can search the page for
About 1000 words are devoted to exactly that, and they struck me as completely clear. Not directly linkable but you can search the page for
Digression: What are you even reading? Why are you reading it? Why am I writing it?posted by flabdablet at 10:08 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
This is, generally, a really good article! You could show it to someone with zero grasp of the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies, and they would be able to digest it and understand the technology and network effects at work, and also come away with a healthy dose of skepticism about a system that basically runs on a cascading series of Ponzi schemes. (I especially liked the number of places where he arranged text blocks into pyramids)
My main complaint is that the author is very definitely a finance guy by trade, and is wearing rose-colored glasses about the entire ecosystem. For example:
Objection, facts not in evidence.
posted by Mayor West at 10:11 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
My main complaint is that the author is very definitely a finance guy by trade, and is wearing rose-colored glasses about the entire ecosystem. For example:
Perhaps this is all a self-referential sinkhole for smart finance people, but honestly it would be weird if that’s all it ever turned out to be. If so many smart finance people have moved into the crypto financial system, if they find it so much more enjoyable and functional and productive than the traditional financial system, surely they’ll eventually figure out how to make it, you know, useful.He just "no true Scotsman"d his whole point away. What this is arguing for is a kind of provisional trust that, hey, don't worry about it, maybe SOME financial services guys are sleazebags who would steal your Grandma's last dollar if they thought they could get away with it, but the INDUSTRY is full of smart and ethical people who will eventually course-correct this crazy thing.
Objection, facts not in evidence.
posted by Mayor West at 10:11 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
They aren’t performant, aren’t safe, aren’t accountable, aren’t interoperable, aren’t equitable and aren’t trustworthy. The aren’t even really decentralized, they’re just badly distributed.
"Tell me you don't use Kubernetes without telling me you don't use Kubernetes"
posted by pwnguin at 10:13 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
"Tell me you don't use Kubernetes without telling me you don't use Kubernetes"
posted by pwnguin at 10:13 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
his position of intellectual detachment is not actually the correct approach to machinery that can chew up whole economies
Good backgrounders like this have a vital place in public discourse.
Crypto is by no means the only financial mechanism capable of chewing up whole economies. Arguably it's not even close to the worst of those that have been encouraged to proliferate since the forces of raw unalloyed greed rediscovered the power that exists in a carefully polished cut glass accent.
I think this piece does a really good job of drawing clear parallels between what's happening in crypto and what's happening in finance more widely, and to the extent that it results in people becoming able to use their misgivings about one to put their finger exactly on what's wrong with the other, it's done us all a service.
posted by flabdablet at 10:39 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Good backgrounders like this have a vital place in public discourse.
Crypto is by no means the only financial mechanism capable of chewing up whole economies. Arguably it's not even close to the worst of those that have been encouraged to proliferate since the forces of raw unalloyed greed rediscovered the power that exists in a carefully polished cut glass accent.
I think this piece does a really good job of drawing clear parallels between what's happening in crypto and what's happening in finance more widely, and to the extent that it results in people becoming able to use their misgivings about one to put their finger exactly on what's wrong with the other, it's done us all a service.
posted by flabdablet at 10:39 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Crypto is by no means the only financial mechanism capable of chewing up whole economies.
But it is one that literally didn't exist thirteen years ago and it offers no real utility other than to launder money, speculate, and scam people. It would've been cast into the dustbin of stupid ideas long ago if people weren't constantly making an intellectual exercise of overlooking it's obvious flaws in order to talk about what it could be. What if....it could be used for something?
Of all the terrible financial mechanisms that are eating the world, we don't need to make excuses for the continued existence of this terrible financial mechanism.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:49 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
But it is one that literally didn't exist thirteen years ago and it offers no real utility other than to launder money, speculate, and scam people. It would've been cast into the dustbin of stupid ideas long ago if people weren't constantly making an intellectual exercise of overlooking it's obvious flaws in order to talk about what it could be. What if....it could be used for something?
Of all the terrible financial mechanisms that are eating the world, we don't need to make excuses for the continued existence of this terrible financial mechanism.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:49 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Crypto is by no means the only financial mechanism capable of chewing up whole economies.
Oh, don't worry, he takes the same approach to all of 'em!
posted by praemunire at 10:49 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Oh, don't worry, he takes the same approach to all of 'em!
posted by praemunire at 10:49 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
Speaking as a veteran of several "Just modernize all the things!" projects, may I just say HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *dies*
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:33 AM on October 26, 2022 [19 favorites]
Speaking as a veteran of several "Just modernize all the things!" projects, may I just say HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *dies*
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:33 AM on October 26, 2022 [19 favorites]
I also noted that he doesn't mention the origins of Ethereum - the lead designer created it in response to being nerfed in World of Warcraft.
Yes, really.
When talking about crypto, I find this story important because it illustrates the pettiness of the people behind the scenes, as well as the sort of mentality driving the endeavor.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:27 PM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Yes, really.
When talking about crypto, I find this story important because it illustrates the pettiness of the people behind the scenes, as well as the sort of mentality driving the endeavor.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:27 PM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Thanks for posting this - not sure how many of the people criticizing it here read the whole thing (I mostly did; parts of Part 3 were hard for me to wrap my liberal-artsy-fartsy brain around and I’ll have to come back to them). It was definitely the clearest explanation I’ve seen of a lot of the concepts and technologies of w3. I didn’t get the sense that he was endorsing crypto - if it weren’t for the hopeful last paragraph I would have assumed his point was that it was a well-meaning idea that went completely south as wealthy players took it over (as they’ve done with pretty much all other financial institutions).
Wait and see is the best we can hope for anyhow.
posted by Mchelly at 12:48 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Wait and see is the best we can hope for anyhow.
posted by Mchelly at 12:48 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Like Levine or not... this is really not a great attitude...
Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny.
I mean it's a pretty understandable attitude... but still not great.
posted by cirhosis at 1:28 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny.
I mean it's a pretty understandable attitude... but still not great.
posted by cirhosis at 1:28 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I mean it's a pretty understandable attitude... but still not great.
It also gets at the fundamental flaw of the piece, which is that Levine wants us to see all this energy put towards creating a system where nobody has to trust anyone else as "interesting".
And the simple fact, Matt, is that it's not. A blockchain isn't interesting or revolutionary - it's an intentionally broken ledger created to enable a system where the people within it don't need to trust each other. And as such, it should come as no surprise that such a system would attract predators.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:47 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
It also gets at the fundamental flaw of the piece, which is that Levine wants us to see all this energy put towards creating a system where nobody has to trust anyone else as "interesting".
And the simple fact, Matt, is that it's not. A blockchain isn't interesting or revolutionary - it's an intentionally broken ledger created to enable a system where the people within it don't need to trust each other. And as such, it should come as no surprise that such a system would attract predators.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:47 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
It's technically interesting, definitely. And lots of interesting things are ultimately very bad, like wars.
posted by JHarris at 3:07 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:07 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
CFCs are also technically interesting, and thank god we didn't let that be an argument for why we should totally keep destroying the world with them.
posted by a faithful sock at 3:35 PM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by a faithful sock at 3:35 PM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
> star gentle uterus: "The World Wide Web was established in 1990-1991. By 2003-2004, it was clear there was something to this WWW thing, even if at first it seemed like the niche province of tech geeks."
