'People were sucked into schemes': Molly White on Crypto
October 26, 2022 3:09 PM Subscribe
Crypto winter had just started when software engineer Molly White launched her blog, Web3 is going just great. She’s now one of the most influential blockchain skeptics. Wherein Molly White explains, among other things, that, no, she does not think it's all a scam.
But:
“It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
Very timely.
It seems we heard often from the folks who made a mint from their early foray into Bitcoin. And many of them know it was stupendous luck. We seldom hear hear from the folks who got in later... and got burnt.
On one forum I follow, a European asked this spring what was the "safest cryptocurrency" they could put funds into, in case things went really pearshaped in the Ukraine. A facepalm moment.
I will always read posts from someone named Ayn Marx. Well done.
posted by Artful Codger at 3:30 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
It seems we heard often from the folks who made a mint from their early foray into Bitcoin. And many of them know it was stupendous luck. We seldom hear hear from the folks who got in later... and got burnt.
On one forum I follow, a European asked this spring what was the "safest cryptocurrency" they could put funds into, in case things went really pearshaped in the Ukraine. A facepalm moment.
I will always read posts from someone named Ayn Marx. Well done.
posted by Artful Codger at 3:30 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
From the interview
People will just deny it. They'll say, “Oh, crypto has been so revolutionary. It's changed people's lives.” And you press on that question and people tend to say, “Well, it's made some people very wealthy,” which is true. But you could say the same thing about a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme.posted by spamandkimchi at 3:37 PM on October 26, 2022 [15 favorites]
“People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
I hate crypto with the heat of an exploding sun, but, to be fair, you can easily say this about pretty much any investment tool/package/plan/etc. Which is more-or-less why banks killed simple, effective, consumer savings plans and pushed everyone into investing. The opaqueness makes people easy marks. The upside, of course, is that normal investing, unlike crypto, is overseen, however feebly, by federal regs and laws.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:19 PM on October 26, 2022 [19 favorites]
I hate crypto with the heat of an exploding sun, but, to be fair, you can easily say this about pretty much any investment tool/package/plan/etc. Which is more-or-less why banks killed simple, effective, consumer savings plans and pushed everyone into investing. The opaqueness makes people easy marks. The upside, of course, is that normal investing, unlike crypto, is overseen, however feebly, by federal regs and laws.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:19 PM on October 26, 2022 [19 favorites]
Although most projects remain imho scams, there is increasingly a real talent pool doing blockchains these days, and more importantly a pipeline training people in cryptography and distributed systems, but all this talent still winds up being fragmented across tribal almost-impossible-to-use financial products.
If governments stop them entirely, then I suspect those people would occupy themselves building other things, often things spy-cops like way less. If otoh governments stop only the real scammers then maybe all those people spend their time building enterprise blockchains for banks, zkSNARKs for GDPR compliance, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:30 PM on October 26, 2022
If governments stop them entirely, then I suspect those people would occupy themselves building other things, often things spy-cops like way less. If otoh governments stop only the real scammers then maybe all those people spend their time building enterprise blockchains for banks, zkSNARKs for GDPR compliance, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:30 PM on October 26, 2022
I suspect those people would occupy themselves building other things
Like Urbit? People don't fall into one style of grift and then just magically start trying to genuinely make anything better. They just fall from one scam into another, telling themselves that this time it's gonna be good.
posted by aramaic at 5:35 PM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
Like Urbit? People don't fall into one style of grift and then just magically start trying to genuinely make anything better. They just fall from one scam into another, telling themselves that this time it's gonna be good.
posted by aramaic at 5:35 PM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
"Oh, crypto has been so revolutionary. It's changed people's lives."
To be fair, my ability to buy illegal drugs on the Internet has been greatly enhanced by crypto.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:06 PM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
To be fair, my ability to buy illegal drugs on the Internet has been greatly enhanced by crypto.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:06 PM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
"Although most projects remain imho scams, there is increasingly a real talent pool doing blockchains these days …"
There is at least one blockchain effort that has some really, (really) heavy-hitter development talent on-board who, being already very wealthy, have dedicated themselves—in an altruistic way—to creating a public blockchain as a service for things such as voting and a bunch of other somewhat mundane, but important, applications for which blockchain promises some real usefulness.
posted by bz at 6:40 PM on October 26, 2022
There is at least one blockchain effort that has some really, (really) heavy-hitter development talent on-board who, being already very wealthy, have dedicated themselves—in an altruistic way—to creating a public blockchain as a service for things such as voting and a bunch of other somewhat mundane, but important, applications for which blockchain promises some real usefulness.
posted by bz at 6:40 PM on October 26, 2022
An easy yardstick for essentially all possible blockchain developments: will it make any of the people involved richer than they are?
