@Laurelai At best they're evaluating it against the huge amount of hype, deciding it doesn't live up to the hype (duh), and concluding that therefore it's not useful at all. They also ignore the fact that it's an evolving technology and that pretty much every complaint is about a replaceable implementation detail.

@seanl @Laurelai I've yet to comprehend just what magic it's supposed to do anyway. what problem was a "blockchain" supposed to solve

@kara @Laurelai It's a means of achieving a single agreed upon ordering of transactions without needing a trusted third party. That way, if someone tries to spend the same money to person A and person B, there's an algorithmic means of determining which is the valid transaction.

@kara @Laurelai There are lots of criticisms like "it's not really decentralized because of pool mining" and "it's easy to attack because you don't really need a majority of hashing power" and "it'll destroy the planet because it uses too much energy". The first hasn't been a problem in practice; the incentives for miners are "better" than the incentives for central banks. For the second I say "well then feel free to go make your billions breaking it".

@kara @Laurelai Bitcoin has the largest bug bounty in history by several orders of magnitude. And the third one I've addressed before but it boils down to the fact that the electricity must be paid for by some combination of transaction fees and block rewards, so it has to grow far more slowly than the transaction rate in the long run, but that there will also be technological advancements to reduce it.

@kara @Laurelai Of course, I was extrapolating a lot from one image. 99.9% of the time if someone is asking if they need a blockchain the answer is indeed "no". And if they're a startup it's like 99.9999% of the time.

@kara @Laurelai There's a second really interesting application of blockchain for which nobody has come up with a better solution, which is assigning human-meaningful, globally unique names to things. For that you either need a central or hierarchical authority or a blockchain.

@seanl @kara Cryptocurrency is ridiculous from an economics perspective, like literally pants on head.

@seanl @Laurelai more or less my feeling. cryptocurrency merely slaps a bunch of mutually incompatible layers of tech over existing media of exchange, it's basic useless

@kara @seanl And it lacks a central issuing authority that can issue it and create a demand for it via taxation. cryptonerds need to learn MMT

@Laurelai @kara People have used stones as currency. I think people overestimate the need for a government to create a demand for a currency via taxation. People will use cryptocurrency because it will allow them to bypass the traditional payment providers and banks and the censorship that they engage in.

@seanl @kara People used stones as currency and it wasn't sustainable or scalable

@seanl @Laurelai competing media of exchange is just a horrible idea in general

@seanl @Laurelai @kara
I'm with Sean in that it's a damn clever solution to the problem of replicating a physical transaction (I give it to you, I don't have it any more) without having to trust a central authority; computers couldn't do that! I can see why people are drawn to it.
What a shame it doesn't appear to scale. I really like the idea of digital cash. But bitcoin now requires a central server and folk are saying it was "always for investment". It wasn't.

@shadowfirebird @seanl @kara Most fiat currency is in computers tbh and you kinda want a central authority so that the government can issue currency when needed to expand the economy

@shadowfirebird @seanl @kara here this explains my position in detail https://www.patreon.com/posts/basic-socialist-17141974

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
well, if there is a central authority and it's the government, then it's not *fiat* currency. :) If you don't like the idea of fiat currency then you're unlikely to like bitcoin. Which is fair enough.

@shadowfirebird @seanl @kara i.....what? No. Fiat is issued by the government.

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
Argh, sorry, yes, I'm exactly 180° wrong. 6:40am here. The term I'm thinking of is "scrip". Bitcoin was supposed to be scrip, not fiat currency. It's not suitable as such.
I stand by what I said, just with … different words? :D

@shadowfirebird @Laurelai @shadowfirebird @kara No competition among exchange media means there's nothing to enforce fiscal and monetary discipline; the government can always steal from savers by printing more money.

Expanding the money supply does not expand the economy, because prices just rise to compensate. In the US because they've created a 2-tier economy it's house and stock prices that rise to compensate.

@seanl @shadowfirebird @kara its not stealing to tax the wealthy, it enforces monetary circuit completion

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @kara I'm not talking about taxation. I'm talking about diluting the value of the currency people are holding by creating more of it out of thin air.

@seanl @shadowfirebird @kara what do you think taxes are? Its how a government removes currency it created from circulation lol

@shadowfirebird @Laurelai @kara Another way to look at it is that no competition means the population is a captive audience for the government/central bank to steal from at will.

Also, there's always competition among assets to hold your wealth in. The question is just whether you want only the rich to have access to alternative assets with which to escape theft through inflation or if you want the middle class to have it too.

@seanl @shadowfirebird @kara Inflation is controlled by taxes and interest rates though, and if anything having a unified currency for the world would make tax evasion even harder

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @kara Inflation is affected by the rate of expansion of the money supply, which is affected in part by interest rates yes. Taxation doesn't affect the money supply because the government just turns around and spends it. And even if they pay down the debt the central bank will just turn around and monetize more of it to offset the downward pressure that puts on interest rates

@seanl @kara @Laurelai Like DNS via Blockchain?

@seanl (let's untag Laurelai from the evangelism eh?)

you haven't really answered my question, though. Bitcoin is not a genuine engineering problem that needed solving

so...is there something _useful_ a blockchain can do for me?

@kara Depends on what kind of stuff you want to do. Do you have something that requires a single agreed upon (but "eventually consistent" in that temporary forks are possible) ordering of signed blobs representing something like transactions? If so, is a single database sufficient? If a single database isn't sufficient, is a federation sufficient?

@kara You also need some way of incentivizing folks to compete to try to insert blocks. Cryptocurrencies usually do this by some combination of giving them the transaction fees and letting them insert a special "unbalanced" transaction that gives them a reward with a predetermined value. For a naming system you could let them reserve a name or something.

Speaking of which, I have no idea how Twister incentivizes mining.

I guess this is all a long way of saying no, probably not.

@kara I missed the part about your saying Bitcoin isn't a genuine engineering problem that needed solving. Anonymous electronic cash is a problem people have been trying to solve for a long time. The previous best solution was David Chaum's Ecash using his blind signature scheme. That required a trusted issuer and de-anonymized people (though not their transactoins) at withdrawal/deposit time, though. So Bitcoin is a solution to that problem.

@kara I guess this is part of the reason I get so flabbergasted that people just dismiss it out of hand as not solving a problem. It's solving a problem I've been wanting to see solved since the mid '90s. I had previously thought the only solution was something like Ripple's original implementation using an "IOU graph" before they went to blockchain.

@kara Of course, I originally dismissed it myself, but for economic reasons. http://undergroundeconomist.com/post/1528511369