Having been a full-grown adult during the Web 1.0 (Web 0.0?) years, this is what I always return to whenever anyone makes the "it's early days" argument for blockchain/crypto stuff. I mean, by 2003 we didn't just have enormous, multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprises like, Ebay, Etrade, Expedia, Netflix (red envelope version, though, not streaming), and Amazon, we also had things like Wikipedia and Salon.com and Geocities webrings and Blogspot and SomethingAwful and Homestar Runner and Hampster Dance. And most of these things weren't even brand-new in 2003, most of these things were >5 years old by then. Heck, Amazon's first profitable year was 2003. So, whenever a crypto enthusiast claims that blockchain is so revolutionary that it ought to be compared to the dawn of the web-based internet, I'm always left wondering why it's taking so long. My own personal theory is that HTTP was designed as a communication protocol and wasn't designed to make money so it allowed for much wider applications while blockchain technology was always designed as a goldbug-ist financial instrument and thus would have a much more limited use.
posted by mhum at 4:12 PM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
Having been a full-grown adult during the Web 1.0 (Web 0.0?) years, this is what I always return to whenever anyone makes the "it's early days" argument for blockchain/crypto stuff. I mean, by 2003 we didn't just have enormous, multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprises like, Ebay, Etrade, Expedia, Netflix (red envelope version, though, not streaming), and Amazon, we also had things like Wikipedia and Salon.com and Geocities webrings and Blogspot and SomethingAwful and Homestar Runner and Hampster Dance. And most of these things weren't even brand-new in 2003, most of these things were >5 years old by then. Heck, Amazon's first profitable year was 2003. So, whenever a crypto enthusiast claims that blockchain is so revolutionary that it ought to be compared to the dawn of the web-based internet, I'm always left wondering why it's taking so long. My own personal theory is that HTTP was designed as a communication protocol and wasn't designed to make money so it allowed for much wider applications while blockchain technology was always designed as a goldbug-ist financial instrument and thus would have a much more limited use.
posted by mhum at 4:12 PM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
So as much as I enjoy Levine's Money Talk articles laughing at rich people screwing over other rich people, or (more often) rich people screwing over themselves, I ain't got time to read this many words about a topic I already know pretty well.
One thing that's come up recently in my not-bitcoin-related-but-bitcoin-invaded-anyways podcast feeds is the role crypto is playing in South America, and Argentina specifically, where inflation is on track to hit 100 percent this year. Nobody wants to be paid in pesos, and reportedly an economist was fined 500,000 pesos a decade ago for publishing an inflation index that contradicted the official numbers. Currency black markets (well blue markets) are well known and rates cited in public.
In this environment, many people are turning to crypto as a lower risk option than holding local currency:
posted by pwnguin at 4:47 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
One thing that's come up recently in my not-bitcoin-related-but-bitcoin-invaded-anyways podcast feeds is the role crypto is playing in South America, and Argentina specifically, where inflation is on track to hit 100 percent this year. Nobody wants to be paid in pesos, and reportedly an economist was fined 500,000 pesos a decade ago for publishing an inflation index that contradicted the official numbers. Currency black markets (well blue markets) are well known and rates cited in public.
In this environment, many people are turning to crypto as a lower risk option than holding local currency:
“I would rather have a digital asset whose price goes up and down than a currency whose only real trend is down”The stablecoin crashes and frauds are bad, but I don't think the people in this thread decrying crypto as 'only for scams and money laundering' have really thought much about emerging markets.
posted by pwnguin at 4:47 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I get Matt's newsletter. He often talks about weird financial issues, like NFTs and meme stocks. He tends to avoid coming right out and saying, "this is stupid" (not financial advice!), but it's pretty clear from his descriptions of various crypto-based schemes that he finds them... unconvincing.
posted by SPrintF at 4:48 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by SPrintF at 4:48 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Actually proof-of-work is utterly pointless, neonamber. It's outright insecure for everyone except bitcoin. Bitocin is kinda secure only because Bitcoin is already proof-of-stake, with its stake being ASICs and corrupt electricity contracts. Also why, proof-of-work is worse than proof-of-stake about making the rich richer.
Academics studied byzantine agreement from long before Bitcoin. Academics designed protocols around blockchain-like abstractions like "bulletin boards" long before Bitcoin. ARLEAS gives one modern example.
Another classic proposal was a DNS-like registrar which prevents censorship/seizure without agreement by many countries. And drand is a simpler but handy "blockchain".
Yes, those protocols both old and new all make sacrifices vs simply trusting one sysadmin, certainly in complexity if not in performance. Yet, you actually do need that complexity once your threat model demands that many people be compromised before the database becomes compromised. At the same time, all this financial bullshit makes people tribal and distracts from real projects, like say doing the domain name registrar well.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:06 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Academics studied byzantine agreement from long before Bitcoin. Academics designed protocols around blockchain-like abstractions like "bulletin boards" long before Bitcoin. ARLEAS gives one modern example.
Another classic proposal was a DNS-like registrar which prevents censorship/seizure without agreement by many countries. And drand is a simpler but handy "blockchain".
Yes, those protocols both old and new all make sacrifices vs simply trusting one sysadmin, certainly in complexity if not in performance. Yet, you actually do need that complexity once your threat model demands that many people be compromised before the database becomes compromised. At the same time, all this financial bullshit makes people tribal and distracts from real projects, like say doing the domain name registrar well.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:06 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
> pwnguin: "The stablecoin crashes and frauds are bad, but I don't think the people in this thread decrying crypto as 'only for scams and money laundering' have really thought much about emerging markets."
I don't quite understand how people are able to obtain BTC but are simultaneously unable to obtain some other currency like USD or EUR which hasn't experienced a ~50% drop in value since the beginning of the year which, incidentally, would correspond to ~100% inflation if you could buy typical goods & services with BTC. The article only mentions a "local dearth of U.S. dollars" (presumably physical greenbacks?) and doesn't really go into detail into how people are transacting with BTC aside from ATMs.
Meanwhile, he most common emerging markets use case that I've heard proponents of crypto pushing is remittances, which sounds at least half-way plausible at first. Yet, as far as I can tell (e.g.: this article or this one), they still constitute a very small fraction of the total. It seems to me that the barriers to wider adoption are: 1) crypto turned out to not actually be cheaper than traditional methods of remittance, 2) crypto is definitely not convenient to use (partly due to legal/regulatory barriers, partly due to the fact that you mostly can't buy a banana with crypto, and partly due to fluctuations in value).
posted by mhum at 5:21 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I don't quite understand how people are able to obtain BTC but are simultaneously unable to obtain some other currency like USD or EUR which hasn't experienced a ~50% drop in value since the beginning of the year which, incidentally, would correspond to ~100% inflation if you could buy typical goods & services with BTC. The article only mentions a "local dearth of U.S. dollars" (presumably physical greenbacks?) and doesn't really go into detail into how people are transacting with BTC aside from ATMs.
Meanwhile, he most common emerging markets use case that I've heard proponents of crypto pushing is remittances, which sounds at least half-way plausible at first. Yet, as far as I can tell (e.g.: this article or this one), they still constitute a very small fraction of the total. It seems to me that the barriers to wider adoption are: 1) crypto turned out to not actually be cheaper than traditional methods of remittance, 2) crypto is definitely not convenient to use (partly due to legal/regulatory barriers, partly due to the fact that you mostly can't buy a banana with crypto, and partly due to fluctuations in value).
posted by mhum at 5:21 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
> jeffburdges
"Academics studied byzantine agreement from long before Bitcoin. Academics designed protocols around blockchain-like abstractions like "bulletin boards" long before Bitcoin. ARLEAS gives one modern example."
I read it and the authors own conclusions are:
"Such a protocol could never succeed in meeting our original goals; law enforcement would always be able to simulate the steps required for proper accountability."
and:
"However, the security provided by a centralized ledger is not significant, as a compromised central authority could circumvent the accountability properties of the system. Thus, we believe that this result indicates that instantiating an retrospective ARLEAS with meaningful security is impractical with known techniques."
Yeah, sounds great! ROFL
posted by neonamber at 8:51 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Academics studied byzantine agreement from long before Bitcoin. Academics designed protocols around blockchain-like abstractions like "bulletin boards" long before Bitcoin. ARLEAS gives one modern example."
I read it and the authors own conclusions are:
"Such a protocol could never succeed in meeting our original goals; law enforcement would always be able to simulate the steps required for proper accountability."
and:
"However, the security provided by a centralized ledger is not significant, as a compromised central authority could circumvent the accountability properties of the system. Thus, we believe that this result indicates that instantiating an retrospective ARLEAS with meaningful security is impractical with known techniques."
Yeah, sounds great! ROFL
posted by neonamber at 8:51 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
> mhum
"I don't quite understand how people are able to obtain BTC but are simultaneously unable to obtain some other currency like USD or EUR which hasn't experienced a ~50% drop in value since the beginning of the year which, incidentally, would correspond to ~100% inflation if you could buy typical goods & services with BTC. The article only mentions a "local dearth of U.S. dollars" (presumably physical greenbacks?) and doesn't really go into detail into how people are transacting with BTC aside from ATMs."
