[unholiness]

The current state is, roughly: Government-backed contracts are ultimately enforced by litigation, which is judged by a judge, who is appointed and judged by the state government, who are appointed and judged by the governor, who is appointed and judged by democratic elections.

A couple factors make the current system powerful: - Each decision-maker is roughly motivated to seek truth and behave honestly by the judgement of the next level up, so i.e. impeachment of judges should be rare - The hierarchical structure makes enforcement exponentially cheaper than every human voting on every contract outcome.

Neither government contracts nor smart contracts can offer 100% correct validation of every contract. All they can do is attempt to set up a structure which tries to motivate the right thing and tries to make litigation somewhat cheap.

It seems a bit silly, though, to think there's no room for improvement there, both in performance and correctness. 1) By making all decisions public, you can make judging those decisions easier 2) By making all decisions public, you can easily reuse a single judgement in many decisions 3) By using machines instead of humans, there is dramatically more bandwidth for a much broader range of contracts 4) The topology of this network only really lets people vote at a single point – where a governor is elected every n years, which is hardly robust feedback. etc.

I mostly agree with your conclusion on most parts of crypto but we shouldn't thing that "government is a solved problem" is a sweeping rebuttal of all smart contracts.

[arcticbull]

Of course there's room for improvement, what's silly is thinking a coal-powered linked list is an improvement :)

You don't want true decentralization for state level activities such as voting. If it's truly decentralized and permission less, allowing anyone to control the ledger, your adversaries will take control. If you have to build a system that accounts for that, you rely on a central authority to switch you over, which invalidates the permissionless and decentralized premise.

There's a reason we've been talking about killer applications of the blockchain for 14 years and zero of them have taken hold - they're all fundamentally flawed. Like concert tickets! Should be easy, everyone hates Ticketmaster. Killer NFT use case right? Of course not, because the venues are owned by LiveNation, the performers are managed by LiveNation and TicketMaster is owned by, wait for it, LiveNation. You can throw up a ticketing system on AWS in like 5 minutes flat, that's not the reason TicketMaster has been successful.

[pcthrowaway]

> Of course there's room for improvement, what's silly is thinking a coal-powered linked list is an improvement :)

Again, Proof of Work is not the only consensus model for blockchains (and while I dislike PoW, it's worth noting that while there's a lot of "greenwashing", many mining farms have legitimately been moving towards using more renewable energy)

[arcticbull]

That renewable energy is still a net negative for society because it’s not being used to decarbonize the actual grid we do productive things with - while generating mountains of ewaste.

You know 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out without ever mining a single block in its entire useful life? Just heating up the ol planet.

It’s an embarrassment that we even try to justify any aspect of it as a profession. Society needs us to step up and call this emperor nude.

You know every time the price goes up, the waste budget does too, and the perverse incentive is miners are rewarded for wasting more.