[dsr_]

The first airplanes had a clear commercial advantage over other methods of transport: speed.

High-value, low-mass packages were transported by airplanes by 1911; by 1918 the USPS had an official air-mail service. That's fifteen years from the Wright Brothers' flight, and only ten years after the first flight of a full mile's distance.

So airplanes were economically a net positive 15 years after their invention. Chaum's ecash, which I think is reasonably comparable to the Kitty Hawk flight, was 25 years ago.

The primary use of Bitcoin that I encounter in my daily life is in ransom requests. If I want to make a legal million dollar payment, it's easier and safer to have the bank do it than to use cryptocoins. If I want to make a $20 payment, it's much easier and safer to use a credit card than cryptocoins. While I quote these extremes, everything [legal] in between is also easier and safer than cryptocurrency.

If the "things that need to be worked on before" don't include any of these cases, what do they include?

[rglullis]

> The first airplanes had a clear commercial advantage over other methods of transport: speed.

And blockchain enables people to send value without intermediaries around the world in less than a few minutes.

Key point: without intermediaries. Any comparison with existing banking systems is moot.

> If the "things that need to be worked on before" don't include any of these cases, what do they include?

- How to get the systems safer to use, so that people can reduce their dependence on existing banking/financial structure.

- How to create other use-cases beyond transmitting value: to create credit systems (along with credit ratings, insurance instruments), to eliminate notaries and have blockchain be also used as a record of private property, deeds, etc.

- How to find a better point in the trade-off decentralization/permissionless/operational cost x centralization/permissioned/economies of scale. That is what Layer-2 solutions are about.

- How to develop and architect applications that make use of this technology without destroying value.

Do you need more?

[dsr_]

All of these things except "without intermediaries" are already solved with intermediaries. Intermediaries are desirable: they solve problems so that the end users don't have to do it. It's fundamental to programming, in fact: you don't handwrite machine code, you use a language with libraries that gets interpreted or compiled to run on an operating system that provides lots of useful facilities and abstractions so that you don't have to care whether the machine is connected via a 3Com 905b or a Lucent Orinoco, and the same code that worked over those obsolete interfaces still works over a 10gig fiber NIC.

In particular, intermediaries allow people to fix mistakes. And people make mistakes all the time.

People like banking; it's individual banks that they hate. Better regulation fixes that. Unregulated transactions are terrible: the entire history of finance proves that people will lie, cheat and defraud each other if given half a chance.

Financial safety comes from the ability of a trustable third party to adjudicate and correct mistakes and disputes.

If you want to compile a credit rating, you need an accurate history of transactions. Blockchains don't give you accurate histories, they give you timestamped signed logs of entries that are really really difficult to amend. "This landlord reported that I was late on rent but I've never lived in that state" is a complaint that a credit agency must accept and evaluate.

Eliminating notaries: the purpose of a notary is not just to say "this event happened at this time" but to say "I witnessed this event happening at this time". A blockchain can't do that. You need to trust the notary as well as the notary's log, and random people adding entries doesn't make them trustable.

Record of private property and deeds: you literally want a single authoritative database here, where every write operation is done by a trusted person.

Each of these cases is not "we need a blockchain" but "it's good to have a signed, difficult-to-forge journal that can be inspected and verified".

Your last point is basically "we don't know what cryptocurrencies are good for."

[rglullis]

> intermediaries allow people to fix mistakes. And people make mistakes all the time.

If intermediaries are optional, they are great. The problem is when they are required, or when they are corrupt, or simply inefficient.

Everything else you are writing shows the same privileged worldview that I see in those who hold strong anti-crypto ideas. You don't know how it is to not have reliable and robust institutions, so you don't understand why so many people want to work on a solution that disrupts them.

> Each of these cases is not "we need a blockchain" but "it's good to have a signed, difficult-to-forge journal that can be inspected and verified".

Yes, blockchain is not the end. It's the tool to have a "signed, difficult-to-forge journal that can be inspected and verified". But until you don't understand the importance of being able to do that without intermediaries, we will be talking past one another.

[arcticbull]

It’s not fair to write off all criticisms of the blockchain as privilege. The issue isn’t privilege. The issue is that folks who don’t have access to financial services deserve access to financial services and blockchain doesn’t get them that. It gets them a “ruined fresco” [1] of that. A crap approximation if you squint, but if you zoom in all the details are wrong.