This is pretty easily explained by the genuinely peer-to-peer nature of BTC. The barrier for entry can be as low as having a mobile phone and knowing a guy.
"It seems to me that the barriers to wider adoption are: 1) crypto turned out to not actually be cheaper than traditional methods of remittance, 2) crypto is definitely not convenient to use (partly due to legal/regulatory barriers, partly due to the fact that you mostly can't buy a banana with crypto, and partly due to fluctuations in value)."
The obstacles of inconvenience and transaction cost are dissolving as client software matures and people start using the Lightning Network which solves the scaling/transaction cost issue, facilitating banana scale transactions. The price fluctuations are expected to diminish as market capitalisation grows and halvings smooth the supply dynamics.
We are also seeing improvements in regulatory clarity that is removing the uncertainty surrounding how individuals and businesses can utilize Bitcoin while being in compliance of local jurisdictions.
posted by neonamber at 9:38 PM on October 26, 2022
"I don't quite understand how people are able to obtain BTC but are simultaneously unable to obtain some other currency like USD or EUR which hasn't experienced a ~50% drop in value since the beginning of the year which, incidentally, would correspond to ~100% inflation if you could buy typical goods & services with BTC. The article only mentions a "local dearth of U.S. dollars" (presumably physical greenbacks?) and doesn't really go into detail into how people are transacting with BTC aside from ATMs."
This is pretty easily explained by the genuinely peer-to-peer nature of BTC. The barrier for entry can be as low as having a mobile phone and knowing a guy.
"It seems to me that the barriers to wider adoption are: 1) crypto turned out to not actually be cheaper than traditional methods of remittance, 2) crypto is definitely not convenient to use (partly due to legal/regulatory barriers, partly due to the fact that you mostly can't buy a banana with crypto, and partly due to fluctuations in value)."
The obstacles of inconvenience and transaction cost are dissolving as client software matures and people start using the Lightning Network which solves the scaling/transaction cost issue, facilitating banana scale transactions. The price fluctuations are expected to diminish as market capitalisation grows and halvings smooth the supply dynamics.
We are also seeing improvements in regulatory clarity that is removing the uncertainty surrounding how individuals and businesses can utilize Bitcoin while being in compliance of local jurisdictions.
posted by neonamber at 9:38 PM on October 26, 2022
A: "Blockchain is the most revolutionary invention of all time, you can do so many things with it!"
B: "Like what?"
A: "You see, in the future...."
Classic.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:37 PM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
B: "Like what?"
A: "You see, in the future...."
Classic.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:37 PM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don't quite understand how people are able to obtain BTC but are simultaneously unable to obtain some other currency like USD or EUR
It's the same reason people use check cashing services. There are systemic obstacles which make using banks difficult enough to create a market for alternatives, even if those alternatives charge much higher "fees" or are outright scams and rugpulls.
Crypto doesn't actually solve any problems. It just creates more opportunities for unsavory individuals to exploit those problems for fun and profit by offering something that's slightly easier to obtain.
This is pretty easily explained by the genuinely peer-to-peer nature of BTC. The barrier for entry can be as low as having a mobile phone and knowing a guy.
Yes. Exactly.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
It's the same reason people use check cashing services. There are systemic obstacles which make using banks difficult enough to create a market for alternatives, even if those alternatives charge much higher "fees" or are outright scams and rugpulls.
Crypto doesn't actually solve any problems. It just creates more opportunities for unsavory individuals to exploit those problems for fun and profit by offering something that's slightly easier to obtain.
This is pretty easily explained by the genuinely peer-to-peer nature of BTC. The barrier for entry can be as low as having a mobile phone and knowing a guy.
Yes. Exactly.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
the Lightning Network which solves the scaling/transaction cost issue
The Lightning Network is a joke.
LN exists because the bitcoin network is so inefficient, it can only handle about 7 transactions per second worldwide. So, LN comes along and its whole premise is that it will allow people to still "benefit" from the "wonders" of the blockchain, but without the slowness. It does this by literally handling transactions outside of the blockchain ("off chain").
Let me repeat this: it's solving the problems of the blockchain by ... not using a blockchain.
Using it requires that you tie up funds ahead of time, because you basically "freeze" funds on the bitcoin blockchain, then do a bunch of stuff outside of the blockchain, then later "close" the transaction to reconcile whatever has happened. This freezing of funds is per-"channel" (per person you want to interact with).
This is, as you might imagine, not very feasible for buying a banana, unless you want to be constantly tying up funds with every random vendor you interact with.
So the way they solve this on LN is ... you can trade through intermediaries. I don't deposit funds for a transaction from me to the banana seller, we just both deposit funds with some other party and we pay through them. Some sort of ... trusted intermediary, who holds our funds and reconciles transactions.
And if you're reading this thinking: so they reinvented the concept of a bank? Yes, they reinvented the concept of a bank. And turns out, the whole thing ends up pretty centralized around a bunch of big payment hubs (PDF), because if it was actually decentralized it would have the same transaction problems of bitcoin.
tl;dr LN is crypto bros re-inventing things that already exist, in a way that is only made worse by being related to the blockchain. Saying it solves bitcoin's scaling/transaction costs is as truthful as saying using Venmo solves bitcoin's scaling/transaction costs.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:33 AM on October 27, 2022 [14 favorites]
The Lightning Network is a joke.
LN exists because the bitcoin network is so inefficient, it can only handle about 7 transactions per second worldwide. So, LN comes along and its whole premise is that it will allow people to still "benefit" from the "wonders" of the blockchain, but without the slowness. It does this by literally handling transactions outside of the blockchain ("off chain").
Let me repeat this: it's solving the problems of the blockchain by ... not using a blockchain.
Using it requires that you tie up funds ahead of time, because you basically "freeze" funds on the bitcoin blockchain, then do a bunch of stuff outside of the blockchain, then later "close" the transaction to reconcile whatever has happened. This freezing of funds is per-"channel" (per person you want to interact with).
This is, as you might imagine, not very feasible for buying a banana, unless you want to be constantly tying up funds with every random vendor you interact with.
So the way they solve this on LN is ... you can trade through intermediaries. I don't deposit funds for a transaction from me to the banana seller, we just both deposit funds with some other party and we pay through them. Some sort of ... trusted intermediary, who holds our funds and reconciles transactions.
And if you're reading this thinking: so they reinvented the concept of a bank? Yes, they reinvented the concept of a bank. And turns out, the whole thing ends up pretty centralized around a bunch of big payment hubs (PDF), because if it was actually decentralized it would have the same transaction problems of bitcoin.
tl;dr LN is crypto bros re-inventing things that already exist, in a way that is only made worse by being related to the blockchain. Saying it solves bitcoin's scaling/transaction costs is as truthful as saying using Venmo solves bitcoin's scaling/transaction costs.
posted by a faithful sock at 5:33 AM on October 27, 2022 [14 favorites]
I've long said I'd be happy to accept crypto as payment for my art, but only, as I'm too stupid to do it myself, please convert it to dollars first...
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:53 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:53 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
LN is crypto bros re-inventing things that already exist, in a way that is only made worse by being related to the blockchain.
Levine puts it this way:
Levine puts it this way:
One story goes like this. We live in a world of trust. That trust pervades everything we do. We’re spoiled; the institutions we deal with every day are trustworthy. Not all of them, not all the time, not in every way, but quite a lot of them to a high degree. We put money in the bank, and when we go to take it out, it’s there.posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
Crypto—Satoshi Nakamoto and his disciples—said:
No, No, No. Trust is bad. Don't trust your bank. Use immutable code. Verify every transaction for yourself, or download open-source code and verify that it works correctly, and then use it to verify every transaction for yourself, or at least use a network in which that's possible and in which economic incentives demonstrably make it likely that it will happen. And do all of this in a system that's resistant to changes, that can't be controlled by governments or banks, that's immune to the rules of wider society.
This had an appeal, and crypto became very valuable, and people looked to put their money to work in crypto—and they trusted people. Over and over again, they trusted Quadriga and Terra and Voyager and Celsius and dozens of other projects that failed or ran off with their money or got hacked. They just fell over themselves to trust people.