If yes, it is a scam.
If no, it is probably a scam that we just haven't figured out yet.
If their involvement will directly impoverish themselves, then it may not be a scam.
If the people involved sign legally-binding agreements that they will not accept any money related to this project for any reason whatsoever (including consulting!) in perpetuity then it's probably not a scam.
posted by aramaic at 6:46 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
If yes, it is a scam.
If no, it is probably a scam that we just haven't figured out yet.
If their involvement will directly impoverish themselves, then it may not be a scam.
If the people involved sign legally-binding agreements that they will not accept any money related to this project for any reason whatsoever (including consulting!) in perpetuity then it's probably not a scam.
posted by aramaic at 6:46 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
Two things can be true at once –
1) There is potentially useful technology being developed by people included in the scope of "crypto" as we generally understand it.
2) 99% or more of things within that scope are useless, scams, whatever else.
As far as I can tell, anything I've heard of in category 1 is mostly not financial in nature (and certainly not described as an "investment"), and any serious person sees the 'usefulness horizon' on a time scale of decades.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:59 PM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
1) There is potentially useful technology being developed by people included in the scope of "crypto" as we generally understand it.
2) 99% or more of things within that scope are useless, scams, whatever else.
As far as I can tell, anything I've heard of in category 1 is mostly not financial in nature (and certainly not described as an "investment"), and any serious person sees the 'usefulness horizon' on a time scale of decades.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:59 PM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
There is at least one blockchain effort that has some really, (really) heavy-hitter development talent on-board
What is this magical project?
Because I haven't seen any—I mean, literally zero—legitimate "blockchain" systems that offer an efficient solution to a problem that couldn't be done better without a blockchain-based consensus system.
There are certainly some interested distributed systems projects, like IPFS, but they do not involve blockchains, and in many ways are evolutionary improvements on technologies that have existed for decades. (IPFS uses DHTs in a manner similar to FreeNet, which has been around for decades, in which it has mostly served as a worked example of why letting people publish anything they want anonymously is a really, really bad idea.)
Back in 2018, when there was the first wave of more-money-than-sense investors tramping each other like Black Friday shoppers at Walmart to fork over money to any project with "blockchain" in it, I spent a while playing dumbest-guy-in-the-room with some brilliant engineers, trying to figure out what the compelling uses for it were. Everything we kept coming up with was basically reducible to "that's just crime with extra steps", "congratulations, you just reinvented DHTs, only poorly", "I guess that only works if you have people with guns to enforce it", or another fun failure mode. (You can put together a solid 5x5 bingo card if you ever have to do this.)
About the only credit I'm willing to give to blockchain systems, aside from probably having sped up global warming by a couple of years, is that they've shown that the pent-up demand for a digital financial network for facilitating crime and other black market activities is really high. Even if we got rid of Bitcoin and its idiotic proof-of-work siblings tomorrow, the cat is basically out of the bag: if someone can provide a putatively immutable public ledger and some sort of token-transaction functionality (even if that functionality barely works), people will imbue those tokens with value in order to use the ledger to facilitate transactions in the real world.
Playing cat-and-mouse with "cryptocurrency" schemes will probably be a part of national law enforcement agencies' purview for generations to come.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:20 PM on October 26, 2022 [51 favorites]
What is this magical project?
Because I haven't seen any—I mean, literally zero—legitimate "blockchain" systems that offer an efficient solution to a problem that couldn't be done better without a blockchain-based consensus system.
There are certainly some interested distributed systems projects, like IPFS, but they do not involve blockchains, and in many ways are evolutionary improvements on technologies that have existed for decades. (IPFS uses DHTs in a manner similar to FreeNet, which has been around for decades, in which it has mostly served as a worked example of why letting people publish anything they want anonymously is a really, really bad idea.)
Back in 2018, when there was the first wave of more-money-than-sense investors tramping each other like Black Friday shoppers at Walmart to fork over money to any project with "blockchain" in it, I spent a while playing dumbest-guy-in-the-room with some brilliant engineers, trying to figure out what the compelling uses for it were. Everything we kept coming up with was basically reducible to "that's just crime with extra steps", "congratulations, you just reinvented DHTs, only poorly", "I guess that only works if you have people with guns to enforce it", or another fun failure mode. (You can put together a solid 5x5 bingo card if you ever have to do this.)
