This shifts the work for your position to another person, and in the negative. Certainly it makes your life easier, but in traps you in a bubble of your own creation.
It’s essentially the same as admitting “I can’t prove it, so you have to prove the inverse” and hoping the other person will Marty McFly for you, and waste their time instead. It’s a solid method for reinforcing confirmation bias because whether they try or forget about it and move on you get to continue in your assumed position.
> There is a problem in distributed computing that is sometimes called the Chinese Generals Problem ... the original title of this paper was The Albanian Generals Problem ... The obviously more appropriate Byzantine generals then occurred to me.
Sure, bitcoin "solves" byzantine generals the same way TCP "solves" it. The theoretical construction is probably unsolvable, like the halting problem. In practice, you can "solve" the halting problem for most inputs too.
In the general construction of byzantine generals, there's essentially an adversarial agent preventing arbitrary communications. As far as I know, a distributed ledger can't generally survive in such an environment. Nor can TCP.
All scams are actually denominated in a currency that has actual value. The goal of a scammer is for them to obtain something valuable (US Dollars, say) from their victim and leave their victims with something worthless (a crypto coin, say).
It doesn’t. Any more than tulip mania invalidated the utility of planting bulbs to get flowers to come up in the spring.
The posts you are responding to never said blockchain consensus protocols don’t work. All they are saying is that hype coins tend to have the shape of a scam.
Now, if you want to get back to us just as soon as you find an application for blockchain consensus protocols that isn’t basically a hype coin, we’d be happy to hear about that.
IPFS is not a blockchain consensus protocol though? And the first five hits on google for storj talk about its investment potential, so.. that looks a lot like a hypecoin to me. But that’s not really important.
Personally I haven’t even seen the goalposts in this interaction since you decided that, in a discussion of a shitcoin pump-and-dump scam, the fact that said coin is built on a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem is somehow important, and… means that people shouldn’t criticize scammers taking advantage of credulous investors to fleece them?
It does not matter if a shitcoin is built using quantum manipulation of the space time continuum, if all that is being done with it is selling it to rubes to obtain their dollars.
You can be excited about blockchain, that’s fine, and you can believe it has actual value. But when people point out that your favorite technology is actually continually being used to perpetrate scams, you should get angry with the scammers, not the people who are pointing that out.
Personally, I like JavaScript. When people shout about tracker-infested slow loading websites, I don’t respond by saying ‘you’re wrong because actually the object dictionary duality in JS is a really elegant system’. That doesn’t matter. I reserve my anger for the people who are using JavaScript for evil.
Why wouldn't percentages be relevant? If one currency delivers a massive amount of utility and value to society while a tiny fraction of it is used for illicit purposes (i.e. USD), and another currency is overwhelming used for illicit purposes, with only a tiny fraction being used for actual utility, that is a meaningful comparison.
You're not making an argument here, you're just saying "percentages bad, absolute value good". The only argument you're making is that using percentages "hides" the negatives USD, but the reverse of that is equally true (absolute values hides the problems w/ cryptocurrency).
My argument is that the net impact of USD is positive, while the net impact of cryptocurrency is negative.
crypto solves the byzantium generals problem, sure, but that's not a problem we were struggling with in the financial system, and it creates more problems than it solves
> Knowing who to trust is absolutely a major problem in financial networking, whether it's crypto, digital or physical.
Solving the Byzantine Generals problem doesn't help you know who to trust.
With a large enough network, it makes it extremely difficult for malicious actors to subvert the process of exchanging money.
It does nothing to solve other crucial aspects of "who do I trust with my money", such as having recourse when someone scams you into giving them money.
In fact, the technology's spread has enabled terrible abuses of trust like cryptolocker attacks, and has probably made scamming much more profitable and practical.
If the solution to those problem has even a whiff of "user error" in it, then I submit that the problem is not actually with the users (it so rarely is).
I don’t think so as evidenced by financial systems moving trillions of dollars that have figured out who to trust. There are exchanges that have “solved” the trust issue and they seem pretty solvent and successful.
I mean, the US has got some really sharp and explodey fiat, arguably the most fiat fiat in the world. But we stopped pretending it was backed by anything else in the 70s.
USD is still the goto choice for ponzi and scams in general, does that invalidate it's utility?