Why did they do this? Well, there’s a common thread in these kinds of things. The people who are easiest to pull in are often the ones who think they’re the most independent-minded and cynical. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying,” Celsius told people, flattering their unjustified belief that they knew the real score.
But there’s something else, too. The people who trusted Celsius weren’t tripped up only by their belief that they were outsmarting the system, though there was that. They also…they thought Celsius was a bank? It looked sort of like a bank. It did things, with crypto, that were banklike. They were familiar with how banks work. They understood that banks are safe, that if you put money in a bank you can get it back. They looked at Celsius and thought, “Well, this is a big thing, it has a nice website, it’s available to Americans. Surely if it was a problem someone would’ve done something about it.”
Why didn’t anyone do anything about it? Why were these platforms allowed to take money from retail customers, run high levels of leverage, and blow themselves up? I think the basic answer is that regulatory authorities are still very much catching up to how crypto works and who should regulate it. There’s a very well-understood system for regulating a bank: There are bank examiners who know how banks work and who visit banks regularly to make sure they’re working properly. In crypto, big platforms are often decentralized and vaguely stateless, and even in the US there’s a lot of jurisdictional jousting over which regulators get to regulate crypto and how they should do it. If you launch a terrible crypto platform, it might take regulators a long time to get around to understanding what you’re doing and figuring out how to stop you. And crypto has been very much in a move-fast-and-break-things mode, so it broke a lot of things before the regulators could catch up.
There’s something a bit alarming about this. Crypto is in a way about rejecting the institutions of society, about being trustless and censorship-resistant. But it quietly free-rides on people’s deep reservoir of trust in those institutions. People are so used to trusting banks that, when Celsius told them not to trust banks, they said, “Ah, yes, OK,” then trusted Celsius to work like a bank, to be regulated like a bank. They didn’t worry about Celsius’s opacity and leverage. They didn’t do their own due diligence on its loans and audit its DeFi positions and demand irrefutable proof of its soundness. It promised to pay them back, and that was good enough for them.
But there’s something hopeful about it, too. Trust in institutions is so strong and resilient that all of crypto’s bluster can’t stamp it out. “Not your keys, not your coins, put your trust only in verifiable code,” crypto evangelists yelled, and people heard them and said, “Yes, that is nice, but I’m busy, I’m going to trust these nice strangers with my Bitcoin.”
Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.
> aspersioncast "This is satire, right? Right?!"
Not satire. My comments on this are consistent with my experience as a user of this burgeoning technology. If another party and I wish to transact using Bitcoin then we can do so over any old communications channel. I have been doing this for years without issue and usability is still improving.
Meanwhile my regular bank card has inexplicably glitched out frequently enough that I now carry emergency backup cash. If I want to increase my daily transaction limit I need to do so in writing, the bank website is often down for maintenance and bank to bank payments often take well over 12 hours to clear. All while living in first world country with, an ostensibly well regulated and modern financial institutions.
posted by neonamber at 6:03 AM on October 27, 2022
Not satire. My comments on this are consistent with my experience as a user of this burgeoning technology. If another party and I wish to transact using Bitcoin then we can do so over any old communications channel. I have been doing this for years without issue and usability is still improving.
Meanwhile my regular bank card has inexplicably glitched out frequently enough that I now carry emergency backup cash. If I want to increase my daily transaction limit I need to do so in writing, the bank website is often down for maintenance and bank to bank payments often take well over 12 hours to clear. All while living in first world country with, an ostensibly well regulated and modern financial institutions.
posted by neonamber at 6:03 AM on October 27, 2022
You're worried about 12 hours for a bank-to-bank payment (which is not really that common), but you don't have a problem with the fact that a person-to-person payment, the kind that you can handle with a debit card or Venmo in the few seconds it takes to pick up the bag of groceries you're buying, currently averages over an hour for bitcoin?
Also, has your terrible bank with a terrible website also lost 60% of your money this year, the way bitcoin has?
posted by a faithful sock at 7:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
Also, has your terrible bank with a terrible website also lost 60% of your money this year, the way bitcoin has?
posted by a faithful sock at 7:00 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
If I want to increase my daily transaction limit I need to do so in writing
This could be considered a feature.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:57 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
This could be considered a feature.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:57 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
> a faithful sock
"LN exists because the bitcoin network is so inefficient, it can only handle about 7 transactions per second worldwide."
This is incorrect, through batching it's possible to achieve up to 50TPS on the Bitcoin blockchain.
But if we include Lightning, the TPS becomes practically infinite.
"Let me repeat this: it's solving the problems of the blockchain by ... not using a blockchain."
Of course. Layer 1 and 2 are different technologies with different goals. Lightning is built upon and expands the functionality of Bitcoin.
"Using it requires that you tie up funds ahead of time..","Some sort of ... trusted intermediary, who holds our funds and reconciles transactions."
You forgot to mention there are Lightning enabled Bitcoin wallet apps that completely hide this complexity from the user. Power users can choose to manually manage channels if that floats their boat but it's completely optional now.
It can be as simple as loading some BTC on the wallet and.... you're good to go!
"And if you're reading this thinking: so they reinvented the concept of a bank? Yes, they reinvented the concept of a bank. And turns out, the whole thing ends up pretty centralized around a bunch of big payment hubs (PDF), because if it was actually decentralized it would have the same transaction problems of bitcoin."
Sorry but this is incorrect. While people can use non-custodial wallets it's easy to run a pruned custodial node on a phone or a full node on modest computer hardware. Hell, it was possible to run a custodial Lightning full node on a mobile phone 2 years ago and it only gets easier as Moore's Law progresses.
"Also, has your terrible bank with a terrible website also lost 60% of your money this year, the way bitcoin has?"
My bank is unusually terrible but they had the best mortgage rate so I'm stuck with them for the time being.
I use Bitcoin for making payments and as a long term savings account. I haven't really 'lost' 60% because I never actually purchased any at that elevated price. I'm not a crypto trader, I just decided to use Bitcoin as a money/savings tool and for that it works great.
"You're worried about 12 hours for a bank-to-bank payment (which is not really that common), but you don't have a problem with the fact that a person-to-person payment, the kind that you can handle with a debit card or Venmo in the few seconds it takes to pick up the bag of groceries you're buying, currently averages over an hour for bitcoin?"
Over an hour huh?
You don't have to like or use Bitcoin but perhaps, banging on with the most outrageously pessimistic and outdated assessments you can muster is not a particularly honest approach to discussing this topic.
posted by neonamber at 8:45 AM on October 27, 2022
"LN exists because the bitcoin network is so inefficient, it can only handle about 7 transactions per second worldwide."
This is incorrect, through batching it's possible to achieve up to 50TPS on the Bitcoin blockchain.
But if we include Lightning, the TPS becomes practically infinite.
"Let me repeat this: it's solving the problems of the blockchain by ... not using a blockchain."
Of course. Layer 1 and 2 are different technologies with different goals. Lightning is built upon and expands the functionality of Bitcoin.
"Using it requires that you tie up funds ahead of time..","Some sort of ... trusted intermediary, who holds our funds and reconciles transactions."
You forgot to mention there are Lightning enabled Bitcoin wallet apps that completely hide this complexity from the user. Power users can choose to manually manage channels if that floats their boat but it's completely optional now.
It can be as simple as loading some BTC on the wallet and.... you're good to go!
"And if you're reading this thinking: so they reinvented the concept of a bank? Yes, they reinvented the concept of a bank. And turns out, the whole thing ends up pretty centralized around a bunch of big payment hubs (PDF), because if it was actually decentralized it would have the same transaction problems of bitcoin."
Sorry but this is incorrect. While people can use non-custodial wallets it's easy to run a pruned custodial node on a phone or a full node on modest computer hardware. Hell, it was possible to run a custodial Lightning full node on a mobile phone 2 years ago and it only gets easier as Moore's Law progresses.
"Also, has your terrible bank with a terrible website also lost 60% of your money this year, the way bitcoin has?"
My bank is unusually terrible but they had the best mortgage rate so I'm stuck with them for the time being.