About the only credit I'm willing to give to blockchain systems, aside from probably having sped up global warming by a couple of years, is that they've shown that the pent-up demand for a digital financial network for facilitating crime and other black market activities is really high. Even if we got rid of Bitcoin and its idiotic proof-of-work siblings tomorrow, the cat is basically out of the bag: if someone can provide a putatively immutable public ledger and some sort of token-transaction functionality (even if that functionality barely works), people will imbue those tokens with value in order to use the ledger to facilitate transactions in the real world.
Playing cat-and-mouse with "cryptocurrency" schemes will probably be a part of national law enforcement agencies' purview for generations to come.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:20 PM on October 26, 2022 [51 favorites]
I don't understand why we haven't applied something like the Class A drugs ban to cryptocurrency, I really don't. It's long past time.
posted by Dysk at 1:13 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 1:13 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
Great to see this interview with White, who always inspires me as a fellow software engineer.
“It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
A couple weeks ago the guy working on our house wanted to know what I thought about his Bitcoin portfolio. He was under the impression that Bitcoin transactions were hyper-fast. The big banks felt threatened because crypto would blow away their crude Swift/BIC technology! And he described a land of milk and honey in Indonesia or somewhere, a preview of a future world where everyone can pay for everything in ₿. Days later I heard an old guy on the train telling his mates that "there will come a time" when all money is crypto.
posted by johngoren at 1:16 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
“It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
A couple weeks ago the guy working on our house wanted to know what I thought about his Bitcoin portfolio. He was under the impression that Bitcoin transactions were hyper-fast. The big banks felt threatened because crypto would blow away their crude Swift/BIC technology! And he described a land of milk and honey in Indonesia or somewhere, a preview of a future world where everyone can pay for everything in ₿. Days later I heard an old guy on the train telling his mates that "there will come a time" when all money is crypto.
posted by johngoren at 1:16 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
I don't understand why we haven't applied something like the Class A drugs ban to cryptocurrency, I really don't. It's long past time.
Because to enforce this you would essentially have to ban all cryptography and drag and force the internet kicking and screaming back into entirely open unencrypted plaintext.
Which I'm sure certain values of they would absolutely love to see happen, but it would completely break the internet as we know it today.
I mean, yeah, you could ban cryptocurrency exchanges and other public facing entry/exit points, and you could criminalize the concept of these things in general, but actually detecting and enforcing them would effectively mean that you've either banned some or all kinds of cryptography for communications - or you have broken cryptography enough to do deep packet analysis of encrypted content, and neither of those are good things for internet security or privacy.
Conceptually it would be like trying to ban drugs if drugs were able to be nothing more than simple water molecules. Or sugar. Or otherwise indistinguishable from any other common and perfectly legal food.
And we can't even ban drugs completely as it is now where we can actually detect them.
posted by loquacious at 4:09 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
Because to enforce this you would essentially have to ban all cryptography and drag and force the internet kicking and screaming back into entirely open unencrypted plaintext.
Which I'm sure certain values of they would absolutely love to see happen, but it would completely break the internet as we know it today.
I mean, yeah, you could ban cryptocurrency exchanges and other public facing entry/exit points, and you could criminalize the concept of these things in general, but actually detecting and enforcing them would effectively mean that you've either banned some or all kinds of cryptography for communications - or you have broken cryptography enough to do deep packet analysis of encrypted content, and neither of those are good things for internet security or privacy.
Conceptually it would be like trying to ban drugs if drugs were able to be nothing more than simple water molecules. Or sugar. Or otherwise indistinguishable from any other common and perfectly legal food.
And we can't even ban drugs completely as it is now where we can actually detect them.
posted by loquacious at 4:09 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
Enforcement would happen largely at the stage where money is converted to or from cryptocurrency. Enforcement doesn't need to be perfect to be meaningful (look at e.g. compulsory taxation for an example of a useful system that effectively cannot be consistently enforced). In practice, the vast majority of cryptocurrency trading takes place via exchanges, which you can absolutely been without having to do deep packet inspection or whatever. Ban the trading and transfer of it, and maybe a few people can run their own wallets and circumvent that somewhat (though good luck arranging a sale without that leaving some kind of communications trail relating to it) but it would still have a seriously detrimental effect on most people's ability to engage with it, and it changes the risk profile making it much less attractive to the casual investor, nevermind the fact that you'd no longer have all the crypto investment adverts and companies. You'd go far by just talking the casual speculator money out of the system, even if some true believers can operate round it.
posted by Dysk at 4:54 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 4:54 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
A coworker of mine, over a year ago when Bitcoin was $60k, spent a couple grand on a bitcoin mining rig -- a high powered PC with a couple expensive video cards in them. At *that* time, the online calculators estimating it at barely covering his electrical costs but he was sure things were still going up! I think he's still running it, hoping it to go to the moon or whatever they say these days.