Intermediaries are a massive optimization and solve a ton of problems. Pushing a world without them onto these disadvantaged folks, in a very real way, locks them into a second tier moving forward.

[1] https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/2-phot...

[rglullis]

> It’s not fair to write off all criticisms of the blockchain as privilege.

Not all of them. Just the ones that compares the current implementation with some untenable ideal or with the status quo in the developing countries. Saying "I can send one million dollars or 20 dollars easily to anyone without blockchain" is no different than a "Let them have cake" to someone in Argentina who would like to work as a freelancer with European customers. Saying "blockchain is never going to compete with Visa" is a big fuck you to the small business owner in Rio who needs some rotating capital to their shop and the bank is offering "competitive rates" of 2%/month.

> Pushing a world without them onto these disadvantaged folks.

It has very little to do with "disadvantaged folks" or "not having access to financial services". It has more to do with enabling whatever-you-can-call "middle class" to be able to protect their wealth and to do their business without being harassed by corrupt government officials, or having their savings inflated away by government that can not/will not manage their finances and even to enable them to make business with foreign entities without getting ripped off by abusive/unfair taxes.

> Intermediaries are a massive optimization and solve a ton of problems.

No argument there. But again, the problem is when people don't have intermediaries they can rely on. If you show me any non-blockchain alternative where people are free to choose if they want intermediaries or not, then I will gladly support it.

As everything in designing systems, there is no solution free of trade-offs. Forcing people to depend on institutions and to accept centralization is a clear trade-off between performance and robustness. Too much optimizing and not focus on robustness brings you to a system that is so inflexible that becomes dangerous. It works well until it doesn't. When it fails, it fails spectacularly.

[arcticbull]

> Saying "I can send one million dollars or 20 dollars easily to anyone without blockchain" is no different than a "Let them have cake" to someone in Argentina who would like to work as a freelancer with European customers.

Again, that's not the point I'm making.

Yes, perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good, but utterly insufficient shouldn't be the enemy of good either.

Yes, some people are helped. No, substantially any more people cannot be helped because - and while you disregarded this criticism earlier - the system simply cannot and does not scale to any transaction quantity larger than that of a single Costco or a large flea market.

btw, if someone's charging you 2% per month for a loan, that's likely because lending to you is incredibly risky. If someone's offering you a loan for less than that, they're in danger.

> It has more to do with enabling whatever-you-can-call "middle class" to be able to protect their wealth and to do their business without being harassed by corrupt government officials, or having their savings inflated away by government that can not/will not manage their finances and even to enable them to make business with foreign entities without getting ripped off by abusive/unfair taxes.

Blockchain doesn't stop any of that. It's not a way to protect your wealth if the value drops 40% in a month. In this month. That's not protection, that's juggling buzzsaws. In no small part because the same thing that allows it to be used in these rogue jurisdictions allows scammers and criminals to manipulate the ever loving crap out of it - I mean, Tether, for example, but that's just the latest example. It's impossible to actually price because you can't see through the murk.

I've said this before, and I stand by it: if you have a government that cannot manage a currency, you have bigger problems than your currency. Once you sort out the government, the currency is no longer a problem. And even if you use crypto you are still subject to those same taxes. But strictly worse because you have to pay them in local units, but store your value in a wildly fluctuating store of value.

I also reject the idea that "just do financial crime" is a solution to really any problem you may have.

> If you show me any non-blockchain alternative where people are free to choose if they want intermediaries or not, then I will gladly support it.

Good news!

Can the entrepreneur in Rio or the freelancer in Argentina who wants to do business with Europeans not use TransferWise or open a TransferWise Borderless account in seconds? [1] It allows them to hold any of 55 currencies and send them to 70 countries - at mid-market rates, plus a small fee - including Brazil, Argentina, the US, Canada and Europe. Their rates are incredibly competitive.

If you're upper-middle-class there's always HSBC Premier which will get you local bank accounts in 80 countries, with one-click transfers between them in Global View. [2]

[1] https://transferwise.com/us/multi-currency-account/

[2] https://www.us.hsbc.com/premier/