I use Bitcoin for making payments and as a long term savings account. I haven't really 'lost' 60% because I never actually purchased any at that elevated price. I'm not a crypto trader, I just decided to use Bitcoin as a money/savings tool and for that it works great.
"You're worried about 12 hours for a bank-to-bank payment (which is not really that common), but you don't have a problem with the fact that a person-to-person payment, the kind that you can handle with a debit card or Venmo in the few seconds it takes to pick up the bag of groceries you're buying, currently averages over an hour for bitcoin?"
Over an hour huh?
You don't have to like or use Bitcoin but perhaps, banging on with the most outrageously pessimistic and outdated assessments you can muster is not a particularly honest approach to discussing this topic.
posted by neonamber at 8:45 AM on October 27, 2022
LOL, you're linking to fucking youtube shorts, to try to prove your point?
The actual data on bitcoin transaction time has it at over 60 minutes average today. The best it has been all week is 12 minutes. Within the last 6 months there have been days it has gone as high as 7+ hours.
Meanwhile, some guy on youtube using the LN (which, again, sidesteps using bitcoin directly and instead uses a separate, complicated system that's not decentralized) can get a transaction done in a less heinous time, so that proves ... what?
Also, you want to talk about honesty? You came into this thread to tell everyone how actually, bitcoin is great because your debit card sucks. Now your story is actually you don't even use it for daily transactions, you just use it for "savings", and also you haven't lost anything this year since you didn't plan to sell it or buy any more anyways. So which is it? Is it an awesome payment processor to let people (as you specifically claimed!) buy a banana? Or just a long-term investment that you shouldn't need to access anytime soon (at which point, why does LN matter to you at all?).
We get it. Nothing anyone can say is going to sway you, because you will always have yet another set of obfuscatory claims about how actually there's a solution (with a giant asterisk, and also probably years away, and also requiring massive improvements in compute power, and also requiring magical thinking, and ...).
Everything you're claiming is bog standard crypto shill talking points meant to confuse and deflect from the reality that crypto is technologically a nothingburger, sociologically a haven for scams and theft, and ecologically a disaster . None of it is convincing to anyone who has spent even a tiny amount of time investigating the issue.
posted by a faithful sock at 9:34 AM on October 27, 2022 [14 favorites]
The actual data on bitcoin transaction time has it at over 60 minutes average today. The best it has been all week is 12 minutes. Within the last 6 months there have been days it has gone as high as 7+ hours.
Meanwhile, some guy on youtube using the LN (which, again, sidesteps using bitcoin directly and instead uses a separate, complicated system that's not decentralized) can get a transaction done in a less heinous time, so that proves ... what?
Also, you want to talk about honesty? You came into this thread to tell everyone how actually, bitcoin is great because your debit card sucks. Now your story is actually you don't even use it for daily transactions, you just use it for "savings", and also you haven't lost anything this year since you didn't plan to sell it or buy any more anyways. So which is it? Is it an awesome payment processor to let people (as you specifically claimed!) buy a banana? Or just a long-term investment that you shouldn't need to access anytime soon (at which point, why does LN matter to you at all?).
We get it. Nothing anyone can say is going to sway you, because you will always have yet another set of obfuscatory claims about how actually there's a solution (with a giant asterisk, and also probably years away, and also requiring massive improvements in compute power, and also requiring magical thinking, and ...).
Everything you're claiming is bog standard crypto shill talking points meant to confuse and deflect from the reality that crypto is technologically a nothingburger, sociologically a haven for scams and theft, and ecologically a disaster . None of it is convincing to anyone who has spent even a tiny amount of time investigating the issue.
posted by a faithful sock at 9:34 AM on October 27, 2022 [14 favorites]
NoxAeternum:
Anything you can use blockchain for, you already have more performant solutions to pick from. And this is not surprising because the use case that blockchain was built around was "how do you run a ledger without trust?"
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. Blockchain has never made sense to me. Not in the "I can't possibly ever understand the theory of relativity" but in the "what your are saying is directly contradicting what you are doing."
"How do you run a ledger with out trust? Well, just trust everyone!"
from TFA via flabdablet:
Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.
It's really, really weird seeing how devoted some people are to the whole concept of blockchain or cryptocurrency. Like, on the spectrum of like dislike for really anything, you'll have a whole spectrum of beliefs from vehement opposed to vehemently supporting. But, with cryptocurrency, it seems like you have the vehemently opposed, slightly opposed, completely indifferent/unaware and then this huge gap where the mildly support should be and jumps straight to 100% all-in.
Where is the group of, "It's alright, I suppose."?
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:31 AM on October 27, 2022
Anything you can use blockchain for, you already have more performant solutions to pick from. And this is not surprising because the use case that blockchain was built around was "how do you run a ledger without trust?"
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. Blockchain has never made sense to me. Not in the "I can't possibly ever understand the theory of relativity" but in the "what your are saying is directly contradicting what you are doing."
"How do you run a ledger with out trust? Well, just trust everyone!"
from TFA via flabdablet:
Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.
It's really, really weird seeing how devoted some people are to the whole concept of blockchain or cryptocurrency. Like, on the spectrum of like dislike for really anything, you'll have a whole spectrum of beliefs from vehement opposed to vehemently supporting. But, with cryptocurrency, it seems like you have the vehemently opposed, slightly opposed, completely indifferent/unaware and then this huge gap where the mildly support should be and jumps straight to 100% all-in.
Where is the group of, "It's alright, I suppose."?
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:31 AM on October 27, 2022
I'm not a crypto trader, I just decided to use Bitcoin as a money/savings tool and for that it works great.
I just spat water when I read this at work. Please forward my manager 0.00076BTC so he can buy a paper towel.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:39 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
I just spat water when I read this at work. Please forward my manager 0.00076BTC so he can buy a paper towel.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:39 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
Hurry, please, he's very damp
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:39 AM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:39 AM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
> a faithful sock
"LOL, you're linking to fucking youtube shorts, to try to prove your point?"
Yeah and?
"The actual data on bitcoin transaction time has it at over 60 minutes average today. The best it has been all week is 12 minutes. Within the last 6 months there have been days it has gone as high as 7+ hours."
The base layer of bitcoin was never intended to be a super fast payments system. The goal was security and robustness. Plus if you're in a hurry you can pay a little more for faster base layer transactions.
"Also, you want to talk about honesty? You came into this thread to tell everyone how actually, bitcoin is great because your debit card sucks. Now your story is actually you don't even use it for daily transactions, you just use it for "savings", and also you haven't lost anything this year since you didn't plan to sell it or buy any more anyways. So which is it? Is it an awesome payment processor to let people (as you specifically claimed!) buy a banana? Or just a long-term investment that you shouldn't need to access anytime soon (at which point, why does LN matter to you at all?)."
In all honesty, I use it for both spending and saving because it functions at both scales. These functions are not mutually exclusive or contradictory.
"We get it. Nothing anyone can say is going to sway you, because you will always have yet another set of obfuscatory claims about how actually..."
What is there to sway? I use this technology and my experience with it is positive. Does using this technology prohibit me from participating in discussions about this tech?
I feel like a sailor getting told that boats don't work after stepping ashore... off a boat.
"...there's a solution (with a giant asterisk, and also probably years away, and also requiring massive improvements in compute power, and also requiring magical thinking, and ...)."
It's here now with current hardware. Future hardware just makes it even easier.
"Everything you're claiming is bog standard crypto shill talking points meant to confuse and deflect from the reality that crypto is technologically a nothingburger, sociologically a haven for scams and theft, and ecologically a disaster . None of it is convincing to anyone who has spent even a tiny amount of time investigating the issue."
I am not surprised. If you're unwilling to accept that the system functions and provides people with utility and value then nothing could justify it's existence. And it follows that anyone who says otherwise is a 'crypto shill'.
posted by neonamber at 10:58 AM on October 27, 2022
"LOL, you're linking to fucking youtube shorts, to try to prove your point?"
Yeah and?
"The actual data on bitcoin transaction time has it at over 60 minutes average today. The best it has been all week is 12 minutes. Within the last 6 months there have been days it has gone as high as 7+ hours."
The base layer of bitcoin was never intended to be a super fast payments system. The goal was security and robustness. Plus if you're in a hurry you can pay a little more for faster base layer transactions.