I, on the other hand, got a notice from Kraken that if I didn't log in again soon they'd consider my account abandoned and forfeited, which I thought I had zeroed out. Turns out I had $50 in litecoin in there! But, I could also see past transactions, dating back to 2013 or so when I had my own mining rig, and all the transactions for $30 or $40 of bitcoin that today would be worth thousands :'( Retroactive FOMO from documented proof of actually missing out.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:33 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
I, on the other hand, got a notice from Kraken that if I didn't log in again soon they'd consider my account abandoned and forfeited, which I thought I had zeroed out. Turns out I had $50 in litecoin in there! But, I could also see past transactions, dating back to 2013 or so when I had my own mining rig, and all the transactions for $30 or $40 of bitcoin that today would be worth thousands :'( Retroactive FOMO from documented proof of actually missing out.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:33 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
Ain't so simple to separate crypto-currencies from say video games, Dysk, so really we'd just tighten enforcement of existing laws where this line kinda exists. It'll change patterns but much less than you think..
We need several small wealthy nations to have wealthy-externalities taxes on owning unnecessarily environmentally destructive assets, initially proof-of-work crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but then later companies involved with coal, oil, gas, meat, cars, airplanes, etc. We do not need huge tax rates here, anywhere between 1% and their inflation rate, but 1% still dwarfs other wealth taxes, so bitcoin holders would move or sell, which mostly means sell. It'll bring the bitcoin ponzi-scheme much closer to collapse.
Afaik IPFS wound up broadly inferior to Tahoo-LAFS, Kadin2048, except in that IPFS uses Go instead of Python, which solves practical problems.
At least initially Protocol Labs started out incredibly sophomoric, like they rebuffed some real p2p experts who offered them advise. In fact, those buffoons even deployed a broken key exchange in libp2p, but like they also ignored advise from GnuNet, I2P, and maybe Tor about doing channel negotiation in forwarding. IPFS similarly ignored all the lessons from Tahoo-LAFS. Filecoin shipped some massively complex zk proof of storage, which really does not deliver quite the desired security properties.
At some point Protocol Labs started hiring people without ex-googler egos, so some of the founders' mistakes started being fixed.
Also, drand is a cool "blockchain".
posted by jeffburdges at 6:34 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
We need several small wealthy nations to have wealthy-externalities taxes on owning unnecessarily environmentally destructive assets, initially proof-of-work crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but then later companies involved with coal, oil, gas, meat, cars, airplanes, etc. We do not need huge tax rates here, anywhere between 1% and their inflation rate, but 1% still dwarfs other wealth taxes, so bitcoin holders would move or sell, which mostly means sell. It'll bring the bitcoin ponzi-scheme much closer to collapse.
Afaik IPFS wound up broadly inferior to Tahoo-LAFS, Kadin2048, except in that IPFS uses Go instead of Python, which solves practical problems.
At least initially Protocol Labs started out incredibly sophomoric, like they rebuffed some real p2p experts who offered them advise. In fact, those buffoons even deployed a broken key exchange in libp2p, but like they also ignored advise from GnuNet, I2P, and maybe Tor about doing channel negotiation in forwarding. IPFS similarly ignored all the lessons from Tahoo-LAFS. Filecoin shipped some massively complex zk proof of storage, which really does not deliver quite the desired security properties.
At some point Protocol Labs started hiring people without ex-googler egos, so some of the founders' mistakes started being fixed.
Also, drand is a cool "blockchain".
posted by jeffburdges at 6:34 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
That the Ethereum inventor was inspired to do so by Blizzard changing game balance in World of Warcraft doesn't seem to have any bearing in how a potential ban would work?
I see it as analogous to money laundering or tax evasion - very difficult if not impossible to consistently enforce, but still illegal, and not pointlessly so as it does make it harder to do, and reduces the prevalence. An inability to consistently enforce is not a reason to throw up your hands and give up entirely.