"Also, you want to talk about honesty? You came into this thread to tell everyone how actually, bitcoin is great because your debit card sucks. Now your story is actually you don't even use it for daily transactions, you just use it for "savings", and also you haven't lost anything this year since you didn't plan to sell it or buy any more anyways. So which is it? Is it an awesome payment processor to let people (as you specifically claimed!) buy a banana? Or just a long-term investment that you shouldn't need to access anytime soon (at which point, why does LN matter to you at all?)."
In all honesty, I use it for both spending and saving because it functions at both scales. These functions are not mutually exclusive or contradictory.
"We get it. Nothing anyone can say is going to sway you, because you will always have yet another set of obfuscatory claims about how actually..."
What is there to sway? I use this technology and my experience with it is positive. Does using this technology prohibit me from participating in discussions about this tech?
I feel like a sailor getting told that boats don't work after stepping ashore... off a boat.
"...there's a solution (with a giant asterisk, and also probably years away, and also requiring massive improvements in compute power, and also requiring magical thinking, and ...)."
It's here now with current hardware. Future hardware just makes it even easier.
"Everything you're claiming is bog standard crypto shill talking points meant to confuse and deflect from the reality that crypto is technologically a nothingburger, sociologically a haven for scams and theft, and ecologically a disaster . None of it is convincing to anyone who has spent even a tiny amount of time investigating the issue."
I am not surprised. If you're unwilling to accept that the system functions and provides people with utility and value then nothing could justify it's existence. And it follows that anyone who says otherwise is a 'crypto shill'.
posted by neonamber at 10:58 AM on October 27, 2022
It's kind of interesting seeing a true believer here on Metafilter. A mixture of ignorance of the very basics, but propped up by an exhortation of "me me me me". It's rather symptomatic.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:07 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:07 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
Where is the group of, "It's alright, I suppose."?
They just don't exist, because crypto's fundamentals are that shaky. Anyone who takes a good look at them either realizes that you have a bunch of people speed running capitalism and NOPE out, or decides to go all in. There's no space for "I guess it might work."
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:45 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
They just don't exist, because crypto's fundamentals are that shaky. Anyone who takes a good look at them either realizes that you have a bunch of people speed running capitalism and NOPE out, or decides to go all in. There's no space for "I guess it might work."
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:45 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm starting to warm to Matt Levine's implied view that amusement, rather than complete despair and horror, is the only emotionally sustainable reaction to watching otherwise reasonable people engage in the verbal trench warfare over this issue that is apparently mandatory now. Because they're clearly not going to stop doing that any time soon.
"You're an irrational crypto shill!"
"No, you're an irrational reality denier!"
Fuck's sake. How about we all just calm the fuck down and discuss something Metafilter does better, like Israel/Palestine maybe.
posted by flabdablet at 11:53 AM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
"You're an irrational crypto shill!"
"No, you're an irrational reality denier!"
Fuck's sake. How about we all just calm the fuck down and discuss something Metafilter does better, like Israel/Palestine maybe.
posted by flabdablet at 11:53 AM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
what if we put the two-state solution on the blockchain
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:51 PM on October 27, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:51 PM on October 27, 2022 [11 favorites]
What if the real blockchain was right there in front of us all along?
posted by aspersioncast at 4:40 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by aspersioncast at 4:40 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
Ok but more seriously: I am a hypomanic obsessive-by-nature whose only two modes are "absolute apathy" and "zealous interest." I'm not unfamiliar with being a True Believer for various things, and time and haven't diluted that habit so much as they've helped me hone my targets a little bit.
When you habitually get Excited about things, you eventually figure out which things are genuinely worth the buzz, and which things should make you wary. Pulling this list out of my ass, but a bunch of the things I've learned are red flags over the years include:
I was recently geeking out to a friend about Steve Jobs' original unveiling of the iPhone. Kind of a niche thing to still be gushing about, maybe, but the iPhone reveal occupies a deeply unusual intersection of technology and marketing and user experience and culture and showmanship, all in a pretty tight package. And one of the amazing things about the way it's structured is that a lot of it is centered around the philosophy of computer interface and hardware design: Steve talks about Apple's own history of interface design, but he also spends a lot of time talking about interface abstraction (like the idea that mice and "clicking", and/or styluses, require an intermediary symbolic layer that fingers don't). He talks about hardware keyboards, and the various approaches that've been taken to them, before he so much as reveals the iPhone's all-screen design. When he does get to the iPhone part, he has to demonstrate swipe-scrolling, multitouch, even the fact that you can rotate the phone to rotate the screen. Because that was a lot of complex novelty, and he introduced it all at once.
But all of that is counterpointed by the fact that, every time he talks about one of these things, the punchline is always something breathtakingly simple. Literally breathtaking: you can hear the crowd gasp half a dozen times. Mice and styluses symbolic abstraction yadda yadda yadda: here, watch the screen scroll when I swipe it. He goes on about multitouch technology and under-screen sensors but all of that is set-up to him pinching a live map of California and it zooms in with his fingers. And then he taps a Starbucks and places a call right from the map, and people lose their minds, because that simple gesture folded so many different levels of conceptual complexity together at once that it was genuinely hard to comprehend that this was a real product and not a hypothetical film.
You don't have to be an Apple fanboy or a Steve Jobs stan to realize that that demo was genuinely revolutionary: it changed the course of the last two decades in profound ways. And the revolutionary nature of it went hand-in-hand with the fact that all the complicated stuff, all the tech wonkery, all the UX philosophy, all mapped perfectly onto the idea that a pocket-sized device could be trusted to run actual computer programs, and that those programs were easier to use than the ones on your laptop. The simplicity of it was the revolution—and the brilliance of it was that it folded countless layers of complexity into something that, at the end of the day, really was that simple.
Cryptocurrency, by contrast, offers only one simple story: people are making a lot of money over there. The blockchain? People are making a lot of money off of it. NFTs? Bored Apes? They sure are making people a lot of money. Cultural relevance? People are launching a bunch of projects that they hope will make them money.
How is the quantity of money being made connected to crypto's mathematical or technological properties? It isn't. Try and map the "stock value" of BTC to the fact that you don't need a bank to store it. You can't. Try and prove that the mathematical soundness of the blockchain is somehow more effective at making somebody money than a physical dollar bill. It's literally impossible. The buzz is about one thing—money money money money!—but we're being told, over and over again, that it's about math or tech or philosophy or politics or ownership or 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Sorry. Got a little nauseous writing all that out.
I get being excited about stuff. Would never want to discourage people from losing their minds about things they think are neat, even when I don't get the appeal of those things myself. But if you're gonna devote yourself to something, you need to take time to make sure you understand what you're actually devoting yourself to and why you are. And you need to know how to separate the bullshit that feels like an answer to those two questions from genuine, meaningful answers.
Bitcoin hype just feels like dumb hype—and if you've spent a lifetime getting hyped up about things, you can spot the difference immediately. Bitcoin hype feels like the way it felt as a kid, when I seriously bought into vague claims that Nintendo had made a shapeshifting controller that could turn into a full cockpit's worth of levers. It's big and bright and the sky's the limit and it's just so so so dumb. The real deal can be big and bright too, but there's a major difference: it gives you something you can actually sink your teeth into.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:10 PM on October 27, 2022 [9 favorites]
When you habitually get Excited about things, you eventually figure out which things are genuinely worth the buzz, and which things should make you wary. Pulling this list out of my ass, but a bunch of the things I've learned are red flags over the years include:
- How much of the hype revolves around stories about other people talking about how hyped they're feeling?
- Is the Exciting part of this thing straightforward, obvious, and concrete, or is it just the idea of the thing that's exciting?
- When you think something feels revolutionary, is it the actual existence of the thing that you think will spark a revolution, or is the revolutionary part philosophical in nature?
- Does a thing's advantages over its alternatives immediately translate into something of material significance?
- How much effort would other people have to make in order for this thing to start to matter?
- How much of the buzz around this thing involves the creation of a new class of celebrity or specialized "intellectual"?
- Is it "brilliant" in the sense of light and clarity, rendering obvious and simple that which was once challenging and complex? Or is it "brilliant" in the sense that it consists of many hard-to-understand layers which only seem to be understood to people who devote themselves to all of those layers at once—meaning, nobody with any expertise of any other kind can make heads or tails of it?