People who are ideologically committed to Bitcoin are far outnumbered by speculators looking to make a buck because they read it was a good investment. Scaring them off is enough to make a meaningful difference.
posted by Dysk at 6:50 AM on October 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
I see it as analogous to money laundering or tax evasion - very difficult if not impossible to consistently enforce, but still illegal, and not pointlessly so as it does make it harder to do, and reduces the prevalence. An inability to consistently enforce is not a reason to throw up your hands and give up entirely.
People who are ideologically committed to Bitcoin are far outnumbered by speculators looking to make a buck because they read it was a good investment. Scaring them off is enough to make a meaningful difference.
posted by Dysk at 6:50 AM on October 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
These recent crypto posts spurred me to finally sell the fractional bitcoin I bought last Dec. I took a 60% hit but already feel better.
posted by mono blanco at 10:24 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by mono blanco at 10:24 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
A lot of the crypto-adjacent software like drand, IPFS, libp2p sound interesting, but then you look at the docs and it's clear the software wasn't designed to actually be used, but instead to advertise how smart the designers and their crypto schemes are. There's a kind of performative complexity to everything crypto-related.
posted by Pyry at 11:36 AM on October 27, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 11:36 AM on October 27, 2022 [11 favorites]
"Sure this sector has a lot of Ponzi schemes, but this particular Ponzi scheme has a lot of very smart people involved."
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:08 PM on October 27, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:08 PM on October 27, 2022 [10 favorites]
A coworker of mine, over a year ago when Bitcoin was $60k, spent a couple grand on a bitcoin mining rig -- a high powered PC with a couple expensive video cards in them. At *that* time, the online calculators estimating it at barely covering his electrical costs but he was sure things were still going up! I think he's still running it, hoping it to go to the moon or whatever they say these days.
Probably not, since the Ethereum Merge has resulted in the gutting of mining operations. On the positive side, it's possible that your coworker has a still-usable decent gaming rig. (Although for most serious gamers, GPUs that were used for mining are being shunned, because they can finally afford a mint-in-box GPU for the first time in years.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:13 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
Probably not, since the Ethereum Merge has resulted in the gutting of mining operations. On the positive side, it's possible that your coworker has a still-usable decent gaming rig. (Although for most serious gamers, GPUs that were used for mining are being shunned, because they can finally afford a mint-in-box GPU for the first time in years.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:13 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
"What is this magical project?"
Magical? It's a private foundation with a very long view, and that hasn't publicized their efforts. They've been working on it for a few years now.
posted by bz at 6:45 PM on October 27, 2022
Magical? It's a private foundation with a very long view, and that hasn't publicized their efforts. They've been working on it for a few years now.
posted by bz at 6:45 PM on October 27, 2022
And the name is..... ?
...and the goal is ....?
You wanna make us beg for the magical blockchain bros? Is that the model, begging? Because if it is, we've got plenty of prior art.
posted by aramaic at 6:54 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
...and the goal is ....?
You wanna make us beg for the magical blockchain bros? Is that the model, begging? Because if it is, we've got plenty of prior art.
posted by aramaic at 6:54 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
“Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia”—münecat, 19 March 2022
posted by ob1quixote at 7:02 PM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:02 PM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
And the name is..... ?I heard it was "Slim Shady".
posted by Juffo-Wup at 7:03 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's a private foundation with a very long view, and that hasn't publicized their efforts.
Wonder if that's where my girlfriend who goes to another school works now.
But okay, I'm sure there are smart people 'working' on it, in the sense that they're hopefully doing a more thorough job of the same analysis I got asked to do in 2018. Maybe they'll find something we didn't. I'm pretty skeptical, though, because at its core, "blockchain" just isn't that novel or revolutionary to people who worked in distributed systems or databases. There's nothing there. The idea of creating an append-only ledger by having each entry contain the hash of the prior entry? That's just hash chaining, an idea that probably dates back to 1953. (Interestingly, the inventor was mainly looking for a way to perform constant-time keyword searches for documents.) Chained signing to enforce immutability has been around at least since the 90s, when I first saw it being used for "soft WORM" storage. None of this stuff is new. Volumes of literature has been written about almost every CS technique underlying "blockchain" software. It's neat stuff, and enables a lot of cool technology that we use all the time. Not a ton of surprises there, though.
The only surprise related to blockchain was the actual implementation of the insanity that is proof-of-work consensus, plus the psychological appeal of "mining" as a way to bring large numbers of people into the system (and personally invested in the convertability of the system's tokens to actual value) quickly. That's the surprising bit about the whole Bitcoin ecosystem: that despite being a really dumb idea, it kinda... worked? And that despite barely working and being a Bad Idea on the scale of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, people really wanted to conduct digital financial transactions outside of existing channels. The latent demand for what Bitcoin purports to be was far in excess of what I think most people in the financial and regulatory spheres would have guessed it was, back in 2008.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:40 PM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
Wonder if that's where my girlfriend who goes to another school works now.
But okay, I'm sure there are smart people 'working' on it, in the sense that they're hopefully doing a more thorough job of the same analysis I got asked to do in 2018. Maybe they'll find something we didn't. I'm pretty skeptical, though, because at its core, "blockchain" just isn't that novel or revolutionary to people who worked in distributed systems or databases. There's nothing there. The idea of creating an append-only ledger by having each entry contain the hash of the prior entry? That's just hash chaining, an idea that probably dates back to 1953. (Interestingly, the inventor was mainly looking for a way to perform constant-time keyword searches for documents.) Chained signing to enforce immutability has been around at least since the 90s, when I first saw it being used for "soft WORM" storage. None of this stuff is new. Volumes of literature has been written about almost every CS technique underlying "blockchain" software. It's neat stuff, and enables a lot of cool technology that we use all the time. Not a ton of surprises there, though.
The only surprise related to blockchain was the actual implementation of the insanity that is proof-of-work consensus, plus the psychological appeal of "mining" as a way to bring large numbers of people into the system (and personally invested in the convertability of the system's tokens to actual value) quickly. That's the surprising bit about the whole Bitcoin ecosystem: that despite being a really dumb idea, it kinda... worked? And that despite barely working and being a Bad Idea on the scale of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, people really wanted to conduct digital financial transactions outside of existing channels. The latent demand for what Bitcoin purports to be was far in excess of what I think most people in the financial and regulatory spheres would have guessed it was, back in 2008.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:40 PM on October 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
...heavy-hitter development talent on-board who, being already very wealthy, have dedicated themselves—in an altruistic way—to creating a public blockchain as a service for things such as voting and a bunch of other somewhat mundane, but important, applications
Smart people can be very stupid about how the rest of the human race operates. Do you really think that election deniers would accept a result they don't like, just because the vote was blockchained? You can explain until you are blue in the face. Doesn't matter.
posted by mono blanco at 6:10 AM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Smart people can be very stupid about how the rest of the human race operates. Do you really think that election deniers would accept a result they don't like, just because the vote was blockchained? You can explain until you are blue in the face. Doesn't matter.
posted by mono blanco at 6:10 AM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Shouldn't "blockchain" be irreparably associated with fraud and theft by now? Even a lot of "smart people" who "really understood the tech" got defrauded / hacked / rugpulled.
Like, there sure are a lot of people who have been fucked over by these mathematically secure distributed proof-of-co2 systems that blah blah lmao.
posted by ryanrs at 11:49 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Like, there sure are a lot of people who have been fucked over by these mathematically secure distributed proof-of-co2 systems that blah blah lmao.
posted by ryanrs at 11:49 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Shouldn't "blockchain" be irreparably associated with fraud and theft by now? Even a lot of "smart people" who "really understood the tech" got defrauded / hacked / rugpulled.
In a world where this happened you'd be foolish to invest in anything at all. Might as well pick your own poison.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:49 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
In a world where this happened you'd be foolish to invest in anything at all. Might as well pick your own poison.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:49 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
You might not like that CloudFlare wants randomness in a Byzantine threat model, Pyry, but drand is hardly "performative complexity".
It's arguably too simple and sacrifices some liveness unnecessarily, which could be fixed by this, or really nasty schemes like this. I mostly think their liveness trade off makes sense for them however.
I dislike libp2p, and maybe "performative complexity" makes libp2p worse, but mostly its problem is being sophomoric. It often provides one-size-fits-all solutions like PubSub, but which do not or cannot correctly capture the problem space, so users should roll their own solutions.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:28 PM on October 29, 2022
It's arguably too simple and sacrifices some liveness unnecessarily, which could be fixed by this, or really nasty schemes like this. I mostly think their liveness trade off makes sense for them however.
I dislike libp2p, and maybe "performative complexity" makes libp2p worse, but mostly its problem is being sophomoric. It often provides one-size-fits-all solutions like PubSub, but which do not or cannot correctly capture the problem space, so users should roll their own solutions.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:28 PM on October 29, 2022
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posted by drewbage1847 at 3:15 PM on October 26, 2022 [15 favorites]