I was recently geeking out to a friend about Steve Jobs' original unveiling of the iPhone. Kind of a niche thing to still be gushing about, maybe, but the iPhone reveal occupies a deeply unusual intersection of technology and marketing and user experience and culture and showmanship, all in a pretty tight package. And one of the amazing things about the way it's structured is that a lot of it is centered around the philosophy of computer interface and hardware design: Steve talks about Apple's own history of interface design, but he also spends a lot of time talking about interface abstraction (like the idea that mice and "clicking", and/or styluses, require an intermediary symbolic layer that fingers don't). He talks about hardware keyboards, and the various approaches that've been taken to them, before he so much as reveals the iPhone's all-screen design. When he does get to the iPhone part, he has to demonstrate swipe-scrolling, multitouch, even the fact that you can rotate the phone to rotate the screen. Because that was a lot of complex novelty, and he introduced it all at once.
But all of that is counterpointed by the fact that, every time he talks about one of these things, the punchline is always something breathtakingly simple. Literally breathtaking: you can hear the crowd gasp half a dozen times. Mice and styluses symbolic abstraction yadda yadda yadda: here, watch the screen scroll when I swipe it. He goes on about multitouch technology and under-screen sensors but all of that is set-up to him pinching a live map of California and it zooms in with his fingers. And then he taps a Starbucks and places a call right from the map, and people lose their minds, because that simple gesture folded so many different levels of conceptual complexity together at once that it was genuinely hard to comprehend that this was a real product and not a hypothetical film.
You don't have to be an Apple fanboy or a Steve Jobs stan to realize that that demo was genuinely revolutionary: it changed the course of the last two decades in profound ways. And the revolutionary nature of it went hand-in-hand with the fact that all the complicated stuff, all the tech wonkery, all the UX philosophy, all mapped perfectly onto the idea that a pocket-sized device could be trusted to run actual computer programs, and that those programs were easier to use than the ones on your laptop. The simplicity of it was the revolution—and the brilliance of it was that it folded countless layers of complexity into something that, at the end of the day, really was that simple.
Cryptocurrency, by contrast, offers only one simple story: people are making a lot of money over there. The blockchain? People are making a lot of money off of it. NFTs? Bored Apes? They sure are making people a lot of money. Cultural relevance? People are launching a bunch of projects that they hope will make them money.
How is the quantity of money being made connected to crypto's mathematical or technological properties? It isn't. Try and map the "stock value" of BTC to the fact that you don't need a bank to store it. You can't. Try and prove that the mathematical soundness of the blockchain is somehow more effective at making somebody money than a physical dollar bill. It's literally impossible. The buzz is about one thing—money money money money!—but we're being told, over and over again, that it's about math or tech or philosophy or politics or ownership or 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Sorry. Got a little nauseous writing all that out.
I get being excited about stuff. Would never want to discourage people from losing their minds about things they think are neat, even when I don't get the appeal of those things myself. But if you're gonna devote yourself to something, you need to take time to make sure you understand what you're actually devoting yourself to and why you are. And you need to know how to separate the bullshit that feels like an answer to those two questions from genuine, meaningful answers.
Bitcoin hype just feels like dumb hype—and if you've spent a lifetime getting hyped up about things, you can spot the difference immediately. Bitcoin hype feels like the way it felt as a kid, when I seriously bought into vague claims that Nintendo had made a shapeshifting controller that could turn into a full cockpit's worth of levers. It's big and bright and the sky's the limit and it's just so so so dumb. The real deal can be big and bright too, but there's a major difference: it gives you something you can actually sink your teeth into.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:10 PM on October 27, 2022 [9 favorites]
So you're saying I should bite my Bitcoins to find out whether they're made from real bits?
posted by flabdablet at 6:48 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 6:48 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
No no, byte.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:56 AM on October 28, 2022
posted by aspersioncast at 6:56 AM on October 28, 2022
Cryptocurrency, by contrast, offers only one simple story: people are making a lot of money over there.
No, it offers a second story, one that can be even more seductive than making money: fuck society, I'm a free person. This is why I feel that the "I got nerfed in a game, so I created a horribly destructive system so I can feel in control" origin story for Ethereum is important to talk about - it illustrates the mentality that drives crypto, even more than making money.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:14 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
No, it offers a second story, one that can be even more seductive than making money: fuck society, I'm a free person. This is why I feel that the "I got nerfed in a game, so I created a horribly destructive system so I can feel in control" origin story for Ethereum is important to talk about - it illustrates the mentality that drives crypto, even more than making money.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:14 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
I am really not sure that this history of finance backs up the argument that the problems of finance can be solved by different, less regulated finance, which is largely the case made by crypto people. And it seems like lots of the problems that crypto claims to solve are not inherent properties of the current system but are largely there because they make money for banks etc and you can solve that by making rules that stop them rather than re-inventing the whole system with a whole different set of ways for intermediaries to make money from your transactions, plus a whole load of the old ways that were regulated away because they were bad.
If people really cared about the problems with the current system they would spend their time and money trying to fix that, but it's not as shiny or as fun or interesting as re-inventing things from scratch.
posted by mr_stru at 7:14 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
If people really cared about the problems with the current system they would spend their time and money trying to fix that, but it's not as shiny or as fun or interesting as re-inventing things from scratch.
posted by mr_stru at 7:14 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am really not sure that this history of finance backs up the argument that the problems of finance can be solved by different, less regulated finance, which is largely the case made by crypto people.
The thing to remember is that the tech community does not believe that it should be ruled over. They are opposed to regulation because regulation means "submitting" to someone else.
A lot of their arguments make a lot more "sense" once you keep that in mind.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:20 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
The thing to remember is that the tech community does not believe that it should be ruled over. They are opposed to regulation because regulation means "submitting" to someone else.
A lot of their arguments make a lot more "sense" once you keep that in mind.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:20 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
not as shiny or as fun or interesting as re-inventing things from scratch
Which leads to crypto, a CADT re-implementation of finance.
posted by flabdablet at 7:49 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Which leads to crypto, a CADT re-implementation of finance.
posted by flabdablet at 7:49 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
And it seems like lots of the problems that crypto claims to solve are not inherent properties of the current system but are largely there because they make money for banks etc
The mistake you're making is, you're taking seriously their claims about what problems they're trying to solve.
Crypto boosters have shown us time and again that they don't really care about solving real-world problems for people. Sure, they'll pay lip service to how they can totally solve some problem for marginalized or under-served communities, but it's only ever a PR campaign -- call it the finance equivalent of "greenwashing". They try to make a big show of it, but ultimately it's not doing much real good and isn't their focus.
Their actual focus is quite simple to understand: they're not fundamentally opposed to the inequalities of the current system, they just want to invent a new system where they get to sit at the top of the hierarchy.
posted by a faithful sock at 8:56 AM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
The mistake you're making is, you're taking seriously their claims about what problems they're trying to solve.
Crypto boosters have shown us time and again that they don't really care about solving real-world problems for people. Sure, they'll pay lip service to how they can totally solve some problem for marginalized or under-served communities, but it's only ever a PR campaign -- call it the finance equivalent of "greenwashing". They try to make a big show of it, but ultimately it's not doing much real good and isn't their focus.
Their actual focus is quite simple to understand: they're not fundamentally opposed to the inequalities of the current system, they just want to invent a new system where they get to sit at the top of the hierarchy.
posted by a faithful sock at 8:56 AM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
This is the article Kevin Roose should have written for the New York Times.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:34 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:34 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
A paragraph about the Levine essay that explains why I liked it:
posted by clew at 12:37 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
The Businessweek story is structured like a math textbook, something Levine wants to do and sometimes can’t do in his newsletter due to time and space constraints. “If you read an upper-level math textbook, it starts from the dumbest thing, like, ‘This is what a number is,’” he says. “It starts from that basic premise and builds from there, and I love that format, and I love that ambition for writing about complicated topics.” Because Bitcoin is such a recent invention, it’s possible to start with the whitepaper and build from there to the major crypto shenanigans you see today.From a fluffy bit at the Verge
posted by clew at 12:37 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Does The Verge ever do anything but fluffy bits? Near as I can tell, it's constructed entirely from fluff so fluffy you could fluff it into your ceiling and stay warm all winter.
posted by flabdablet at 10:32 AM on October 29, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 10:32 AM on October 29, 2022
Personally, I think the problem with Levine's approach is not that he's credulous, but that his position of intellectual detachment is not actually the correct approach to machinery that can chew up whole economies.
I personally really enjoyed the article, and think it sits in a nice place of discourse with the Folding Ideas “Line Goes Up” video that had us a ll a-twitter before the crash. In that video, Dan Olson has a moment where he spouts some long piece of gibberish and pools and derivatives (and maybe a DAO), and then makes an apology because “some of this is just gonna be like that”. But then the rest of the video isn’t like that - it’s him providing a review of basic crypto tech and then making a very tidy political argument about why crypto is bad that could, at a high level, be boiled down to “The Money wants to control it and you, and it’s full of scams”. It’s great! What he never really did, though, was go back to that pool of gibberish from the beginning and explain what it had meant. And I wanted to know what it meant! My experience of the crypto skeptic discourse by and large has followed this route - high level tech reviews, claims that it’s full of scams, everything is scams, etc., abjure abjure abjure, and don’t talk about it.
The really nice thing about this article is that it actually explains these things instead of just yelling “NO!”. I think I can refer back to this essay when I want some facts about novel stuff that people have tried with crypto, or some notion of why the technology is appealing (because you can make up magical money things that might make you rich), even if it’s also paired with the understanding that crypto isn’t adding anything of value and shouldn’t really be touched except for with the funnest of fun money. Olson sort of takes a blanket view that these people are all crooks who want your money, but it sort of ignores the idea that people might actually find crypto fun and intellectually interesting. To Olson, everyone involved in crypto is sort of suffering through the experience but they’ve got to endure it to rob you, while Levine acknowledges that some of them are having a good time trying to do fun things that might end up failing terribly or becoming Ponzi schemes. In many, ways, I feel like the people with whom I philosophically agree with here are talking down to me, while Levine is at least acknowledging that I might want to understand the territory.
One of the “Line Goes Up” videos core theses seemed to be “crypto will leave all the big problems the same” so it is bad. This seemed a bit unjustified. Should I care that the success of Web3 means that Marc Andreessen will be richer and Mark Zuckerburg will be poorer? It seems sort of moot - the real question is whether I’ll be richer or poorer, and the answer is… shrug emoji. Reworking all apps to be dApps is a bad use of time - but as a philosophical point about money, it seems weak as heck. As long as people are paid to do it and happy to do the work, it seems essentially the same as the status quo.
Similarly, Olson’s objections to people in need turning to crypto as a desperate move for wealth are gut wrenching but also… people are desperately searching for ways out of poverty all the time. Crypto is our flavor of the week. It should be abjured, but it doesn’t make it novel, exactly. The novel stuff is El Salvador treating bitcoin as an official currency, or people trying to use stablecoins as hedges against unstable local currencies. That’s really reprehensible, and I wish Levine and Olson both touched on it a bit more in their respective genre entries: the rails that are too dang hot to touch with this system today.
A final specific wish for the article: that it could be longer! Olson -or maybe U Mich. Prof. Nicholas Weaver, or both- argues that private blockchains are essentially just git repositories and are useless, but Levine notes that some of those seem to actually exist and are things regulators might like to see! What’s their deal?
posted by Going To Maine at 5:56 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I personally really enjoyed the article, and think it sits in a nice place of discourse with the Folding Ideas “Line Goes Up” video that had us a ll a-twitter before the crash. In that video, Dan Olson has a moment where he spouts some long piece of gibberish and pools and derivatives (and maybe a DAO), and then makes an apology because “some of this is just gonna be like that”. But then the rest of the video isn’t like that - it’s him providing a review of basic crypto tech and then making a very tidy political argument about why crypto is bad that could, at a high level, be boiled down to “The Money wants to control it and you, and it’s full of scams”. It’s great! What he never really did, though, was go back to that pool of gibberish from the beginning and explain what it had meant. And I wanted to know what it meant! My experience of the crypto skeptic discourse by and large has followed this route - high level tech reviews, claims that it’s full of scams, everything is scams, etc., abjure abjure abjure, and don’t talk about it.
The really nice thing about this article is that it actually explains these things instead of just yelling “NO!”. I think I can refer back to this essay when I want some facts about novel stuff that people have tried with crypto, or some notion of why the technology is appealing (because you can make up magical money things that might make you rich), even if it’s also paired with the understanding that crypto isn’t adding anything of value and shouldn’t really be touched except for with the funnest of fun money. Olson sort of takes a blanket view that these people are all crooks who want your money, but it sort of ignores the idea that people might actually find crypto fun and intellectually interesting. To Olson, everyone involved in crypto is sort of suffering through the experience but they’ve got to endure it to rob you, while Levine acknowledges that some of them are having a good time trying to do fun things that might end up failing terribly or becoming Ponzi schemes. In many, ways, I feel like the people with whom I philosophically agree with here are talking down to me, while Levine is at least acknowledging that I might want to understand the territory.
One of the “Line Goes Up” videos core theses seemed to be “crypto will leave all the big problems the same” so it is bad. This seemed a bit unjustified. Should I care that the success of Web3 means that Marc Andreessen will be richer and Mark Zuckerburg will be poorer? It seems sort of moot - the real question is whether I’ll be richer or poorer, and the answer is… shrug emoji. Reworking all apps to be dApps is a bad use of time - but as a philosophical point about money, it seems weak as heck. As long as people are paid to do it and happy to do the work, it seems essentially the same as the status quo.
Similarly, Olson’s objections to people in need turning to crypto as a desperate move for wealth are gut wrenching but also… people are desperately searching for ways out of poverty all the time. Crypto is our flavor of the week. It should be abjured, but it doesn’t make it novel, exactly. The novel stuff is El Salvador treating bitcoin as an official currency, or people trying to use stablecoins as hedges against unstable local currencies. That’s really reprehensible, and I wish Levine and Olson both touched on it a bit more in their respective genre entries: the rails that are too dang hot to touch with this system today.
A final specific wish for the article: that it could be longer! Olson -or maybe U Mich. Prof. Nicholas Weaver, or both- argues that private blockchains are essentially just git repositories and are useless, but Levine notes that some of those seem to actually exist and are things regulators might like to see! What’s their deal?
posted by Going To Maine at 5:56 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Olson -or maybe U Mich. Prof. Nicholas Weaver yt , or both- argues that private blockchains are essentially just git repositories and are useless
Because all a blockchain is at its heart is a ledger that's had key functionality removed in order to create a system that can be "trusted" through "economic motives" rather than through actual trust reinforced by consequences. In a private situation, you either have trust, in which case you have much better options, or you don't, in which case You Be Fucked.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Because all a blockchain is at its heart is a ledger that's had key functionality removed in order to create a system that can be "trusted" through "economic motives" rather than through actual trust reinforced by consequences. In a private situation, you either have trust, in which case you have much better options, or you don't, in which case You Be Fucked.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Audit trails matter, so that's not literally true. You could do git-like hash-based audit trails in many ways, some of which do not require replacing your existing performant database with sophomoric garbage. There are also optimizations around batch processing, which maybe imposes some new block like structure, but avoid anything designed by the Ethereum foundation anyways. This is likely Weaver's point.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:14 AM on October 30, 2022
posted by jeffburdges at 11:14 AM on October 30, 2022
Re-skimming the article (as one does), this intro comes out:
Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny. Crypto has a very high density of stories like that.
This feels like a lot. I can find crypto stories funny in the abstract, but as soon as I start thinking of any of these scams in a real way, as hurting real suckers (and we are all potential suckers) it becomes hard.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:49 PM on October 31, 2022
Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny. Crypto has a very high density of stories like that.
This feels like a lot. I can find crypto stories funny in the abstract, but as soon as I start thinking of any of these scams in a real way, as hurting real suckers (and we are all potential suckers) it becomes hard.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:49 PM on October 31, 2022
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posted by MengerSponge at 2:25 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]